
Even before the pandemic we were increasingly pessimistic about the future, Stephen Davies argues it is time to cheer up. The technology of tomorrow is going to make us healthier, wealthier and happier than we are today.
Almost fifty-nine years ago, on 12th September 1962, John F Kennedy delivered one of his most memorable and inspiring speeches. Known as the ‘Moon Speech’ because it was mainly about a new project to land a man on the moon, it reflects an attitude and outlook that is strikingly different to what we see now.
In one arresting passage Kennedy gave an account of what human history looked like if it was compressed into fifty years. His point was to emphasise the dramatic acceleration of innovation and discovery in technology and science that had happened in the recent past and to urge his audience to take part in this process. The speech breathes optimism, about technology, discovery, and the future. How different things are now.
Many people see the future prospects of the world and humanity in dark terms. We are haunted by the premonition of disaster; a feeling intensified no doubt by the worst pandemic since 1918-19. The optimism about technology and its benefits has been replaced by a feeling that technical innovation and scientific discovery are dark forces that threaten the future of humanity. Even those who enjoy modern innovations tend to see them in terms of comfort and convenience and not as the kind of transformative events that Kennedy spoke of.

President John F. Kennedy laughs during a press conference August 9, 1963. (Photo by National Archive/Newsmakers)
All of this is wrong. People everywhere need to recover their sense of confidence and optimism and to realise not only that this is, undoubtedly, the best time ever to be alive, but also that the future will be even better.
The world is in the throes of a massive technological revolution, as dramatic as the one in the late nineteenth century that saw the advent of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and a fundamental breakthrough in medicine. There are innovations, not only on the horizon but rushing upon us, which in the next two decades will fundamentally change human life, and vastly for the better. What though are they?
Autonomous vehicles (driverless cars and other vehicles) are a technology that has already impinged on the public consciousness. However, it is still seen as a fringe technology, something that will not replace driver-controlled vehicles for a long time. Quite simply, this is like those who thought in 1914 that the motor car would remain a curiosity and would not replace the horse for decades. In fact, the replacement was nearly complete within 15 years.
The technology of autonomous vehicles is progressing rapidly and they are being adopted in more and more places. The American company TuSimple is planning to roll out completely autonomous lorries this year. Once adopted the convenience and safety autonomous vehicles provide will drive manual vehicles from the roads, not least because there will soon be a sharp escalation in insurance costs for human drivers, given that driver error is responsible for over 90% of road fatalities and injuries.

The cars of the future won’t need drivers.
Not only will traffic flow much more smoothly and the number of road injuries and fatalities collapse, the number of vehicles on the road will fall to about 10% of what it is now. This is because driverless vehicles can be in use intensively for almost 90% of the time, currently the average car spends about 5% of the time being driven.
This will, at a stroke, increase the capacity of the road system without a single new road being built. It will also mean an end to the need for most parking and so release an enormous amount of land for other uses, most of it in densely populated built up areas. The transformative effects of this on the urban environment can only be imagined, particularly when most autonomous vehicles will be electrical.

Traffic jams will soon become a thing of the past.
Another equally beneficial technology on the verge of widespread adoption is synthetic food. The best-known case is synthetic meat. This is not a vegetable-based substitute but actual meat originating in a cell taken from an animal, that has been cultured and grown in a plant. Apart from the original cell’s donor no actual animal is involved.
This technology was first tested over a decade ago but at that point was very expensive. In 2013, the world’s media packed themselves into London television studio to watch a man eat a 140-gram burger patty grown entirely in a lab. The price tag? $330,000.
But just a few years later and cultured meat is now competitive. Singapore recently became the first state to allow it to be sold to consumers. It will soon replace most meat products derived from animals in our supermarkets, and the effects will be staggering.

The $330,000 burger was made from 20,000 muscle fibres grown from cells.
Quite apart from the disappearance of factory farming, and the cruelty to animals and health risks for them and humans that it creates, this will have revolutionary environmental effects. Over half of the grain produced today is fed to livestock. If even half of that is no longer needed – I predict it will be much higher – this will free up enormous amounts of land, much of which can be returned to wilderness.
Nor is meat the only innovation here. A Finnish company, Solar Foods, has produced a flour from bacterial culture and similar work is happening elsewhere. This would mean most of the rest of the land currently being used for grain production being returned to its natural state or used for other purposes.
There is also the prospect of synthetic milk and dairy products. Vegetables will increasingly be produced in large vertical greenhouses using hydroponic cultivation, in what is known as vertical farming, with two new facilities recently opened in Yorkshire. This is more productive than conventional farming as there can be multiple crops per year rather than just one or two
ArrayArtificial intelligence (AI) is a new technology whose imminence and transformative effects have been recognised already. This will change almost every aspect of life due to its being a systems technology, one that affects all other ones. The best way to describe this is to say that AI will hugely increase efficiency and reduce waste while at the same time dramatically raising productivity. Leading to far greater wealth and a double whammy of more efficient use of resources and therefore less pressure on the environment.
A common fear is it will mean the disappearance of work, but this is misguided. What technologies like this do is to create more opportunities for work and more forms of employment – just different ones to what we have now. As things are done by automated processes this frees up the ultimately scarce resource – human time – for us to do the things we really want to do.
Moreover, one of the things that AI will not be able to automate, because of technical difficulty and cost, is manual work. What it will do is make traditional skilled manual labour more productive and therefore better paid. White collar administrative jobs will disappear but manual trades will enter a new golden age.

Highly intelligent machines from the 2004 movie I, Robot.
One prospect to discount is that of a technological ‘Singularity’ in which AIs become super intelligent and, in the worst case scenario, kill all human life. This confuses intelligence with consciousness when they are different in kind. It does mean though that programming and instructing AI will be challenging, morally and prudentially.
Since AI, although very intelligent, will lack true self awareness, they will act in accordance with the instructions given them by human programmers. It will become a matter of vital importance that those instructions do not allow them to engage in harmful or violent acts and that the programming is carefully structured so that following them in a literal minded way will not have disastrous results. This means that the programmers of advanced AI will have to be skilled philosophers as well as designers – it may also lead to actual developments in philosophy and human reasoning as we work out what the actual implications of philosophies and ethical principles are.
The most dramatic of the breakthroughs stealing upon us is that of radical change to a fundamental feature of human life: ageing. In the last five decades our understanding of ageing has been revolutionised. Rather than having a single cause or being genetically programmed as we once thought, ageing is actually the damaging consequences of various processes accumulating with time. There is not one process but several and these have been identified and studied.

We will be able to be as age-defying as Cher, without the surgery.
What that means is that in several cases we now know enough about the nature of these processes to know in theory how they can be at least delayed or arrested or even reversed. This raises the prospect of being able to dramatically extend human lifespans to two hundred years or more or even to eliminate ageing entirely.
People would not live forever, they would simply not die from age-related causes – the great majority of cancers, for example – but they would still die from other causes such as suicide, homicide, accident, and non-age-related illness. Standard actuarial calculations predict that in that scenario the average life expectancy would be around 700 years. This is an area where research is at an earlier stage than the ones already mentioned but it is happening at a rapid and accelerating rate.
Interestingly, it is incorrect when people say that we are living longer, as the maximum lifespan is currently no longer than it ever was. What has changed is the proportion of the population reaching advanced age.
These four breakthroughs are all ones that will happen very soon. All of them will change the way we live dramatically. They will bring enormous benefit and help us to resolve all kinds of problems and challenges. So cheer up and embrace the optimism and excitement that JFK expressed so well, all those years ago in Texas.
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