Monday, November 20, 2006

Smart makes stupid

The New Scientist webzine has prediction for 50 years from now from 70 top scientists.

What immediately struck me about this story and list of predictions is that every scientist makes these narrow predictions from their own field of research as if that field exists in a vacua of its own. Furthermore there is a very obvious filter affect going on wherein which ever arena that particular scientist is working on will "revolutionize our understanding" or some other superlative description of the drastic necessity and importance of their work.

50 years is a long time, look back fifty years and the fields of science these people pursue would be almost unrecognizable by today's standards. With rates of change steadily accelerating it seems likely that the same will hold true into the future.

That is of course assuming some virulent social meme or belief system hasn't eradicated all free thought and reduced all of this material into so much forbidden unknowns or unknowables. [People in the West should know inherently whom I am referring to here.]

1 comment:

Rae Ann said...

You're absolutely right about that. Maybe in 50 years the prominent field of study will be farming since the world population will be so huge (unless climate change kills most of us ;-) ).