Future Forecasting

My nine-year-old self found James Burke’s 1978 TV science programme Connections absolutely compelling, at least the bits of it I saw. I didn’t have much of an idea what he was talking about, of course, and my knowledge had only incrementally increased by the time his subsequent shows were broadcast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that some of the most interesting thinkers about scientific matters are not, strictu sensu, scientists, but those who can see science in a broader perspective: Burke’s first degree was in English, specialising in Middle English language and literature, not the most obvious way into a career examining and explaining science to the public. That’s what made the series fun.

The core conviction of Connections is that scientific and technological change does not take place in intellectual isolation, but that individuals take decisions based on their own motivations with no idea of what the results will be, and that consequently predictions of how change will pan out are nothing more than conjecture. Some people make accurate guesses, but that’s just luck.

That belief hasn’t stopped Burke having a good go at predicting where technological change will take the world, as I was reminded when he popped up on the radio again a couple of days ago with what I discover is his customary spiel about nanotechnology (which I’ll return to in a minute). As well as his exhilarating analysis of the history of science and thought, Mr Burke’s reputation as a prophet of the modern world rests on some of the statements he made decades ago about the effect of the onset of the digital society on how we behave. This year someone dug out a clip from the 1985 series The Day the Universe Changed and popped it onto Twitter to demonstrate how Burke foretold the chaos wrought in our political life by the Internet.

Note that what he doesn’t describe is how established political forces will manipulate that chaos for their own ends. Now let’s cast even further back to 1973, when Burke was presenting the series The Burke Special, a pell-mell rollercoaster ride of futurology almost all of which was wiped from the BBC archives. That year, the Radio Times decided to get him to make his predictions about what might be going on twenty years hence.

Burke’s world of the future is a world of databanks, citizens’ dossiers, identity cards, and restrictions on the individual. He believes the storage of personal information in databanks will be accepted, not resented, at least by the young … In 1993, ideas about personal liberty will probably be as different from ours as ours are from those of a century ago.  Citizens will be generally far less reluctant to provide information about themselves, because they will realise that it will help society to organise itself better: they will accept that they must live for one another, because if they don’t, they’ll be headed for anarchy. It will be an open, honest society, in which the distant hum and chatter of the machines will be as commonplace as birdsong. Computer-aided learning systems will provide every child with his own plug-in superteacher … each [computer in a factory or office] providing rapid forecasts on the effects of management decision-making.

You would expect some predictions to be right and some wrong, and you can set aside the timescale, but what strikes me most here is that where Burke was right, it was for the wrong reasons. Citizens share so much information now not out of altruistic consideration for one another, but because it enables them to buy things faster and because they’ve been softened up for it by social media, seeking an addictive rush of validation by Likes and Loves.

This brings us back to nanotechnology. I’ve spent ages trying to find James Burke’s recent contribution to what was probably an episode of Today in which he predicted over the course of a couple of breathless minutes what was going to be happening in 2030, but I can’t chase it down so you’ll have to take my word for it. He envisaged the development within ten years of ‘computers the size of dust’ that would manipulate matter at a sub-atomic level to turn any substance into anything else, mud into plastics and plastics into gold, straws that would convert polluted water into clean as you sucked them, and microscopic machines to draw down carbon dioxide from the air, ‘so that’s climate change solved, by technology instead of by destroying the world’s economy as we seem about to’.

Hmm, I thought. It turns out that Burke has been talking about nanotechnology for ages. In a 2013 discussion on Radio 4’s PM revisiting his 1973 Radio Times prophecies, he harped on the theme using almost precisely the same terminology as he did this year (nanoscale is ‘weeny-weeny’; making things out of ‘air, water and dirt’). It’s the same thesis he laid out in 2018 in his think-piece The End of Scarcity, a world in which all our existing political systems are rendered obsolete by ‘personal nanofactories’ making everything any individual could ever want from food to music.

As Burke points out, this is a future first glimpsed as long ago as 1959 by Richard Feynman in an impromptu lecture to the American Physical Society, ‘There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom’, and it’s true that a team from Manchester University led by Professor David Leigh has indeed developed a ‘programmable molecular machine’ which can manipulate atoms. But note this: a ‘molecular machine’ is only a machine conceptually, and Professor Leigh’s machines are ‘programmable’ in that by the addition of a positive or negative electron they can operate in a right-handed or left-handed direction. Such machines are not ‘clever little nanobots’ as the good Doctor encounters on TV, which we might imagine as microscopic robots made of metal and silicone and capable of independent decision-making: they are artificial chemicals designed to do one specific task at a time. So far nanotechnology hasn’t got us any further than putting molecule-thick layers of graphite on a metal sheet, and we can’t yet envisage saying to a future iteration of Alexa, ‘Make me a strawberry milkshake’ and moments later the concoction will arrive. I’m not sure we can wait for this to solve our more pressing problems.

Mr Burke mentioned the plug-in superteacher this year again, just for good measure. Technologically I can’t see why that can’t happen now, with the knowledge we already have available: the fact that it hasn’t presumably means we don’t really want it to, and there are different constraints operating than merely what we can and can't do.