Dedication
For Juliet and Miles
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Human Progress Quantified
Doing More with Less
The “Specialness” of Humanity
J. M. Bergoglio’s 2015 Review of Global Ecology
Leaking, Thinning, Sliding Ice
Glaciers
Our Collective Blind Spot
Three De-carbonizing Scientific Breakthroughs
Juice
A Call to Action
A Bridge Between the 21st and 22nd Century
The Greatest Environmental Disaster
Technobiophilic Cities
LENR Could Supplant Fossil Fuels
Emotions Influence Environmental Well-Being
Global Warming Redux: A Serious Challenge to Our Species
Blue Marble 2.0
High-Tech Stone Age
The Dematerialization of Consumption
Science Made This Possible
The Brain Is a Strange Planet
The Abdication of Spacetime
The News That Wasn’t There
No News Is Astounding News
One Hundred Years of Failure
Hope Beyond the Higgs Boson
An Unexpected, Haunting Signal
News About How the Physical World Operates
Unpublicized Implications of Hawking Black-Hole Evaporation
The Energy of Nothing
The Big Bang Cannot Be What We Thought It Was
Anomalies
Looking Where the Light Isn’t
Simplicity
The LHC Is Working at Full Energy
New Probes of Einstein’s Curved Spacetime—and Beyond?
Supermassive Black Holes
Gigantic Black Holes at the Center of Galaxies
The Universe Is Infinite
Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo
The News Is Not the News
We Know All the Particles and Forces We’re Made Of
Computational Complexity and the Nature of Reality
Einstein Was Wrong
Replacing Magic with Mechanism?
Quantum Entanglement Is Independent of Space and Time
Breakthroughs Become Part of the Culture
Space Exploration, New and Old
Pluto Is a Bump in the Road
Pluto Now, Then on to 550 AU
The Universe Surprised Us, Close to Home
Progress in Rocketry
The Space Age Takes Off . . . and Returns to Earth Again
How Widely Should We Draw The Circle?
A New Algorithm Showing What Computers Can and Cannot Do
Designer Humans
Cellular Alchemy
A Terrible Beauty Has Been Born
DNA Programming
Human Chimeras
The Race Between Genetic Meltdown and Germline Engineering
The Ongoing Battles with Pathogens
Antibiotics Are Dead; Long Live Antibiotics!
The 6 Billion Letters of Our Genome
Systems Medicine
Growing a Brain in a Dish
Self-Driving Genes Are Coming
Life Diverging
Fundamentally Newsworthy
Paleo-DNA and De-Extinction
The Wisdom Race Is Heating Up
Tabby’s Star
Extraterrestrials Don’t Land on Earth!
We Are Not Unique, but We Are Very Much Alone
Breakthrough Listen
Life in the Milky Way
There Is (Already) Life on Mars
The Breathtaking Future of a Connected World
Everything Is Computation
Identifying the Principles, Perhaps the Laws, of Intelligence
Neuro-News
Microbial Attractions
The Epidemic of Absence
Bugs R Us
Fecal Microbiota Transplants
Hi, Guys
The Anti-democratic Trend
The Age of Awareness
A Large-Scale Personality Research Method
The Conquest of Human Scale
Big Data and Better Government
This Is the Science-News Essay You Want to Read
Those Annoying Ads? The Harbinger of Good Things to Come
Biology Versus Choice
How to Be Bad Together
Psychology’s Crisis
The Truthiness of Scientific Research
Blinded by Data
The Epistemic Trainwreck of Soft-Side Psychology
Science Itself
A Compelling Explanation for Scientific Misconduct
Sub-Prime Science
The Infancy of Meta-Science
The Disillusion and the Disaffection of Poor White Americans
Inequality of Wealth and Income: A Runaway Process
The Age of Visible Thought
Our Changing Conceptions of What It Means to Be Human
Complete Head Transplants
The En-Gendering of Genius
Diversity in Science
The Democratization of Science
News About Science News
The Broadening Scope of Science
Q-Bio
Mathematics and Reality
Synthetic Learning
A Genuine Science of Learning
Bayesian Program Learning
FSM (Feces-Standard Money)
The Ironies of Higher Arithmetic
Broke People Ignoring $20 Bills on the Sidewalk
We Fear the Wrong Things
Living in Terror of Terrorism
The State of the World Isn’t As Bad As You Think
The Healthy Diet U-Turn
Fatty Foods Are Good for Your Health
Partisan Hostility
Cognitive Science Transforms Moral Philosophy
Morality Is Made of Meat
People Kill Because It’s the Right Thing to Do
Interdisciplinary Social Research
Intellectual Convergence
Weapons Technology Powered Human Evolution
The Immune System: A Grand Unifying Theory for Biomedical Research
Harnessing Our Natural Defenses Against Cancer
Cancer Drugs for Brain Diseases
The Most Powerful Carcinogen May Be Entropy
The Decline of Cancer
The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women
The Most Important X . . . Y . . . Z . . .
The Mother of All Addictions
The Trust Metric
Optogenetics
The State of Brain Science
Nootropic Neural News
Memory Is a Labile Fabrication
The Continually New You
Toddlers Can Master Computers
The Predictive Brain
A New Imaging Tool
Sensors: Accelerating the Pace of Scientific Discovery
3D Printing in the Medical Field
Deep Science
A World That Counts
Programming Reality
Pointing Is a Prerequisite for Language
Macro-Criminal Networks
Virtual Reality Goes Mainstream
The Twin Tides of Change
Imaging Deep Learning
The Neural Net Reloaded
Differentiable Programming
Deep Learning, Semantics, and Society
Seeing Our Cyborg Selves
The Rejection of Science Itself
Re-thinking Artificial Intelligence
I, for One
Data Sets over Algorithms
Biological Models of Mental Illness Reflect Essentialist Biases
Neuroprediction
> The Thin Line Between Mental Illness and Mental Health
Theodiversity
Modernity Is Winning
Religious Morality Is Mostly Below the Belt
A Science of the Consequences
Creation of a “No Ethnic Majority” Society
Interconnectedness
Early Life Adversity and Collective Outcomes
We’re Still Behind
Neural Hacking, Handprints, and the Empathy Deficit
Send in the Drones
That Dress
Anthropic Capitalism and the New Gimmick Economy
The Origin of Europeans
The Platinum Rule: Dense, Heavy, but Worth It
Adjusting to Feathered Dinosaurs
People Are Animals
The Longevity of News
Weather Prediction Has Quietly Gotten Better
The Word: First As Art, Then As Science
The Convergence of Images and Technology
The Mindful Meeting of Minds
Carpe Diem
Linking the Levels of Human Variation
Challenging the Value of a University Education
The Hermeneutic Hypercycle
Rethinking Authority with the Blockchain Crypto Enlightenment
Envoi: We May All Die Horribly
Acknowledgments
Also by John Brockman
Copyright
About the Publisher
Preface
The Edge Question
Scientific topics receiving prominent play in newspapers and magazines over the past several years include molecular biology, artificial intelligence, artificial life, chaos theory, massive parallelism, neural nets, the inflationary universe, fractals, complex adaptive systems, superstrings, biodiversity, nanotechnology, the human genome, expert systems, punctuated equilibrium, cellular automata, fuzzy logic, space biospheres, the Gaia hypothesis, virtual reality, cyberspace, and teraflop machines. . . . Unlike previous intellectual pursuits, the achievements of the third culture are not the marginal disputes of a quarrelsome mandarin class: they will affect the lives of everybody on the planet.
You might think that the above list of topics is a preamble for the Edge Question of 2016, but you would be wrong. It was a central point in my essay, “The Third Culture,” published twenty-five years ago in the Los Angeles Times, September 19, 1991. The essay, a manifesto, was a collaborative effort, with input from Stephen Jay Gould, Murray Gell-Mann, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Stuart Kauffman, and Nicholas Humphrey among other distinguished scientists and thinkers. It proclaimed that “the third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are,” and it continued:
What traditionally has been called “science” has today become “public culture.” Stewart Brand writes that “Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, . . . even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.” We now live in a world in which the rate of change is the biggest change.
Science has thus become a big story, if not the big story: News that will stay news.
This is evident by the continued relevance today of the scientific topics in the 1991 essay, all of which were in play before the Web, social media, mobile communications, deep learning, Big Data. Time for an update. . . .
WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER THE MOST INTERESTING RECENT [SCIENTIFIC] NEWS? WHAT MAKES IT IMPORTANT?
The online response this year is just shy of 200 contributions: Here is the news, sifted by those who often make it.
John Brockman
Publisher, Edge
Human Progress Quantified
Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; author, The Sense of Style
Human intuition is a notoriously poor guide to reality. A half-century of psychological research has shown that when people try to assess risks or predict the future, their heads are turned by stereotypes, memorable events, vivid scenarios, and moralistic narratives.
Fortunately, as the bugs in human cognition have become common knowledge, the workaround—objective data—has become more prevalent, and in many spheres of life observers are replacing gut feelings with quantitative analysis. Sports have been revolutionized by Moneyball, policy by Nudge, punditry by 538.com, forecasting by tournaments and prediction markets, philanthropy by effective altruism, the healing arts by evidence-based medicine.
This is interesting news, and it’s scientific news because the diagnosis comes from cognitive science and the cure from data science. But the most interesting news is that the quantification of life has been extended to the biggest question of all: Have we made progress? Have the collective strivings of the human race against entropy and the nastier edges of evolution succeeded in improving the human condition?
Enlightenment thinkers thought this was possible, of course, and in Victorian times progress became a major theme of Anglo-American thought. But since then, Romantic and counter–Enlightenment pessimism have taken over large swaths of intellectual life, stoked by historical disasters such as the World Wars and by post-1960s concerns with anthropogenic problems such as pollution and inequality. Today it’s common to read about “faith” in progress (often a “naïve” faith), which is set against a nostalgia for a better past, an assessment of present decline, and a dread of the dystopia to come.
But the cognitive and data revolutions warn us not to base our assessment of anything on subjective impressions or cherry-picked incidents. As long as bad things haven’t vanished altogether, there will always be enough to fill the news, and people will intuit that the world is falling apart. The only way to circumvent this illusion is to plot the incidence of good and bad things over time. Most people agree that life is better than death, health better than disease, prosperity better than poverty, knowledge better than ignorance, peace better than war, safety better than violence, freedom better than coercion. That gives us a set of yardsticks by which we can measure whether progress has actually occurred.
The interesting news is that the answer is mostly yes. I had the first inkling of this answer when quantitative historians and political scientists responded to my answer to the 2007 Edge question (“What Are You Optimistic About?”) with data sets showing that the rate of homicides and war deaths had plummeted over time. Since then, I have learned that progress has been tracked by the other yardsticks. Economic historians and development scholars (including Gregory Clark, Angus Deaton, Charles Kenny, and Steven Radelet) have plotted the growth of prosperity in their data-rich books, and the case has been made even more vividly in Web sites with innovative graphics, such as Hans Rosling’s Gapminder, Max Roser’s Our World in Data, and Marian Tupy’s HumanProgress.
Among the other upward swoops are these. People are living longer and healthier lives, not just in the developed world but globally. A dozen infectious and parasitic diseases are extinct or moribund. Vastly more children are going to school and learning to read. Extreme poverty has fallen worldwide from 85 to 10 percent. Despite local setbacks, the world is more democratic than ever. Women are better educated, marrying later, earning more, and in more positions of power and influence. Racial prejudice and hate crimes have decreased since data were first recorded. The world is even getting smarter: In every country, IQ has been increasing by three points a decade.
Of course, quantified progress consists of a set of empirical findings; it is not a sign of some mystical ascent or utopian trajectory or divine grace. And so we should expect to find some spheres of life that have remained the same, gotten worse, or are altogethe
r unquantifiable (such as the endless number of apocalypses that may be conjured in the imagination). Greenhouse gases accumulate, fresh water diminishes, species go extinct, nuclear arsenals remain.
Yet even here, quantification can change our understanding. “Eco-modernists” such as Stewart Brand, Jesse Ausubel, and Ruth DeFries have shown that many indicators of environmental health have improved over the last half-century, and that there are long-term historical processes—such as the de-carbonization of energy, the dematerialization of consumption, and the minimization of farmland—that can be further encouraged. Tabulators of nuclear weapons have pointed out that no such weapon has been used since Nagasaki, testing has fallen effectively to zero, proliferation has expanded the club only to nine countries (rather than thirty or more, as was predicted in the 1960s), seventeen countries have given up their programs, and the number of weapons (and hence the number of opportunities for thefts and accidents and the number of obstacles to the eventual goal of zero) has been reduced by five-sixths.
What makes all this important? Foremost, quantified progress is a feedback signal for adjusting what we’ve been doing. The gifts of progress we have enjoyed are the result of institutions and norms that have become entrenched in the last two centuries: reason, science, technology, education, expertise, democracy, regulated markets, and a moral commitment to human rights and human flourishing. As counter–Enlightenment critics have long pointed out, there’s no guarantee that these developments would make us better off. Yet now we know that in fact they have left us better off. This means that for all the ways in which the world today falls short of utopia, the norms and institutions of modernity have put us on a good track. We should work on improving them, rather than burning them down in the conviction that nothing could be worse than our current decadence and in the vague hope that something better might rise from their ashes.
Also, quantified human progress emboldens us to seek more of it. A common belief among activists is that any optimistic datum must be suppressed lest it lull people into complacency, and instead one must keep up the heat by wailing about ongoing crises and scolding people for being insufficiently terrified. Unfortunately, this can lead to a complementary danger: fatalism. After being told that the poor might always be with us, that the gods will punish our hubris, that nature will avenge our despoliation, and that the clock is inexorably ticking down to a midnight of nuclear holocaust and climatic catastrophe, it’s natural to conclude that resistance is futile and we should party while we can. The empowering feature of a graph is that it invites you to identify the forces pushing a curve up or down, and then to apply them to push it farther in the same direction.
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