Know This Read online

  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.