NOT long ago, in association with żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, I was involved with
a symposium called the Next Generation, which attempted to peer into the future
of the natural sciences, technology and medicine. We recruited 24 top young
Cambridge researchers across the main disciplines to tell us where they thought
their fields were headed over the next 25 years. Surprisingly, there was a
marked resistance to unrestrained crystal-gazing.

At a preliminary meeting of the speakers, a chemist (specialising in the
mysteries of chirality) spiritedly rejected the notion that we should engage in
anything that smacked of speculation as opposed to authentic prediction. She
insisted that when scientists abandon prediction, they enter the realms of
irresponsible science fiction—an opinion echoed by most of her young
symposium colleagues.

With the year 2000 approaching, the time is clearly apt for a bit of
futurology. There is much extravagant speculation about quantum leaps, which is
matched with loose talk about the final demise, the end itself, of science.
Hence a book subtitled “How Science Will Revolutionise the 21st Century”, is
doubly welcome. Is there a future? And what kind of future is it likely to
be?

Michio Kaku, a practicing astrophysicist, best known for his book
Hyperspace, has written a highly accessible and readable essay in answer to
these two questions. Unfortunately, according to the criteria laid down by our
Next Generation youngsters, it fails to merit the description of serious science
writing.

About science’s future, Kaku has absolutely no misgivings—he believes
science is endowed with infinity. “This is a book about the limitless future of
science and technology,” he says, “focusing on the next 100 years.” By the time
he gets to talk about developments ten millenniums ahead, however, the
distinction between prediction and speculation has long since
disappeared—and so has the gulf between reasonable assumptions and soaring
rhetoric.

Extrapolating from the fact that “more scientific knowledge has been created
in the past decade than in all of human history”, and that computer power is
doubling every 18 months, Kaku would have us believe that we are entering
another revolution of rapid, bewildering change in which “before us lies a new
ocean, the ocean of endless scientific possibilities and applications, giving us
the potential for the first time to manipulate and mould these forces of Nature
to our wishes”. Instead of being passive observers of nature, he says, we will
be “active choreographers”.

A central feature of this “age of mastery”, as opposed to antiquated
“discovery” is the future of AI and robotics. Mastery in this field, he goes on,
will give us a race of machines that will make life easier for us. Kaku is also
confident that they will have consciousness and even wills of their own.

Yet is this really where AI and robotics are headed? Who are Kaku’s
informants? In the first place, he takes at face value the claims of robotics’
futurologists, such as Hans Moravec, who believes we will download our minds
into software within fifty years. Then he visits the Massachusetts Institute for
Technology and extols the scheme to build an “evolutionary” machine called COG,
designed to develop its own consciousness with primitive qualia of pain and
pleasure. The future of AI and robotics, says Kaku, will be shaped by the
bottom-up replication of evolution and the final passing of programmed
systems.

It is here that Kaku’s enthusiasm sets him adrift, not only from sensible
prediction but from a fair report of the current state of the discipline. At the
heart of his thesis about AI, and science as a whole, is an assumption about the
existence of a gathering consensus. It is an assumption that is widely, and
mistakenly, accepted by the public. “There is a rough consensus emerging among
those engaged in the research about how the future will evolve,” he insists, as
if the mere proclamation will make it so. Yet anyone who has followed the
chequered story of cybernetics, AI and robotics since the 1950s knows that
consensus is precisely what is lacking.

Consider, for example, the multifarious arguments and failures over the
claims for viable unprogrammed parallel distributed processing systems. If there
is a gathering consensus, it is precisely in a tendency to downscale the soaring
ambitions for systems that supposedly mimic evolutionary neurobiology. Many in
the field are leaning towards the belief that robust algorithms of limited scope
are the only way forward.

The difficulties implicit in discussing the future of AI and robotics are
inextricably linked with the problems of theorising about our higher order
consciousness in the first place—a task that calls on the combined efforts
of psychology, neurobiology, cognitive science and philosophy of mind. Again,
recent attempts to agree a definition, not to mention explanation, of
consciousness and volition have been marked not by a growing consensus but by
dissension and strife.

Yet even if there were a grain of realism in Kaku’s proposals we are surely
left with the limitations of energy along with inevitable ecological
devastation. It is Kaku’s answer to the future energy crisis that puts him
finally far beyond remote galaxies of realistic prediction.

We are at present, he says, trapped in energy technology that exploits the
death of the dead planet—coal and oil. Given that our energy needs grow by
3 per cent each year, we must break out of this type-zero civilisation, as he
calls it, and force the nations of the world to cooperate in three future modes
of civilisation. The first will involve mastery of all forms of terrestrial
energy, including the oceans, the weather and the planet’s core. The second,
mastery of stellar energy, will entail building a giant sphere around the Sun to
gather solar energy. While the third will involve harnessing neighbouring star
systems and clusters to exploit the energy of the entire Galaxy.

As a set of fantasies about our possible futures, Visions makes for
entertaining reading. But a serious essay on the future of science it
emphatically is not. My principal objection is to its claim to speak nobly for
the public understanding of science. Kaku assures us that his aim is to capture
“the raw excitement and vitality of real science” and to instil “the romance and
excitement of science in the public, especially the young”. And this is but a
means to his true goal, which is to promote “democracy . . . in an increasingly
technological and bewildering world”.

This is, of course, rhetorical twaddle. Beyond the problems of how to make
science accessible and intelligible to the public, even how to keep up, is the
real difficulty: how are nonspecialists to grasp the pluralist nature of
scientific speculation? Moreover, how are they to judge between competing
theories and explanations when the expositors consistently pretend that science
speaks with a single, infallible and oracular voice?

The interests of democracy are poorly served by science writers who fail to
come clean about the contradictions and the lack of consensus in science,
especially at the popular level. This failure is likely to persist while writers
and editors fail to recognise that the real excitement consists in science as a
history of heroic persistence, disagreement and instructive disappointment.

WHEN the New Zealand-born physicist Ernest Rutherford arrived in Cambridge in
1895 he found himself under the direction of the eminent J. J. Thomson at the
Cavendish. In his profile of Rutherford, one of seven potted biographies of
great 20th-century physicists in Heisenberg Probably Slept Here,
Richard Brennan gives us a peculiar item of gossip from those days. Persuaded by
his colleagues that his only pair of trousers had become too baggy to wear,
Thomson bought a new pair on his way home to lunch and changed into them before
returning to work. When his wife came home she found the old pair and sent a
worried message to the laboratory in consternation, convinced that her
absent-minded genius had gone off in nothing but his underpants, or worse.

As in his Levitating Trains and Kamikaze Genes, Brennan’s aim and
aptitude is to get readers to swallow difficult science, sugared by anecdote
and arch humour. On one level he certainly succeeds. This is an amusing and
highly readable book for nonscientists in search of a quick guide to the
mountain peaks of modern physics—Einstein, Heisenberg, Planck, Rutherford,
Bohr and Gell-Mann. Brennan provides an accessible view of some tough areas of
science by knowing what to leave out, and the way he links the continuing quest
of physics through the century is admirable.

I wanted to cheer Brennan on, for anybody who can manage to make relativity
and quantum physics palatable deserves praise and encouragement. But there are
difficulties inherent in this. Alas, there will be readers in plenty who will
remember Thomson’s trousers long after they have forgotten his model of the
atom. And while Brennan’s intention is to make science more “human”, his eye for
significant anecdotes invariably raises more questions than it settles. Is it
really possible that a kick in the stomach on the way to school prompted Isaac
Newton to become a genius?

More importantly, though, his accounts of the stuff of physics are so
accessible as to give the impression that there is nothing really difficult
involved. Brennan claims that his prime concern is to combat the notion that
science holds no privileges over other sorts of narrative about the world. He
claims that science, unlike other forms of knowledge, is “devoted to the effort
to see things as they are”, and he would have us believe that the “literary
intellectuals” who teach that there are other ways of knowing “do their budding
lawyers, journalists, sociologists, businesspeople, and whatever a severe
»ĺľ±˛ő˛ő±đ°ů±ąľ±ł¦±đ”.

There is a word for this sort of silly claim, and it is scientism. The irony
is that in making it, Brennan draws fire away from his intended target, which is
relativism: the increasingly fashionable idea that there is no special merit in
scientific explanations over other kinds of explanations. It is precisely the
potted version of science—pre-digested qualitative conclusions that
skate over immensely counterintuitive difficulties—that contributes to the
current plague of relativism. The same is surely true of any other complex
endeavour: after all, if you’ve only ever been exposed to the comic strip
version of Macbeth, why should you think it superior to Batman
?

So while recommending this book, I would also issue a warning: there is
little or no attempt to convey the intellectually demanding and circuitous paths
that lead to the scientific conclusions of its heroes. Nor does it give an
adequate sense of the pluralism, the angry contentions, that reign in the
history and philosophy of science.

Science is not a growing symphony of progress conducted by weird geniuses in
baggy trousers. It does its work by fits and starts, amid the socioeconomic mess
of the human condition, and should embrace as broad a sweep of society as
possible.

It used to be thought that the divide between the “two
cultures”—science versus the rest—could be reconciled by books like
Brennan’s. But the public needs something more: the need is not just for fish,
landed and filleted, but the encouragement and the means to fish for
ourselves.