Book review

Abstract

A Danish proverb, sometimes attributed to Neils Bohr, states “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.” Predicting the future is a challenging problem, particularly when dealing with an open system. That doesn’t seem to stop us from trying. Science fiction has a long history of making predictions. Some examples are laughably quaint; robot maids and butlers, a staple of 1950s era science fiction, seem less and less plausible as we make advances in robotics and artificial intelligence—real-world AIs seem much more likely to be task-specific, rather than generalists, at least in current lifetimes. Other imagined technologies turn out to have been quite prescient. H. G. Wells described an automatic sliding door in When the Sleeper Wakes, published in 1899; the first one was installed in 1960. In 1968, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey showed characters using tablet computers in everyday life. I remember computer watches and computer books from Inspector Gadget and other fiction in my childhood; the GPS watch and tablet computer I got in grad school felt like the realization of those tropes. Sometimes the science fiction even spurs the technical invention; Martin Cooper’s work on mobile telephones at Bell Labs was driven, in part, by the desire to bring about the communicators from the television franchise Star Trek. Even harder to predict than the specific technological advances is how those advances will impact society. Star Trek envisioned a future where automation and replicator technology would eliminate material need. However, an episode in its first season still revolved around a group of women going off into space to meet unknown men so they could become wives; the writers failed entirely to realize that there would be no reason for women to subject themselves to such treatment—as many women actually did in historical settings such as the American West in the late 1800s, seeking better economic opportunities—in a post-scarcity society. It’s easy to project unchallenged assumptions about society into a future where those assumptions would be completely unfounded. How, then, can one make any sort of reasonable predictions about the future? One path, taken by Zach and Kelly Weinersmith in their new book Soonish, is to focus on relatively near-term technology and its ramifications. Near-term, because it’s much more likely that we can predict technical changes 20 years from now than 200; technology, because it’s easier (though still difficult) to see what technologies might become possible, and what effects these specific technologies could have, than to predict other large-scale societal changes. In this book, the authors lay out ten emerging technologies that have the possibility of huge ramifications in a time frame ranging from a decade or so (if things progress rapidly) to a century (if the technology actually works, but it takes us, as a species, a while to figure it out). They present the current state of each particular technology, with citations to the literature and interviews with domain experts. They point out what seem to be the biggest technological barriers, and explore experts’ current thoughts on surpassing those barriers. Finally, the authors present an array of possibilities for this technology, both beneficial and harmful; after all, the subtitle of the book is “Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/ or Ruin Everything.”