What Should We Be Worried About?: Real Scenarios That Keep Scientists Up at Night

436 Pages·2014·1.77 MB·English

by  John Brockman

DEDICATION
To Daniel Kahneman who knows from worry
CONTENTS
Dedication

Acknowledgments
Preface: The Edge Question
The Real Risk Factors for War
MADness
We Are in Denial About Catastrophic Risks
Living Without the Internet for a Couple of Weeks
Safe Mode for the Internet
The Fragility of Complex Systems
A Synthetic World
What is Conscious?
Will There Be a Singularity Within Our Lifetime?
“The Singularity”: There’s No There There
Capture
The Triumph of the Virtual
The Patience Deficit
The Teenage Brain
Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Words?
The Contest Between Engineers and Druids
“Smart”
The Stifling of Technological Progress
The Rise of Anti-Intellectualism and the End of Progress
Armageddon
Superstition
Rats in a Spherical Trap
The Danger from Aliens
Augmented Reality
Too Much Coupling
Homogenization of the Human Experience
Are We Homogenizing the Global View of a Normal Mind?
Social Media: The More Together, The More Alone
Internet Drivel
Objects of Desire
Incompetent Systems
Democracy Is Like the Appendix
The Is-Ought Fallacy of Science and Morality
What Is a Good Life?
A World Without Growth?
Human Population, Prosperity Growth: One I Fear, One I Don’t
The Underpopulation Bomb
The Loss of Lust
Not Enough Robots
That We Won’t Make Use of the Error Catastrophe Threshold
A Fearful Asymmetry: The Worrying World of a Would-Be Science
Misplaced Worries
There Is Nothing to Worry About, and There Never Was
Worries on the Mystery of Worry
The Disconnect
Science by (Social) Media
Unfriendly Physics, Monsters from the Id, and Self-Organizing Collective
Delusions
Myths About Men
The Mating Wars
We Don’t Do Politics
The Black Hole of Finance
The Opinions of Search Engines
Technology-Generated Fascism
Magic
Data Disenfranchisement
Big Experiments Won’t Happen
The Nightmare Scenario for Fundamental Physics
No Surprises from the LHC: No Worries for Theoretical Physics
Crisis at the Foundations of Physics
The End of Fundamental Science?
Quantum Mechanics
One Universe
The Dangerous Fascination of Imagination
What—Me Worry?
Our Increased Medical Know-How
The Promise of Catharsis
I’ve Given up Worrying
Our Blind Spots
The Anthropocebo Effect
The Relative Obscurity of the Writings of Édouard Glissant
The Danger of Inadvertently Praising Zygomatic Arches
The Belief or Lack of Belief in Free Will Is Not a Scientific Matter
Natural Death
The Loss of Death
Global Graying
All the T in China
Technology May Endanger Democracy
The Fourth Culture
Classic Social Sciences’ Failure to Understand “Modern” States Shaped by
Crime
Is the New Public Sphere . . . Public?
Blown Opportunities
The Power of Bad Incentives
Science Publishing
Excellence
Unmitigated Arrogance
The Decline of the Scientific Hero
Authoritarian Submission
Are We Becoming Too Connected?
Stress
Putting Our Anxieties to Work
Science Has Not Brought Us Closer to Understanding Cancer
Society’s Parlous Inability to Reason About Uncertainty
The Rise in Genomic Instability
Current Sequencing Strategies Ignore the Role of Microorganisms in Cancer
The Failure of Genomics for Mental Disorders
Exaggerated Expectations
Losing Our Hands
Losing Touch
The Human/Nature Divide
Power and the Internet
Close to the Edge
The Paradox of Material Progress
Close Observation and Description
Impact
The Complex, Consequential, Not-So-Easy Decisions About Our Water
Resources
Children of Newton and Modernity
Where Did You Get That Fact?
Is Idiocracy Looming?
The Disconnect Between News and Understanding
Super-AIs Won’t Rule the World (Unless They Get Culture First)
Posthuman Geography
Being Told That Our Destiny Is Among the Stars
Communities of Fate
Working with Others
Global Cooperation Is Failing and We Don’t Know Why
The Behavior of Normal People
Metaworry
Morbid Anxiety
The Loss of Our Collective Cognition and Awareness
Worrying About Children
The Death of Mathematics
Should We Worry About Being Unable to Understand Everything?
The Demise of the Scholar
Science Is in Danger of Becoming the Enemy of Humankind
Illusions of Understanding and the Loss of Intellectual Humility
The End of Hardship Inoculation
Internet Silos
The New Age of Anxiety
Does the Human Species Have the Will to Survive?
Neural Data Privacy Rights
Can They Read My Brain?
Losing Completeness
C. P. Snow’s Two Cultures and the Nature-Nurture Debate
The Unavoidable Intrusion of Sociopolitical Forces into Science
The Growing Gap Between the Scientific Elite and the Vast “Scientifically
Challenged” Majority
Present-ism
Do We Understand the Dynamics of Our Emerging Global Culture?
We Worry Too Much About Fictional Violence
A World of Cascading Crises
Who Gets to Play in the Science Ballpark
An Exploding Number of New Illegal Drugs
History and Contingency
Unknown Unknowns
Digital Tats
Fast Knowledge
Systematic Thinking About How We Package Our Worries
Worrying About Stupid
The Cultural and Cognitive Consequences of Electronics
What We Learn From Firefighters: How Fat Are the Fat Tails?
Lamplight Probabilities
The World As We Know It
Worrying—the Modern Passion
The Gift of Worry
Notes
Index

Also by John Brockman
Copyright
About the Publisher
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank Peter Hubbard of HarperCollins for his encouragement. I am also
indebted to my agent, Max Brockman, who saw the potential for this book, and,
as always, to Sara Lippincott for her thoughtful and meticulous editing.

JOHN BROCKMAN
Publisher & Editor, Edge
PREFACE: THE EDGE QUESTION
JOHN BROCKMAN

In 1981, I founded the Reality Club, an attempt to gather together those people
exploring the themes of the post–Industrial Age. In 1997, the Reality Club went
online, rebranded as Edge. The ideas presented on Edge are speculative; they
represent the frontiers in such areas as evolutionary biology, genetics, computer
science, neurophysiology, psychology, cosmology, and physics. Emerging out of
these contributions is a new natural philosophy, new ways of understanding
physical systems, new ways of thinking that call into question many of our basic
assumptions.
For each of the anniversary editions of Edge, I and a number of Edge stalwarts,
including Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and George Dyson, get together to plan
the annual Edge Question—usually one that comes to one or another of us or our
correspondents in the middle of the night. It’s not easy coming up with a
question. (As the late James Lee Byars, my friend and sometime collaborator,
used to say: “I can answer the question, but am I bright enough to ask it?”) We
look for questions that inspire unpredictable answers—that provoke people into
thinking thoughts they normally might not have.

The 2013 Edge Question: