New Scientists' "Brilliant Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years"
I suspect I'll have a lot more to say about this after I've read through and digested the whole thing, but I wanted to point out New Scientists' special feature "Instant Expert: Brilliant Minds Forecast the Next 50 Years."
What will be the biggest breakthrough of the next 50 years? As part of our 50th anniversary celebrations we asked over 70 of the world's most brilliant scientists for their ideas.
In coming decades will we: discover that we are not alone in the universe? Unravel the physiological basis for consciousness? Routinely have false memories implanted in our minds? Begin to evolve in new directions? And will physicists finally hit upon a universal theory of everything? In fact, if the revelations of the last 50 years are anything to go on - the internet and the human genome for example - we probably have not even thought up the exciting advances that lay ahead of us.
I don't want to be too hard on a feature like this, as I don't think it's intended to be read as a serious exercise in prognostication; it's a highbrow, PBS-like version of a futures petting zoo, not a report that's going to affect science policy. Still, having just returned from a conference where I spent two days arguing about the meaning of the words "forecast" and "technology," and the ways out assumptions about both may be leading us seriously astray, my reflex is to argue that no set of forecasts this short, produced by people working by themselves, can illuminate much of anything. But more on the pros and cons of such projects later.
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