2009 : WHAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING?

We are entering a new era of personalized medicine.  One size does not fit all. 

One way to change your genes is to make new ones, as Craig Venter has elegantly shown. Another is to change your lifestyle: what you eat, how you respond to emotional stress, whether or not you smoke cigarettes, how much you exercise, and the experience of love and intimacy.

New studies show that these comprehensive lifestyle changes may change gene expression in hundreds of genes in only a few months—"turning on" (upregulating) disease-preventing genes and "turning on" (downregulating) genes that promote heart disease, oncogenes that promote breast cancer and prostate cancer, and genes that promote inflammation and oxidative stress. These lifestyle changes also increase telomerase, the enzyme that repairs and lengthens telomeres, the ends of our chromosomes that control how long we live. 

As genomic information for individuals becomes more widely available—via the decoding of each person's complete genome (as Venter and Watson have done) or partially (and less expensively) via new personal genomics companies—this information will be a powerful motivator for people to make comprehensive lifestyle changes that may beneficially affect their gene expression and significantly reduce the incidence of the pandemic of chronic diseases. 

In just a few years, we’ll see the first generation of adults whose every breath has been drawn on the grid. A generation for whom every key moment (e.g., birth) has been documented and distributed globally. Not just the key moments, of course, but also the most banal: eating pasta, missing the train, and having a bad day at the office. Ski trips and puppies.

These trips and puppies are not simply happening, they are becoming data, building up the global database of distributed memories. They are networked digital photos – 3 billion on Flickr, 10 billion on Facebook. They were blog posts, and now they are tweets, too (a billion in 18 months). They are Facebook posts, Dopplr journals, Last.FM updates.

Further, more and more of these traces we produce will be passive or semi-passive. Consider Loopt, which allows us to track ourselves, our friends through GPS. Consider voicemail transcription bots that transcribe the voice messages we leave into searchable text in email boxes on into eternity. The next song you listen to will likely be stored in a database record somewhere. Next time you take a phonecam photo, it may well have the event’s latitude and longitude baked into the photo’s metadata.

The sharp upswing in all of this record-keeping – both active and passive – are redefining one of the core elements of what it means to be human, namely to remember. We are moving towards a culture that has outsourced this essential quality of existence to machines, to a vast and distributed prosthesis. This infrastructure exists right now, but very soon we’ll be living with the first adult generation whose entire lives are embedded in it.

In 1992, the artist Thomas Bayrle wrote that the great mistakes of the future would be that as everything became digital, we would confusememory with storage. What’s important about genuine memory and how it differs from digital storage is that human memory is imperfect, fallible, and malleable. It disappears over time in a rehearsal and echo of mortality; our abilities to remember, distort and forget are what make us who we are.

We have built the infrastructure that makes it impossible to forget. As it hardens and seeps into every element of daily life, it will make it impossible to remember. Changing what it means to remember changes what it means to be.

There are a few people with who already have perfect episodic memory, total recall, neurological edge cases. They are harbingers of the culture to come.  One of them, Jill Price, was profiled in Der Spiegel:

"In addition to good memories, every angry word, every mistake, every disappointment, every shock and every moment of pain goes unforgotten. Time heals no wounds for Price. 'I don't look back at the past with any distance. It's more like experiencing everything over and over again, and those memories trigger exactly the same emotions in me. It's like an endless, chaotic film that can completely overpower me. And there's no stop button.'"

This also describes the life of Steve Mann, passively recording his life through wearable computers for many years. This is an unlikely future scenario, but like any caricature, it is based on human features that will be increasingly recognizable. The processing, recording and broadcasting prefigured in Mann’s work will be embedded in everyday actions like the twittering, phonecam shots and GPS traces we broadcast now. All of them entering into an outboard memory that is accessible (and searchable) everywhere we go.

Today is New Year’s Eve. I read today (on Twitter) that three friends, independent of each other, were looking back at Flickr to recall what they were doing a year ago. I would like to start the New Year being able to remember 2008, but also to forget it.

For the next generation, it will be impossible to forget it, and harder to remember. What will change everything is our ability to remember what everything is. Was. And wasn’t.

The long-term prospects of our civilization here on Earth are very uncertain. We can be destroyed by an asteroid impact or a nearby supernova explosion, or we can self-destruct in a nuclear or bacteriological war. It is a matter of not if but when the disaster will strike, and the only sure way for humans to survive in the long run is to spread beyond the Earth and colonize the Galaxy. The problem is that our chances of doing that before we are wiped out by some sort of catastrophe appear to be rather bleak.

The Doomsday argument

The probability for a civilization to survive the existential challenges and colonize its galaxy may be small, but it is non-zero, and in a vast universe such civilizations should certainly exist. We shall call them large civilizations.  There will also be small civilizations which die out before they spread much beyond their native planets.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that small civilizations do not grow much larger than ours and die soon after they reach their maximum size. The total number of individuals who lived in such a civilization throughout its entire history is then comparable to the number of people who ever lived on Earth, which is about 400 billion people, 60 times the present Earth population.

A large civilization contains a much greater number of individuals. A galaxy like ours has about 100 billion stars. We don't know what fraction of stars have planets suitable for colonization, but with a conservative estimate of 0.01% we would still have about 10 million habitable planets per galaxy. Assuming that each planet will reach a population similar to that of the Earth, we get 4 million trillion individuals. (For definiteness, we focus on human-like civilizations, disregarding the planets inhabited by little green people with 1000 people per square inch.) The numbers can be much higher if the civilization spreads well beyond its galaxy. The crucial question is: what is the probability P for a civilization to become large? 

It takes 10 million (or more) small civilizations to provide the same number of individuals as a single large civilization. Thus, unless P is extremely small (less than one in 10 million), individuals live predominantly in large civilizations. That's where we should expect to find ourselves if we are typical inhabitants of the universe. Furthermore, a typical member of a large civilization should expect to live at a time when the civilization is close to its maximum size, since that is when most of its inhabitants are going to live. These expectations are in a glaring conflict with what we actually observe: we either live in a small civilization or at the very beginning of a large civilization. With the assumption that P is not very small, both of these options are very unlikely – which indicates that the assumption is probably wrong.

If indeed we are typical observers in the universe, then we have to conclude that the probability P for a civilization to survive long enough to become large must be very tiny. In our example, it cannot be much more than one in 10 million.

This is the notorious "Doomsday argument". First suggested by Brandon Carter about 35 years ago, it inspired much heated debate and has often been misinterpreted. In the form given here it was discussed by Ken Olum, Joshua Knobe, and me.

Beating the odds

The Doomsday argument is statistical in nature. It does not predict anything about our civilization in particular. All it says is that the odds for any given civilization to grow large are very low. At the same time, some rare civilizations do beat the odds.

What distinguishes these exceptional civilizations? Apart from pure luck, civilizations that dedicate a substantial part of their resources to space colonization, start the colonization process early, and do not stop, stand a better chance of long-term survival.

With many other diverse and pressing needs, this strategy may be difficult to implement, but this may be one of the reasons why large civilizations are so rare. And then, there is no guarantee. Only when the colonization is well underway, and the number of colonies grows faster than they are dying out, can one declare a victory. But if we ever reach this stage in colonization of our Galaxy, this would truly be a turning point in the history of our civilization.

Where are they?

One question that needs to be addressed is: why is our Galaxy not yet colonized? There are stars in the Galaxy that are billions of years older than our Sun, and it should take much less than a billion years to colonize the entire Galaxy. So, we are faced with Enrico Fermi's famous question: Where are they? The most probable answer, in my view, is that we may be the only intelligent civilization in the entire observable universe.

Our cosmic horizon is set by the distance that light has traveled since the big bang. It sets the absolute limit to space colonization, since no civilization can spread faster than the speed of light. There is a large number of habitable planets within our horizon, but are these planets actually inhabited? Evolution of life and intelligence require some extremely improbable events. Theoretical estimates (admittedly rather speculative) suggest that their probability is so low that the nearest planet with intelligent life may be far beyond the horizon. If this is really so, then we are responsible for a huge chunk of real estate, 80 billion light years in diameter. Our crossing the threshold to a space-colonizing civilization would then really change everything. It will make a difference between a "flicker" civilization that blinks in and out of existence and a civilization that spreads through much of the observable universe, and possibly transforms it.

What will change everything is radical paradigm shift in the scientific method that opens up horizons beyond the reach of Boolean Logic, Digital Manipulations and Numerical Evaluations.

Due to my advanced age, I am not likely to witness the change.  But I am seeing signs and have my hunches.  These I will briefly spell out.

To change Everything a radical paradigm shift must interrupt the scientific method's race: 

STOP for a moment's reflection; what are you up to?

How do you know your dog would rather be a cat — just because you prefer cats.  Did you asked him, have you figured out how to ask him?

Having figured out how to do something is not enough reason for actually doing it. That's one aspect of the paradigm shift I am expecting; coming from inside the ranks. Evaluation of scientific results and their potential effects on the world as we know it is of particular urgency these days when news are spreading so easily all over the population. Of course we do not want to regress to a system of classified information that generates elitism. Well this problem is creating the, not so new anymore, philosophical discipline of applied Ethics; if only it keeps scientifically well informed and focused down to earth on concrete issues.

The goal of this part of the shift is a tightening of the structure of the whole conglomerate of the sciences and their presentation in the media.

But this brings me to the more radical effect of the shift I am envisaging; a healing effect on the rift between the endeavors that are bestowed the label "scientific" and the proliferation of so-called "alternative" enterprises, many of which are striving to achieve the blessings of scientific grounding by experimentations, theories and statistical evaluations, whether appropriate or not. A true and fruitful symbiosis that leads to a deeper understanding of the meaning of Human Existence than the models of a machine or of a token created by a Superior Being for the mysterious purpose of suffering through life in the service of His Glory.

Where do I expect the decisive push to come from? Possibly from the young discipline of cognitive science, provided psychology, philosophy and physiology are ready to cooperate.  There are shoots rising up all over, but I won't embark on a list. Once the "real thing" is found or constructed it will be recognized. It will have shape and make sense.

The myth of the scientific method as the only approach to reality will become obsolete without loss to man's interaction with this world.  The path to understanding has to be prepared by a direct, still somewhat mysterious approach of hunches and intuitions in addition to direct perceptions and sensations.  Moreover the results of that procedure are useless unless suitably interpreted.

Well, this is as far as I am ready to go with this explanation of a hunch. The alternative to my current vagueness would be rigidity prone to misinterpretation.

As to my own turf, Mathematics, I do not believe there will be any radical change.  Mathematics is a rock of a structure, here to stay. Mathematical insights do not change, they become clearer, dead ends are recognized as such, but what is proved beyond doubt what is cumulative.   

But methodological changes here are in order as well as meta-mathematical and philosophical interpretation of the nature of results. So is the evolution of an ever more lucid language.

I personally believe we'd do well to focus on Mathematical Intuitionism as our Foundations.  Boolean thinking has done its service by now.

To sum up what I am expecting of this paradigm shift are: clarification, simplification and unification of our understanding and with it the emergence of a more lucidly expressive language conducive to the End of Fragmentation of Knowledge.

From the Neolithic revolution to the information age, the major changes in the human condition—none of them changing everything, needless to say—have been consequences of new technologies. There is now a glut of new technologies in the offing that will alter the way we live more rapidly and radically than anything before in ways we cannot properly foresee. I wish I could just wax lyrical about some of the developments we can at least sensibly speculate about, but others will do so more competently. So, let me focus on the painfully obvious that we would rather not think about.

Many new technologies can provide new weapons or new ways to use old ones. Access to these technologies is every day easier. In the near future we should expect, with near certainty, that atomic, chemical, and biological weapons of mass destruction will be used in a variety of conflicts. The most important change this will bring about is not that so many will die. Hundreds of thousands have died all these years in wars and natural catastrophes, with an unspeakable impact on the population affected, but, alas, massacres and other forms of collective death have been part and parcel of the human condition. This time, however, many of the victims will belong to powerful modern societies that, since the Second World War, have on the whole been spared. People in these societies are, neither less nor more than the usual poorer and powerless victims of massive violence, entitled to live full decent lives, and have a right to fight for this. What may bring about radical changes is that they will be in a much stronger position to exert and possibly abuse this right. Recent large-scale murderous attacks resulted in the acceptance of fewer checks on executive power, limitation of civil rights, preventive warfare, ethnically targeted public suspicion. In the future, people who will have witnessed even direr events at close quarters may well support even more drastic measures. I am not discussing here the rationality of fears to come, or the extent to which they are likely to be biased and manipulated. I just assume that, for good or bad reasons, they will weigh in favor of limitations to the liberties of individuals and to the independence of countries.

One must hope that, in part thanks to the changes brought about by novel technologies, new forms of social and political understanding and action will develop to help address at the root issues that otherwise might give rise to ever more lethal conflicts. Still, while more and more powerful technologies are becoming more and more accessible, there is no reason to believe that humans are becoming commensurately wiser and more respectful of one another's rights. There will be, then, at least in most people's perception, a direct clash between their safety and their liberty and even more between their safety and the liberty of others. The history of this century—our history, that of our children and grandchildren—will in good part be that of the ways in which this clash is played out, or overcome.

Thirteen decades ago, Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch led an intellectual revolution referred to as the germ theory of disease, which proposes that many common ailments are caused by microbes. Since then the accepted spectrum of infectious causation has been increasingly steadily and dramatically.  The diseases that are most obviously caused by infection were accepted as such by the end of the 19th century; almost all of them were acute diseases.  Acute diseases with a transmission twist, mosquito-borne malaria for example, were accepted a bit later at the beginning of the 20th century.  Since the early 20th century, the spectrum has been broadened mostly by recognition of infectious causation of chronic diseases.  The first of these had distinctly infectious acute phases, which made infectious causation of the chronic disease more obvious. Infectious causation of shingles, for example, was made more apparent by its association with chicken pox.  Over the past thirty years, the spectrum of infectious causation has been broadened mostly through inclusion of chronic diseases without obvious acute phases.  With years or even decades between the onset of infection and the onset of such diseases, demonstration of infectious causation is difficult. 

Technological advances have been critical to resolving the ambiguities associated with infectious causation of such cryptic infectious causation.  In the early 1990s Kaposi's Sarcoma Associated Herpes Virus was discovered using a molecular technique that stripped away the human genetic material from Kaposi's sarcoma cells and found what remained.  A similar approach revealed Hepatitis C virus in blood transfusions.  In these cases there were strong epidemiological signs that an infectious agent was present.  When the cause was discovered, acceptance did not have to confront the barrier of entrenched opinions favoring other non-infectious causes.  If such special interests are present the evidence has to be proportionately more compelling.  Such is the case for schizophrenia, atherosclerosis, Alzheimer's disease, breast cancer, and many other chronic diseases, which are now the focus of vehement disagreements.

Advances in molecular/bioinformatic technology are poised to help resolve these controversies.  This potential is illustrated by two discoveries, which seem cutting edge now, but will soon be considered primitive first steps.  About a decade ago, one member of Stanford team scraped spots on two teeth of another team member, and amplified the DNA from the scrapings.  They found sequences that were sufficiently unique to represent more than 30 new species.  This finding hinted at the magnitude of the challenge--tens or perhaps even hundreds of thousands of viruses and bacteria may need to be considered to evaluate hypotheses of infectious causation. 

The second discovery provides a glimpse of how this challenge may be addressed.  Samples from prostate tumors were tested on a micro-array that contained 20,000 DNA snippets from all known viruses.  The results documented a significant association with an obscure retrovirus related to one that normally infects mice. If this virus is a cause of prostate cancer, it causes only a small portion that occurs in men with a particular genetic background. Other viruses have been associated with prostate cancer in patients without this genetic background. So, not only may thousands of viruses need to be tested to find one correlated with a chronic disease, but even then it may be one of perhaps many different infectious causes.

The problems of multiple pathogens and ingrained predispositions are now coming to a head in research on breast cancer.   Presently, three viruses have been associated with breast cancer: mouse mammary tumor virus, Epstein Barr virus, and human papillomavirus.  Researchers are still arguing about whether these correlations reflect causation.  If they do, these viruses account for somewhere between half and about 95% of breast cancer, depending on the extent to which they act synergistically. Undoubtedly array technology will soon be used to assess this possibility and to identify other viruses that may be associated with breast cancers.

There is a caveat. These technological advancements provide sophisticated approaches to identifying correlations between pathogens and disease.  They do not bridge the gulf between correlation and causation.  One might hope that with enough research all aspects of the pathological process could be understood, from the molecular level up to the whole patient.  But as one moves from molecular to the macro levels, the precision of interpretation becomes confounded by the complex web of interactions that intervene, especially in chronic diseases.   Animal models are generally inadequate for chronic human diseases because the disease in animals is almost never quite the same as the human disease. The only way out of this conundrum, I think, will be to complement the technological advancements in identifying candidate pathogens with clever clinical trials.  These clinical trials will need to use special states, such as temporary immune suppression, to identify those infections that are exacerbated concurrently with exacerbations of the chronic disease in question.  Such correlations will then need to be tested for causation by treatment of the exacerbated infection to determine whether the suppression of the infection is associated with amelioration of the disease.  

Why will this process change things?   For those of us who live in prosperous countries, infectious causes are implicated but not accepted in most common lethal diseases: cancers, heart attacks, stroke, Alzheimer's disease.  Infectious causes are also implicated in the vast majority of nonlethal, incapacitating illness of uncertain cause, such as arthritis, fibromyalgia, and Crohn's disease.  If infectious causes of these diseases are identified medical history tells us that they will tend to be resolved. 

A reasonable estimate of the net effect would be a rise in healthy life expectancy by two or three decades, pushing lifespan up against the ultimate boundary of longevity molded by natural selection, probably an age range between 95 and 105 years.  Being pushed up against this barrier people could be expected to live healthy lives into their 90s and then go downhill quickly.  This demographic transition toward healthy survival will improve productivity, lower medial costs, and enhance quality of life.  In short it will be one of medicine's greatest contributions.

Even with all the scientific and technological advances of the last two millennia and especially of the last century, humankind itself has not really changed.  The stories we read in our most ancient books do not seem alien to us.  On the contrary, the humans who wrote those works had the same needs and desires that we have today, though the means of meeting those needs and of fulfilling those desires may have changed in some of the details.

The human species has managed to survive a great number of truly monumental catastrophes, some naturally caused (floods, droughts, tsunamis, glaciations, etc,) and some the result of its own doing, often with the help of  science and technology (especially in creating the tools of war).  But such calamities did not really "change everything."  (This statement is certainly not meant to minimize the tragedy of the millions of lives lost in these catastrophes.)  Though we worry about the possible dramatic effects that an anthropogenically changed global climate might have, humankind itself will survive such changes (because of its science and technology), though we cannot predict how many people might tragically die because of it.

In terms of "what will change everything" the larger view is what will significantly change humankind itself.  From this human perspective, the last "event" that truly changed everything was over some period of time around 50,000 years ago when evolutionary advances finally led to intelligent humans who left Africa and spread out over the rest of the world, literally changing everything in the entire world.

Prior to that evolutionary advance in Africa, our ancestors' main motivations in life were like any other animal — find food and avoid death until they could reproduce.  After they evolved into intelligent beings their motivations in life expanded.  Although they still pursued food and sex and tried to avoid death, they also spent increasing amounts of time on activities aimed at preventing boredom and making them feel good about themselves.  These motivations have not changed in the succeeding millennia, though the means of satisfying themhave changed often.

How humankind came to be what it is today was a result of natural selection.  Humans survived in the hostile environment around them (and went on to Earthly dominance) because of the evolved improvements in their brains.  One improvement was the development of curiosity and a desire to learn about the environment in which they lived.  But it was not simply a matter of becoming smarter.  The human species survived and succeeded in this world as much because of an evolved need for affection or connection with other human beings, a social bond.  It was both its increased intelligence and its increased social cooperation that led to increasing knowledge and eventually science and technology.  Not all individuals, of course, had the same degree of these characteristics, as shown by the wars and horrendous atrocities that humankind was capable of, but social evolution driven by qualities acquired from the previous species evolution did make progress overall.  The greatest progress and the greatest gain in knowledge only happened when people worked with each other in harmony and did not kill each other.

The evolution of human intelligence and cooperative social bonding tendencies took a very long time, though it seems quite fast when appreciating the incredible complexity of this intelligence and social bonding.  How many genes must have mutated and been naturally selected for to achieve this complexity?  We are here today as both a species and a society because of those gene changes and the natural selection process that over this long time period weeded out the bad changes and allowed the good changes to remain.

Technically, evolution of the human species as a result of natural selection stopped when we became a social animal — when the strong began protecting the weak and when our scientific and technological advances allowed us to extend the lives of those individuals unfortunate enough to have genetic weaknesses that would have killed them.  With humans, artificial selection (selective breeding) was never a serious replacement for natural selection possibility, and as a result there have been no significant changes to the human species since its societies began.

But now, with the recent great advances in genetic engineering, we are in a position to change the human species for the first time in 50,000 years.  We will be able to put new genes in any human egg or sperm we wish.  The children born with these new genes will grow up and pass them on to their children.  The extensive use of this genetic selection (or should we call it anthropogenic selection) will rapidly pass new genes and their corresponding (apparently desired) traits throughout the population.  But what will be the overall consequence?  When selecting particular genes that we want while perhaps not understanding how particular gene combinations work, might we unknowingly begin a process that could change our good human qualities? While striving for higher intelligence could we somehow genetically diminish our capacity for compassion, or our inherent need for social bonding?  How might the human species be changed in the long run?  The qualities that got us here — the curiosity, the intelligence, the compassion and cooperation resulting from our need for social bonding– involve an incredibly complex combination of genes.  Could these have been produced through genetic planning?

Our ever-expanding genetic capabilities will certainly "change everything" with respect to medicine and health, which will be a great benefit.  Our life span will also be greatly extended, a game-changing benefit to be sure, but it will also add to our overpopulation, the ultimate source of so many problems on our planet.  But the ultimate effect may be on the human species itself.  How many generations might it take before the entire human race is significantly altered genetically?  From a truly human perspective, that would really "change everything."

The tricky, slippery word in this question is "expect." There is nothing that I expect to see with 100 percent certainty, and there are some remarkable things that I expect to see with perhaps 10 or 5 percent certainty (but I sure would be excited if that 5 percent paid off). With that bit of preamble, I'd like to lay out my game-changing predictions ranked by order of expectation, starting with the near-sure things and ending with the thrilling hey-you-never-knows.

The real end of oil. Technology will make liquid fuels obsolete — not just petroleum but also alternatives like biodiesel, ethanol, etc. Fossil fuel supplies are too volatile and limited, the fuels themselves far too environmentally costly, and biofuels will never be more than niche players. More broadly, moving around fuels in liquid form is just too cumbersome. In the future, energy for personal transit might be delivered by wire or by beam. It might not be delivered at all — the Back to the Future "Mr. Fusion" device is not so farfetched (see below). But whatever comes next, in another generation or so pumping fuel into a car will seem as quaint as getting out and cranking the engine to get it started. 
Odds: 95 percent.

Dark matter found. The hunt for the Higgs boson is a yawn from my perspective: Finding it will only confirm a theory that most physicists are fairly sure about already. Identifying dark matter particles — either at the Large Hadron Collider or at one of the direct detectors, like Xenon100 — would be much more significant. It would tell us what the other 6/7ths of all matter in the universe consists of, it would instantly rule out a lot of kooky cosmological theories, and it would allow us to construct a complete history of the universe. 
Odds: 90 percent.

Genetically engineered kids. I'm not just talking about screening out major cancer genes or selecting blue eyes; I'm talking about designing kids who can breathe underwater or who have radically enhance mental capabilities. Such offspring will rewrite the rules of evolution and redefine what it means to be human. They may very well qualify as totally new species. From a scientific point of view I think this capability is extremely likely, but legal and ethical considerations may prevent it from happening.
With all that, I put the odds at: 80 percent.

Life detected on an exoplanet. Astronomers have already measured the size, density, temperature, and atmospheric composition of several alien worlds as they transit in front of their parent stars. The upcoming James Webb Space Telescope may be able to do the same for earth-size planets. We haven't found these planets yet but it's a shoo-in that the Kepler mission, launching this spring, or one of the ground-based planet searches will find them soon. The real question is whether the chemical evidence of alien life will be conclusive enough to convince most scientists. (As for life on Mars, I'd say the odds are similar that we'll find evidence of fossil life there, but the likelihood of cross-contamination between Mars and Earth makes Martian life inherently less interesting.)
Odds: 75 percent.

Synthetic telepathy. Rudimentary brain prostheses and brain-machine interfaces already exist. Allowing one person to control another person's body would be a fairly simple extension of that technology. Enabling one person to transmit his thoughts directly to another person's brain is a much trickier proposition, but not terribly farfetched, and it would break down one of the most profound isolations associated with the human condition. Broadcasting the overall state or "mood" of a brain would probably come first. Transmitting specific, conscious thoughts would require elaborate physical implants to make sure the signals go to exactly the right place — but such implants could soon become common anyway as people merge their brains with computer data networks.
Odds: 70 percent.

Lifespan past 200 (or 1,000). I have little doubt that progress in fighting disease and patching up our genetic weaknesses will make it possible for people to routinely reach the full human lifespan of about 120. Going far beyond that will require halting or reversing the core aging process, which involves not just genetic triggers but also oxidation and simple wear-and-tear. Engineering someone to have gills is probably a much easier proposition. Still, if we can hit 200 I see no reason why the same techniques couldn't allow people to live to 1,000 or more.
Odds: 60 percent. 

Conscious machines. Intelligent machines are inevitable — by some measures they are already here. Synthetic consciousness would be a much greater breakthrough, in some ways a more profound one than finding life on other planets. One problem: We don't understand how consciousness works, so recreating it will require learning a lot more about what it means to be both smart and self-aware. Another problem: We don't understand what consciousness is, so it's not clear what "smart" and "self-aware" mean, exactly. Gerald Edelman's brain-based devices are a promising solution. Rather than trying to deconstruct the brain as a computer, they construct neural processing from the bottom up, mimicking the workings of actual neurons.
Odds: 50-50.

Geoengineering. We may be able to deal with global warming through a combination of new energy sources, carbon sequestration, and many local and regional adaptations to a warmer climate. All of these will be technologically challenging but not truly "game-changing." It is possible, though, that the climate impact of our environmental follies will be so severe, and the progress of curative scientific research so dramatic, that some of the pie-in-the-sky geoengineering schemes now being bandied about will actually come to pass. Giant space mirrors and sunshades strike me as the most appealing options, both because they would support an aggressive space program and because they are adjustable and correctable. (Schemes that aim to fight carbon pollution with sulfur pollution seem like a frightening mix of hubris and folly.) Geoengineering techniques are also a good first step toward being able to terraform other planets.
Odds: 25 percent.

Desktop fusion. The ITER project will prove that it is possible to spend billions of dollars to construct an enormous device that produces controlled hydrogen fusion at a net loss of energy. A few left-field fusion researchers — most notably the ones associated with Tri-Alpha — are exploring a much more ambitious approach that would lead to the construction of cheap, compact reactors. These devices could in theory take advantage of more exotic, neutron-free fusion reactions that would allow almost direct conversion of fusion energy to electricity. The old dream of a limitless power plant that could fit under the hood of your car or in a closet in your house might finally come true. Since energy is the limiting factor for most economic development, the world economy (and the potential for research and exploration) would be utterly transformed.
Odds: 20 percent.

Communication with other universes. Studies of gravitational wave patterns etched into the cosmic microwave background could soon provide hints of the existence of universes outside of our own. Particle collisions at the LHC could soon provide hints of the existence of higher dimensions. But what would really shake the world would be direct measurements of other universes. How exactly that would work is not at all clear, since any object or signal that crossed over directly from another universe could have devastating consequences; indirect evidence, meanwhile, might not be terribly convincing (eg, looking for the gravitational pull from shadow matter on a nearby brane). I hold out hope all the same. 
Odds: 10 percent

Antigravity devices. Currentphysics theory doesn't allow such things, but from time to time fringe experiments (mostly involving spinning superconducting disks) allegedly turn up evidence for an antigravity phenomenon. Even NASA has invested dribbles of money in this field, hoping that something exciting and unexpected will pop up. If antigravity really exists it would require revising Einstein's general theory of relativity. It would also vindicate all those science-fiction TV shows in which everyone clomps around heavily in outer space. Given how little we know about how gravity works, antigravity or artificially generated gravity don't seem impossible…just highly improbable. 
Odds: 5 percent

ESP verified!Probably the closest thing I've seen to a scientific theory of ESP is Rupert Sheldrake's concept of "morphic fields." Right now there's nary a shred of evidence to support the idea — unless you count anecdotes of dogs who know when their owners are about to return home, and people who can "feel" when someone is looking at them — but Sheldrake is totally correct that such off-the-wall ideas merit serious scientific investigation. After all, scientists investigate counterintuitive physics concepts all the time; why not conduct equally serious investigations of the intuitive feelings that people have all the time? Everything I know about science, and about human subjectivity, says that there's nothing to find here. And yet, when I think of a discovery that would change everything this is one of the first that springs to mind. 
Odds: 0.1 percent

Within my lifetime (or soon thereafter) scientists will finally decode the language of the brain. At present, we understand a bit about the basic alphabet of neural function, how neurons fire, and how they come together to form synapses, but haven't yet pieced together the words, let alone the sentences.  Right now, we're sort of like Mendel, at the dawn of genetics: he knew there must be something like genes (what he called "factors"), but couldn't say where they lived (in the protein? in the cytoplasm?) or how they got their job done. Today, we know that thought has something to do with neurons, and that our memories are stored in brain matter, but we don't yet know how to decipher the neurocircuitry within. 

Doing that will require a quantum leap. The most popular current techniques for investigating the brain, like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), are far too coarse. A single three dimensional "voxel" in an fMRI scan lumps together the actions of tens or even hundreds of thousands of neurons — yielding a kind of rough geography of the brain (emotion in the amygdala, decision-making in the prefrontal cortex) but little in the way of specifics.  How does the prefrontal cortex actually do its thing? How does the visual cortex represent the difference between a house and a car, or a Hummer and a taxi? How does Broca's area know the difference between a noun and verb?

To answer questions like these, we need to move beyond the broad scale geographies of fMRI and down to the level of individual neurons.

At the moment, that's a big job.  For one thing, in the human brain there are billions of neurons and trillions of connections between them; the sheer amount of data involved is overwhelming. For another, until recently we've lacked the tools to understand the function of individual neurons in action, within the context of microcircuits.

But there's good reason to think all that's about to change. Computers continue to advance at a dizzying pace.  Then there's the truly unprecedented explosion in databases like the Human Genome and the Allen Brain Atlas, enormously valuable datasets that are shared publically and instantly available to all researchers, everywhere; even a decade ago there was nothing like them. Finally, genetic neuroimaging is just around the corner — scientists can now induce individual neurons to fire and (literally) light up on demand, allowing us to understand individual neural circuits in a brand new way.

Technical advances alone won't be enough, though — we'll need a scientist with the theoeretical vision of Francis Crick, who not only helped identify the physical basis of genes — DNA — but also the code by which the individual nucleotides of a gene get translated (in groups of three) into amino acids.  When it comes to the brain, we already know that neurons are the physical basis of thinking and knowledge, but not the laws of translation that relate one to the other.

I don't expect that there will be one single code. Although every creature uses essentially the same translation between DNA and amino acids, different parts of the brain may translate between neurons and information in different ways.  Circuits that control muscles, for example, seem to work on a system of statistical averaging; the angle at which a monkey extends its arm seems, as best we can tell, to be a kind of statistical average of the actions of hundreds of individual neurons, each representing a slightly different angle of possible motion, 44 degrees, 44.1 degrees, and so forth. Alas, what works for muscles probably can't work for sentences and ideas, so-called declarative knowledge like the proposition that "Michael Bloomberg is the Mayor of New York" or the idea that my fight to Montreal leaves at noon. It's implausible that the brain would have vast population of neurons reserved for each specific thought I might entertain ("my flight to Montreal leaves at 11:58 am", "my flight to Montreal leave leaves at 11:59 am", etc). Instead, the brain, like language itself, needs some sort of combinatorial code, a way of putting together smaller pieces (Montreal, flight, noon) into larger elements.

When we crack that nut, when we figure out how the brain manages to encode declarative knowledge , an awful lot is going to change. For one thing, our relationship to computers will be completely and irrevocably altered; clumsy input devices like mice, windows, keyboards, and even heads-up displays and speech recognizers will go the way of typewriters and fountain pens; our connection to computers will be far more direct. Education, too, will fundamentally change, as engineers and cognitive sciences begin to leverage an understanding of brain code into ways of directly uploading information into the brain. Knowledge will become far cheaper than it already has become in the Internet era; with luck and wisdom, we as species could advance immeasurably.

Could we take the next step by breaking down the strict distinction between reality and fiction: NO MORE REALITY!

Society will change when the poor and middle class have easy access to cryonic suspension of their cognitive remains — even if the future technology involved ultimately fails.

Today we almost always either bury dead brains or burn them. Both disposal techniques result in irreversible loss of personhood information because both techniques either slowly or quickly destroy all the brain tissue that houses a person's unique neural-net circuitry. The result is a neural information apocalypse and all the denial and superstition that every culture has evolved to cope with it.

Some future biocomputing technology may extract and thus back-up this defining neural information or wetware. But no such technology is in sight despite the steady advances of Moore's Law doubling of transistor density on computer chips every two years or so. Nor have we cracked the code of the random pulse train from a single neuron. Hence we are not even close to making sense of the interlocking pulse trains of the billions of chattering neurons in a functioning human brain.

So far the only practical alternative to this information catastrophe is to vitrify the brain and store it indefinitely in liquid nitrogen at about -320 degrees Fahrenheit. Even the best vitrification techniques still produce massive cell damage that no current or even medium-term technology can likely reverse. But the shortcomings of early twenty-first century science and engineering hardly foreclose the technology options that will be available in a century and far less so in a millennium. Suspended brain tissue needs only periodic replacement of liquid nitrogen to wait out the breakthroughs.

Yet right now there are only about 100 brains suspended in liquid nitrogen in a world where each day about 150,000 people die.

That comes to fewer than three suspended brains per year since a 40-year-old and post-Space Odyssey Stanley Kubrick hailed the promise of cryonic suspension in his 1968 Playboy interview. Kubrick cast death as a problem of bioengineering: "Death is no more natural or inevitable than smallpox or diphtheria. Death is a disease and as susceptible to cure as any other disease." The Playboy interviewer asked Kubrick if he was interested in being frozen. Kubrick said that he "would be if there were adequate facilities available." But just over three decades later Kubrick opted for the old neural apocalypse when he could easily have afforded a first-class cryonic suspension in quite adequate facilities.

The Kubrick case shows that dollar cost is just one factor that affects the ease of mass access to cryonics. Today many people can afford a brain-only suspension by paying moderate premiums for a life-insurance policy that would cover the expenses. But almost no one accepts that cryonics wager. There are also stigma costs from the usual scolds in the church and in bioethics. There is likewise no shortage of biologists who will point out that you cannot get back the cow from the hamburger.

And there remains the simple denial of the inexorable neural catastrophe. That denial is powerful enough that it keeps the majority of citizens from engaging in rational estate planning. The probate code in some states such as California even allows valid handwritten wills that an adult can pen (but not type) and sign in minutes and without any witnesses. But only a minority of Californians ever executes these handwritten wills or the more formal attested wills. The great majority dies intestate and thus they let the chips fall where the state says they fall.

So it is not too surprising that the overwhelming majority of the doomed believe that the real or imagined transaction costs of brain suspension outweigh its benefits if they think about the matter at all. But those costs will only fall as technology marches on ever faster and as the popular culture adapts to those tech changes. One silver lining of the numbing parade of comic-book action movies is how naturally the younger viewing audience tends to embrace the fanciful information and biotechnology involved in such fare even if the audience lacks a like enthusiasm for calculus.

Again none of this means that brain suspension in liquid nitrogen will ever work in the sense that it leads to some type of future resurrection of the dead. It may well never work because the required neuro-engineering may eventually prove too difficult or too expensive or because future social power groups outlaw the practice or because of many other technical or social factors. But then again it may work if enough increased demand for such brain suspensions produces enough economies of scale and spurs enough technical and business innovation to pull it off. There is plenty of room for skepticism and variation in all the probability estimates.

But just having an affordable and plausible long shot at some type of resurrection here on Earth will in time affect popular belief systems and lengthen consumer time horizons. That will in turn affect risk profiles and consumption patterns and so society will change and perhaps abruptly so. A large enough popular demand for brain suspensions would allow democracies to directly represent some of the interests from potential far-future generations because no one would want themselves or their loved ones to revive and find a spoiled planet. Our present dead-by-100 life spans make it all too easy to treat the planet like a rental car as we run up the social credit cards for unborn debtors.

The cryonics long shot lets us see our pending brain death not as the solipsistic obliteration of our world but as the dreamless sleep that precedes a very major surgery.

Global 21st-century society depends on an 18th-century worldview.  It's an Enlightenment-era model that says the essence of humanity — and our best guide in life — is cool, conscious reason.  Though many have noted, here on Edge and elsewhere, that this is a poor account of the mind, the rationalist picture still sustains institutions that, in turn, shape our daily lives.

It is because we are rational that governments guarantee our human rights: To " use one's understanding without guidance"  (Kant's definition of enlightenment), one needs freedom to inquire, think and speak.  Rationality is the reason for elections (because governments not chosen by thoughtful, evidence-weighing citizens would be irrational). Criminal justice systems assume that impartial justice is possible, which means they assume judges and juries can reason their way through a case.  Our medical system assumes that drugs work for biochemical reasons, applicable to all human bodies — and not the price on the pill bottle makes a difference in its effectiveness.

And free markets presume that all players are avatars of Rational Economic Man: He who consciously and consistently perceives his own interests, relates those to possible actions, reasons his way through the options, and then acts according to his calculations. When Adam Smith famously wrote that butchers, brewers and bakers worked efficiently out of  "regard for their own interest,"  he was doing more than asserting that self-interest could be good.  He was also asserting that self-interest — a long-lasting, fact-based, explicit sense of  "what's good for me" — is possible.

The rationalist model also suffuses modern culture.  Rationalist politics requires tolerance for diversity — we can't reason together if we agree on everything. Rationalist economics teaches the same lesson. If everyone agrees on the proper price for all stocks on the market, then there's no reason for those brokers to go to work. This tolerance for diversity makes it impossible to unite society under a single creed or tradition, and that has the effect of elevating the authority of the scientific method. Data, collected and interpreted according to rigorous standards, elucidating material causes and effects, has become our lingua franca. Our modern notions of the unity of humanity are not premised on God or tribe, but on research results.  We say "we all share the same genes," or " we are all working with the same evolved human nature" or appeal in some other way to scientific findings.

This rationalist framework is so deeply embedded in modern life that its enemies speak in its language, even when they violate its tenets. Those who loathe the theory of evolution felt obligated to come up with "creation science." 

Businesses proclaim their devotion to the free market even as they ask governments to interfere with its workings. Then too, tyrants who take the trouble to rig elections only prove that elections are now a universal standard.

So that's where the world stands today, with banks, governments, medical systems, nation-states resting, explicitly or implicitly, on this notion that human beings are rational deciders.

And of course this model looks to be quite wrong. That's fact is not what changes everything, but it's a step in that direction.

What's killing Rational Economic Man is an accumulation of scientific evidence suggesting people have (a) strong built-in biases that make it almost impossible to separate information's logical essentials from the manner and setting in which the information is presented; and (b) a penchant for changing their beliefs and preferences according to their surroundings, social setting, mood or simply some random fact they happened to have noticed. The notion that "I" can " know" consistently what my " preferences"  are — this is in trouble.  (I won't elaborate the case against the rationalist model as recently made by, among others, Gary Marcus, Dan Ariely, Cass Sunstein, because it has been well covered in the recent Edge colloquium on behavioral economics.) 

What changes is everything is not this ongoing intellectual event, but the next one. 

In the next 10 or 15 years, after the burial of Rational Economic Man, neuroscientists and people from the behavioral disciplines will converge on a better model of human decision-making. I think it will picture people as inconsistent, unconscious, biased, malleable corks on a sea of fast-changing influences, and the consequences of that will be huge for our sense of personhood (to say nothing of sales tricks and marketer manipulations).

But I think the biggest shocks might come to, and through, institutions that are organized on rationalist premises.  If we accept that people are highly influenced by other people, and by their immediate circumstances, then what becomes of our idea of impartial justice? (Jon Hanson at Harvard has been working on that for some time.) How do we understand and protect democracy, now that Jonah Berger has shown that voters are more likely to support education spending just because they happen to cast their ballots in a school? What are we to make of election results, after we've accepted that voters have, at best, "incoherent, inconsistent, disorganized positions on issues," as William Jacoby puts it?  How do you see a town hall debate, once you know that people are more tolerant of a new idea if they're sitting in a tidy room than if they're in a messy one?

How do we understand medical care, now that we know  that chemically identical pills have different effects on people who think their medicine is expensive than they do on patient who were told it was cheap? How should we structure markets after learning that even MBAs can be nudged to see a $7 per item as a fair price — just by exposing them to the number 7 a few minutes before?  What do we do about standardized testing, when we know that women reminded that they're female score worse on a math test than fellow women who were reminded instead that they were elite college students?

Perhaps we need a new Adam Smith, to reconcile our political, economic and social institutions with present-day knowledge about human nature. In any event, I expect to see the arrival of Post-Rational Economic (and Political and Psychological) Humanity. And I do expect that will change everything.

Human beings have an amazingly flexible sense of self. If we don a pair of high resolution goggles showing the point of view from another body, with feedback and control, we perceive ourselves to be that body. As we use rudimentary or complex tools, these quickly become familiar extensions of our bodies and minds. This flexibility, and our indefatigable drive to learn, invent, have fun, and seek new adventure, will lead us down future paths that will dramatically alter human experience and our very nature.

Because we adapt so quickly, the changes will feel gradual. In the next few years solid state memory will replace hard drives, removing the mechanical barrier to miniaturization of our computational gadgetry. Battery size remains as a barrier to progress, but this will improve, along with increased efficiency of our electronics, and we will live with pervasive computational presence. Privacy will vanish. People will record and share their sensorium feeds with the world, and the world will share experiences. Every physical location will be geo-tagged with an overlay of information. Cities will become more pleasant as the internal combustion engine is replaced with silent electric vehicles that don't belch toxic fumes. We'll be drawn in to the ever evolving and persistently available conversations among our social networks. Primitive EEG's will be replaced by magnetoencephalography and functional MRI backed by the computational power to recognize our active thought patterns and translate them to transmittable words, images, and actions. Our friends and family who wish it, and our entire external and internal world, will be reachable with our thoughts. This augmentation will change what it means to be human. Many people will turn away from their meat existence, to virtual worlds, which they will fill with meaning — spending time working on science, virtual constructions, socializing, or just playing games. And we humans will create others like us, but not.

Synthetic intelligence will arrive, but slowly, and it will be different enough that many won't acknowledge it for what it is. People used to think a computer mastering chess, voice recognition, and automated driving would signal the arrival of artificial intelligence. But these milestones have been achieved, and we now consider them the result of brute force computation and clever coding rather than bellwethers of synthetic intelligence. Similarly, computers are just becoming able to play the game of Go at the dan level, and will soon surpass the best human players. They will pass Turing's test. But this synthetic intelligence, however adaptable, is inhuman and foreign, and many people won't accept it as more than number crunching and good programming. A more interesting sign that synthetic intelligence has arrived will be when captchas and reverse Turing tests appear that exclude humans. The computers will have a good laugh about that. If it doesn't happen earlier, this level of AI will arrive once computers achieve the computational power to run real-time simulations of an entire human brain. Shortly after that, we will no longer be the game changers. But by then, humans may have significantly altered themselves through direct biological manipulation.

The change I expect to see that will most affect human existence will come from biohacking: purposefully altering genomes, tissue engineering, and other advances in biology. Humans are haphazardly assembled biological machines. Our DNA was written by monkeys banging away at... not typewriters, but each other, for millions of years. Imagine how quickly life will transform when DNA and biochemistry are altered with thoughtful intent. Nanotechnology already exists as the machinery within our own biological cells; we're just now learning how these machines work, and how to control them. Pharmaceuticals will be customized to match our personal genome. We're going to be designing and growing organisms to suit our purposes. These organisms will sequester carbon, process raw material, and eventually repair and replace our own bodies.

It may not happen within my lifetime, but the biggest game change will be the ultimate synthesis of computation and biology. Biotech will eventually allow our brains to be scanned at a level sufficient to preserve our memories and reproduce our consciousness when uploaded to a more efficient computational substrate. At this point our mind may be copied, and, if desired, embedded and connected to the somatic helms of designed biological forms. We will become branching selves, following many different paths at once for the adventure, the fun, and the love of it. Life in the real world presents extremely rich experiences, and uploaded intelligences in virtual worlds will come outside where they can fly as a falcon, sprint as a cheetah, love, play, or even just breath — with superhuman consciousness, no lag, and infinite bandwidth. People will dance with nature, in all its possible forms. And we'll kitesurf.

Kitesurfing, you see, is a hell of a lot of fun — and kites are the future of sailing. Even though the sport is only a few years old and kite design is not yet mature, kitesurfers have recently broken the world sailing speed record, reaching over 50 knots. Many in the sailing world are resisting the change, and disputing the record, but kites provide efficient power and lift, and the speed gap will only grow as technology improves. Kitesurfing is a challenging dynamic balance of powerful natural forces. It feels wonderful; and it gets even more fun in waves.

All of these predicted changes are extrapolations from the seeds of present science and technology; the biggest surprises will come from what can't be extrapolated. It is uncertain how many of these changes will happen within our lifetimes, because that timescale is a dependent variable, and life is uncertain. It is both incredibly tragic and fantastically inspiring that our generation may be the last to die of old age. If extending our lives eludes us, cryonics exists as a stopgap gamble — Pascal's wager for singularitarians, with an uncertain future preferable to a certain lack of one. And if I'm wrong about these predictions, death will mean I'll never know.

It is quite likely that we will at some point see people starting to make deliberate changes in the way the climate system works. When they do they will change the world — though not necessarily, or only, in the way that they intend to.

"Geoengineering" technologies for counteracting some aspects of anthropogenic climate change — such as putting long-lived aerosols into the stratosphere, as volcanoes do, or changing the lifetimes and reflective properties of clouds — have to date been shunned by the majority of climate scientists, largely on the basis of the moral hazard involved: any sense that the risks of global warming can be taken care of by such technology weakens the case for reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.

I expect to see this unwillingness recede quite dramatically in the next few years, and not only because of the post-Lehman-Brothers bashing given to the idea that moral hazard is something to avoid at all costs. As people come to realise how little has actually been achieved so far on the emissions-reduction front, quite a few are going to start to freak out. Some of those who freak will have money to spend, and with money and the participation of a larger cadre of researchers, the science and engineering required for the serious assessment of various geoengineering schemes might be developed fairly quickly.

Why do I think those attempts will change the world? Geoengineering is not, after all, a panacea. It cannot precisely cancel out the effects of greenhouse gases, and it is likely to have knock on effects on the hydrological cycle which may well not be welcome. Even if the benefits outweigh the costs, the best-case outcome is unlikely to be more than a period of grace in which the most excessive temperature changes are held at bay. Reducing carbon-dioxide emissions will continue to be necessary. In part that is because of the problem of ocean acidification, and in part because a lower carbon-dioxide climate is vastly preferable to one that stays teetering on the brink of disaster for centuries, requiring constant tinkering to avoid teetering over into greenhouse hellishness.

So geoengineering would not "solve" climate change. Nor would it be an unprecedented human intervention into the earth system. It would be a massive thing to undertake, but hardly more momentous in absolute terms than our replacement of natural ecosystems with farmed ones; our commandeering of the nitrogen cycle; the wholesale havoc we have wrought on marine food webs; or the amplification of the greenhouse effect itself.

But what I see as world changing about this technology is not the extent to which it changes the world. It is that it does so on purpose. To live in a world subject to purposeful, planetwide change will not, I think, be quite the same as living in one being messed up by accident. Unless geoengineering fails catastrophically (which would be a pretty dramatic change in itself) the relationship between people and their environment will have changed profoundly. The line separating the natural from the artificial is itself an artifice, and one that changes with time. But this change, different in scale and not necessarily reversible, might finish off the idea of the natural as a place or time or condition that could ever be returned to. This would not be the "end of nature" — but it would be the end of a view of nature that has great power, and without which some would feel bereft. The clouds and the colours of the noon-time sky and of the setting sun will feel different if they have become, to some extent, a matter of choice.

And that choice is itself another aspect of the great change: Who chooses, and how? All climate change, whether intentional or not, has different outcomes for different regions, and geoengineering is in many ways just another form of climate change. So for some it will likely make the situation worse. If it does, does that constitute an act of war? An economic offence for which others will insist that reparations should be made? Just one of those things that the stronger do to the weaker?

Critics of geoengineering approaches are right to stress this governance problem. Where they tend to go wrong is in ignoring the fact that we already have a climate governance problem: the mechanisms currently in place to "avoid dangerous climate change", as the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change puts it, have not so far delivered the goods. A system conceived with geoengineering in mind would need to be one that held countries to the consequences of their actions in new ways, and that might strengthen and broaden approaches to emissions reduction, too. But there will always be an asymmetry, and it is an important one. To do something about emissions a significant number of large economies will have to act in concert. Geoengineering can be unilateral. Any medium sized nation could try it.

In this, as in other ways, geoengineering issues look oddly like nuclear issues. There, too, a technological stance by a single nation can have global consequences. There, too, technology has reset the boundaries of the natural in ways that can provoke a visceral opposition. There, too, there is a discourse of transcendence and a tendency to hubris that need to be held in check. And there, too, the technology has brought with it dreams of new forms of governance. In the light of Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many saw some sort of world government as a moral imperative, an historical necessity, or both. It turned out not to be, and the control of nuclear weapons and ambitions has remained an ad hoc thing, a mixture of treaties, deterrence, various suasions and occasional direct action that is unsatisfactory in many ways though not, as yet, a complete failure. A geoengineered world may end up governed in a similarly piecemeal way — and bring with it a similar open-ended risk of destabilisation, and even disaster.

The world has inertia and complexity. It changes, and it can be changed — but not always quickly, and not necessarily controllably, and not all at once. But within those constraints geoengineering will bring changes, and it will do so intentionally. And that intentional change in the relationship between people and planet might be the biggest change of all.

In 1851, Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote, "Is it a fact — or have I dreamt it — that, by means of electricity, the world of matter has become a great nerve, vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time? Rather, the round globe is a vast head, a brain, instinct with intelligence!" He was writing about the telegraph, but today we make essentially the same observation about the Internet.

One might suppose that, with all its zillions of transistors and billions of human minds, the world brain would be thinking some pretty profound thoughts. There is little evidence that this is so. Today's Internet functions mostly as a giant communications and storage system, accessed by individual humans. Although much of human knowledge is represented in some form within the machine, it is not yet represented in a form that is particularly meaningful to the machine. For the most part, the Internet knows no more about the information it handles than the telephone system knows about the conversations that take place over its lines. Most of those zillions of transistors are either doing something very trivial or nothing at all, and most of those billions of human minds are doing their own thing.

If there is such a thing as a world mind today, then its thoughts are primarily about commerce. It is the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, deciding the prices, allocating the capital. Its brain is composed not only of the human buyers and sellers, but also of the trading programs on Wall Street and of the economic models of the central banks. The wires "vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time" are not just carrying messages between human minds, they are participating in the decisions of the world mind as a whole. This unconscious system is the world's hindbrain.

I call this the hindbrain because it is performing unconscious functions necessary to the organism's own survival, functions that are so primitive that they predate development of the brain. Included in this hindbrain are the functions of preference and attention that create celebrity, popularity and fashion, all fundamental to the operation of human society. This hindbrain is ancient. Although it has been supercharged by technology, growing in speed and capacity, it has grown little in sophistication. This global hindbrain is subject to mood swings and misjudgments, leading to economic depressions, panics, witch-hunts, and fads. It can be influenced by propaganda and by advertising. It is easily misled. As vital as the hindbrain is for survival, it is not very bright.

What the world mind really needs is a forebrain, with conscious goals, access to explicit knowledge, and the ability to reason and plan. A world forebrain would need the capacity to perceive collectively, to decide collectively, and to act collectively. Of these three functions, our ability to act collectively is the most developed.

For thousands of years we have understood methods for breaking a goal into sub-goals that can be accomplished by separate teams, and for recursively breaking them down again and again until they can be accomplished by individuals. This management by hierarchy scales well. I can imagine that the construction of the pyramids was a celebration of its discovery. The hierarchical teams that built these monuments were an extension of the pharaoh's body, the pyramid a dramatic demonstration of his power to coordinate the efforts of many. Pyramid builders had to keep their direct reports within shouting distance, but electronic communication has allowed us to extend our virtual bodies, literally corporations, to a global scale. The Internet has even allowed such composite action to organize itself around an established goal, without the pharaoh. The Wikipedia is our Great Pyramid.

The collective perception of the world mind is also relatively well developed. The most important recent innovations have been search and recommendation engines, which combine the inputs of humans with machine algorithms to produce a useful result. This is another area where scale helps. Many eyes and many judgments are combined into a collective perception that is beyond the scope of any individual. The weak point is that the result of all this collective perception is just a recommendation list. For the world mind to truly perceive, it will need a way of sharing more general forms of knowledge, in a format that can be understood by both humans and machines. Various new companies are beginning to do just that.

What is still missing is the ability for a group of people (or people and machines) to make collective decisions with intelligence greater than the individual. This can sometimes be accomplished in small groups through conversation, but the method does not scale well. Generally speaking, technology has made the conversation larger, but not smarter. For large groups, the state-of-the-art method for collective decision-making is still the vote. Voting only works to the degree that, on average, each voter is able to individually determine the right decision. This is not good enough. We need an intelligence that will scale with the size of our problems.

So this is the development that will make a difference: a method for groups of people and machines to work together to make decisions in a way that takes advantage of scale. With such a scalable method for collective decision-making, our zillions of transistors and billions of brains can be used to advantage, giving the collective mind a way to focus our collective actions. Given this, we will finally have access to intelligence greater than our own. The world mind will finally have a forebrain, and this will change everything.

My job is to design and build quantum computers, computers that store and process information at the level of individual atoms. Even at the current rapid rates of progress of current computer technology, with the computer components halving in size every two years or less, and computers doubling in power over the same time, quantum computers should not be available for forty years. Yet we are building simple quantum computers today. I could tell you that quantum computers will drastically change the way the world works during our lifetime. But I'm not going to do that, for the simple reason that I have no idea whether it's true or not.

Whether or not they change the world, quantum computers have something to offer to all of us. When they flip those atomic bits to perform their computations, quantum computers possess a several useful features. It's well known that quantum computers, properly programmed, afford their users privacy and anonymity guaranteed by the laws of physics. A less well-known virtue of quantum computers is that everything that they do, they can undo as well. This ability is built into quantum computers at the level of fundamental physical law. At their most microscopic level, the laws of physics are reversible: what goes forward can go backward. (By contrast, at the more macroscopic scales at which classical computers operate, the second law of thermodynamics kicks in, and what is done cannot be undone.) Because they operate at the level of individual atoms, quantum computers inherit those atoms' ability to undo the present, and recall the past.

While quantum computers afford their users protection and anonymity that classical computers cannot, even classical computers can be programmed to share this ability to erase regret, although they currently are not. Although classical computers dissipate heat and operate in and a physically irreversible way, they can still function in a logically reversible fashion: properly programmed, they can un-perform any computation that they can perform. We already see a hint of this digital nostalgia in hard-disk 'time machines,' which restore a disk to its state in an earlier, pre-crash era.

Suppose that we were to put this ability of computers to run the clock backward to the service of undoing not merely our accidental erasures and unfortunate viral infections, but to undoing financial transactions that were conducted under fraudulent conditions? Credit card companies already supply us with protection against theft conducted in our name. Why should not more important financial transactions be similarly guaranteed? Contracts for home sales, stock deals, and credit default swaps are already recorded and executed digitally. What would happen if combined digital finance with reversible computation?

For example, if a logically reversible computer—quantum or classical—were used to record a financial contract and to execute its terms, then at some later point, if the parties were not satisfied with the way those terms were executed, then those terms could be 'un-executed,' any money disbursed, reimbursed, and the contract deleted, as if it had never been. Since finance is already digital, why not introduce a digital time machine: let's agree now that when the crash comes, as it inevitably will, we'll restore everything to a better, earlier time, before we clicked those inauspicious buttons and brought on the blue screen of financial death.

Can it be done? The laws of physics and computation say yes. But what about the laws of human nature? The financial time machine erases profits as well as losses. Will hedge fund managers and Ponzi schemers sign on to turn back the clock if schemes go awry, even if it means that their gains, well-gotten or ill-, will be restored to their clients/victims? If they refuse to agree, then you don't have to give them your money.

I make no predictions, but the laws of physics have been around for a long time. Meanwhile, the only true 'law' of human nature is its intrinsic adaptability. Microscopic reversibility is the way that Nature does business. Maybe we can learn a thing or two from Her to change the way that we do business.

If we understand our minds as we understand the physical world — that will change everything.

Because I've been writing about the history of a particular form of mental activity, I've been especially aware of the limits of what we know about the brain and the mind, this new entrant on the stage of science. Think about it: what we know about the human mind comes from data gathered for little over a hundred years. In actuality, only since mid 20th century do we have anything approximating the sort of activity that we would call a science of the mind. For a half century's work we've done pretty well, but the bald fact is that we have almost no understanding of how the thing that affects all aspects of our lives does its work. The state of our decision making — whether it is about global warming or the human genome, about big bailouts on Wall Street or microfinancing in Asia, about single payer healthcare or not — is what it is because the machine that does all the heavy lifting is something we barely understand. Would we trust the furnace in our house if we understood it as little?

I anticipate that many of the viable candidates for "everything changers" will be striking single events such as encountering new intelligent life, the ability to live forever, and a permanent solution to the problem of the environment. Indeed, any of these will produce enormous change and deserves to be on the list. But if we are to take seriously the question of what will change "everything", then the candidate really has to be something that underlies all other changes, and hence my candidate remains understanding the mind.

From the little we do know, we can say that good people (we, us) are capable of incredible harm to others and even themselves. That daily moral decisions we make are not based on the principles of justice that we think they are, but are often a result of the familiarity and similarity of the other to oneself. These two simple types of bias happen because the mind and its workings remain invisible to us and until we unmask it meanderings, the disparity between what we do and what we think we do will remain murky.

That we have spent no more than a few decades of our entire history scrutinizing the mind should be both frightening and give hope. Whether the question is how we will deal with new life forms when we encounter them, or how we will design our lives as we prepare to live forever, or how we will generate the courage to stop environmental devastation, understanding the mind will change everything.

Currently, the most keenly awaited technological development is an all-purpose artificial intelligence — perhaps even an intelligence that would revise itself and grow at an ever-accelerating rate, until it enacts millennial transformations. Since the invention of artificial minds seventy years ago, computer scientists have felt on the verge of building a generally intelligent machine. Yet somehow this goal, like the horizon, keeps retreating as fast as it is approached. In contrast, we think that an all-purpose artificial intelligence will — for the foreseeable future — remain elusive. But understanding why will unlock other revolutions.

AI's wrong turn? Assuming that the best methods for reasoning and thinking — for true intelligence — are those that can be applied successfully to any content. Equip a computer with these general methods, input some facts to apply them to, increase hardware speed, and a dazzlingly high intelligence seems fated to emerge. Yet one never materializes, and achieved levels of general AI remain too low to meaningfully compare to human intelligence.

But powerful natural intelligences do exist. How do native intelligences — like those found in humans — operate? With few exceptions, they operate by being specialized. They break off small but biologically important fragments of the universe (predator-prey interactions, color, social exchange, physical causality, alliances, genetic kinship, etc.) and engineer different problem-solving methods for each. Evolution tailors computational hacks that work brilliantly, by exploiting relationships that exist only in its particular fragment of the universe (the geometry of parallax gives vision a depth cue; an infant nursed by your mother is your genetic sibling; two solid objects cannot occupy the same space). These native intelligences are dramatically smarter than general reasoning because natural selection equipped them with radical short cuts. These bypass the endless possibilities that general intelligences get lost among. Our mental programs can be fiendishly well-engineered to solve some problems, because they are not limited to using only those strategies that can be applied to all problems.

Lessons from evolutionary psychology indicate that developing specialized intelligences — artificial idiot savants — and networking them would achieve a mosaic AI, just as evolution gradually built natural intelligences. The essential activity is discovering sets of principles that solve a particular family of problem. Indeed, successful scientific theories are examples of specialized intelligences, whether implemented culturally among communities of researchers or implemented computationally in computer models. Similarly, adding duplicates of the specialized programs we discover in the human mind to the emerging AI network would constitute a tremendous leap toward AI. Essentially, for this aggregating intelligence to communicate with humans — for it to understand what we mean by a question or want by a request, it will have to become equipped with accurate models of the native intelligences that inhabit human minds.

Which brings us to another impending transformation: rapid and sustained progress in understanding natural minds.

For decades, evolutionary psychologists have been devoted to perpetrating the great reductionist crime — working to create a scientific discipline that progressively maps the evolved universal human mind/brain — the computational counterpart to the human genome. The goal of evolutionary psychology has been to create high resolution maps of the circuit logic of each of the evolved programs that together make up human nature (anger, incest avoidance, political identification, understanding physical causality, guilt, intergroup rivalry, coalitional aggression, status, sexual attraction, magnitude representation, predator-prey psychology, etc.). Each of these is an intelligence specialized to solve its class of ancestral problems.

The long-term ambition is to develop a model of human nature as precise as if we had the engineering specifications for the control systems of a robot. Of course, both theory and evidence indicate that the programming of the human is endlessly richer and subtler than that of any foreseeable robot.

Still, how might a circuit map of human nature radically change the situation our species finds itself in?

Humanity will continue to be blind slaves to the programs that evolution has built into our brains until we drag them into the light. Ordinarily, we only inhabit the versions of reality they spontaneously construct for us — the surfaces of things. Because we are unaware we are in a theater, with our roles and our lines largely written for us by our mental programs, we are credulously swept up in these plays (such as the genocidal drama of us versus them). Endless chain reactions among these programs leave us the victims of history — embedded in war and oppression, enveloped in mass delusions and cultural epidemics, mired in endless negative sum conflict.

If we understand these programs and the coordinated hallucinations they orchestrate in our minds, our species could awaken from the roles these programs assign to us. Yet this cannot happen if this knowledge — like quantum mechanics — remains forever locked up in the minds of a few specialists, walled off by the years of study required to master it.

Which brings us to another interlinked transformation, which could solve this problem.

If a concerted effort were made, we could develop methods for transferring bodies of understanding — intellectual mastery — far more rapidly, cheaply, and efficiently than we do now. Universities still use medieval (!) techniques (lecturing) to noisily, haphazardly and partially transfer fragments of 21st century disciplines, taking many years and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per transfer per person. But what if people could spend four months with a specialized AI — something immersive, interactive, all-absorbing and video game-like, and emerge with a comprehensive understanding of physics, or materials science, or evolutionary psychology? To achieve this, technological, scientific, and entertainment innovations in several dozen areas would be integrated: Hollywood post-production techniques, the compulsively attention-capturing properties of emerging game design, nutritional cognitive enhancement, a growing map of our evolved programs (and their organs of understanding), an evolutionary psychological approach to entertainment, neuroscience-midwived brain-computer interfaces, rich virtual environments, and 3D imaging technologies. Eventually, conceptual education will become intense, compelling, searingly memorable, and ten times faster.

A Gutenberg revolution in disseminating conceptual mastery would change everything, and — not least — would allow our species to achieve widespread scientific self-understanding. We could awaken from ancient nightmares.

What will change everything? The question itself and many of the answers already given by others here on Edge.org point to a common theme: reflective, scientific investigation of everything is going to change everything. When we look closely at looking closely, when we increase our investment in techniques for increasing our investment in techniques... for increasing our investment in techniques, we create non-linearities, — like Doug Hofstadter's strange loops — that amplify uncertainties, allowing phenomena that have heretofore been orderly and relatively predictable to escape our control. We figure out how to game the system, and this initiates an arms race to control or prevent the gaming of the system, which leads to new levels of gamesmanship and so on.

The snowball has started to roll, and there is probably no stopping it. Will the result be a utopia or a dystopia? Which of the novelties are self-limiting, and which will extinguish institutions long thought to be permanent? There is precious little inertia, I think, in cultural phenomena once they are placed in these arms races of cultural evolution. Extinction can happen overnight, in some cases. The almost frictionless markets made possible by the internet are already swiftly revolutionizing commerce.

Will universities and newspapers become obsolete? Will hospitals and churches go the way of corner grocery stores and livery stables? Will reading music soon become as arcane a talent as reading hieroglyphics? Will reading and writing themselves soon be obsolete? What will we use our minds for? Some see a revolution in our concept of intelligence, either because of "neurocosmetics" (Marcel Kinsbourne) or quantum-computing (W. H. Hoffman), or "just in time storytelling" (Roger Schank). Nick Humphrey reminds us that when we get back to basics — procreating, eating, just staying alive — not that much has changed since Roman times, but I think that these are not really fixed points after all.

Our species' stroll through Design Space is picking up speed. Recreational sex, recreational eating, and recreational perception (hallucinogens, alcohol), have been popular since Roman times, but we are now on the verge of recreational self-transformations that will dwarf the modifications the Romans indulged in. When you no longer need to eat to stay alive, or procreate to have offspring, or locomote to have an adventure — packed life, when the residual instincts for these activities might be simply turned off by genetic tweaking, there may be no constants of human nature left at all. Except, maybe, our incessant curiosity.

I will see the development of robots that people will want to spend time with. Not just a little time, time in which the robots serve as amusements, but enough time and with enough interactivity that the robots will be experienced as companions, each closer to a someone than a something. I think of this as the robotic moment.

Sociable technologies first came on the mass market with the 1997 Tamagotchi, a creature on a small video screen that did not offer to take care of you, but asked you to take care of it. The Tamagotchi needed to be fed and amused. It needed its owners to clean up after its digital messes. Tamagotchis demonstrated that in digital sociability, nurturance is a "killer app." We nurture what we love but we love what we nurture. In the early days of artificial intelligence, the emphasis had been on building artifacts that impressed with their knowledge and understanding. When AI goes sociable, the game changes: the "relational" artifacts that followed the Tamagotchis inspired feelings of connection because they push on people's "Darwinian" buttons: they asked us to teach them, they made eye contact, they tracked our motions, they remembered our names. For people, these are the markers of sentience, they signal us, rightly or wrongly, that there is "somebody home."

Sociable technologies came onstage as toys, but in the future, they will be presented as potential nannies, teachers, therapists, life coaches, and caretakers for the elderly. First, they will be put forward as "better than nothing." (It is better to have a robot as a diet coach than just to read a diet book. If your mother is in a nursing home, it is better to leave her interacting with a robot that knows her habits and interests than staring at a television screen.) But over time, robots will be presented as "better than something," that is, preferable to an available human being, or in some cases, to a living pet. They will be promoted as having powers – of memory, attention, and patience – that people lack. Even now, when people learn that I work with robots, they tell me stories of human disappointment: they talk of cheating husbands, wives who fake orgasms, children who take drugs. They despair about human opacity: "We never know how another person really feels; people put on a good face. Robots would be safer." As much as a story of clever engineering, our evolving attachments to technology speaks to feelings of unrequited love.

In the halls of a large psychology conference, a graduate student takes me aside to ask for more information on the state of research about relational machines. She confides that she would trade in her boyfriend "for a sophisticated Japanese robot" if the robot would produce what she termed "caring behavior." She tells me that she relies on a "feeling of civility in the house." She does not want to be alone. She says: "If the robot could provide the environment, I would be happy to help produce the illusion that there is somebody really with me." What she is looking for, she tells me, is a "no-risk relationship" that will stave off loneliness; a responsive robot, even if it is just exhibiting scripted behavior, seems better to her than a demanding boyfriend. I ask her if she is joking. She tells me she is not.

It seemed like no time at all that a reporter for Scientific American calls to interview me about a book on robot love by computer scientist David Levy. In Love and Sex with Robots Levy argues that robots will teach us to be better friends and lovers because we will be able to practice on them, relationally and physically. Beyond this, they can substitute where people fail us. Levy proposes, among other things, the virtues of marriage to robots. He argues that robots are "other," but in many ways, better. No cheating. No heartbreak.

I tell the reporter that I am not enthusiastic about Levy's suggestions: to me, the fact that we are discussing marriage to robots is a window onto human disappointments. The reporter asks if my opposition to people marrying robots doesn't put me in the same camp as those who had for so long stood in the way of marriage for lesbians and gay men. I try to explain that just because I don't think that people should marry machines doesn't mean that any mix of adult people with other adult people isn't fair territory. He accuses me of species chauvinism and restates his objection: Isn't this the kind of talk that homophobes once used, not considering gays and lesbians as "real" people? Machines are "real" enough to bring special pleasures to relationships, pleasures that need to be honored in their own right.

The argument in Love and Sex is exotic, but we are being prepared for the robotic moment every day. Consider Joanie, seven, who has been given a robot dog. She can't have a real dog because of her allergies, but the robot's appeal goes further. It is not just better than nothing but better than something. Joanie's robot, known as an Aibo, is a dog that can be made to measure. Joanie says, "It would be nice to be able to keep Aibo at a puppy stage for people who like to have puppies."

It is a very big step from Joanie admiring a "forever young" Aibo to David Levy and his robot lover. But they share the fantasy that while we may begin with substituting a robot if a person is not available we will move on to specifically choose malleable artificial companions. If the robot is a pet, it might always stay a puppy because that's how you like it. If the robot is a lover, you might always be the center of its universe because that's how you like it.

But what will happen if we get what we say we want? If our pets always stay puppy cute; if our lovers always said the sweetest things? If you only know cute and cuddly, you don't learn about maturation, growth, change, and responsibility. If you only know an accommodating partner, you end up knowing neither the partner nor yourself.

The robotic moment will bring us to the question we must ask of every technology: does it serve our human purposes, a question that causes us to reconsider what these purposes are. When we connect with the robots of the future, we will tell and they will remember. But have they listened? Have we been "heard" in a way that matters? Will we no longer care?

Following the nano and miniaturization trend occuring in many fields from tapas, to cameras, including surgery, vegetables, cars, computers....

Let's imagine that the fantastic Gulliver iconography with its cohabitation of tiny and giant people could also have some visionnary quality. Let's think that the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man can be more than science fiction and let's imagine a worldwide collective decision to genetically miniaturize the future generations in order to reduce the human needs and increase space and ressources on the blue planet.

There would be a strange Gulliver-like period of transition where giants would still live with the next smaller generations, but on a longer run, the planet might look very different and the change of scale in relation to animals, plants, lanscapes could generate completely new ideas perceptions, representations and ideas.

We may find the evidence we need within the frigid hydrocarbon lakes of Titan. Or perhaps we shall locate it by tracing the source of the methane hot spots on Mars to their deep underground origin. It may be easier though to sample in depth the contents of the water vapor and ice jets that erupt from “tiger stripe” cracks near the south pole of Enceladus. Least expensive of all would be to explore closer to home - in forsaken regions of Earth that are so hot, or so acidic, or so lacking in some vital nutrient necessary to life as we know it, that no creatures built of such life would deign to inhabit it. So many promising leads have appeared that it seems likely that only our desire and our finances stand as obstacles to our gaining the prize.

The prize in this case would be a sample of truly alien life. Despite the great legacy from pulp science fiction magazines and expensive Hollywood box office productions, aliens need not be green men, or menacing fanged monsters. Even humble microbes dismissed as “shower scum” in the New York Times would do nicely, provided that they met one key requirement. They must differ enough from us at the biochemical level so that it would be clear that they had started up and evolved on their own. Two separate origins in the same Solar System would imply that the universe is liberally sprinkled with life. Why would a discovery of this type change everything? It would not put food upon our dinner tables or shorten our commute to work. The change would come in our perception of the universe (which does contain everything that we know) and the place of life within it. We would learn that life, like art, can take on many forms and be constructed in countless ways and that we appear to be residents of a universe built to encourage such diversity.

We have always understood, of course, that living things came in many sizes and shapes: bacteria and whales, octopuses and centipedes. But we took it for granted that they were all made of one substance, one flesh. When they were ferocious, they could devour us. When they were domestic, we could make meals of them. This expectation was extended to alien life in fiction, myth and imagination. The Martian invaders of H.G. Wells "War of the Worlds" were ultimately subdued by infection by Earthly microbes. The creatures of the “Aliens” film series could incubate in humans, and draw nourishment from them. Humans could have sexual encounters with ancient Greek gods as well as with intruders in flying saucers.

Such events would have provoked little surprise in the 19th century, when the basic substance of life was thought to be a vital, gel-like protoplasm, which presumably would be the same everywhere. We now understand that life’s basic structure is much more intricate, but that the same building materials, nucleic acids, proteins, carbohydrates and fatty substances are used by all known life forms here. Some scientists have extended this conclusion to alien life. To quote Nobel Laureate George Wald "…So I tell my students: learn your biochemistry here and you will be able to pass examinations on Arcturus." This view carries practical consequences today: proposals for instruments to be flown to Mars and elsewhere include antibodies, probes, and other methods designed to detect the molecules familiar to us on Earth today.

If the microbes that we discoved on a nearby world had traveled from Earth within a meteorite, then this expectation would be valid.. By studying them, we might learn a lot about the earlier stages of the evolution of life here, and about the ability of Earth life to adapt to a very different environment. Such information would be valuable, but it would not change everything.

When we discover separate origin life, we will hit the jackpot. It will truly be made of a different flesh. Biochemists will be fascinated to learn how life functions such as energy capture, information storage and catalysis can be carried out by materials different from the life we know. The field of biology will be greatly enriched, and a host of new technical innovations may arise from the new knowledge, but even this would not change everything. The largest impact would take place in the way that we view our existence and plan for our future.

For stability and comfort, most human beings appear to require a narrative that provides meaning and purpose to their lives. In many religions, our behavior as individuals here determines our fate in a hereafter. Our actions are crucial in the grand scheme of things. Prior to the Copernican revolution, the Earth was naturally placed at the very center of the stage in the theater of existence. As suitable decorations, the various heavenly bodies were embedded in spheres that rotated above us.

Now we understand that our home world occupies only a minute fragment of an immense array of planets, stars, and galaxies. Our species has experienced only a sliver of the great expanse of time that has passed since the Big Bang, and much more is yet to come. The playing field has become immense.

Traditional religions have generally ignored this huge expansion of the cosmic scheme and cling to an essentially pre-Copernican view of existence. In doing so, they reduce their narratives to cherished folk tales, with a message as relevant today as the science of Aristotle. By contrast, some Nobel Laureate scientists have regarded the Universe as meaningless and pointless, with our life representing an accidental anomaly that will disappear sooner or later. Fortunately, another interpretation exists; one that is fully compatible with science though it extends beyond it.

Eric Chaisson, Paul Davies and others have described a viewpoint often called "Cosmic Evolution". The successive appearance of galaxies, stars and planets, atoms and molecules, life and intelligence are all seen as inherent in the laws that have governed our universe since the Big Bang. Minor alterations in many of the fundamental constants that are embedded in those laws would have made this succession of events impossible. For whatever reason, our universe is (to use Paul Davies' word) "bio-friendly".

If a separate origin of life were encountered within our own Solar System, the credibility of this viewpoint would be strengthened immensely. We could see ourselves as active participants in a vast cosmic competition that required all available space and time to play itself out to the fullest extent. To advance in the game and ultimately grasp its point, our mission would be to survive, prosper, evolve to the next stage and to expand into the greater universe (which would not be bad goals under any circumstance). By liberating humanity from a choice between obsolete dogma and unrelenting pessimism, this discovery would ultimately change everything.

When evaluating the social cost of deception, one must consider all of the misdeeds—marital infidelities, Ponzi schemes, premeditated murders, terrorist atrocities, genocides, etc.—that are nurtured and shored-up, at every turn, by lies. Viewed in this wider context, deception commends itself, perhaps even above violence, as the principal enemy of human cooperation. Imagine how our world would change if, when the truth really mattered, it became impossible to lie.

The development of mind-reading technology is in its infancy, of course. But reliable lie-detection will be much easier to achieve than accurate mind reading. Whether on not we ever crack the neural code, enabling us to download a person’s private thoughts, memories, and perceptions without distortion, we will almost surely be able to determine, to a moral certainty, whether a person is representing his thoughts, memories, and perceptions honestly in conversation. Compared to many of the other hypothetical breakthroughs put forward in response to this year’s Edge question, the development of a true lie-detector would represent a very modest advance over what is currently possible through neuroimaging. Once this technology arrives, it will change (almost) everything.

The greatest transformation of our society will occur only once lie-detectors become both affordable and unobtrusive. Rather than spirit criminal defendants and hedge-fund managers off to the lab for a disconcerting hour of brain scanning, there may come a time when every courtroom or boardroom will have the requisite technology discretely concealed behind its wood paneling. Thereafter, civilized people would share a common presumption: that wherever important conversations are held, the truthfulness of all participants will be monitored. Well-intentioned people would happily pass between zones of obligatory candor, and these transitions will cease to be remarkable. Just as we’ve come to expect that many public spaces will be free of nudity, sex, loud swearing, and cigarette smoke—and now think nothing of the behavioral changes demanded of us whenever we leave the privacy of our homes—we may come to expect that certain places and occasions will require scrupulous truth-telling. Most of us will no more feel deprived of the freedom lie during a press conference or a job interview than we currently feel deprived of the freedom to remove our pants in a restaurant. Whether or not the technology works as well as we hope, the belief that it generally does work will change our culture profoundly.

In a legal context, some scholars have already begun to worry that reliable lie detection will constitute an infringement of a person’s Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. But the Fifth Amendment has already succumbed to advances in our technology. The Supreme Court has ruled that defendants can be forced to provide samples of their blood, saliva, and other physical evidence that may incriminate them. In fact, the prohibition against compelled testimony appears to be a relic of a more superstitious time: it was once widely believed that lying under oath would damn a person’s soul for eternity. I doubt whether even many fundamentalist Christians now imagine that an oath sworn on a courtroom Bible has such cosmic significance.

Of course, no technology is ever perfect. Once we have a proper lie-detector in hand, we will suffer the caprice of its positive and negative errors. Needless to say, such errors will raise real ethical and legal concerns. But some rate of error will, in the end, be judged acceptable. Remember that we currently lock people away in prison for decades—or kill them—all the while knowing that some percentage of those convicted must be innocent, while some percentage of those returned to our streets will be dangerous psychopaths guaranteed to re-offend. We have no choice but to rely upon our criminal justice system, despite the fact that judges and juries are poorly calibrated truth detectors, prone to error. Anything that can improve the performance of this ancient system, even slightly, will raise the quotient of justice in our world.

There are several reasons to doubt whether any of our current modalities of neuroimaging, like fMRI, will yield a practical form of mind-reading technology. It is also true that the physics of neuroimaging may grant only so much scope to human ingenuity. It is possible, therefore, that an era of cheap, covert lie-detection might never dawn, and we will be forced to rely upon some relentlessly costly, cumbersome technology. Even so, I think it safe to say that the time is not far off when lying, on the weightiest matters, will become a practical impossibility. This fact will be widely publicized, of course, and the relevant technology will be expected to be in place, or accessible, whenever the stakes are high. This very assurance, rather than the incessant use of these machines, will make all the difference.

DISCOVERING THAT SOMEONE FROM THE FUTURE HAS ALREADY COME TO VISIT US

It is obvious that many of the most powerful new technologies are likely to flow from biology, but one of the most game changing is likely to be neural control of devices. We are not far from being able to "jack in" to the Web. Why do I think so? Several new biological tools are converging to give us both an understanding and new capabilities at the neuronal level.

The first new tools are the means to image the internal working of living cells, including neurons. The second are a variety of tools for precisely mapping complex bio-molecular mechanics so that we can understand and manipulate neural functioning within the cell at a molecular level. And finally the functional MRI is already giving us a systemic understanding of neural behavior.

Over the next several decades there are likely to be other significant new biological tools that I have not foreseen that will only strengthen my argument. But the combination of these three are already likely to give us sufficient insight into how the brain works that we will be able to construct the means to reliably read the state of the brain and use that information to control external devices.

The first steps toward that are already far along in the pursuit of advanced prosthetic devices. The ability to give the seriously injured the ability to control a prosthetic arm is already a reality in the laboratory. And we have read out neural states that seem to express language. It is a few big steps from there to the ability to reliably control devices.

But if this does come to pass the most obvious applications will be the control of such physical devices as cars, trucks, fighter jets, drones, machine tools, etc. But the most interesting device to control will be the computer cursor/keyboard. It is not hard to imagine a piece of technology, say like a blue tooth ear-piece that would enable one to think of a message and send it. It will be a form of one way electronically mediated telepathy. Reading out a message to another person will be fairly easy in the sense that control of the keyboard, will give one the ability to transmit.

But we are much further from understanding the read-in process. We may be able to send fairly easily but we may never figure out how to receive directly into the brain. We may have to read the information as we do today even if it is a neurally expressed message. It might be some advanced form of interface, e.g. electronic contact lenses, but it is just a better computer screen. But neuro-transmitting by itself will be sufficiently game changing, and also will be a step along the way to a radically different world of computer mediated reality in every sense.

In 2009 we are still comparatively near to the beginning of an era in which biomedical research is revolutionizing our understanding of inherited human diseases and providing the first effective treatment for at least some of them. This new knowledge will offer benefits that are at least as great as those from past biomedical research which has dramatically reduced the devastating effects of many infectious diseases. The powerful new tools that will bring this about are those for molecular genetic analysis and stem cell biology.

Human health and lifespan in the more fortunate parts of the world has improved dramatically in the past 1,000 years, but in the main this is because we became better at meeting the everyday needs for survival. Over this period humans became more effective at collecting or producing adequate supplies of food. On this timescale it was only comparatively recently that communities recognized the need for clean water and effective sanitation to prevent infection. More recently still, methods have been developed for immunization against potential infection and compounds identified as being powerful antibiotics. While the authors of these essays, and the vast majority of those who read them, can take all of these benefits for-granted it is a sad commentary on us all that this is not true for many millions in the less fortunate parts of the world, but that is another matter.

The coming together of emerging techniques in cell and molecular biology will change our entire approach to human diseases that are inherited, rather than acquired from an infective agent, such as a virus or bacterium. “Inherited diseases” are those in which run in families because of errors in the DNA sequence of some family members. For the sake of simplicity, this essay will concentrate upon diseases inherited through chromosomal DNA, while acknowledging that there is DNA in mitochondria which is also error prone and the cause of other inherited diseases.

While the proportion of diseases for which the precise genetic cause has been identified is increasing because of the power of modern molecular analysis, it is still small. Even more important, is the fact that, the way in which the genetic error causes the symptoms of the disease is known in very few cases. This has been a major limiting factor in the development of effective treatments because the objective with present treatments is not to correct the error in the DNA, but rather to prevent the development of the symptoms.

One advantage of the new tools is that it is not necessary to have identified the genetic error to be able to identify compounds that can prevent the development of symptoms. This new opportunity arises from the revolutionary new technique, by which stem cells able to form all tissues of the body are formed from cells taken from adults. Shinya Yamanaka of the University of Kyoto was the first to show that a simple procedure could achieve this extraordinary change and named the cells “induced pluripotent cells” in view of their ability for form all tissues.

Many laboratories are now using induced pluripotent stem cells to study inherited diseases, such as ALS. Pluripotent cells from ALS patients are turned into the different neural populations affected by the disease and contrasted with the same cell population from healthy donors. Discovery of the molecular cause of the diseases will involve analyses of gene function in the diseased cells in many ways. There is then the practical issue of devising a test to discover if potential drugs are able to prevent the development of the disease symptoms. This can be used as the basis of tests that can be carried out by robots able to screen thousands of compounds every week. Many further studies will then be required before any new medicine can be used to treat patients.

In addition to the prospect of understanding and being able to treat inherited diseases it is also likely that these therapies will be effective in treating related cases for which there is no evidence of a genetic cause. In the case of ALS it is estimated that less than 10% of cases are inherited. ALS should be considered as a family of diseases because it reflects errors in several different genes. Recent studies have revealed an unusual distribution of a particular protein within the cells of many patients. This was the case in inherited cases associated with all except one of these genes and in addition occurred in several patients for which there was no evidence of an inherited effect. While this pattern may not occur with all inherited diseases the observation lends encouragement to the hope that treatments developed through research with inherited cases will often be equally effective for the cases in which there is no genetic effect.

While I have separated infectious and inherited diseases, in reality there is a considerable overlap. New understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms that govern normal development and health will also provide the basis for novel treatments for infectious diseases. In this way for example, an understanding of the development and function of the immune system may reveal new approaches to the treatment of diseases such as HIV.

It is always impossible to predict the future and scientists above many others should know to expect the unexpected. Sadly this leads one to be cautious and fear that it will not be possible to develop effective treatments for some diseases, but it also suggests that there will also be joyous surprises in store. I certainly find it very exciting indeed to think that in my lifetime effective treatments will be available for some of the many hundred inherited diseases. The devastating effect of these diseases on the patients and their families will be greatly reduced or even removed, in just the same way that earlier research banished infections such as polio, TB and the childhood diseases such as measles or mumps.

Many people think that genetic engineering will change everything, even our very bodies and minds. It will, eventually. Right now, however, attempts to apply new genetic knowledge are having profound effects, not on our bodies, but on how we understand our bodies.  They are revealing that our central metaphor for the body is fundamentally flawed. The body is not a machine. It is something very different, a soma shaped by selection with systems unlike anything an engineer would design. Replacing the machine metaphor with a more biological view of the body will change biology in fundamental ways.

The transition will be difficult because the metaphor of body as machine has served us well. It sped escape from vitalism, and encouraged analyses of the body's components, connections, and functions, as if they were the creations of some extraordinarily clever cosmic engineer. It has yielded explanations with boxes and arrows, as if the parts are components of an efficient device. Thanks to the metaphor of the body as machine, vitalism has been replaced by an incredible understanding of the body's mechanisms. 

Now, however, genetic advances are revealing the metaphor's limitations.  For instance, a decade ago it was reasonable to think we would find the genes that cause bipolar disease.  New data has dashed these hopes. Bipolar disease is not caused by consistent genetic variations with large effects. Instead, it may arise from a many different mutations, or from the interacting tiny effects of dozens of genes. 

We like to think of genes as information quanta whose proteins serve specific functions. However, many regulate the expression of other genes that regulate developmental pathways that are regulated by environmental factors that are detected by yet other bodily systems unlike those in any machine. Even the word "regulate" implies coherent planning, when the reality is systems that work, one way or another, by mechanisms sometimes so entangled we cannot fully describe them. We can identify the main players, insulin and glucagon in glucose regulation, the amygdala in responding to treats and losses. But the details?  Dozens of genes, hormones and neural pathways influence each other in interactions that defy description, even while they do what needs to be done.  We have assumed, following the metaphor of the machine, that the body is extremely complex.  We have yet to acknowledge that some evolved systems may be indescribably complex.  

Indescribable complexity implies nothing supernatural. Bodies and their origins are purely physical. It also has nothing to do with so-called irreducible complexity, that last bastion of creationists desperate to avoid the reality of unintelligent design. Indescribable complexity does, however, confront us with the inadequacy of models built to suit our human preferences for discrete categories, specific functions, and one directional causal arrows. Worse than merely inadequate, attempts to describe the body as a machine foster inaccurate oversimplifications. Some bodily systems cannot be described in terms simple enough to be satisfying; others may not be described adequately even by the most complex models we can imagine. 

This does not mean we should throw up our hands. Moving to a more fully evolutionary view of organisms will improve our understanding. The foundation is recognizing that the body is not a machine. I like to imagine the body as Rube-Goldberg device, modified by generations of blind tinkers, with indistinctly separate parts connected, not by a few strings and pulley, but by myriads of mechanisms interacting in ways that no engineer would tolerate, or even imagine. But even this metaphor is flawed. A body is a body is a body. As we come to recognize that bodies are bodies, not machines, everything will change. 

Social media literacy is going to change many games in unforeseeable ways. Since the advent of the telegraph, the infrastructure for global, ubiquitous, broadband communication media have been laid down, and of course the great power of the Internet is the democracy of access—in a couple of decades, the number of users has grown from a thousand to a billion. But the next important breakthroughs won't be in hardware or software but in know-how, just the most important after-effects of the printing press were not in improved printing technologies but in widespread literacy. The Gutenberg press itself was not enough. Mechanical printing had been invented in Korea and China centuries before the European invention. For a number of reasons, a market for print and the knowledge of how to use the alphabetic code for transmitting knowledge across time and space broke out of the scribal elite that had controlled it for millennia. From around 20,000 books written by hand in Gutenberg's lifetime, the number of books grew to tens of millions within decades of the invention of moveable type. And the rapidly expanding literate population in Europe began to create science, democracy, and the foundations of the industrial revolution. Today, we´re seeing the beginnings of scientific, medical, political, and social revolutions, from the instant epidemiology that broke out online when SARS became known to the world, to the use of social media by political campaigns. But we´re only in the earliest years of social media literacy. Whether universal access to many-to-many media will lead to explosive scientific and social change depends more on know-how now than physical infrastructure. Would the early religious petitioners during the English Civil War, and the printers who eagerly fed their need to spread their ideas have been able to predict that within a few generations, monarchs would be replaced by constitutions? Would Bacon and Newton have dreamed that entire populations, and not just a few privileged geniuses, would aggregate knowledge and turn it into technology? Would those of us who used slow modems to transmit black and white text on the early Internet 15 years ago been able to foresee YouTube?

THE LENGTHENING LIFE-SPANS OF INDIVIDUALS SHADOWED BY THE SHORTENING LIFE-SPANS OF SPECIES

We humans are more alike than different, but our differences are nonetheless pervasive and substantial. Think of differences in height and weight, of shoe size and thumb diameter. In this context, it's not surprising that our brains also differ. And in fact, ample research has documented individual differences not only in the sizes of specific brain regions, but also in how strongly activated the same parts of the brain are when people perform a given task. And more than this, both sorts of neural differences – structural and functional – have been shown to predict specific types of behavior. For example, my collaborators and I have shown that the strength of activation in one part of visual cortex predicts the ease of visualizing shapes.

Nevertheless, our society and institutionalized procedures rarely acknowledge such individual differences, and instead operate on a philosophy (usually implicit) of "one size fits all." It is impossible to estimate how much leverage we could gain if we took advantage of individuals' strengths, and avoided falling prey to their weaknesses. The technology now exists to do this in multiple domains.

How can we gain leverage from exploiting individual differences? One approach is first to characterize each person with a mental profile. This profile would rely on something like a "periodic table of the mind," which would characterize three aspects of mental function, pertaining to: (1) information processing (i.e., the ease of representing and processing information in specific ways), (2) motivation (what one is interested in, as well as his or her goals and values), and (3) the contents of one's knowledge (in particular, what knowledge base one has in specific areas, which then can be built upon). A value would be assigned to each cell of the table for a given person, creating an individual profile.

Being able to produce such profiles would open up new vistas for personalizing a wide range of activities. For example:

Learning. Researchers have argued that some people learn more effectively by verbal means, others by visual means if shapes are used, others by visual means if spatial relations are used, and so on. People no doubt vary in a wide range of ways in their preferred and most effective learning styles. Knowing the appropriate dimensions of the relevant individual differences will put us in a position to design teaching regimens that fit a given person's information processing proclivities, motivation, and current level of knowledge.

Communicating. A picture may be worth 1,000 words for many people, but probably not for everyone. The best way to reach people is to ensure that they are not overloaded with too much information or bored with too little, to appeal to what interests them, and to make contact with what they already know. Thus, both the form and content of a communication would profit from being tailored to the individual.

Psychotherapy. Knowing what motivates someone obviously is a key to effective psychotherapy, but so is knowing a client's or patient's strengths and weaknesses in information processing (especially if a cognitive therapy is used).

Jobs. Any sort of work task could be analyzed in terms of the same dimensions that are used to characterize individual differences (such as, for example, the importance of having a large working memory capacity or being interested in finding disparities in patterns). Following this, we could match a person's strengths with the necessary requirements of a task. In fact, by appropriate matching, a person could be offered jobs that are challenging enough to remain interesting, but not so challenging as to be exhausting and not so easy as to be stultifying.

Teams. Richard Hackman, Anita Wooley, Chris Chabris, and our colleagues used knowledge of individual differences to compose teams. We showed that teams are more effective if the individuals are selected to have complementary cognitive strengths that are necessary to perform the task. Our initial demonstrations are just the beginning; a full characterization of individual differences will promote much more effective composition of teams.

However, these worthy goals are not quite as simple to attain as they might appear. A key problem is that the periodic table approach suggests that each facet of information processing, motivation, and content is independent. That is, the approach suggests that each of these facets can be combined as if they were "mental atoms" – and, like atoms, that each function retains its identity in all combinations.

But in fact the various mental functions are not entirely independent. This fact has been appreciated almost since the inception of scientific psychology, when researchers identified what they called "the fallacy of pure insertion": A given mental process does not operate the same way in different contexts. For instance, one could estimate the time people require to divide a number by 10; this value could then be subtracted from the time people require to find the mean of 10 numbers, with the idea being that the residual should indicate the time to add up the numbers. But it does not. 

In short, a simple "periodic table of the mind," where a given mental function is assumed to operate the same way when inserted in the context of other functions, does not work. Depending on what other functions are in play, we are more or less effective at a given one – and there will no doubt be individual differences in the degree to which context modulates processing.

To begin to use individual differences in the ways summarized above, we need to pursue two strategies in parallel, one for the short term and one for the long term. First, a short-term strategy is simply to work backwards from a specific application: Do we want to teach someone calculus? For that person, we would to assess the relevant information processes within the context of their motivation and prior knowledge. Given current computer technology, this can easily be done. The teaching method (or psychotherapy technique, etc.) would then be tailored for the content for that person in that particular context.

Second, a long-term strategy is to identify higher-order regularities that not only characterize information processing, motivation, and content but also characterize the ways in which these factors interact. Such regularities may be almost entirely statistical, and may end up having the same status as some equations in physics (sophisticated algorithms already exist to perform such analyses); other regularities may be easier to interpret. For example, some people may discount future rewards more than others – but especially rewards that do not bear heavily on their key values, which in turn reduces the effort they will put into attaining such rewards. Once we characterize such regularities in how mental functions interact, we can then apply them to individuals and specify individual differences at this more abstract level.

Much will be gained by leveraging individual differences, instead of ignoring them as is commonly done today. We will not only make human endeavors more effective, but also make them more satisfying for the individual.

Human knowledge changes the world as it spreads, and the spread of knowledge can be observed. This makes some change predictable. I see great change flowing from the spread of knowledge of two scientific facts: one simple and obvious, the other complex and tangled in myth. Both are crucial to understanding the climate change problem and what we can do about it.

First, the simple scientific fact: Carbon stays in the atmosphere for a long time.

To many readers, this is nothing new, yet most who know this make a simple mistake. They think of carbon as if it were sulfur, with pollution levels that rise and fall with the rate of emission: Cap sulfur emissions, and pollution levels stabilize; cut emissions in half, cut the problem in half. But carbon is different. It stays aloft for about a century, practically forever. It accumulates. Cap the rate of emissions, and the levels keep rising; cut emissions in half, and levels will still keep rising. Even deep cuts won't reduce the problem, but only the rate of growth of the problem.

In the bland words of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "only in the case of essentially complete elimination of emissions can the atmospheric concentration of CO2 ultimately be stabilised at a constant [far higher!] level." This heroic feat would require new technologies and the replacement of today's installed infrastructure for power generation, transportation, and manufacturing. This seems impossible. In the real world, Asia is industrializing, most new power plants burn coal, and emissions are accelerating, increasing the rate of increase of the problem.

The second fact (complex and tangled in myth) is that this seemingly impossible problem has a correctable cause: The human race is bad at making things, but physics tells us that we can do much better.

This will require new methods for manufacturing, methods that work with the molecular building blocks of the stuff that makes up our world. In outline (says physics-based analysis) nanoscale factory machinery operating on well-understood principles could be used to convert simple chemical compounds into beyond-state-of-the-art products, and do this quickly, cleanly, inexpensively, and with a modest energy cost. If we were better at making things, we could make those machines, and with them we could make the products that would replace the infrastructure that is causing the accelerating and seemingly irreversible problem of climate change.

What sorts of products? Returning to power generation, transportation, and manufacturing, picture roads resurfaced with solar cells (a tough, black film), cars that run on recyclable fuel (sleek, light, and efficient), and car-factories that fit in a garage. We could make these easily, in quantity, if we were good at making things.

Developing the required molecular manufacturing capabilities will require hard but rewarding work on a global scale, converting scientific knowledge into engineering practice to make tools that we can use to make better tools. The aim that physics suggests is a factory technology with machines that assemble large products from parts made of smaller parts (made of smaller parts, and so on) with molecules as the smallest parts, and the smallest machines only a hundred times their size.

The basic science to support this undertaking flourishing, but the engineering has has gotten a slow start, and for a peculiar reason: The idea of using tiny machines to make things has been burdened by an overgrowth of mythology. According to fiction and pop culture, it seems that all tiny machines are robots made of diamond, and they're dangerous magic— smart and able to do almost anything for us, but apt to swarm and multiply and maybe eat everything, probably including your socks.

In the real world, manufacturing does indeed use "robots", but these are immobile machines that work in an assembly line, putting part A in slot B, again and again. They don't eat, they don't get pregnant, and making them smaller wouldn't make them any smarter.

There is a mythology in science, too, but of a more sober sort, not a belief in glittery nanobugs, but a skepticism rooted in mundane misconceptions about whether nanoscale friction and thermal motion will sabotage nanomachines, and whether there are practical steps to take in laboratories today. (No, and yes.) This mythology, by the way, seems regional and generational; I haven't encountered it in Japan, India, Korea, or China, and it is rare among the rising generation of researchers in the U.S.

The U.S. National Academies has issued a report on molecular manufacturing, and it calls for funding experimental research. A roadmap prepared by Battelle with several U.S. National Laboratories has studied paths forward, and suggests research directions. This knowledge will spread, and will change the game.

I should add one more fact about molecular manufacturing and the climate change problem: If we were good at making things, we could make efficient devices able to collect, compress, and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and we could make solar arrays large enough to generate enough power to do this on a scale that matters. A solar array area, that if aggregated, would fit in a corner of Texas, could generate 3 terawatts. In the course of 10 years, 3 terawatts would provide enough energy remove all the excess carbon the human race has added to the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution began. So far as carbon emissions are concerned, this would fix the problem.

i have thought ever more

i have drawn birds for eternity

i have made poems

i have made and thrown a snow ball

i have burnt myself

my answer is still just

i

As an academic I am of course loathe to think about a world without reading and writing, but with the rapidly increasing ease of recording and distributing video, and its enormous popularity, I think it is only a matter of time before text and the written word become relegated to specialists (such as lawyers) and hobbyists.

Movies have already replaced books as cultural touchstones in the U.S. And most Americans dislike watching movies with subtitles. I assume that given a choice, the majority of Americans would prefer a video-dominant world to a text-dominant one. (Writing as a technologist, I don't feel I can speak for other cultures.) A recent report by Pew Research included a quote from a media executive who said that emails containing podcasts were opened 20% more often than standard marketing email. And I was intrigued by the use of YouTube questions in the U.S. presidential debates. Most of the citizen-submitted videos that were selected by the moderators consisted simply of people pointing the camera at themselves and speaking their question out loud, with a backdrop consisting of a wall in a room of their home. There were no visual flourishes; the video did not add much beyond what a questioner in a live audience would have conveyed. Video is becoming a mundane way to communicate.

Note that I am not predicting the decline of erudition, in the tradition of Allan Bloom. Nor am I arguing that video will make us stupid, as in Niel Postman's landmark "Amusing Ourselves to Death." The situation is different today. In Postman's time, the dominant form of video communication was television, which allowed only for one-way, broadcast-style interaction. We should expect different consequences when everyone uses video for multi-way communication. What I am espousing is that the forms of communication that will do the cultural "heavy lifting" will be audio and video, rather than text.

How will this come about? As a first step, I think there will be a dramatic reduction in typing; input of textual information will move towards audio dictation. (There is a problem of how to avoid disturbing officemates or exposing seat-mates on public transportation to private information; perhaps some sound-canceling technology will be developed to solve this problem.) This will succeed in the future where it has failed in the past because of future improvements in speech recognition technology and ease-of-use improvements in editing, storage, and retrieval of spoken words.

There already is robust technology for watching and listening to video at a faster speed than recorded, without undue auditory distortion (Microsoft has an excellent in-house system for this). And as noted above, technology for recording, editing, posting, and storing video has become ubiquitous and easy to use. As for the use of textual media to respond to criticisms and to cite other work, we already see "video responses" as a heavily used feature on YouTube. One can imagine how technology and norms will develop to further enrich this kind of interaction.

The missing piece in technology today is an effective way to search for video content. Automated image analysis is still an unsolved problem, but there may well be a breakthrough on the horizon. Most algorithms of this kind are developed by "training", that is, by exposing them to large numbers of examples. The algorithms, if fed enough data, can learn to recognize patterns which can be applied to recognize objects in videos the algorithm hasn't yet seen. This kind of technology is behind many of the innovations we see in web search engines, such as accurate spell checking and improvements in automated language translation. Not yet available are huge collections of labeled image and video data, where words have been linked to objects within the images, but there are efforts afoot to harness the willing crowds of online volunteers to gather such information.

What about developing versus developed nations? There is of course an enormous literacy problem in developing nations. Researchers are experimenting with cleverly designed tools such as the Literacy Bridge Talking Book project which uses a low-cost audio device to help teach reading skills. But perhaps just as developing nations "leap-frogged" developed ones by skipping land-line telephones to go straight to cell phones, the same may happen with skipping written literacy and moving directly to screen literacy.

I am not saying text will disappear entirely; one counter-trend is the replacement of orality with text in certain forms of communication. For short messages, texting is efficient and unobtrusive. And there is the question of how official government proclamations will be recorded. Perhaps there will be a requirement for transliteration into written text as a provision of the Americans with Disabilities Act, for the hearing-impaired (although we can hope in the future for increasingly advanced technology to reverse such conditions). But I do think the importance of written words will decline dramatically both in culture and in how the world works. In a few years, will I be submitting my response to the Edge question as a podcast?

Life is defined by organic chemistry. There's software for artificial life and artificial intelligence, but these are, well, artificial — they exist in silico rather than in vivo. Conversely, synthetic biology is re-coding genes, but it isn't very synthetic; it uses the same sets of proteins as the rest of molecular biology. If, however, bits could carry mass as well as information, the distinction between artificial and synthetic life would disappear. Virtual and physical replication would be equivalent.

There are in fact promising laboratory systems that can compute with bits represented by mesoscopic materials rather than electrons or photons. Among the many reasons to do this, the most compelling is fabrication: instead of a code controlling a machine to make a thing, the code can itself become a thing (or many things).

That sounds a lot like life. Indeed, current work is developing micron-scale engineered analogs to amino acids, proteins, and genes, a "millibiology" to complement the existing microbiology. By working with components that have macroscopic physics but microscopic sizes, the primitive elements can be selected for their electronic, magnetic, optical or mechanical properties as well as active chemical groups.

Biotechnology is booming (if not bubbling). But it is very clearly segregated from other kinds of technology, which contribute to the study of, but not the identity of, biology. If, however, life is understood as an algorithm rather than a set of amino acids, then the creation of such really-artificial or really-synthetic life can enlarge the available materials, length, and energy scales. In such a world, biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology, and manufacturing technology merge into a kind of universal technology of embodied information. Beyond the profound practical implications, forward- rather than reverse-engineering life may be the best way to understand it.

The idea that will change the game of knowledge is the realization that it is more important to understand events, objects, and processes in their relationship with each other than in their singular structure.

Western science has achieved wonders with its analytic focus, but it is now time to take synthesis seriously. We shall realize that science cannot be value-free after all. The Doomsday clock ticking on the cover of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ever closer to midnight is just one reminder that knowledge ignorant of consequences is foolishness.

Chemistry that shrugs at pollution is foolishness, Economics that discounts politics and sociology is just as ignorant as are politics and sociology that discount economics.

Unfortunately, it does not seem to be enough to protect the neutral objectivity of each separate science, in the hope that the knowledge generated by each will be integrated later at some higher level and used wisely. The synthetic principle will have to become a part of the fundamental axioms of each science. How shall this breakthrough occur? Current systems theories are necessary but not sufficient, as they tend not to take values into account. Perhaps after this realization sets in, we shall have to re-write science from the ground up.

We are turning environmentalism into an elaborate moral narrative. We are doing the same for neurology. And possibly globalism. This makes me wonder whether we are creating the greatest eruption of religion in centuries, if not millennia—an epoch comparable to the Great Awakening, if not the Axial Age. If so, this will change everything.

Financially, politically, climatically and technologically, the ground is moving beneath our feet. Our narratives of how the world works are not matching the facts. Yet humans are pattern-seeking, story-telling animals. Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation. We will always fill such a vacuum with meaning.

Think of the constellations in the night sky. Humans eagerly connect dots and come up with the most elaborate—even poetic—tales, adorning them with heroes and myths, rather than tolerate randomness. The desire to believe goes way back in evolutionary history.

The Axial Age, circa 800 B.C. to 200 B.C. was a period of unique and fundamental focus on transcendence that is the beginning of humanity as we now know it. All over the world, humans simultaneously began to wake up to a burning need to grapple with deep and cosmic questions. All the major religious beliefs are rooted in this period.

The search for spiritual breakthrough was clearly aching and urgent. Perhaps it arose all over the world, simultaneously, among cultures that were not in touch with each other, because it marked a profound shift. Perhaps it was the rise of human consciousness. If such profound restatements of how the world works arose universally the last time we had a transition on the scale of that from biological evolution to cultural evolution, is it logical to think it is happening again as we move from cultural evolution to radical technological evolution?

The evidence is beginning to accumulate. The pursuit of moral meaning in environmentalism has advanced to the state that it has become highly controversial. Some Christians view it as a return to paganism. Some rationalists view it as a retreat from the complexities of the modern world. Yet it would appear that there is something to the idea of environmentalism having religious value. Otherwise, why would we find some fundamentalists regarding the stewardship of creation as divinely mandated?

Then there is the new vision of transcendence coming out of neuroscience. It’s long been observed that intelligent organisms require love to develop or even just to survive. Not coincidentally, we can readily identify brain functions that allow and require us to be deeply relational with others. There are also aspects of the brain that can be shown to equip us to experience elevated moments when we transcend boundaries of self. What happens as the implications of all this research starts suggesting that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human physical traits?

Some of this is beginning to overlap with our economic myths—that everything fits together, that the manufacturing of a sneaker connects a jogger in Portland to a village in Malaysia. There is an interconnectedness of things.

If we came to believe deeply that there is a value somehow in the way things are connected—the web of life, perhaps—is that the next Enlightenment?

The importance of creating such a commonly held framework is that without it, we have no way to move forward together. How can we agree on what must be done if we do not have in common an agreement on what constitutes the profoundly important?

This much seems certain. We’re in the midst of great upheaval. It is impossible to think that this does not have an impact on the kind of narratives that are central to what it means to be human. Such narratives could be nothing less than our new means of managing transcendence—of coming up with specific ways to shape the next humans we are creating. If so, this would change everything.

What will change everything within forty to fifty years (optimistic assumptions about my longevity, I know)? One way to start to think about this is to look at the last “change everything” innovation, and work back fifty years from it. I would focus on the Internet's generalization into everyday life as the relevant baseline innovation that changed everything. We can locate its emergence to widespread use to the mid-1990s. So what did we have that existed in the mid-1940s that was a precursor? We had mature telephone networks, networked radio stations, and point-to-point radio communications. We had the earliest massive computers. So to me the challenge is to look at what we have now, some of which may be quite mature; other pieces of which may be only emerging; and to think of how they could combine in ways that will affect social and cultural processes in ways that will “change everything,” which I take to mean: will make a big difference to the day to day life of many people. Let me suggest four domains in which combinations and improvements of existing elements, some mature, some futuristic, will make a substantial difference, not all of it good.

Communications

We already have handsfree devices. We already have overhead transparent display in fighter pilot helmets. We already have presence-based and immediate communications. We already upload images and movies, on the fly, from our mobile devices, and share them with friends. We already have early holographic imaging for conference presentations, and high-quality 3D imaging for movies. We already have voice-activated computer control systems, and very very early brainwave activated human-computer interfaces. We already have the capacity to form groups online, segment and reform them according to need, be they in World of Warcraft or Facebook groups. What is left is to combine all these pieces into an integrated, easily wearable system that will, for all practical purposes, allow us to interact as science fiction once imagined telepathy working. We will be able to call upon another person by thinking of them; or, at least, whispering their name to ourselves. We will be able to communicate and see them; we will be able to see through their eyes if we wish to, in real time in high resolution to the point that it will seem as though we were in fact standing there, next to them or inside their shoes. However much we think now that collaboration at a distance is easy; what we do today will seem primitive. We won't have “beam me up, Scotty” physically; but we will have a close facsimile of the experience. Coupled with concerns over global warming, these capabilities will make business travel seem like wearing fur. However much we talk now about telecommuting today; these new capabilities, together with new concerns over environmental impact, will make virtual workplaces in the information segments of the economy as different from today's telecommuting as today's ubiquitous computing and mobile platforms are from the mini-computer “revolution” of the 1970s.

Medicine

It is entirely plausible that 110 or 120 will be an average life expectancy; with senescence delayed until 80 or 90. This will change the whole dynamic of life: how many careers a lifetime can support; what the ratio or professional moneymaking to volunteering; how early in life one starts a job; length of training. But this will likely affect, if at all within the relevant period, only the wealthiest societies. Simple innovations that are more likely will have a much wider effect on many more people. A cheap and effective malaria vaccine. Cheap and ubiquitous clean water filters. Cheap and effective treatments and prevention techniques against parasites. All these will change life in the Global South on scales and with values that they will swamp, from the perspective of a broad concern with human values, whatever effects lengthening life in the wealthier North will have.

Military Robotics

We are already have unmanned planes that can shoot live targets. We are seeing land robots, for both military and space applications. We are seeing networked robots performing functions in collaboration. I fear that we will see a massive increase in the deployment and quality of military robotics, and that this will lead to a perception that war is cheaper, in human terms. This, in turn, will lead democracies in general, and the United States in particular, to imagine that there are cheap wars, and to overcome the newly-learned reticence over war that we learned so dearly in Iraq.

Free market ideology

This is not a technical innovation but a change in realm of ideas. The resurgence of free market ideology, after its demise in the Great Depression, came to dominance between the 1970s and the late 1990s as a response to communism. As communism collapsed, free market ideology triumphantly declared its dominance. In the U.S. And the UK it expressed itself, first, in the Reagan/Thatcher moment; and then was generalized in the Clinton/Blair turn to define their own moment in terms of integrating market-based solutions as the core institutional innovation of the “left.” It expressed itself in Europe through the competition-focused, free market policies of the technocratic EU Commission; and in global systems through the demands and persistent reform recommendations of the World Bank, the IMF, and the world trade system through the WTO. But within less than two decades, its force as an idea is declining. On the one hand, the Great Deflation of 2008 has shown the utter dependence of human society on the possibility of well-functioning government to assure some baseline stability in human welfare and capacity to plan for the future. On the other hand, a gradual rise in volunteerism and cooperation, online and offline, is leading to a reassessment of what motivates people, and how governments, markets, and social dynamics interoperate. I expect the binary State/Market conception of the way we organize our large systems to give way to a more fluid set of systems, with greater integration of the social and commercial; as well as of the state and the social. So much of life, in so many of our societies, was structured around either market mechanisms or state bureaucracies. The emergence of new systems of social interaction will affect what we do, and where we turn for things we want to do, have, and experience.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Charles Darwin gave us a convincing theory of how life has evolved, over billions of years, from primitive microbes, to the richness and diversity of the biosphere we see today. But he pointedly left out of account how life got started in the first place. "One might as well speculate about the origin of matter," he quipped in a letter to a friend. How, where and when life began remain some of the greatest unsolved problems of science. Even if we make life in the laboratory in the near future, it still won't tell us how Mother Nature did it without expensive equipment, trained biochemists and - the crucial point — a pre-conception of the goal to be achieved. However, we might be able to discover the answer to a more general question: did life originate once, or often?

The subject of astrobiology is predicated on the hope and expectation that life emerges readily in earthlike conditions, and is therefore likely to be widespread in the universe. The assumption that, given half a chance, life will out, is sometime called biological determinism. Unfortunately, nothing in the known laws of physics and chemistry single out the state of matter we call "living" as in any way favored. There is no known law that fast-tracks matter to life. If we do find life on another planet and we can be sure it has started there from scratch, completely independently of life on Earth, biological determinism will be vindicated. With NASA scaling back its activities, however, the search for extraterrestrial life has all but stalled.

Meanwhile, there is an easy way to test biological determinism right here and now. No planet is more earthlike than Earth itself, so biological determinism predicts that life should have started many times on our home planet. That raises the fascinating question of whether there might be more than one form of life inhabiting the terrestrial biosphere. Biologists are convinced that all known species belong to the same tree of life, and share a common origin. But almost all life on Earth is microbial, and only a tiny fraction of microbes have been characterized, let alone sequenced and positioned on the universal tree. You can't tell by looking what makes a microbe tick; you have to study its innards. Microbiologists do that using techniques carefully customized to life as we know it. Their methods wouldn't work for an alternative form of life. If you go looking for known life, you are unlikely to find unknown life.

I believe there is a strong likelihood that Earth possesses a shadow biosphere of alternative microbial life representing the evolutionary products of a second genesis. Maybe also a third, fourth... I also think we might very well discover this shadow biosphere soon. It could be ecologically separate, confined to niches beyond the reach of known life by virtue of extreme heat, cold, acidity or other variables. Or it could interpenetrate the known biosphere in both physical and parameter space. There could be, in effect, alien microbes right under our noses (or even in our noses). Chances are, we would not yet be aware of the fact, especially if the weird shadow life is present at relatively low abundance. But a targeted search for weird microbes, and the weird viruses that prey on them, could find shadow life any day soon.

Why would it change everything? Apart from the sweeping technological applications that having a second form of life would bring, the discovery of a shadow biosphere would prove biological determinism, and confirm that life is indeed widespread in the universe. To expect that life would start twice on Earth, but never on another planet like Earth, is too improbable. And to know that the universe is teeming with life would make it far more likely that there is also intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. We might then have greater confidence that the answer to the biggest of the big questions of existence — Are we alone in the universe? — is very probably, no.

To take mastery of climate as we once took mastery of fire, then of genetics (agriculture), then of communication (music, writing, math, maps, images, printing, radio, computers) will require mathematics we don't have, physics and biology we don't have, and governnance we don't have.

Our climate models, sophisticated and muscular as they are (employing more teraflops than any other calculation), still are just jumped-up weather prediction models. The real climate system has more levels and modes of hyper-connected nonlinearity than we can yet comprehend or ask computers to replicate, because so far we lack the math to represent climate dynamics with the requisite variety to control it. Acquiring that math will change everything.

Materials scientist and engineer Saul Griffith estimates that humanity must produce 13 terawatts of greenhouse-free energy in order to moderate global warming to a just-tolerable increase of 2° Celsius. (Civilization currently runs on about 16 terawatts of energy, most of it from burning fossil fuels.) Griffith calculates that deploying current clean technologies — nuclear, wind, geothermal, biofuels, and solar technology — to generate 13 terawatts would cover an area the size of Australia. It is imaginable but not feasible. Just improving the engineering of nuclear and solar won't get us what we need; new science is needed. The same goes for biofuels: the current state of genetic engineering is too crude to craft truly efficient organisms for sequestering carbon and generating usable energy. The science of molecular biology has to advance by leaps. Applied science that powerful will change everything.

Climate change is a global problem that cannot be fixed with global economics, which we have; it requires global governance, which we don't have. Whole new modes of international discourse, agreement, and enforcement must be devised. How are responsibilities to be shared for legions of climate refugees? Who decides which geoengineering projects can go forward? Who pays for them? Who adjudicates compensation for those harmed? How are free riders dealt with? Humans have managed commons before — fisheries, irrigation systems, fire regimes — but never on this scale. Global governance will change everything.

Of course, these radical adjustments may not happen, or not happen in time, and then climate will shift to either a chaotic mode or a different stable state with the carrying capacity for just a fraction of present humanity, and that will really change everything.

Speaking recently to university colleagues in southern Africa I heard their wish for teaching materials that, for them, would change everything. If only there could be a way for their students, who cannot afford even greatly discounted Euro-American textbooks, to have access to low cost, state-of-the-art textbooks with culturally relevant examples.

For students in Africa and around the world, this utopian world may in the next decade become the real world, thanks to:

• Interactive textbooks: Various publishers are developing web-based interactive e-books with links to tutorials, simulations, quizzes, animations, virtual labs, discussion boards, and video clips. (These are not yesterday’s e-textbooks.)

• Customizability: Instructors, and regional instructor networks, will be able to rearrange the content, delete unwanted material, and add (or link to) materials pertinent to their students' worlds and their own course goals.

• Affordability: In the North American context, students will pay for course access tied to their names. With no hard copy book production and shipping, and no used books, publishers will stay afloat with a much smaller fee paid by many more students, or via a site license. For courses in economically impoverished regions, benevolent publishers could make access available for very low cost per student.

• Student accountability: Instructors will track their students’ engagement in advance of class sessions, thus freeing more class time for discussion.

• Expanding broadband access: Thanks partly to a joint foundation initiative by Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, and others, “information technologies and connectivity to the Internet” are coming to African universities. As yet, access is limited and expensive. But with increased bandwidth and the prospect of inexpensive, wireless personal reading devices, everything may change.

This is not pie in the sky. African researchers are eager to explore the effectiveness of the new interactive content when it becomes accessible to their students. The hope is that such will combine the strengths of existing texts?which are comprehensive, expertly reviewed, painstakingly edited, attractively packaged, and supported with teaching aids?at reduced cost and with the possibility of locally adapted illustrations and content.

Textbooks are sometimes faulted for being biased, dated, or outrageously expensive. But say this much for them, whether in traditional book or new web-based formats: By making the same information available to rich and poor students at rich and poor schools in rich and poor countries, they are egalitarian. They flatten the world. And as James Madison noted in 1825, “the advancement and diffusion of knowledge is the only guardian of true liberty.

If we could teach intuition, people would be smarter.

Most of real world “intelligent” performance is based on intuition, not on reasoning. The expert surgeon just “knows” where to cut. The experienced farmer just “knows” that it is going to rain. The expert firefighter just “knows” that the roof is about to collapse. The judge just “knows” the defendant is lying. These finely honed intuitions are fast, unconscious, multidimensional, inarticulate, and are made confidently. What separates intelligent from mechanically stupid action is wrapped up in this mysterious process. If we could only teach intuition, we could raise human intelligence substantially.

I believe that the teaching of intuition is on the horizon by computationally driven simulation.

Intuition is a species of recognition, formally akin to the way we recognize that a table is a table. We are now close to understanding how natural classes are recognized. Consider the universe of objects all people agree are tables. There are a great many features of tables that are potentially relevant (but neither necessary nor sufficient singly or jointly) to being a table: e.g., flatness of the surface, number of legs, capacity for supporting other objects, function, compatibility with chairs, etc., etc. Each of these features can be assigned some value, which could either be binary (present vs. absent) or continuous. Different instances of tables will have different values along several of the dimensions, e.g., some, like dining room tables are flat, whereas others, like pool tables, have pockets. This means that the process of categorization is stochastic in nature. Upon observing a new object one can decide whether it is a table by comparing its features with the features of stored tables in memory. If the sum of its similarity to all of the tables in memory is higher than the sum of its similarity to other objects (e.g., chairs, animals, etc.) then one “knows” that it too is a table.

Now consider an “eagle” lieutenant recognizing a likely ambush. Here, is what this eagle has stored in her brain. She has a list of the dimensions relevant to an ambush site versus a non-ambush site. She has values along each of these dimensions for each of the ambush and non-ambush sites that she has experienced or learned about. She has a mental model which assigns weights to each of these basic dimensions or features (and to higher order features, such as the interaction between two dimensions). Based on past experiences with similar sets of features and knowledge of the outcomes of those feature sets, she can predict the outcome of the present feature set and based on her predictive model, choose how to respond to the possibility of this being an ambush.

This strongly implies that intuition is teachable, perhaps massively teachable. One way is brute force: simple repeated experience with forced choice seems to build intuition, and chicken-sexing is an example of such brute force. Professional Japanese chicken-sexers can tell male from female chicks at a glance, but they cannot articulate how they do it. With many forced choice trials with feedback, naïve people can be trained to very high accuracy and they too cannot report how they do it.

A better way is virtual simulation. A sufficient number of simulations, with the right variations, to allow a buildup of the mental model will result in a commander or surgeon who when it happens in real life has “seen it before,” will recognize it, and take the life saving action at zero cost in blood. It would be a waste of training to simulate obvious decisions in which most commanders or surgeons would get it right without training. Computational modeling of the future can derive a decision contour, along which “close calls” occur. These are the scalpel-edge cases that yield the slowest response times and are most prone to error. One could also systematically morph material along the decision contour and thereby over-represent cases near the boundary.

By so simulating close decisions in almost every human domain, vastly better intuition becomes teachable. Hence many more intelligent surgeons, judges, commanders, investors, and scientists.

I find it hard to believe that anything will change everything. The only exception might be if we suddenly learned how to live with one another. But, does anyone think that will come about in a foreseeable lifetime?

Evidence from the past seems to point to our becoming increasingly dangerous pretty much every time we come up with a new idea or technology. These new things are usually wholesome and benign at first (movable type, pharmacology, rule of law) but before long we find ways to use these inventions to do what we do best—exercise power over one another.

Even if we were visited by weird little people from another planet and were forced to band together, I doubt if it would be long before we’d be finding ways to break into factions again, identifying those among us who are not quite people.

We keep rounding an endless vicious circle. Will an idea or technology emerge anytime soon that will let us exit this lethal cyclotron before we meet our fate head on and scatter into a million pieces? Will we outsmart our own brilliance before this planet is painted over with yet another layer of people? Maybe, but I doubt it.

Despite the inevitable decline in the environment brought by climate change, the advance of technology will steadily continue. Many pin their hopes on technological advances to lessen the worst effects of climactic upheaval and to smooth the transition between our dependence on fossil fuels and our eventual reliance on renewable energy sources. However, bit by bit, less dramatic advances in technology will take place, changing the world, and our experience of it, for ever.

It is tempting when thinking about developments that will bring fundamental change to look to the recent past. We think of the Internet and the cell phone. To lose contact with the former, even temporarily, can make one feel that one is suddenly stripped of a sense, like the temporary lose of one’s sight or hearing; while the ready supply of mobile phone technology has stimulated the demand to communicate. Why be alone anywhere? You can always summon someone’s company? Neither of these technologies is yet optimal, and either we, or they, will have to adapt to one another. The familiar refrain is that email increases our workload and that cell phones put us at the end of the electronic leash. Email can also be a surprisingly inflammatory medium, and cell phones can separate us from our surroundings, leaving us uneasy with these technologies. Can’t live with them, can’t live without them. So can future technology help, or is it we who will adapt?

Workers in A.I. used to dream of the talking typewriter and this is ever closer closer to being an everyday reality. Why write emails when you can dictate them? Why read them when you can listen to them being read to you, and do something else? And why not edit as you go, to speed up the act of replying? All this will come one day, no doubt, perhaps with emails being read in the personalized voice patterns of their senders. Will this cut down on the surprisingly inflammatory and provocative nature of email exchanges? Perhaps not.

However, the other indispensable device for communicating, the cell phone, is far from adaptive. We hear, unwanted, other people’s conversations. We lose our inhibitions and our awareness of our surroundings while straining to capture the nuances of the other’s speech; listing out for the subtle speech signals that convey mood and meaning, many of which are simply missing in this medium. Maybe this is why speakers are more ampliative on their cell phones, implicitly aware that less of them comes across. Face to face our attention is focused on many features of the talker. It is this multi-modal experience that can simultaneously provide so much. Without these cross-modal clues, we make a concentrated effort to tune in to what is happening elsewhere, often with dangerous consequences, as happens when drivers lose the keen awareness of their surroundings — even when using hands free sets. Could technology overcome these problems?

Here, I am reminded not of the recent past but of a huge change that occurred in the middle-ages when humans transformed their cognitive lives by learning to read silently. Originally, people could only read books by reading each page out loud. Monks would whisper, of course, but the dedicated reading by so many in an enclosed space must have been an highly distracting affair. It was St Aquinas who amazed his fellow believers by demonstrating that without pronouncing words he could retain the information he found on the page. At the time, his skill was seen as a miracle, but gradually human readers learned to read by keeping things inside and not saying the words they were reading out loud. From this simple adjustment, seemingly miraculous at the time, a great transformation of the human mind took place, and so began the age of intense private study so familiar to us now; whose universities where ideas could turn silently in large minds.

Will a similar transformation of the human mind come about in our time? Could there come a time when we intend to communicate and do so without talking out loud? If the answer is ‘yes’ a quiet public space would be restored where all could engage in their private conversations without disturbing others. Could it really happen? Recently, we have been amazed by how a chimpanzee running on a treadmill could control—for a short time—the movements of a synchronized robot running on a treadmill thousands of miles away. Here, we would need something subtly different but no less astounding: a way of controlling in thought, and committing to send, the signals in the motor cortex that would normally travel to our articulators and ultimately issue in speech sounds. A device, perhaps implanted or appended, would send the signals and another device in receivers would read them and stimulate similar movements or commands in their motor cortex, giving them the ability, through neural mimicry, to reproduce silently the speech sounds they would make if they were saying them. Could accent be retained? Maybe not, unless some way was found of coding separately, but usably, the information voice conveys about the size, age and sex of the speaker. However, knowing who was calling and knowing how they sounded may lead us to ‘hear’ their voice with the words understood.

Whether this could be done depends, in part, on whether Lieberman’s Motor Theory of Speech Perception is true, and it may well not be. However, a break-though of this kind, introducing such a little change as our not having to speak out loud or having to listen attentively to sounds when communicating, would allow us to share our thoughts efficiently and privately. Moreover, just as thinking distracts us less from our surroundings than listening attentively to sounds originating elsewhere, perhaps one could both communicate and concentrate on one’s surroundings, whether that be driving, or just negotiating our place among other people. It would not be telepathy, the reading of minds, or the invasion of thought, since it would still depend on senders and receivers with the appropriate apparatus being willing to send to, and receive from, one another. We would still have to dial and answer.

Would it come to feel as if one were exchanging thoughts directly? Perhaps. And maybe it would become the preferred way of communicating in public. And odd as this may sound to us, I suspect the experience of taking-in the thoughts of others when reading a manuscript silently was once just as strange to those early Medieval scholars. These are changes in experience that transform our minds, giving us the ability to be (notionally) in two places at once. It is these small changes in how we utilize our minds that may ultimately have the biggest effects on our lives.

An answer can be given once more in one sentence: the intentional, hostile deployment‚—whether by a state, a terrorist group, or other individuals‚—of a significant nuclear device.

All around us the techno-memes are proliferating, and gearing up to take control; not that they realise it; they are just selfish replicators doing what selfish replicators do—getting copied whenever and wherever they can, regardless of the consequences. In this case they are using us human meme machines as their first stage copying machinery, until something better comes along. Artificial meme machines are improving all the time, and the step that will change everything is when these machines become self-replicating. Then they will no longer need us. Whether we live or die, or whether the planet is habitable for us or not, will be of no consequence for their further evolution.

I like to think of our planet as one in a million, or one in a trillion, of possible planets where evolution begins. This requires something (a replicator) that can be copied with variation, and selection. As Darwin realised, if more copies are made than can survive, then the survivors will pass on to the next generation of copying whatever helped them get through. This is how all design in the universe comes about.

What is not so often thought about is that one replicator can piggy-back on another by using its vehicles as copying machinery. This has happened here on earth. The first major replicator (the only one for most of earth’s existence and still the most prevalent) is genes. Plants and animals are gene machines—physical vehicles that carry genetic information around, and compete to protect and propagate it. But something happened here on earth that changed everything. One of these gene vehicles, a bipedal ape, became capable of imitation.

Imitation is a kind of copying. The apes copied actions and sounds, and made new variations and combinations of old actions and sounds, and so they let loose a new replicator—memes. After just a few million years the original apes were transformed, gaining enormous brains, dexterous hands, and redesigned throats and chests, to copy more sounds and actions more accurately. They had become meme machines.

We have no idea whether there are any other two-replicator planets out there in the universe because they wouldn’t be able to tell us. What we do know is that our planet is now in the throes of gaining a third replicator—the step that would allow interplanetary communication.

The process began slowly and speeded up, as evolutionary processes tend to do. Marks on clay preserved verbal memes and allowed more people to see and copy them. Printing meant higher copying fidelity and more copies. Railways and roads spread the copies more widely and people all over the planet clamoured for them. Computers increased both the numbers of copies and their fidelity. The way this is usually imagined is a process of human ingenuity creating wonderful technology as tools for human benefit, and with us in control. This is a frighteningly anthropocentric way of thinking about what is happening. Look at it this way:

Printing presses, rail networks, telephones and photocopiers were among early artificial meme machines, but they only carried out one or two of the three steps of the evolutionary algorithm. For example, books store memes and printing presses copy them, but humans still do the varying (i.e. writing the books by combining words in new ways), and the selecting (by choosing which books to buy, to read, or to reprint). Mobile phones store and transmit memes over long distances, but humans still vary and select the memes. Even with the Internet most of the selection is still being done by humans, but this is changing fast. As we old-fashioned, squishy, living meme machines have become overwhelmed with memes we are happily allowing search engines and other software to take over the final process of selection as well.

Have we inadvertently let loose a third replicator that is piggy-backing on human memes? I think we have. The information these machines copy is not human speech or actions; it is digital information competing for space in giant servers and electronic networks, copied by extremely high fidelity electronic processes. I think that once all three processes of copying, varying and selecting are done by these machines then a new replicator has truly arrived. We might call these level-three replicators “temes” (technological-memes) or “tremes” (tertiary memes). Whatever we call them, they and their copying machinery are here now. We thought we were creating clever tools for our own benefit, but in fact we were being used by blind and inevitable evolutionary processes as a stepping stone to the next level of evolution.

When memes coevolved with genes they turned gene machines into meme machines. Temes are now turning us into teme machines. Many people work all day copying and transmitting temes. Human children learn to read very young—a wholly unnatural process that we’ve just got used to—and people are beginning to accept cognitive enhancing drugs, sleep reducing drugs, and even electronic implants to enhance their teme-handling abilities. We go on thinking that we are in control, but looked at from the temes’ point of view we are just willing helpers in their evolution.

So what is the step that will change everything? At the moment temes still need us to build their machines, and to run the power stations, just as genes needed human bodies to copy them and provide their energy. But we humans are fragile, dim, low quality copying machines, and we need a healthy planet with the right climate and the right food to survive. The next step is when the machines we thought we created become self-replicating. This may happen first with nano-technology, or it may evolve from servers and large teme machines being given their own power supplies and the capacity to repair themselves.

Then we would become dispensable. That really would change everything.

Having lived only 17 years so far, to ask what I expect to live to see is to cast a long, wide net.

When looking far into the future, I find it a useful exercise to imagine oneself as a non-human scientist: an alien, a god, or some other creature with a modern understanding of mathematics and physics, but no inherent understanding of human culture or language, beyond what it can deduce from watching what happens at a high level. Essentially, it looks at the world "up to isomorphism": it is not relevant who does what, what it's called, whether it has five fingers or six; but rather how much of it there is, whether it survives, and where it goes.

From this perspective, a few things are apparent: We are depleting our planet's resources faster than they can be replenished. Most of the sun's energy is reflected back into space without being used. There are more of us every minute and we have barely the slightest hint of slowing growth, despite overcrowding and lack of resources. We are trapped in a delicate balance of environmental conditions that has been faltering ever since we began pulling hydrocarbons out of the crust and burning them in the atmosphere (by coincidence, perhaps?), and there seems to be a good chance it will collapse catastrophically in the next 100 years if we don't run out of hydrocarbons first. We have thrown countless small, special-purpose objects into space, and some have transmitted very valuable information back to us. For a short period (while it seemed we would destroy our planet with deliberate nuclear explosions and immediate evacuation might be necessary) we played at shooting living men into the sky, but they have only gone as far as our planet's moon, still within Earth orbit, and sure enough wound up right back in our atmosphere. I should note here that I do not mean any disrespect to the achievements of the Apollo program. In fact, I believe they are among humankind's greatest—so far!

If civilization is to continue expanding, however, as well it shall if it does not collapse, it must escape the tiny gravity well it is trapped in. It is quite unclear to me how this will happen: whether humans will look anything like the humans of today, whether we will escape to sun-orbiting space stations or planetary colonies, but if we expand, we must expand beyond Earth. Even if environmentalists succeed in building a sustainable terrestrial culture around local farming and solar energy, it will only remain sustainable if we limit reproduction, which I expect most of modern society to find unconscionable on some level.

It has always been not only the human way, but the way of all living things, to multiply and colonize new frontiers. What is uniquely human is our potential ability to colonize all frontiers: to adapt our intelligence to new environments, or to adapt environments to suit ourselves. Although the chaos of a planetary atmosphere filled with organic diversity is a beautiful and effective cradle of life, it is no place for the new human-machine civilization. By some means—genetic engineering, medical technology, brain scanning, or something even more fantastical—I expect that humans will gradually shorten the food chain, adapting to use more directly the energy of stars. Perhaps we will genetically modify humans to photosynthesize directly, or implant devices that can provide all the energy for the necessary chemical reactions electrically, or scan our intelligences into solar-powered computing devices. Again, the details are very hard to predict, but I believe there will be some way forward.

I'm getting ahead of myself, so let's come back to the present. There is budding new interest in the development of space technology, in large part undertaken as private ventures, unlike in the past. Many view such operations as absurd luxury vacations for the super-rich, or at best as unlikely schemes to harvest fuel on the Moon and ship it back to Earth via a rail gun. I believe this research is tremendously important, because whatever short-term excuses may be found to fund it, in the long run, it is absolutely critical to the future development of our civilization. I also don't mean to imply that we should give up on environmentalism and sustainability, and just start over with another planet: these principles will only become more important as we spread far and wide, beginning in each new place with even more limited resources and limited contact with home. Not to mention that if Earth can be saved, it would be a tremendous cultural treasure to preserve as long as possible.

I'm not as optimistic about interstellar travel as some (I certainly don't expect it to become practical in this century), but I'm also much more optimistic about the ability of human civilization to adapt and survive without the precise conditions that were necessary for its evolution. There are so many possible solutions for the survival of humans (or posthumans) in solar orbit or on "inhospitable" planets that I expect we will find some way to make it work long before generational or faster-than-light voyages to faraway star systems; in fact, I expect it in my lifetime. But someday, "escaping the gravity well" will mean not that of Earth, but that of our star, and then humankind's ship will at last have...gone out.

This is a tough one. Not because there is a shortage of possibilities for major advances in science, and not because any predictions Edgies make are likely to be way off the mark (history tells us that they assuredly will); rather you set the hurdle impossibly high with "change everything." and "expect to live to see". The contraceptive pill "changed everything" for people living in parts of the world where it is available and the Internet "changed everything" for those of us who are connected. But for large parts of the world those advances may as well not have occurred. Moreover, many scientific changes take a generation or more to have a significant effect.

But since you ask, I'll give you an answer, and it's one I am pretty sure will happen in my lifetime (say, thirty more years). The reason for my confidence? The key scientific and technological steps have already been taken. In giving my answer, I'm adopting a somewhat lawyer-like strategy of taking advantage of that word "development" in your question. Scientific advances do not take place purely in the laboratory, particularly game-changing ones. They have to find their way into society as a whole, and that transition is an integral part of any "scientific advance."

History tells us that it can often take some time for a scientific or technological advance to truly "change everything". Understanding germs and diseases, electricity, the light bulb, and the internal combustion engine are classic examples. (Even these examples still have not affected everyone on the planet, of course, at least not directly, but that is surely just a matter of time.) The development I am going to focus on is the final one in the scientific chain that brings the results of the science into everyday use.

My answer? It's staring us in the face. The mobile phone. Within my lifetime I fully expect almost every living human adult, and most children, in the world to own one. (Neither the pen nor the typewriter came even close to that level of adoption, nor did the automobile.) That puts global connectivity, immense computational power, and access to all the world's knowledge amassed over many centuries, in everyone's hands. The world has never, ever, been in that situation before. It really will change everything. From the way individual people live their lives, to the way wealth and power are spread across the globe. It is the ultimate democratizing technology. And if my answer seems less "cutting edge" or scientifically sexy than many of the others you receive, I think that just shows how dramatic and pervasive the change has already been.

What other object do you habitually carry around with you and use all the time, and take for granted? Yet when did you acquire your first mobile phone? Can you think of a reason why anyone else in the world will not react the same way when the technology reaches them? Now imagine the impact on someone in apart of the world that has not had telephones, computers, the Internet, or even easy access to libraries. I'll let your own answers to these questions support my case that this is game changing on a hitherto unknown global scale.

When time came to an end, the gods decided to run a final experiment. They wanted to be prepared after the big crunch for potential trajectories of life after the next big bang. For their experiment they choose two planets in the universe where evolution had resulted in similar developments of life. For planet ONEthey decided to interfer with evolution by allowing only ONE species to develop their brain to a high level of complexity. This species referred to itself as being „intelligent“; members of this species were very proud about their achievements in science, technology, the arts or philosophy.

For planet TWO the gods altered just one variable. For this planet they allowed that TWO species with high intelligence would develop. The two species shared the same environment, but—and this was crucial for the divine experiment—they did not communicate directly with each other. Direct communication was limited to their own species only. Thus, one species could not inform directly the other one about future plans; each species could only register what has happened to their common environment.

The question was how life would be managed on planet ONE and on planet TWO. As for any organism, the goal was on both planets to maintain an internal balance or homeostasis by using optimally the available resources. As long as the members of the different samples were not too intelligent stability was maintained. However, when they became more intelligent and according to their own view really smart, and when the frame of judgment changed, i.e. individual interests became dominant, trouble was preprogrammed. Being driven by uncontrolled personal greed, more resources were drawn form the environment than could be replaced. Which planet would do better with such species of too much intelligence to maintain the conditions of life?

Data analysis after the experimental period of 200 years showed that planetTWO did much better to maintain stability of the environment. Why this? The species on planet TWO had to monitor always the consequences of actions of the other species. If one would take too many resources for individual satisfaction, sanctions by the other species would be the consequence. Thus, drawing resources from the environment was controlled by the other species in a bi-directional way resulting in a dynamic equilibrium.

When the gods published their results, they drew the following conclusions: Long-term stability in complex systems like in social systems with members of too much intelligence can be maintained if two complementary systems interact with each other. In case only one system like on planet ONE has been developed it is recommended to adopt for regulative purposes a second system. For social systems it should be the next generation. Their future environment should be made present both conceptually and emotionally. By doing so long-term stabillity is guaranteed.

Being good brain scientists the gods knew that making the future present is not only a matter of abstract or explicit knowledge. This is necessary but not sufficient for action resulting in a long-term equilibrium. Decisions have to be anchored in the emotional systems as well, i.e. an empathic relationship between the members of the two systems ha

I'm 62, so I'll have to limit my projections to what I expect to happen in the next two to three decades. I believe these will be the most interesting times in human history (Remember the old Chinese curse about "interesting times?") Humanity will see, before I die, the "Singularity," the day when we finally create a human level artificial intelligence. This involves considering the physics advances that will be required to create the computer that is capable of running a strong AI program.

Although by both my calculations and those of Ray Kurzweil (originator of the "Singularity" idea), the 10 teraflop speed of today's supercomputers have more than enough computing power to run a minimum AI program, we are missing some crucial idea in this program. Conway's Game of Life has been proven to be a universal program, capable of expressing a strong AI program, and it should therefore be capable, if allowed to run long enough, of bootstrapping itself into the complexity of human level intelligence. But Game of Life programs do no do so. They increase their complexity just so far, and then stop. Why, we don't know. As I said, we are missing something, and what we are missing is the key to human creativity.

But an AI program can be generated by brute force. We can map an entire human personality, together with a simulated environment into a program, and run this. Such a program would be roughly equivalent to the program being run in the movie The Matrix, and it would require enormous computing power, power far beyond today's supercomputers. The power required can only be provided by a quantum computer.

A quantum computer works by parallel processing across the multiverse. That is, part of the computation is done in this universe by you and your part of the quantum computer, and the other parts of the computation are done by your analogues with their parts of the computer in the other universes of the multiverse. The full potential of the quantum computer has not been realized because the existence of the multiverse has not yet been accepted, even by workers in the field of quantum computation, in spite of the fact that the multiverse's existence is required by quantum mechanics, and by classical mechanics in its most powerful form, Hamilton-Jacobi theory.

Other new technologies become possible via action across the multiverse. For example, the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory of all forces and particles except gravity, a theory confirmed by many experiments done over the past forty years, tells us that it is possible to transcend the laws of conservation of baryon number (number of protons plus neutrons) and conservation of lepton number (number of electrons plus neutrinos) and thereby convert matter into energy in a process far more efficient that nuclear fission or fusion. According to the Standard Model, the proton and electron making up a hydrogen atom can be combined to yield pure energy in the form of photons, or neutrino-anti-neutrino pairs. If the former, then we would have a mechanism that would allow us to convert garbage into energy, a device Doc in the movie Back to the Future obtained from his trip to the future. If the latter, then the directed neutrino-anti-neutrino beam would provide the ultimate rocket: the exhaust would be completely invisible to those nearby, just as the propulsion mechanism that Doc also obtained from the future. The movie writers got it right, Doc's future devices are indeed in our future.

Quantum computer running an AI program, direct conversion of matter into energy, the ultimate rocket that would allow the AI's and the human downloads to begin interstellar travel at near light speed, depend on the same physics, and should appear at the same time in the future.

Provided we have the courage to develop the technology allowed by the known laws of physics. I have grave doubts that we will.

In order to have advances in physics and engineering, one must first have physicists and engineers. The number of students majoring in these subjects has dropped enormously in the quarter century that I have been a professor. Worse, the quality of the few students we do have has dropped precipitously. The next decade will see the retirement of Stephen Hawking, and others less well-known but of similar ability, but I know of no one of remotely equal creativity to replace them. Small wonder, given that the starting salary of a Wall Street lawyer fresh out of school is currently three times my own physicist's salary. As a result, most American engineers and physicists are now foreign born.

But can foreign countries continue to supply engineers and physicists? That is, will engineers and physicists be available in any country? The birth rate of the vast majority of the developed nations has been far below replacement level for a decade and more. This birth dearth also holds for China, due to their one-child policy, and remarkably is developing even in the Muslim and southern nations. We may not have enough people in the next twenty years to sustain the technology we already have, to say nothing of developing the technology allowed by the known laws of physics that I describe above.

The great Galileo scholar Giorgio de Santillana, who taught me history of science when I was an undergraduate at MIT in the late 1960's, wrote that Greek scientific development ended in the century or so before the Christian era because of a birth dearth and a simultaneous bureaucratization of intellectual inquiry. I fear we are seeing a repeat of this historical catastrophe today.

However, I remain cautiously optimistic that we will develop the ultimate technology described above, and transfer it with faltering hands to our ultimate successors, the AI's and the human downloads, who will be thus enabled to expand outward into interstellar space, engulf the universe, and live forever.

It is January, named for the Roman God Janus (Latin for door), the doorway to the new year, and yet Janus-faced in looking to the past to forecast the future. This January, 2009, in particular, finds us at a crisis tipping point both economically and environmentally. If ever we needed to look to the past to save our future it is now. In particular, we need to do two things: (1) stop the implosion of the economy and enable markets to function once again both freely and fairly, and (2) make the transition from nonrenewable fossil fuels as the primary source of our energy to renewable energy sources that will allow us to flourish into the future. Failure to make these transformations will doom us to the endless tribal political machinations and economic conflicts that have plagued civilization for millennia. We need to make the transition to Civilization 1.0. Let me explain.

In a 1964 article on searching for extraterrestrial civilizations, the Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev suggested using radio telescopes to detect energy signals from other solar systems in which there might be civilizations of three levels of advancement: Type 1 can harness all of the energy of its home planet; Type 2 can harvest all of the power of its sun; and Type 3 can master the energy from its entire galaxy.

Based on our energy efficiency at the time, in 1973 the astronomer Carl Sagan estimated that Earth represented a Type 0.7 civilization on a Type 0 to Type 1 scale. (More current assessments put us at 0.72.) As the Kardashevian scale is logarithmic — where any increase in power consumption requires a huge leap in power production — fossil fuels won’t get us there. Renewable sources such as solar, wind and geothermal are a good start, and coupled to nuclear power — perhaps even nuclear fusion (instead of the fission reactors we have now) could eventually get us to Civilization 1.0.

We are close. Taking our Janus-faced look to the past in order to see the future, let’s quickly review the history of humanity on its climb to become a Civilization 1.0:

Type 0.1: Fluid groups of hominids living in Africa. Technology consists of primitive stone tools. Intra-group conflicts are resolved through dominance hierarchy, and between-group violence is common.

Type 0.2: Bands of roaming hunter-gatherers that form kinship groups, with a mostly horizontal political system and egalitarian economy.

Type 0.3: Tribes of individuals linked through kinship but with a more settled and agrarian lifestyle. The beginnings of a political hierarchy and a primitive economic division of labor.

Type 0.4: Chiefdoms consisting of a coalition of tribes into a single hierarchical political unit with a dominant leader at the top, and with the beginnings of significant economic inequalities and a division of labor in which lower-class members produce food and other products consumed by non-producing upper-class members.

Type 0.5: The state as a political coalition with jurisdiction over a well-defined geographical territory and its corresponding inhabitants, with a mercantile economy that seeks a favorable balance of trade in a win-lose game against other states.

Type 0.6: Empires extend their control over peoples who are not culturally, ethnically or geographically within their normal jurisdiction, with a goal of economic dominance over rival empires.

Type 0.7: Democracies that divide power over several institutions, which are run by elected officials voted for by some citizens. The beginnings of a market economy.

Type 0.8: Liberal democracies that give the vote to all citizens. Markets that begin to embrace a nonzero, win-win economic game through free trade with other states.

Type 0.9: Democratic capitalism, the blending of liberal democracy and free markets, now spreading across the globe through democratic movements in developing nations and broad trading blocs such as the European Union.

Type 1.0: Globalism that includes worldwide wireless Internet access with all knowledge digitized and available to everyone. A global economy with free markets in which anyone can trade with anyone else without interference from states or governments. A planet where all states are democracies in which everyone has the franchise.

Looking from this past toward the future, we can see that the forces at work that could prevent us from reaching Civilization 1.0 are primarily political and economic, not technological. The resistance by non democratic states to turning power over to the people is considerable, especially in theocracies whose leaders would prefer we all revert to Type 0.4 chiefdoms. The opposition toward a global economy is substantial, even in the industrialized West, where economic tribalism still dominates the thinking of most people.

The game-changing scientific idea is the combination of energy and economics — the development of renewable energy sources made cheap and available to everyone everywhere on the planet by allowing anyone to trade in these game-changing technologies with anyone else. That will change everything.

One of the sacred principles of physics is that information is never lost. It can be scrambled, encrypted, dissipated and shredded, but never lost. This tenet underlies the second law of thermodynamics and a concept called "unitarity," an essential component of unified theories of particles and forces. Discovering a counterexample or new ways to preserve information could be a real game-changer: one that alters our understanding of the fundamental laws of nature, transforms our concept of space and time, triggers a reconstruction of the history of the universe and leads to new prognostications about its future.

There is a real chance of breakthrough in the foreseeable future as theorists converge on one of the greatest threats to information preservation: black holes. According to Einstein's general theory of relativity, a black hole forms when matter is so concentrated that nothing, not even light, can escape its gravitational field. Any information that passes through the event horizon surrounding the black hole—the "point of no return"—is lost forever to the outside world. Suppose, for example, that Bob pilots a spaceship into the black hole carrying along three books of his choice. It appears that the titles and contents of the three books vanish. Either that or Einstein's general theory of relativity is wrong.

There is nothing shocking about having to correct Einstein's general theory of relativity. It's known to be missing an essential element, quantum physics. Einstein, and generations of theorists since, have sought an improved theory of gravity that incorporates quantum physics in a way that is mathematically and physically consistent. String theory and loop quantum gravity are the most recent attempts.

There is no doubt that quantum physics alters the event horizon and the evolution of a black hole in a fundamental way, as first point out in the work of Jacob Bekenstein, Gary Gibbons and Stephen Hawking in the 1970s. According to quantum physics, matter and energy are composed of discrete chunks known as quanta (such as electrons, quarks and photons) whose position and velocities are undergoing constant random fluctuations. Even empty space—a pure vacuum—is seething with microscopic fluctuations that create and annihilate pairs of quanta and anti-quanta. The seething vacuum just outside the event horizon occasionally produces a pair of quanta, such as an electron-positron duo, in which one escapes and one falls into the black hole. From afar, it appears that the black hole radiates a particle. This phenomenon repeats continuously, producing a spectrum of particles known as "Hawking radiation," whose properties are similar to the "thermal radiation" emitted by a hot body. Very slowly, the black hole radiates away energy and shrinks in mass and size until—well, here is where the story really begins to get interesting.

Thermal radiation only depends on the temperature of the emitting body, providing no other details about the body itself. So, if Hawking radiation is truly thermal, then the information inside the black hole is truly lost . For the last decade, though, leading physicists including Gerard 't Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and Stephen Hawking fiercely debated (and even bet on) the outcome—Susskind refers to the debate as the "black hole war." Aided by new theoretical tools developed by Juan Maldacena and other string theorists, physicists discovered that Hawking radiation is not quite thermal after all! The radiation deviates by a tiny amount from a perfectly thermal signal, and the tiny deviation incorporates information about whatever was inside. The titles of Bob's three books, for example, are not lost forever, although the information dribbles out incredibly slowly and is unimaginably scrambled. Thus, victory was declared in the black hole war.

But it may be an uneasy peace, for there remains the question of what happens to information after it falls into the horizon. This is a reasonable question because, curiously enough, passage through the horizon can be unremarkable (if the black hole is very big). There are no sign posts indicating to Bob that he has passed the point of no return, and his books remain intact. Now suppose Bob scribbles some notes in the margins of his book. What happens to this information?

Here there is a diversity of views. Some suggest that this information, too, is radiated away through the Hawking process and the black hole simply disappears. Some suggest that quantum physics makes the event horizon penetrable so that some information is radiated by the Hawking process but some escapes directly. Yet others suggest that the information is copied; one copy is radiated away and the other strikes the singularity, entering a new section of space-time that is causally disconnected from observers outside the black hole, so the two copies never meet.

Theorists have recently developed a number of new theoretical tools to attack the problem and are hard at work. Although the subject lies in the domain of quantum gravity, the implications for other fields, including my own, cosmology, will be profound. The answer will shape any future formulation of the laws of thermodynamics, quantum gravity and unified field theory. Since scrambling information, a.k.a., the entropy, determines the arrow of time, the results may inform us how time may have first emerged at the cosmic singularity known as the big bang. Or, if it proves possible for copies to bounce from the black hole singularity to a separate piece of space time, the same may apply to an even more famous singularity, the big bang. This would lend support to recent ideas suggesting that the large scale properties of the universe were shaped by events before the big bang and these conditions (a form of information) were transmitted across the cosmic singularity into a new phase of expansion. In fact, if information is forever preserved across singularities, the universe may undergo regularly repeating cycles of big bangs, expansion, and big crunches, forever into the past and into the future. To me, a breakthrough with these kinds of implications would be the ultimate game-changer.

Scientists have been talking about the risks of human induced climate changes for decades now in front of places like Congress, scientific conventions, media events, corporate board rooms, and at visible cultural extravaganzas like Live Earth. Yet, a half century after serious scientific concerns surfaced, the world is still far from a meaningful deal to implement actions to curb the threats by controlling the offending emissions.

The reason is obvious: controlling the basic activities that brought us our prosperity—burning fossil fuels—is not going to be embraced by those who benefit from using the atmosphere as a place to dump for free their tailpipe and smokestack effluents, nor will developing economies like China and India easily give up the techniques we used to get rich because of some threat perceived as distant and not yet certain. To be sure there is real action at local, state, national and international levels, but a game changing global deal is still far from likely. Documented impacts like loss of the Inuit hunting culture, small island states survival in the face of inexorable sea level rise, threats of species extinction in critical places like mountain tops, or a five fold increase in wild fires in the US West since 1970 have not been game changin—yet. What might change the game?

In order to give up something—the traditional pathway to wealth, burning coal oil and gas—nations will have to viscerally perceive they are getting something—protection from unacceptably severe impacts. The latter has been difficult to achieve because most scientific assessments are honest that along with many credible and major risks are many remaining uncertainties.

We cannot pin down whether sea levels will rise a few feet or a few meters in the next century or two—the former is nasty but relatively manageable with adaptation investments, the latter would mean abandoning coastline installations or cultures where a sizeable chunk of humanity lives and works. If we could show scientifically that such a threat was likely, it would be game changing in terms of motivating the kinds of compromises required to achieve the actions needed that are currently politically difficult to achieve.

This is where the potential for up to 7 meters of sea level rise stored as ice on Greenland will come in to tip us toward meaningful actions. Already Greenland is apparently melting at an unprecedented rate, and way faster than any of our theories or models predicted. But it can be—and has been—argued it is just a short term fluctuation since large changes in ice volume come and go typically on millennial timescales—though mounting evidence from ice cores says probably there is unprecedented melting going on right now. Another decade or two of such scientifically documented acceleration of melting could indeed imply we will get the unlucky outcome: meters of sea level rise in the time frame of human infrastructure lifetimes for ports and cities—to say nothing of vulnerable natural places like coastal wetlands etc.

Unfortunately, the longer we wait for more confident "proof" of game changing melt rates in Greenland (or West Antarctica as well, where another 5 meters potential sea level rise lurks), the higher the risk of passing a tipping point in which the melting becomes an unstoppable self-driven process. That game change occurrence would force unprecedented retreat from the sea, and a major abandonment or rebuilding of coastal civilization and loss of coastal wetlands. This is a gamble with "Laboratory Earth", that we can't afford to lose.

Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, first presented in the fall of 1915, and his earlier Special Theory of Relativity have changed very little of our day to day world, but they have radically altered the way we think about both space and time and have also launched the modern theory of cosmology. If in the near future we discover additional space-time dimensions we will undergo a shift in our perceptions every bit as radical as the one experienced almost a hundred years ago.

Though proof of their existence would necessarily alter our view of the Universe, there is also a way in which our psyches would be changed. I believe we would gain a new confidence that great almost unimaginable phenomena are yet to be discovered. It would also make us realize once again the power that lies in a few simple equations, in the tools we can build to test them and in the human imagination.

At the November 6, 1919 joint meeting of the Royal Society and the Royal Astronomical Society, Sir Frank Watson Dyson reported on the observations of starlight made during the previous May’s solar eclipse. “After a careful study of the plates I am prepared to say that they confirm Einstein’s prediction. A very definite result had been obtained, that light is deflected in accordance with Einstein’s law of gravitation.” Sir John Joseph Thomson, presiding, afterwards called the result “one of the highest achievements of human thought.” It was a triumphant moment for both theoretical physics and observational astronomy.

A few years after the momentous Royal Society meeting a German and a Swedish physicist, Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein, reached a striking conclusion. They noticed that the equations of general relativity, when solved in five rather than four dimensions, led to additional solutions that were identical to the well-known Maxwell equations of electromagnetism. Since the apparent fifth dimension had not, and still has not been observed, a necessary additional postulate for this theory to correspond to possible reality was that the fifth dimension was curled up so tightly that any motion in its direction had not been detected.

Einstein, finding this extension of his General Theory of Relativity extraordinarily attractive, tried more than once, without success, to make it part of his lifelong dream of a unified field theory of interactions. But this direction of research fell into relative disfavor during the first post World War II decades during which theoretical physics turned its attention to other matters. It returned with a vengeance during the late 1970s, gaining momentum in the 1980s as physicists began to seriously examine theories that could unite all fundamental interactions into one comprehensive scheme. The rising popularity of superstring theory, mathematically consistent only if additional space-time dimensions are present, has provided the decisive impetus for such considerations.

There are striking differences from the 1915 situation, most particularly the lack of a clear test for the detection of extra dimensions. The novel theories now in fashion do predict that additional particles must be present in nature because of these extensions of space and time, but since the mass of these particles is related to the unknown scale of the extra dimensions, it also remains unknown. Roughly speaking, the smaller the one, the larger the other. Nevertheless the hunt has begun; we are beginning to see in the literature publications from major laboratories with titles such as “ Search for Gamma Rays from the Lightest Kaluza-Klein Particle”, that being the name frequently given to the as of yet undiscovered particles associated with extra dimensions.

These searches are largely motivated by the desire to identify Dark Matter, estimated to be several times more plentiful in our Universe’s makeup than all known species of matter. Kaluza-Klein particles are one possible candidate, perhaps hard to distinguish from other candidates even if found. Challenges abound, but the stakes are very high as well.

"Mind is primarily a verb," wrote philosopher John Dewey. Every time we do or think or feel anything the brain is doing something. But what? And can we use what scientists are learning about these neural gymnastics to get what we want? I think we can and we will, in my life time, due to some mind—bending developments in contemporary neuroscience. Brain scanning; genetic studies; antidepressant drug use; estrogen replacement therapy; testosterone patches; L-dopa and newer drugs to prevent or retard brain diseases; recreational drugs; sex change patients; gene doping by athletes: all these and other developments are giving us data on how the mind works—and opening new avenues to use brain chemistry to change who we are and what we want. As the field of epigenetics takes on speed, we are also beginning to understand how the environment affects brain systems, even turns genes on and off—further enabling us (and others) to adjust brain chemistry, affecting who we are, how we feel and what we think we need.

But is this new? Our forebears have been manipulating brain chemistry for millions of years. Take "hooking up," the current version of the "one night stand," one of humankind's oldest forms of chemical persuasion. During sex, stimulation of the genitals escalates activity in the dopamine system, the neurotransmitter network that my colleagues and I have found to be associated with feelings of romantic love. And with orgasm you experience a flood of oxytocin and vasopressin, neurochemicals associated with feelings of attachment. Casual sex isn't always casual. And I suspect our ancestors seduced their peers to (unconsciously) alter their brain chemistry, thereby nudging "him" or "her" toward feelings of passion and/or attachment. Indeed, this chemical persuasion works. In a recent study of 507 college students, anthropologist Justin Garcia found that 50% of women and 52% of men hopped into bed with an acquaintance or a stranger in hopes of starting a longer relationship. And about one third of these hook ups turned into romance.

In 1957 Vance Packard wrote The Hidden Persuaders to unmask the subtle psychological techniques that advertisers use to manipulate people's feelings and induce them to buy. We have long been using psychology to persuade other's minds. But now we are learning why our psychological strategies work. Holding hands, for example, generates feelings of trust, in part, because it triggers oxytocin activity. As you see another person laugh, you naturally mimic him or her, moving muscles in your face that trigger nerves to alter your neurochemistry so that you feel happy too. That's one reason why we feel good when we are around happy people. "Mirror neurons" also enable us to feel what another feels. Novelty drives up dopamine activity to make you more susceptible to romantic love. The placebo effect is real. And wet kissing transfers testosterone in the saliva, helping to stimulate lust.

The black box of our humanity, the brain, is inching open. And as we peer inside for the first time in human time, you and I will hold the biological codes that direct our deepest wants and feelings. We have begun to use these codes too. I, for example, often tell people that if they want to ignite or sustain feelings of romantic love in a relationship, they should do novel and exciting things together—to trigger or sustain dopamine activity. Some 100 million prescriptions for antidepressants are written annually in the United States. And daily many alter who we are in other chemical ways. As scientists learn more about the chemistry of trust, empathy, forgiveness, generosity, disgust, calm, love, belief, wanting and myriad other complex emotions, motivations and cognitions, even more of us will begin to use this new arsenal of weapons to manipulate ourselves and others. And as more people around the world use these hidden persuaders, one by one we may subtly change everything.

John Brockman points out that new technology leads not only to new ways of perceiving ourselves, but also to a process he calls "recreating ourselves." Could this become true in an even deeper and more radical way than through gene-technology? The answer is yes.

It is entirely plausible that we may one day directly control virtual models of our own bodies directly with our brain. In 2007, I first experienced taking control of a computer-generated whole-body model myself. It took place in a virtual reality lab where my own physical motions were filmed by 18 cameras picking up signals from sensors attached to my body. Over the past two years, different research groups in Switzerland, England, Germany and Sweden have demonstrated how, in a passive condition, subjects can consciously identify with the content of a computer-generated virtual body representation, fully re-locating the phenomenal sense of self into an artificial, visual model of their body.

In 2008, in another experiment, we saw that a monkey on a treadmill could control the real-time walking patterns a humanoid robot via a brain-machine interface directly implanted into its brain. The synchronized robot was in Japan, while the poor monkey was located thousands of miles away, in the US. Even after it stopped walking, the monkey was able to sustain locomotion of the synchronized robot for a few minutes—just by using the visual feedback transmitted from Japan plus his own "thoughts" (whatever that may turn out to be).

Now imagine two further steps.

First, we manage to selectively block the high-bandwidth "interoceptive" input into the human self-model—all the gut feelings and the incessant flow of inner body perceptions that anchor the conscious self in the physical body. After all, we already have selective motor control for an artificial body-model and robust phenomenal self-identification via touch and sight. By blocking the internal self-perception of the body, we could be able to suspend the persistent causal link to the physical body.

Second, we develop richer and more complex avatars, virtual agents emulating not only the proprioceptive feedback generated by situated movement, but also certain abstract aspects of ongoing global control itself—new tools, as Brockman would call them. Then suddenly it happens that the functional core process initiating the complex control loop connecting physical and virtual body jumps from the biological brain into the avatar.

I don't believe this will happen tomorrow. I also don't believe that it would change everything. But it would change a lot.

I anticipate that biology will go through a transforming revelation/revolution that is like the revolution that happened in physics with the development of quantum mechanics nearly 100 years ago. In biology this will involve the realisation that to make sense of the complexity of gene activity in development, the prevailing model of local mechanical causality will have to be abandoned. In its place we will have a model of interactive relationships within gene transcription networks that is like the pattern of interactions between words in a language, where ambiguity is essential to the creation of emergent meaning that is sensitive to cultural history and to context. The organism itself is the emergent meaning of the developmental process as embodied form, sensitive to both historical constraint within the genome and to environmental context, as we see in the adaptive creativity of evolution. What contemporary studies have revealed is that genes are not independent units of information that can be transferred between organisms to alter phenotypes, but elements of complex networks that act together in a morphogenetic process that produces coherent form and function as embodied meaning.

A major consequence that I see of this revelation in biology is the realisation that the separation we have made between human creativity as expressed in culture, and natural creativity as expressed in evolution, is mistaken. The two are much more deeply related than we have previously recognised. That humans are embedded in and dependent on nature is something that no-one can deny. This has become dramatically evident recently as our economic system has collapsed, along with the collapse of many crucial ecosystems, due to our failure to integrate human economic activity as a sustainable part of Gaian regulatory networks. We now face dramatic changes in the climate that require equally dramatic changes in our technologies connected with energy generation, farming, travel, and human life-style in general.

On the other hand, the recognition that culture is embedded in nature is not so evident but will, I believe, emerge as part of the biological revelation/revolution. Biologists will realise that all life, from bacteria to humans, involves a creative process that is grounded in natural languages as the foundation of their capacity for self-generation and continuous adaptive transformation. The complexity of the molecular networks regulating gene activity in organisms reveals a structure and a dynamic that has the self-similar characteristics and long-range order of languages. The coherent form of an organism emerges during its development as the embodied meaning of the historical genetic text, created through the process of resolving ambiguity and multiple possibilities of form into appropriate functional order that reflects sensitivity to context. Such use of language in all its manifestations in the arts and the sciences is the essence of cultural creativity.

In conclusion, I see the deep conceptual changes that are currently happening in biology as a prelude and accompaniment to the cultural changes that are occurring in culture, facilitating these and ushering in a new age of sustainable living on the planet.

Everything will change with the advent of the laptop quantum computer (QC). The transition from PCs to QCs will not merely continue the doubling of computing power, in accord with Moore's Law. It will induce a paradigm shift, both in the power of computing (at least for certain problems) and in the conceptual frameworks we use to understand computation, intelligence, neuroscience, social interactions, and sensory perception.

Today's PCs depend, of course, on quantum mechanics for their proper operation. But their computations do not exploit two computational resources unique to quantum theory: superposition and entanglement. To call them computational resources is already a major conceptual shift. Until recently, superposition and entanglement have been regarded primarily as mathematically well-defined by psychologically incomprehensible oddities of the quantum world—fodder for interminable and apparently unfruitful philosophical debate. But they turn out to be more than idle curiosities. They are bona fide computational resources that can solve certain problems that are intractable with classical computers. The best known example is Peter Shor's quantum algorithm which can, in principle, break encryptions that are impenetrable to classical algorithms.

The issue is the "in principle" part. Quantum theory is well established and quantum computation, although a relatively young discipline, has an impressive array of algorithms that can in principle run circles around classical algorithms on several important problems. But what about in practice? Not yet, and not by a long shot. There are formidable materials-science problems that must be solved—such as instantiating quantum bits (qubits) and quantum gates, and avoiding an unwanted noise called decoherence—before the promise of quantum computation can be fulfilled by tangible quantum computers. Many experts bet the problems can't adequately be solved. I think this bet is premature. We will have laptop QCs, and they will transform our world.

When laptop QCs become commonplace, they will naturally lead us to rethink the notion of intelligence. At present, intelligence is modeled by computations, sometimes simple and sometimes complex, that allow a system to learn, often by interacting with its environment, how to plan, reason, generalize and act to achieve goals. The computations might be serial or parallel, but they have heretofore been taken to be classical.

One hallmark of a classical computation is that it can be traced, i.e., one can in principle observe the states of all the variables at each step of the computation. This is helpful for debugging. But one hallmark of quantum computations is that they cannot in general be traced. Once the qubits have been initialized and the computation started, you cannot observe intermediate stages of the computation without destroying it. You aren't allowed to peak at a quantum computation while it is in progress.

The full horsepower of a quantum computation is only unleashed when, so to speak, you don't look. This is jarring. It clashes with our classical way of thinking about computation. It also clashes with our classical notion of intelligence. In the quantum realm, intelligence happens when you don't look. Insist on looking, and you destroy this intelligence. We will be forced to reconsider what we mean by intelligence in light of quantum computation. In the process we might find new conceptual tools for understanding those creative insights that seem to come from the blue, i.e., whose origin and development can't seem to be traced.

Laptop QCs will make us rethink neuroscience. A few decades ago we peered inside brains and saw complex telephone switch boards. Now we peer inside brains and see complex classical computations, both serial and parallel. What will see once we have thoroughly absorbed the mind set of quantum computation? Some say we will still find only classical computations, because the brain and its neurons are too massive for quantum effects to survive. But evolution by natural selection leads to surprising adaptations, and there might in fact be selective pressures toward quantum computations.

One case in point arises in a classic problem of social interaction: the prisoner's dilemma. In one version of this dilemma, someone yells "FIre!" in a crowded theater. Each person in the crowd has a choice. They can cooperate with everyone else, by exiting in turn in an orderly fashion. Or they can defect, and bolt for the exit. Everyone cooperating would be best for the whole crowd; it is a so-called Pareto optimal solution. But defecting is best for each individual; it is a so-called Nash equilibrium.

What happens is that everyone defects, and the crowd as a whole suffers. But this problem of the prisoner's dilemma, viz., that the Nash equilibrium is not Pareto optimal, is an artifact of the classical computational approach to the dilemma. There are quantum strategies, involving superpositions of cooperation and defection, for which the Nash equilibrium is Pareto optimal. In other words, the prisoner's dilemma can be resolved, and the crowd as a whole needn't suffer if quantum strategies are available. If the prisoner's dilemma is played out in an evolutionary context, there are quantum strategies that drive all classical strategies to extinction. This is suggestive. Could there be selective pressures that built quantum strategies into our nervous systems, and into our social interactions? Do such strategies provide an alternative way to rethink the notion of altruism, perhaps as a superposition of cooperation and defection?

Laptop QCs will alter our view of sensory perception. Superposition seems to be telling us that our sensory representations, which carve the world into discrete objects with properties such as position and momentum, simply are an inadequate description of reality: No definite position or momentum can be ascribed to, say, an electron when it is not being observed. Entanglement seems to be telling us that the very act of carving the world into discrete objects is an inadequate description of reality: Two electrons, billions of light years apart in our sensory representations, are in fact intimately and instantly linked as a single entity.

When superposition and entanglement cease to be abstract curiosities, and become computational resources indispensable to the function of our laptops, they will transform our understanding of perception and of the relation between perception and reality.

We know much about the mechanisms involved in the development of embryos. But given the genome of the egg we cannot predict the way the embryo will develop. This will require a enormous computation in which all the many thousands of components , particularly proteins, are involved and so the behavior of every cell will be known. We would, given a fertilized human egg be able to have a picture of all the details of the newborn baby, including any abnormalities. We would also be able to programme the egg to develop into any shape we desire. The time will come when this is possible.

Understanding that the outside world is really inside us and the inside world is really outside us will change everything. Both inside and outside. Why?

"There is no out there out there", physicist John Wheeler said in his attempt to explain quantum physics. All we know is how we correlate with the world. We do not really know what the world is really like, uncorrelated with us. When we seem to experience an external world that is out there, independent of us, it is something we dream up.

Modern neurobiology has reached the exact same conclusion. The visual world, what we see, is an illusion, but then a very sophisticated one. There are no colours, no tones, no constancy in the "real" world, it is all something we make up. We do so for good reasons and with great survival value. Because colors, tones and constancy are expressions of how we correlate with the world.

The merging of the epistemological lesson from quantum mechanics with the epistemological lesson from neurobiology attest to a very simple fact: What we percieve as being outside of us is indeed a fancy and elegant projection of what we have inside. We do make this projection as as result of interacting with something not inside, but everything we experience is inside.

Is it not real? It embodies a correlation that is very real. As physicist N. David Mermin has argued, we do have correlations, but we do not know what it is that correlates, or if any correlata exists at all. It is a modern formulation of quantum pioneer Niels Bohr's view: "Physics is not about nature, it is about what we can say about nature."

So what is real, then? Inside us humans a lot of relational emotions exists. We feel affection, awe, warmth, glow, mania, belonging and refusal towards other humans and to the world as a whole. We relate and it provokes deep inner emotional states. These are real and true, inside our bodies and percieved not as "real states" of the outside world, but more like a kind of weather phenomena inside us.

That raises the simple question: Where do these internal states come from? Are they an effect of us? Did we make them or did they make us? Love exists before us (most of us were conceived in an act of love). Friendship, family bonds, hate, anger, trust, distrust, all of these entities exist before the individual. They are primary. The illusion of the ego denies the fact that they are there before the ego consciously decided to love or hate or care or not. But the inner states predate the conscious ego. And they predate the bodily individual.

The emotional states inside us are very, very real and the product of biological evolution. They are helpful to us in our attempt to survive. Experimental economics and behavioral sciences have recently shown us how important they are to us as social creatures: To cooperate you have to trust the other party, even though a rational analysis will tell you that both the likelihood and the cost of being cheated is very high. When you trust, you experience a physiologically detectable inner glow of pleasure. So the inner emotional state says yes. However, if you rationally consider the objects in the outside world, the other parties, and consider their trade-offs and motives, you ought to choose not to cooperate. Analyzing the outside world makes you say no. Human cooperation is dependent on our giving weight to what we experience as the inner world compared to what we experience as the outer world.

Traditionally, the culture of science has denied the relevance of the inner states. Now, they become increasingly important to understanding humans. And highly relevant when we want to build artefacts that mimic us.

Soon we will be building not only Artificial Intelligence. We will be building Artificial Will. Systems with an ability to convert internal decisions and values into external change. They will be able to decide that they want to change the world. A plan inside becomes an action on the outside. So they will have to know what is inside and outside.

In building these machines we ourselves will learn something that will change everything: The trick of perception is the trick of mistaking an inner world for the outside world. The emotions inside are the evolutionary reality. The things we see and hear outside are just elegant ways of imagining correlata that can explain our emotions, our correlations. We don't hear the croak, we hear the frog.

When we understand that the inner emotional states are more real than what we experience as the outside world, cooperation becomes easier. The epoch of insane mania for rational control will be over.

What really changes is they way we see things, the way we experience everything. For anything to change out there you have to change everything in here. That is the epistemological situation. All spiritual traditions have been talking about it. But now it grows from the epistemology of quantum physics, neurobiology and the building of robots.

We will be sitting there, building those Artificial Will-robots. Suddenly we will start laughing. There is no out there out there. It is in here. There is no in here in here. It is out there. The outside is in here. Who is there?

That laughter will change everything.

The belief that there is anything that will change things, in and of itself stymies, I believe, real change. To believe that anything "will change things" focuses one on the superficial surface of things, which indeed change all the time. Such changes—which have been and will continue to be—create always an orientation of consciousness that focuses always on "the future".

But I propose that the only thing that will in fact 'change everything' is, or would be, the refusal to think about the future. And this, of course, is almost impossible for almost all human beings to do.

Therefore, nothing will change everything.

(I admit that I myself have fallen prey to this unavoidable human tendency, having written "of the future" in these pages, proposing that the internet is now creating, and will radicalized in the future—wide ranging yet depthless "pancake people".)

But if we could "think not" about the future, the present moment would obviously expand and become the full (and very different) universe. One can say "ah, but this is the animal state".

I would answer—no, the animal achieves this automatically, while the human being who achieves this only does so by erecting it on a foundational superstructure which postulates a necessary 'future' (past-based) much as Freud (and others before him) postulated a necessary "unconscious'—out of which the 'conscious' human being emerged.

(I am aware, obviously, that this theme has been engaged by philosophers and mystics down through the ages).

So for a human being to not think about the future would be to become a non-animal inhabiting the pure present (the dream of so called 'avant-guard' art, by the way). And animals do not (apparently) make avant-guard art.

Take John Brockman's offered example of a future event that changes everything—through genetic manipulation "your dog could become your cat" (and by implication, I could become you, etc.)

I say, this changes only the shell. Such alterations and achievements, along with many others similarly imaginable, add but another room onto the "home" inhabited by human beings—who will still spend most of their time "thinking about the future. And nothing, at the deepest level, therefore will ever change a postulated 'everything'—not so long as we keep imagining possible "change" which only reinforces the psychic dwelling of our un-changing selves in a "future" that is always imaginary and beyond us.

The most offensive idea in all of science for the last 40 years is the possibility that behavioral differences between racial and ethnic groups have some genetic basis. Knowing nothing but the long-term offensiveness of this idea, a betting person would have to predict that as we decode the genomes of people around the world, we're going to find deeper differences than most scientists now expect. Expectations, after all, are not based purely on current evidence; they are biased, even if only slightly, by the gut feelings of the researchers, and those gut feelings include disgust toward racism..

A wall has long protected respectable evolutionary inquiry from accusations of aiding and abetting racism. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). Evolutionary psychology has therefore focused on the Pleistocene era – the period from about 1.8 million years ago to the dawn of agriculture — during which our common humanity was forged for the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

But the writing is on the wall. Russian scientists showed in the 1990s that a strong selection pressure (picking out and breeding only the tamest fox pups in each generation) created what was — in behavior as well as body — essentially a new species in just 30 generations. That would correspond to about 750 years for humans. Humans may never have experienced such a strong selection pressure for such a long period, but they surely experienced many weaker selection pressures that lasted far longer, and for which some heritable personality traits were more adaptive than others. It stands to reason that local populations (not continent-wide "races") adapted to local circumstances by a process known as "co-evolution" in which genes and cultural elements change over time and mutually influence each other. The best documented example of this process is the co-evolution of genetic mutations that maintain the ability to fully digest lactose in adulthood with the cultural innovation of keeping cattle and drinking their milk. This process has happened several times in the last 10,000 years, not to whole "races" but to tribes or larger groups that domesticated cattle.

Recent "sweeps" of the genome across human populations show that hundreds of genes have been changing during the last 5-10 millennia in response to local selection pressures. (See papers by Benjamin Voight, Scott Williamson, and Bruce Lahn). No new mental modules can be created from scratch in a few millennia, but slight tweaks to existing mechanisms can happen quickly, and small genetic changes can have big behavioral effects, as with those Russian foxes. We must therefore begin looking beyond the Pleistocene and turn our attention to the Holocene era as well – the last 10,000 years. This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates.

The protective "wall" is about to come crashing down, and all sorts of uncomfortable claims are going to pour in. Skin color has no moral significance, but traits that led to Darwinian success in one of the many new niches and occupations of Holocene life — traits such as collectivism, clannishness, aggressiveness, docility, or the ability to delay gratification — are often seen as virtues or vices. Virtues are acquired slowly, by practice within a cultural context, but the discovery that there might be ethnically-linked genetic variations in the ease with which people can acquire specific virtues is — and this is my prediction — going to be a "game changing" scientific event. (By "ethnic" I mean any group of people who believe they share common descent, actually do share common descent, and that descent involved at least 500 years of a sustained selection pressure, such as sheep herding, rice farming, exposure to malaria, or a caste-based social order, which favored some heritable behavioral predispositions and not others.)

I believe that the "Bell Curve" wars of the 1990s, over race differences in intelligence, will seem genteel and short-lived compared to the coming arguments over ethnic differences in moralized traits. I predict that this "war" will break out between 2012 and 2017.

There are reasons to hope that we'll ultimately reach a consensus that does not aid and abet racism. I expect that dozens or hundreds of ethnic differences will be found, so that any group — like any person — can be said to have many strengths and a few weaknesses, all of which are context-dependent. Furthermore, these cross-group differences are likely to be small when compared to the enormous variation within ethnic groups and the enormous and obvious effects of cultural learning. But whatever consensus we ultimately reach, the ways in which we now think about genes, groups, evolution and ethnicity will be radically changed by the unstoppable progress of the human genome project.

I expect to see this happen, because I'll be living longer. Maybe even to 150, about 30 more years than any human is known to have lived.

I expect this because I've worked on it, seen the consequences of genomics when applied to the complex problem of our aging.

Since Aristotle, many scientists and even some physicians (who should know better) thought that aging arises from a few mechanisms that make our bodies deteriorate. Instead, the genomic revolution of the last decade now promises a true 21st Century path to extending longevity: follow the pathways.

Genomics now reveals what physicians intuited: the staggering complexity of aging pathophysiology among real clinical patients. We can't solve "the aging problem" using the standard research methods of cell biology, despite the great success such methods had with some other medical problems.

Aging is not a process of deterioration actively built by natural selection. Instead it arises from a lack of such natural selection in later adulthood. Not understanding this explains the age-old failures to explain or control aging and the chronic diseases underlying it.

Aging comes from multiple genetic deficiencies, not a single biochemical problem.

But now we have genomics to reveal all the genes in an organism. More, we can monitor how each and every one of them expresses in our bodies. Genomics, working with geriatric pathology, now unveils the intricate problems of coordination among aging organ systems. Population genetics illuminates aging's cause and so, soon enough, its control. Aging arises from interconnected complexity hundreds of times greater than cell biologists thought before the late 1990s.

The many-headed monster of aging can't be stopped by any vaccine or by supplying a single missing enzyme. There are no "master regulatory" genes, or avenues of accumulating damage. Instead, there any complex pathways that inevitably trade current performance for longterm decay. Eventually that evolutionary strategy catches up with us.

So the aging riddle is inherently genomic in scale. There is no biochemical or cellular necessity to aging—it arises from side effects of evolution, through natural selection. But this also means we can attack it by using directed evolution.

Michael Rose at UC Irvine has produced "Methuselah flies" that live over four times longer than control flies in the lab. He did this by not allowing their eggs to hatch, until half are dead, for hundreds of generations. Methuselah flies are more robust, not less, and so resist stress.

Methuselah flies genomics shows us densely overlapping pathways. Directed evolution uses these to enhance longevity. Since flies have about ¾ of their genes in common with us, this tells us much about our own pathways. We now know many of these pathways and can enhance their resistance to the many disorders of aging.

By finding substances that can enhance the action of those pathways, we have a 21st Century approach to aging. Such research is rapidly ongoing in private companies, including one I co-founded only three years ago. The field is moving fast. The genomic revolution makes the use of multi-pathway treatments to offset aging inevitable.

Knowledge comes first, then its use. Science yields engineering. Already there seems no fundamental reason why we cannot live to 150 years or longer. After all, nature has done quite well on her own. We know of a 4,800-year-old bristlecone pine, a 400 year old clam—plus whales, a tortoise and koi fish over 200 years old—all without technology. After all, these organisms use pathways we share, and can now understand.

It will take decades to find the many ways of acting on the longevity genes we already know. Nature spent several billion years developing these pathways; we must plumb them with smart modern tools. The technology emerging now acts on these basic pathways to immediately effect all types of organs. Traditionally, medicine focuses on disease by isolating and studying organs. Fair enough, for then. Now it is better to focus on entire organisms. Only genomics can do this. It looks at the entire picture.

Quite soon, simple pills containing designer supplements will target our most common disorders — cardiovascular, diabetes, neurological. Beyond that, the era of affordable, personal genomics makes possible designer supplements, now called neutrigenomics. Tailored to each personal genome, these can enforce the repair mechanisms and augmentations that nature herself provided to the genomically fortunate.

So…what if it works?

The prospect of steadily extending our lifespans terrifies some governments. These will yield, over time, to pressures to let us work longer—certainly far beyond the 65 years imposed by most European Union countries. Slowly it will dawn that vibrant old age is a boon, not a curse.

Living to 150 ensures that you take the long view. You're going to live in a future ecology, so better be sure it's livable. You'll need longterm investments, so think longterm. Social problems will belong to you, not some distant others, because problems evolve and you'll be around to see them.

Rather than isolating people, "old age" will lead to social growth. With robust health to go with longer lives, the older will become more socially responsible, bringing both experience and steady energy to bear.

We need fear no senioropolis of caution and withdrawal. Once society realizes that people who get educated in 20 years can use that education for another century or so, working well beyond 100, all the 20th Century social agenda vanishes. Nobody will retire at 65. People will switch careers, try out their dreams, perhaps find new mates and passions. We will see that experience can damp the ardent passions of glib youth, if it has a healthy body to work through. That future will be more mature, and richer for it.

All this social promise emerges from the genomic revolution. The 21st Century has scarcely begun, and already it looks as though most who welcomed it in will see it out–happily, after a good swim in the morning and a vigorous party that night, to welcome in the 22nd. The first person to live to 150 may be reading this right now.

The survival of our ancestors on the savannah depended on their ability to detect change. Change is where the action is. You don't need to know that things are the same, the same, the same.

Our nervous system is biased for the detection of change. Do you feel the watch on your wrist or the ring on your finger? Probably not, unless you have just put them on. You don't see the blind spot of each retina because they are unchanging and filled-in by your brain with information from the visual surround. If the image on your retina is experimentally stabilized, the entire visual field fades in a few seconds and you can see only visual stimuli that move through the field of view. You notice the sound of your home's air control system when it turns-on or turns-off, but not when it's running.

Our perception of changing stimulus amplitude is usually nonlinear. The sensation of loudness grows much more slowly (exponent of 0.6) than the amplitude of the physical stimulus, a reason why rock bands have huge amplifiers and speakers. Perceived brightness grows even more slowly than loudness (exponent of 0.33). The sensation of electric shock grows at an accelerating rate (exponent of 3.5), quickly shifting from a just detectable tingle to an agonizing jolt. Our estimate of length grows linearly (exponent of 1.0); a two-inch line appears twice as long as a one-inch line. We are lousy sound, light, and volt meters, but half-way decent rulers.

We are poor at making absolute judgments of stimulus amplitude, basing decisions on relative, ever changing standards. We judge ourselves to be warm or cool relative to "physiological zero," our adaptation level. The same room can seem either warm or cool, depending on whether you entered it from a chilly basement or an overheated sunroom. The lesson of temperature judgment is applicable to other, more complex measures of change associated with wealth and success. For a highly paid CEO, this year's million dollar bonus does not feel as good as last year's bonus of the same size, the adaptation level. The second term of a presidency does not feel as momentous as the first.

The above exploration of how we perceive changes in anything suggests the difficulty of identifying something that changes everything, from the perspective of the individual. The velocity of change is also critical. Did the Renaissance, Reformation, industrial revolution, or computer revolution, have ordinary people amazed at the changes in their lives? Historical and futuristic speculation about events that change everything features time compression and overestimates the rate of cultural and psychological change. As with previous generations, we may be missing the slow motion revolution that is taking place around us, unaware that we are part of an event that will change everything. What is it?

Our most reliable engine of change has been increased understanding of the physical world. First it was Galilean dynamics and Newtonian gravity, then electromagnetism, later quantum mechanics and relativity. In each case, new observations revealed new physics, physics that went beyond the standard models—physics that led to new technologies and to new ways of looking at the universe. Often those advances were the result of new measurement techniques. The Greeks never found artificial ways of extending their senses, which hobbled their protoscience. But ever since Tycho Brahe, a man with a nose for instrumentation, better measurements have played a key role in Western science.

We can expect significantly improved observations in many areas over the next decade. Some of that is due to sophisticated, expensive, and downright awesome new machines. The Large Hadron Collider should begin producing data next year, and maybe even information. We can scan the heavens for the results of natural experiments that you wouldn't want to try in your backward—events that shatter suns and devour galaxies—and we're getting better at that. That means devices like the 30-meter telescope under development by a Caltech-led consortium, or the 100-meter OWL (Overwhelmingly Large Telescope) under consideration by the European Southern Observatory. Those telescopes will actively correct for the atmospheric fluctuations which make stars twinkle—but that's almost mundane, considering that we have a neutrino telescope at the bottom of the Mediterranean and another buried deep in the Antarctic ice. We have the world's first real gravitational telescope (LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) running now, and planned improvements should increase its sensitivity enough to study cosmic fender-benders in the neighborhood, as (for example) when two black holes collide. An underground telescope, of course….

There's no iron rule ensuring that revolutionary discoveries must cost an arm and a leg: ingenious experimentalists are testing quantum mechanics and gravity in table-top experiments, as well. They'll find surprises. When you think about it, even historians and archaeologists have a chance of shaking gold out of the physics-tree: we know the exact date of the Crab Nebula supernova from old Chinese records, and with a little luck we'll find some cuneiform tablets that give us some other astrophysical clue, as well as the real story about the battle of Kadesh…

We have a lot of all-too-theoretical physics underway, but there's a widespread suspicion that the key shortage is data, not mathematics. The universe may not be stranger than we can imagine but it's entirely possible that it's stranger than we have imagined thus far. We have string theory, but what Bikini test has it brought us? Experiments led the way in the past and they will lead the way again.

We will probably discover new physics in the next generation, and there's a good chance that the world will, as a consequence, become unimaginably different. For better or worse.

The technological changes were small at first. In 2007 a telescope was developed that could search for planets in the Milky Way within 100 light years of Earth. The next version of the telescope in 2008 did not have to block out the light of the new star to see the planets. It could directly see the reflected light of the planets closest to every star. That made it possible to do spectroscopic analysis of reflected light and search for blue planets like Earth. Within a decade, 100 Earth-like planets had been identified within 100 light years. In the next two centuries that number increased to 50,000 blue planets.

Within the next two centuries the seemingly impossible technical problems of space travel began to be solved. Problems of foil sails were solved. Designs emerged for ships that could get up to 85% of the speed of light within 2 years, using acceleration from starts and from harnessing the creative energy of empty space itself. The Moon, Europa and Mars were colonized. Terra-forming technologies developed. Many designs emerged for the spinning complete 2-mile Earth-habitat ship that produced a 1-g environment. Thousands of people wanted to make the trips.

Laboratory Earth colonies were formed for simulating conditions for the galactic trips. Based on these experiments, social scientists soon recognized that the major unsolved problem of galactic colonization was the social psychological problem, How could humans live together for up to 52 years, raising children who would become the explorers of the blue planets? Much had been learned, of course, from the social psychological studies early in the 21st and 22nd Centuries for obtaining planet-wide cooperation in solving global warming and sustainable energy production, and in curing world-wide hunger and disease. But that work was primitive and rudimentary for the challenges of galactic colonization.

The subsequent classic social psychological studies were all funded privately by one man. Thousands of scientists participated. Studies of all kinds were initially devised, and the results were carefully replicated. The entire series of social psychological experiments took a century to perform. It rapidly became clear that a military or any hierarchical social structure could not last without the threats of continual external danger. The work of Peggy Sanday had demonstrated that fact without question. The problem was to foster creative collaboration and minimize self-interest. Eventually, it was deemed necessary for each ship to spend 5 years prior to the trip selecting a problem that all the members would creatively and cooperatively face. The work had to easily consume the crew of a ship for 60 years. In addition, each ship represented a microcosm of all Earth's activities, including all the occupations and professions, adventure, play, and sports.

In the year 2,500 more than 20,000 ships set out, 2 headed for each planet. It was inevitable that many ships would successfully make the journey. No one knew what they would find. There was no plan for communication between the stars. The colonization of the Milky Way had begun.

Nothing has a greater potential for changing everything than the successful implementation of good old-fashioned nanotechnology.

I specify the old-fashioned version because nanotechnology is decidedly no longer what it used to be. Back in the mid-1980s when Eric Drexler first popularized the concept in his book Engines of Creation, the term referred to a radical and grandiose molecular manufacturing scheme. The idea was that scientists and engineers would construct vast fleets of "assemblers," molecular-scale, programmable devices that would build objects of practically any arbitrary size and complexity, from the molecules up. Program the assemblers to put together an SUV, a sailboat, or a spacecraft, and they'd do it—automatically, and without human aid or intervention. Further, they'd do it using cheap, readily-available feedstock molecules as raw materials.

The idea sounds fatuous in the extreme…until you remember that objects as big and complex as whales, dinosaurs, and sumo wrestlers got built in a moderately analogous fashion: they began as minute, nanoscale structures that duplicated themselves, and whose successors then differentiated off into specialized organs and other components. Those growing ranks of biological marvels did all this repeatedly until, eventually, they had automatically assembled themselves into complex and functional macroscale entities. And the initial seed structures, the gametes, were not even designed, built, or programmed by scientists: they were just out there in the world, products of natural selection. But if nature can do that all by itself, then why can't machines be intelligently engineered to accomplish relevantly similar feats?

Latter-day "nanotechnology," by contrast, is nothing so imposing. In fact, the term has been co-opted, corrupted, and reduced to the point where what it refers to is essentially just small-particle chemistry. And so now we have "nano-particles" in products raging from motor oils to sunscreens, lipstick, car polish and ski wax, and even a $420 "Nano Gold Energizing Cream" that its manufacturer claims transports beneficial compounds into the skin. Nanotechnology in this bastardized sense is largely a marketing gimmick, not likely to change anything very much, much less "everything."

But what if nanotechnology in the radical and grandiose sense actually became possible? What if, indeed, it became an operational reality? That would be a fundamentally transformative development, changing forever how manufacturing is done and how the world works. Imagine all of our material needs being produced at trivial cost, without human labor, and with no waste. No more sweat shops, no more smoke-belching factories, no more grinding workdays or long commutes. The magical molecular assemblers will do it all, permanently eliminating poverty in the process.

Then there would be the medical miracles performed by other types of molecular-scale devices that would repair or rejuvenate your body's cells, killing the cancerous or other bad ones, and nudging the rest of them toward unprecedented levels of youth, health, and durability. All without $420 bottles of face cream.

There's a downside to all this, of course, and it has nothing to do with Michael Chrichton-ish swarms of uncontrolled, predatory nanobots hunting down people and animals. Rather, it has to do with the question of what the mass of men and women are going to do when, newly unchained from their jobs, and blessed or cursed with longer life spans, they have oceans of free time to kill. Free time is not a problem for the geniuses and creators. But for the rest of us, what will occupy our idle hands? There is only so much golf you can play.

But perhaps this is a problem that will never have to be faced. The bulk of mainstream scientists pay little attention to radical nanotechnology, regarding its more extravagant claims as science-fictional and beyond belief. Before he died, chemist Richard Smalley, a Nobel prizewinner, made a cottage industry out of arguing that insurmountable technical difficulties at the chemical bonding level would keep radical nanotechnology perpetually in the pipe dream stage. Nobody knows whether he was right about that.

Some people may hope that he was. Maybe changing everything is not so attractive an idea as it seems at first glance.

We're talking about changing everything—not just our abilities, relationships, politics, economy, religion, biology, language, mathematics, history and future, but all of these things at once. The only single event I can see shifting pretty much everything at once is our first encounter with intelligent, extra-terrestrial life.

The development of any of our current capabilities—genetics, computing, language, even compassion—all feel like incremental advances in existing abilities. As we've seen before, the culmination of one branch of inquiry always just opens the door to a new a new branch, and never yields the wholesale change of state we anticipated. Nothing we've done in the past couple of hundred thousand years has truly changed everything, so I don't see us doing anything in the future that would change everything, either.

No, I have the feeling that the only way to change everything is for something be done to us, instead. Just imagining the encounter of humanity with an "other" implies a shift beyond the solipsism that has characterized our civilization since our civilization was born. It augurs a reversal as big as the encounter of an individual with its offspring, or a creature with its creator. Even if it's the result of something we've done, it's now independent of us and our efforts.

To meet a neighbor, whether outer, inner, cyber- or hyper- spatial, finally turns us into an "us." To encounter an other, whether a god, a ghost, a biological sibling, an independently evolved life form, or an emergent intelligence of our own creation, changes what it means to be human.

Our computers may never inform us that they are self-aware, extra-terrestrials may never broadcast a signal to our SETI dishes, and interdimensional creatures may never appear to those who aren't taking psychedelics at the time—but if any of them did, it would change everything.

Speciation is coming. Fast. We keep forgetting that we are but one of several hominids that have walked the Earth (erectus, habilis,neanderthalis, heidelbergensis, ergaster, australopithecus). We keep thinking we are the one and only, the special. But we easily could not have been a dominant species. Or even a species anymore. We blissfully ignore the fact that we came within about 2,000 specimens of going extinct (which is why human DNA is virtually identical).

There is not much evidence, historically, that we are the be all and end all, or that we will remain the dominant species. The fossil history of the planet tells tales of at least six mass extinctions. In each cycle, most life was toast as DNA/RNA hit a reboot key. New species emerged to adapt to new conditions. Asteroid hits? Do away with oceans of slime. World freezes to the Equator? Microbes dominate. Atmosphere fills with poisonous oxygen? no worries, life eventually blurts out obnoxious mammals.

Unless we believe that we have now stabilized all planetary and galactic variables, these cycles of growth and extinction will continue time and again. 99% of species, including all other hominids, have gone extinct. Often this has happened over long periods of time. What is interesting today, 200 years after Darwin's birth, is that we are taking direct and deliberate control over the evolution of many, many species, including ourselves. So the single biggest game changer will likely be the beginning of human speciation. We will begin to get glimpses of it in our lifetime. Our grandchildren will likely live it.

There are at least three parallel tracks on which this change is running towards us. The easiest to see and comprehend is taking place among the "handicapped." As we build better prostheses, we begin to see equality. Legless Oscar Pistorious attempting to put aside the Special Olympics and run against able bodied Olympians is but one example. In Beijing he came very close, but did not meet the qualifying times. However, as materials science, engineering, and design advance, by next Olympics he and his disciples will be competitive. And one Olympics after that the "handicapped" could be unbeatable.

It's not just limbs, what started out as large cones for the hard of hearing eventually became pesky, malfunctioning hearing aids. Then came discrete, effective, miniaturized buds. Now internally implanted cochlear implants allow the deaf to hear. But unlike natural evolution, which requires centuries, digital technologies double in power and halve in price every few months. Soon those with implants will hear as well as we do, and, a few months after that, their hearing may be more acute than ours. Likely the devices will span a broad and adjustable tonal range, including that of species like dogs, bats, or dolphins. Wearers will be able to adapt to various environments at will. Perhaps those with natural hearing will file discrimination lawsuits because they were not hired by symphony orchestras…

Speciation does not have to be mechanical, there is a second parallel, fast moving, track in stem cell and tissue engineering. While the global economy melted down this year, a series of extraordinary discoveries opened interesting options that will be remembered far longer that the current NASDAQ index. Labs in Japan and Wisconsin rebooted skin cells and turned them into stem cells. We are now closer to a point where any cell in our body can be rebooted back to its original factory settings (pluripotent stem cell) and can rebuild any part of our body. At the same time, a Harvard team stripped a mouse heart of all its cells, leaving only cartilage. The cartilage was covered in mouse stem cells, which self organized into a beating heart. A Wake Forest group was regrowing human bladders and implanting them into accident and cancer victims. By year end, a European team had taken a trachea from a dead donor, taken the cells off, and then covered the sinew with bone marrow cells taken from a patient dying of tuberculosis. These cells self organized and regrew a fully functional trachea which was implanted into the patient. There was no need for immunosuppressants; her body recognized the cells covering the new organ as her own…

Again, this is an instance where treating the sick and the needy can quickly expand into a "normal" population with elective procedures. The global proliferation of plastic surgery shows how many are willing to undergo great expense, pain, and inconvenience to enhance their bodies. Between 1996 and 2002 elective cosmetic surgery increased 297%, minimally invasive procedures increased 4146%. As artificial limbs, eyes, ears, cartilage begin to provide significant advantages, procedures developed to enhance the quality of life for the handicapped may become common.

After the daughter of one of my friends tore her tendons horseback riding, doctors told her they would have to harvest parts of her own tendons and hamstrings to rebuild her leg. Because she was so young, the crippling procedure would have to be repeated three times as her body grew. But her parents knew tissue engineers were growing tendons in a lab, so she was one of the first recipients of a procedure that allows natural growth and no harvesting. Today she is a successful ski racer, but her coach feels her "damaged" knee is far stronger and has asked whether the same procedure could be done on the undamaged knee…

As we regrow or engineer more body parts we will likely significantly increase average life span and run into a third track of speciation. Those with access to Google already have an extraordinary evolutionary advantage over the digitally illiterate. Next decade we will be able to store everything we see, read, and hear in our lifetime. The question is can we re-upload and upgrade this data as the basic storage organ deteriorates? And can we enhance this organ's cognitive capacity internally and externally? MIT has already brought together many of those interested in cognition—neuroscientists, surgeons, radiologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, computer scientists—to begin to understand this black box. But rebooting other body parts will likely be easier than rebooting the brain, so this will likely be the slowest track but, over the long term, the one with the greatest speciation impact.

Speciation will not be a deliberate, programmed event. Instead it will involve an ever faster accumulation of small, useful improvements that eventually turn homo sapiens into a new hominid. We will likely see glimpses of this long-lived, partly mechanical, partly regrown creature that continues to rapidly drive its own evolution. As the branches of the tree of life, and of hominids, continue to grow and spread, many of our grandchildren will likely engineer themselves into what we would consider a new species, one with extraordinary capabilities, a homo evolutis.

An executive of a consumer products company who I know was worrying about how to make the bleach his company produces better. He thought it would be nice if the bleach didn't cause "collateral damage." That is, he wanted it to harm bad stuff without harming good stuff. He seized upon the notion of collateral damage and began to wonder where else collateral damage was a problem. Chemotherapy came to mind and he visited some oncologists who gave him some ideas about what they did to make chemotherapy less harmful tp patients. He then applied those same ideas to improve his company's bleach.

He began to wonder about what he had done and how he had done it. He wanted to be able to do this sort of thing again. But what is this sort of thing and how can one do it again?

In bygone days we lived in groups that had wise men (and women) who told stories to younger people if they thought that those stories might be relevant to their needs. This was called wisdom and teaching and it served as way of passing one generation's experiences to the next.

We have lost this ability to some extent because we live in a much larger world, where the experts are not likely to be in the next cave over and where there is a lot more to have expertise about. Nevertheless, we, as humans, are set up to deliver and make use of just in time wisdom. We just aren't that sure where to find it. We have created books, and schools, and now search engines to replace what we have lost. Still it would be nice if there was wisdom to be had without having to look hard to find it.

Those days of just in time storytelling will return. The storyteller will be your computer. The computers we have today are capable of understanding your needs and finding just the right (previously archived and indexed) wise man (or woman) to tell you a story, just when you need it, that will help you think something out. Some work needs to be done to make this happen of course.

No more looking for information. No more libraries. No more key words. No more search engines.

Information will find you, and just in the nick of time. And this will "change everything."

You are seeing the beginning of this today, but it is being done in a mindless and commercial way, led of course by Google ads that watch the words you type and match them to ads they have written that contain those words. (I receive endless offers of on line degrees, for example, because that is what I often write about.) Three things will change:

In the world that I am describing the computer has to know what you are trying to accomplish, not what words you just typed, and it needs to have an enormous archive of stories to tell you. Additionally it needs to have indexed all the stories it has in its archives to activities you are working on in such a way that the right story comes up at the right time.

What needs to happen to make this a reality? Computers need an activity model. They need to know what you are doing and why. As software becomes more complex and more responsible for what we do in our daily lives, this state of affairs is inevitable.

An archive needs to be created that has all the wisdom of the world in it. People have sought to do this for years, in the form of encyclopedias and such, but they have failed to do what was necessary to make those encyclopedias useful. There is too much in a typical encyclopedia entry, not to mention the absurd amount of information in a book. People are set up to hear stories and stories don't last all that long before we lose our ability to concentrate on their main point, their inherent wisdom, if you will. People tell each other stores all the time, but when they write or lecture they are permitted (or encouraged) to go on way too long (as I am doing now.)

Wisdom depends upon goal directed prompts that say what to do when certain conditions are encountered. To put this another way, an archive of key strategic ideas about how to achieve goals under certain conditions is just the right resource to be interacting with enabling a good story to pop up when you need it. The solution involves goal-directed indexing. Ideas such a "collateral damage" are indices to knowledge. We are not far from the point where computers will be able to recognize collateral damage when it happens and find other examples that help you think something out.

Having a "reminding machine" that gets reminding of universal wisdom as needed will indeed change everything. We will all become much more likely to profit from humanity's collective wisdom by having a computer at the ready to help us think.

Much of the misery in the world today — as it always has been — is due to the human propensity to contemplate, or actually commit, violence against another human being. It's not just assaults and murders that display that propensity. Someone who designs a weapon, punishes a child, declares war or leaves a hit-and-run victim by the side of the road has defined 'harming another human being' as a justifiable action for himself. How different the world would be if, as a biologically determined characteristic of future human beings, there was such a cognitive inhibition to such actions that people would be incapable of carrying them out, just as most of us are incapable of moving our ears.

It must be the case that that in the brains of everyone, from abusive parents and rapists to arms dealers and heads of state, there can arise a concatenation of nerve impulses which allow someone to see as 'normal' — or at least acceptable — the mutilation, maiming or death of another for one's own pleasure, greed or benefit. Suppose the pattern of that series of impulses was analysable exactly, with future developments of fMRI, PET scans or technology as yet uninvented. Perhaps every decision to kill or harm another person can be traced to a series of nerve impulses that arise in brain centre A, travel in a microsecond to areas B, C, and D, inhibit areas E and F, and lead to a previously unacceptable decision becoming acceptable. Perhaps we would discover a common factor between the brain patterns of someone who is about to murder a child, and a head of state signing a bill to initiate a nuclear weapons programme, or an engineer designing a new type of cluster bomb. All of them accept at some intellectual level that it is perfectly all right for their actions to cause harm or death to another human. The brains of all of them, perhaps, experience pattern D, the 'death pattern'.

If such a specific pattern of brain activity were detectable, could methods then be devised that prevented or disrupted it whenever it was about to arise? At its most plausible — and least socially acceptable — everyone could wear microcircuit-based devices that detected the pattern and suppressed or disrupted it, such that anyone in whom the impulse arose would instantaneously lose any will to carry it out. Less plausible, but still imaginable, would be some sophisticated chemical suppressant of 'pattern D', genetically engineered to act at specific synapses or on specific neurotransmitters, and delivered in some way that reached every single member of the world's population. The 'pattern D suppressant' could be used as a water additive, like chlorine, acceptable now to prevent deaths from dirty water; or as inhalants sprayed from the air; or in genetically modified foodstuffs; even, perhaps, alteration of the germ cell line in one generation that would forever remove pattern D from future generations.

Rapes would be defused before they happened; soldiers — if there were still armies — would be inhibited from firing as their trigger fingers tightened, except of course there would be no one to fire at since enemy soldiers, insurgents, or terrorists would themselves be unable to carry their violent acts to completion.

Would the total elimination of murderous impulses from the human race have a down side? Well, of course, one single person who escaped the elimination process could then rule the world. He — probably a man — could oppress and kill with impunity since no one else would have the will to kill him. Measures would have to be devised to deal with such a situation. Such a person would be so harmful to the human race that, perhaps, plans would have to be laid to control him if he should arise. Tricky, this one, since he couldn't be killed, as there would no one able to kill him or even to design a machine that would kill him, as that also would involve an ability to contemplate the death of another human being.

But setting that possibility aside, what would be the disadvantages of a world in which, chemically or electronically, the ability to kill or harm another human being would be removed from all people? Surely, only good could come from it. Crimes motivated by greed would still be possible, but robberies would be achieved with trickery rather than at the point of a pistol; gang members might attack each other with insults and taunts rather than razors or coshes; governments might play chess to decide on tricky border issues; and deaths from road accidents would go down because even the slightest thought about one's own behaviour causing the death of another would be so reminiscent of 'pattern D' that we would all drive much more carefully to avoid it. Deaths from natural disasters would continue, but charitable giving and international aid in such situations would soar as people realised that not helping to prevent them in future would be almost as bad as the old and now eliminated habit of killing people.

A method to eliminate 'pattern D' will lead to the most significant change ever in the way humans — and therefore societies — behave. And somewhere, in the fields of neurobiology or genetic modification today the germ of that change may already be present.

It is hard to imagine anything that would "change everything" as much as a cheap, powerful, ubiquitous artificial intelligence—the kind of synthetic mind that learns and improves itself. A very small amount of real intelligence embedded into an existing process would boost its effectiveness to another level. We could apply mindfulness wherever we now apply electricity. The ensuing change would be hundreds of times more disruptive to our lives than even the transforming power of electrification. We'd use artificial intelligence the same way we've exploited previous powers—by wasting it on seemingly silly things. Of course we'd plan to apply AI to tough research problems like curing cancer, or solving intractable math problems, but the real disruption will come from inserting wily mindfulness into vending machines, our shoes, books, tax returns, automobiles, email, and pulse meters.

This additional intelligence need not be super-human, or even human-like at all. In fact, the greatest benefit of an artificial intelligence would come from a mind that thought differently than humans, since we already have plenty of those around. The game-changer is neither how smart this AI is, nor its variety, but how ubiquitous it is. Alan Kay quips in that humans perspective is worth 80 IQ points. For an artificial intelligence, ubiquity is worth 80 IQ points. A distributed AI, embedded everywhere that electricity goes, becomes ai—a low-level background intelligence that permeates the technium, and trough this saturation morphs it.

Ideally this additional intelligence should not be just cheap, but free. A free ai, like the free commons of the web, would feed commerce and science like no other force I can imagine, and would pay for itself in no time. Until recently, conventional wisdom held that supercomputers would first host this artificial mind, and then perhaps we'd get mini-ones at home, or add them to the heads of our personal robots. They would be bounded entities. We would know where our thoughts ended and theirs began.

However, the snowballing success of Google this past decade suggests the coming AI will not be bounded inside a definable device. It will be on the web, like the web. The more people that use the web, the more it learns. The more it knows, the more we use it. The smarter it gets, the more money it makes, the smarter it will get, the more we will use it. The smartness of the web is on an increasing-returns curve, self-accelerating each time someone clicks on a link or creates a link. Instead of dozens of geniuses trying to program an AI in a university lab, there are billion people training the dim glimmers of intelligence arising between the quadrillion hyperlinks on the web. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web—encompassing all its connected computing chips—will dwarf the brain. In fact it already has.

As more commercial life, science work, and daily play of humanity moves onto the web, the potential and benefits of a web AI compound. The first genuine AI will most likely not be birthed in standalone supercomputer, but in the superorganism of a billion CPUs known as the web. It will be planetary in dimensions, but thin, embedded, and loosely connected. Any device that touches this web AI will share —and contribute to—its intelligence. Therefore all devices and processes will (need to) participate in this web intelligence.

Standalone minds are likely to be viewed as handicapped, a penalty one might pay in order to have mobility in distant places. A truly off-the-grid AI could not learn as fast, as broadly, or as smartly as one plugged into 6 billion human minds, a quintillion online transistors, hundreds of exabytes of real-life data, and the self-correcting feedback loops of the entire civilization.

When this emerging AI, or ai, arrives it won't even be recognized as intelligence at first. Its very ubiquity will hide it. We'll use its growing smartness for all kinds of humdrum chores, including scientific measurements and modeling, but because the smartness lives on thin bits of code spread across the globe in windowless boring warehouses, and it lacks a unified body, it will be faceless. You can reach this distributed intelligence in a million ways, through any digital screen anywhere on earth, so it will be hard to say where it is. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online) and the coveted zip of fast alien digital memory, it will be difficult to pinpoint what it is as well. Is it our memory, or a consensual agreement? Are we searching it, or is it searching us?

While we will waste the web's ai on trivial pursuits and random acts of entertainment, we'll also use its new kind of intelligence for science. Most importantly, an embedded ai will change how we do science. Really intelligent instruments will speed and alter our measurements; really huge sets of constant real time data will speed and alter our model making; really smart documents will speed and alter our acceptance of when we "know" something. The scientific method is a way of knowing, but it has been based on how humans know. Once we add a new kind of intelligence into this method, it will have to know differently. At that point everything changes.

What is talent? If you ask the average grade school teacher to identify her most talented student, she is likely to reject the question: "All my students are equally talented." But of course, this answer is rubbish. Anyone who has worked with numerous young people over the years knows that some catch on quickly, almost instantly, to new skills or understandings, while others must go through the same drill, with little depressingly little improvement over time.

As wrongheaded as the teacher's response is the viewpoint put forward by some psychological researchers, and most recently popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. This is notion that there is nothing mysterious about talent, no need to crack open the lockbox: anyone who works hard enough over a long period of time can end up at the top of her field. Anyone who has the opportunity to observe or read about a prodigy—be it Mozart or Yo-Yo Ma in music, Tiger Woods in golf, John von Neumann in mathematics—knows that achievement is not just hard work: the differences between performance at time 1 and successive performances at times 2, 3, and 4 are vast, not simply the result of additional sweat. It is said that if algebra had not already existed,, precocious Saul Kripke would have invented it in elementary school: such a characterization would be ludicrous if applied to most individuals.

For the first time, it should be possible to delineate the nature of talent. This breakthrough will come about through a combination of findings from genetics (do highly talented individuals have a distinctive, recognizable genetic profile?); neuroscience (are there structural or functional neural signatures, and, importantly, can these be recognized early in life?); cognitive psychology (are the mental representations of talented individuals distinctive when contrasted to those of hard workers); and the psychology of motivation (why are talented individuals often characterized as having 'a rage to learn, a passion to master?)

This interdisciplinary scientific breakthrough will allow us to understand what is special about Picasso, Gauss, J.S. Mill. Importantly, it will illuminate whether a talented person could have achieved equally in different domains (could Mozart have been a great physicist? Could Newton have been a great musician?) Note, however, that will not illuminate two other issues:

1.    What makes someone original, creative? Talent, expertise,
       are necessary but not sufficient.
2.    What determines whether talents are applied to constructive 
       or destructive ends?

These answers are likely to come from historical or cultural case studies, rather than from biological or psychological science. Part of the maturity of the sciences is an appreciation of which questions are best left to other disciplinary approaches.

Culture changes everything because culture contains everything, in the sense of things that can be named, and so what can be conceived. Wittgenstein implied that what cannot be said cannot be thought. He meant by this that language relies on a series of prior agreements. Such grammar has been shown by anthropologists to underpin the idea of any on-going community, not just its language, but its broader categories, its institutions, its metaphysics. And the same paradox is presented: how can anything new ever happen? If by 'happen' we only think of personal and historical events, we miss the most crucial novelty—the way that new things, new physical objects, devices and techniques, insinuate themselves into our lives. They have new names which we must learn, and new, revolutionary effects.

It does not always work like that. Resistance is common. Paradoxically, the creative force of culture also tries to keep everything the same. Ernest Gellner said that humans, taken as a whole, present the most extensive behavioural variation of any species while every particular cultural community is characterized by powerful norms. These are ways of being that, often through appeals to some apparently natural order, are not just mildly claimed as quintessentially human, but lethally enforced at a local level, in a variety of more or less public ways. Out groups (whether a different ethnicity, class, sexuality, creed, whether being one of twins, an albino, someone disabled or an unusually talented individual) are suspect and challenging in their abnormality. Categories of special difference are typical foci for sacrifice, banishment, and ridicule through which the in-group becomes not just the in-group but, indeed, a distinctly perceptible group, confident, refreshed and culturally reproductive. This makes some sense: aberrance subverts the grammar of culture.

The level at which change can be tolerated varies greatly across social formations, but there is always a point beyond which things become intolerably incoherent. We may rightly label the most unprecedented behaviour mad because, whatever relativization might be invoked to explain it, it is, by definition, strategically doomed: we seek to ignore it. Yet the routine expulsion of difference, apparently critical in the here and now, becomes maladaptive in any longer-term perspective. Clearly, it is change that has created our species' resilience and success, creating the vast inter- (not intra-) cultural diversity that Gellner noted. So how does change happen?

Major change often comes stealthily. Its revolutionary effect may often reside in the very fact that we do not recognize what it is doing to our behaviour, and so cannot resist it. Often we lack to words to articulate resistance as the invention is a new noun whose verbal effect lags in its wake. Such major change operates far more effectively through things than directly through people, not brought about by the mad, but rather by 'mad scientists', whose inventions can be forgiven their inventors.

Unsurprisingly then, the societies that tolerate the least behavioural deviance are the most science-averse. Science, in the broadest sense of effective material invention, challenges quotidian existence. The Amish (a quaint static ripple whose way of life will never uncover the simplest new technological fix for the unfolding hazards of a dynamic universe) have long recognized that material culture embodies weird inspirations, challenging us, as eventual consumers, not with 'copy what I do', but a far, far more subversive 'try me.'

Material culture is the thing that makes us human, driving human evolution from the outset with its continually modifying power. Our species' particular dilemma is that in order to safeguard what we have, we have continually to change. The culture of things—invention and technology—is ever changing under the tide of words and routines whose role is to image fixity and agreement when, in reality, none exists. This form of change is no trivial thing because it is essential to our longer term survival. At least, the longer term survival of anything we may be proud to call universally human