The Future (2 page)

As a young freshman member of the U.S. House of Representatives elected in 1976, I joined a new bipartisan group of congressmen and senators known as the Congressional Clearinghouse on the Future, founded by the late Charlie Rose of North Carolina.
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In my second term, Rose asked me to succeed him as chair of the group. We organized workshops on the implications of new technologies and scientific discoveries and met with leaders in business and science. Among our other initiatives, we persuaded all 200 subcommittees in the Congress to publish a list of the
most important issues they expected to emerge over the following twenty years and published it as “The Future Agenda.” Most of all, we studied emerging trends and met regularly with the leading thinkers about the future: Daniel Bell, Margaret Mead, Buckminster Fuller, Carl Sagan, Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, Arno Penzias, and hundreds of others.

The visiting scholar who made perhaps the biggest impression on me was a short and balding scientist
born in Russia a few months before the 1917 Revolution but
educated in Belgium: Ilya Prigogine, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery of a major corollary to the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

Entropy, according to the Second Law, causes all isolated physical systems to break down over time and is
responsible for irreversibility in nature. For a simple example of entropy, consider a smoke ring: it begins as a coherent
donut with clearly defined boundaries. But as the molecules separate from one another and dissipate energy into the air, the ring falls apart and disappears. All so-called closed systems are subject to the same basic process of dissolution; in some, entropy operates quickly, while in others the process takes more time.

Prigogine’s discovery was that an open system—that is, a system that imports flows of energy from outside the system into it, through it, and out again—not only breaks down, but as the flow of energy continues, the system then
reorganizes itself
at a higher level of complexity. In a sense, the phenomenon described by Prigogine is the opposite of entropy. Self-organization, as a law of nature and as a process of change, is truly astonishing. What it means is that complex new forms can
emerge
spontaneously through
self-organization
.

Consider the increased flows of information throughout the world following the introduction of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Elements of the old information pattern began to break down. Many newspapers went bankrupt, readership sharply declined in most others, bookstores consolidated and closed. Many business models became obsolete. But the new emergent pattern led to the self-organization of thousands of new business models, and volumes of online communication dwarfing those that characterized the world of the printing press.

The Earth itself, when viewed as a whole, is also an open system. It imports energy from the sun that flows into and through the elaborate patterns of energy transfer that make up the Earth system, including the oceans, the atmosphere, the various geochemical processes—and life itself. The energy then flows from the Earth back into the universe surrounding it as heat energy in the form of infrared radiation.

The essence of the emergent crisis of global warming is that we are importing enormous amounts of energy from the crust of the Earth and exporting entropy (that is, progressive disorder) into the previously stable, though dynamic, ecological systems upon which the continued flourishing of civilization depends. These new flows of energy, originally imported to the Earth from the sun ages ago, have been
stabilized underground for millions of years as inert deposits of carbon.

By mobilizing them and injecting the waste products from their combustion into the atmosphere, we are breaking down the stable climate pattern that has persisted since not long after the end of the last Ice Age ten millennia ago. This was not long before the first cities and the beginning of the Agricultural Revolution, which began to spread in the valleys of the Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Yellow rivers 8,000 years ago after Stone Age women and men patiently picked and selectively bred the plant varieties on which our modern diet still depends. In the process, we are forcing the emergence of a new climate pattern very
different from the one to which our entire civilization is tightly configured and within which we have thrived.

While Prigogine’s discovery of this new law of nature may seem arcane, its implications for the way we should think about the future are profound. The modern meaning of the word “emergence,” and the entire field of knowledge known as complexity theory, are both derived from Prigogine’s work. The motivation for his exploration of emergence was his passion for understanding how the future becomes irreversibly different from the past. He wrote that, “given my interest in the concept of time, it was only natural that my attention was focused on … the study of irreversible phenomena,
which made so manifest the ‘arrow of time.’ ”

The way we think about the future has a past. Throughout the history of human civilization, every culture has had its own idea of the future. In the words of an Australian futurist, Ivana Milojević, “Although the conception of time and the future exist universally,
they are understood in different ways in different societies.” Some have assumed that time is circular and that past, present, and future are all part of the same recurring cycle. Others have believed that the only future that matters is in the afterlife.

The crushing disappointments that are so often part of the human condition have sometimes led to crises of confidence in the future, replacing hope with despair. But most have learned from their life experiences and the stories told by their elders that what we do in the present, when informed by knowledge of the past, can shape the future in objectively better ways.

Anthropologists tell us of evidence dating back almost 50,000 years of humans
trying to divine the future with the help of oracles or mediums. Some attempted to see into the future by reading clues to the unfolding patterns of life in the entrails of
animals sacrificed to the gods,
by studying the movements of fish, by interpreting
marks on the Earth, or in any of a hundred other ways. Some still read the patterns of palms or Tarot cards for the same purpose. The implicit assumption in such searches is that all reality is of one fabric encompassing past, present, and future, according to a design whose meaning can be divined from
particular portions of the whole and applied to other parts of the fabric in order to interpret the unfolding future.

Doctors and scientists now divine clues about the future of individuals from the pattern of DNA that is found in every cell. Mathematicians discern the nature of fractal equations—and the geometric forms derived from them—by observing the “self-sameness” of the patterns they manifest at every level of resolution. Holographic images are contained in their entirety in
each molecule of the gaseous cylinders onto which the emergent larger image is projected.

According to historians,
astrologers of ancient Babylon used a double clock—one for measuring the timescale of human affairs, and another for tracking the celestial movements they believed had an influence on earthly events. In divining our own future, we too must now pay due attention to a double clock. There is the one that measures our hours and days, and the other that measures the centuries and millennia over which our disruptions of the Earth’s natural systems will continue to occur.

Even as teams of scientists race against the clock to compete with other teams in making new genetic discoveries that may cure diseases and lay the foundation for multibillion-dollar products, we must consult another clock that measures the timescales over which evolution operates—because the emergent capabilities bursting forth from the revolutionary advances in the life sciences are about to make us the principal agent of evolution.

Because of the new power that seven billion of us collectively wield with our new technologies, voracious consumption, and outsized economic dynamism, some of the ecological changes that we are setting in motion are going to unfold, the scientists tell us, in geologic time, measured by a planetary clock that tracks timespans that strain the limits of human imagination. Roughly a quarter of the 90 million tons of global warming pollution we put into the atmosphere each day
will still linger there—still trapping heat—more than 10,000 years from now.

Consequently, in reconciling the difference between what “is” and what “
ought
to be,” we are faced with an existential conundrum. Though we have great difficulty conceiving of geologic time, we have nevertheless become a geologic force; though we cannot imagine evolutionary timescales, we are nevertheless becoming the chief force behind evolution.

The idea that human history is characterized by progress from one
era to the next is not, as some have long thought, an invention of the Enlightenment. The explosion of philosophy in ancient Greece marked the beginning of recorded contemplations about the future of humankind. In the fourth century
BCE
, Plato wrote about progress as “a continuous process, which improves the human condition from its original state of nature to higher and higher levels of culture, economic organization and political structure towards an ideal state. Progress flows from the growing complexity of society and the
need to enlarge knowledge, through the development of sciences and arts.”

In the fourth century
CE
, St. Augustine, who frequently quoted Plato, wrote, “The education of the human race, represented by the people of God, has advanced, like that of an individual, through certain epochs, or, as it were, ages, so that it might gradually rise from
earthly to heavenly things, and from the visible to the invisible.”

Nor is progress exclusively a Western invention. Many interpret the Tao of ancient
China as a guide for those who wish to progress as they make their way forward in the world—though its conception of progress is very different from what emerged in the West. The eleventh-century Islamic philosopher Muhammad al-Ghazali wrote that Islam teaches that “Sincere accomplished work towards progress and development is, therefore, an act of religious worship and is rewarded as such. The end result will be a serious, scrupulous and perfect work,
true scientific progress and hence actual achievement of balanced and comprehensive development.”

At the beginning of the Renaissance, the rediscovery of the Aristotelian branch of ancient Greek philosophy—which had been preserved in Alexandria in Arabic and reintroduced to Europe in Al-Andalus—
contributed to a fascination with the physical as well as the philosophical legacies of both Athens and Rome. The legacies of that recovered past nourished dreams that would find fruition in the Enlightenment, when a strong consensus emerged that secular progress is the dominant pattern in human history.

The discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and the others who launched the Scientific Revolution helped to ignite a belief that, whatever God’s role or plan, the growth of knowledge made progress in human societies inevitable. Francis Bacon, who more than any other emphasized the word “progress” in describing humanity’s journey into the future, was also among the first to write about human progress with
a special emphasis on subduing, dominating, and controlling nature—as if we were as separate from nature as Descartes believed the mind was separate from the body.

Centuries later, this philosophical mistake is still in need of correction. By tacitly assuming our own separateness from the ecological system of the planet, we are frequently surprised by phenomena that emerge from our inextricable connections to it. And as the power of our civilization grows exponentially, these surprises are becoming increasingly unpleasant.

The cultural legacy that still influences the scientific method is reductionist—that is, by dividing and endlessly subdividing the objects of our research and analysis, we separate interconnected phenomena and processes to develop specialized expertise. But the focusing of attention on ever narrower slices
of
the whole often comes at the expense of attention
to
the whole, which can cause us to miss the significance of emergent phenomena that spring unpredictably from the interconnections and interactions among multiple processes and networks. That is one reason why linear projections of the future are so often wrong.

The invention of powerful new tools and the development of potent new insights—and the discovery of rich new continents—led to exciting new ways of seeing the world and expansive optimism about the future.
In the seventeenth century, the father of microbiology, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, fashioned new lenses for the microscope (which itself had
been invented in Holland less than a century earlier), and by looking
through them discovered cells and bacteria. Simultaneously, his close friend in Delft, Johannes Vermeer, revolutionized portraiture with the use (most art historians agree) of the
camera obscura, made possible by the new understanding of optics.

As the Scientific Revolution accelerated and the Industrial Revolution began, the idea of progress shaped prevailing conceptions of the future. In the years before his death, Thomas Jefferson wrote about the progress he had witnessed in his life and noted, “And where this progress will stop no one can say. Barbarism has, in the meantime, been receding before
the steady step of amelioration, and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth.”

Four years after Jefferson’s death, the publication by Charles Lyell of his masterwork,
Principles of Geology
, in 1830, profoundly disrupted the long prevailing view of humanity’s relationship to time. In the Judeo-Christian world especially, most had assumed that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, and that humans were created not long after the planet itself,
but Lyell amply proved that the Earth was not thousands, but at the very least millions of years old (
4.5 billion, we now know). In reshaping the past, he also reshaped the idea of the future. And he provided the temporal context for the discovery by Charles Darwin of the principles of evolution. Indeed, as a young man
Darwin took Lyell’s books with him during his voyage on the
Beagle
.