Science fiction used to be the wild child of the speculative arts, flaring up, up and away from the world of the possible to imagine worlds and technologies yet unborn. Twenty-first century science seems to have tamed it. Science fiction is now an asymptote of reality, surging ever-closer to the steep curve of real-world progress without quite touching it. For the first time in history, all of future technology seems to be predictable, extrapolating from present-day science. Not speculatively, but by calculating reason. Ever since Einstein stood Cartesian reality on its head, the physics laboratory has lagged decades behind the blackboard. But the discovery of the Higgs boson has validated the standard model of physics. Decades of theoretical research stand vindicated, and, for the first time in over half a century, we have a reasonably clear idea of where knowledge is headed. This is one of several interesting postulates of the authors of this long-sighted collection of essays — Megatech: Technology in 2050 (The Economist Books/ Profile Books; 242 pages, Rs 499) edited by the executive editor of The Economist and written by specialists in numerous disciplines, from philanthropy (Melinda Gates) to gastroenterology (Gianfranco Farrugia). Not surprisingly, the majority of contributors are editors of or contributors to The Economist. If the future of science is almost certainly known, what remains for science fiction to speculate about? Future politics, the art of the impossible. In this volume, American author Nancy Kress sets a story on a ghat on the Ganga, where a series of fruitless projects to clean up the river has degenerated into the predictable scapegoating. The Muslim tanners of Kanpur’s Jajmau are blamed for poisoning the water with hexavalent chromium effluent, and face pogroms as old hostilities are sharpened by climate change. The Economist is a fairly conservative show, and this collection stands apart by cautioning against the can-do ebullience of technology writing, which serves the interests of venture capitalists rather too conveniently. Tomorrow is just another yesterday, most of the essays here say. It is generally agreed that disruptive technologies have altered human civilisation in unprecedented ways and wrested control of the future. But while disruption is now regarded as a kind of moral force in industry, the digital revolution has mostly changed the way in which we perform traditional activities. The crippling blow delivered to postal services by email is dramatic, but our communications are still essentially epistolary. Social media has accelerated the sharing of information, but it is still just information, packaged in traditional formats — newspapers, books, cinema, rants. The digital revolution has been on for two decades but has begun to play a political role only recently, with Arab Spring and, now, the unverified possibility that it is swaying electorates. Apart from these spikes, it has only modified and eased traditional forms of human interaction. It has not altered social and political structures in the manner that the agricultural revolution did, causing nomadic tribal cultures to mutate swiftly into city dwellers overseen by a feudal administration which protected freshly evolved systems of taxation, credit and trade. Technological change has accelerated in recent years, but core technologies remain in use unaltered. The “Mother of All Bombs” detonated in Afghanistan by the US last week was a perfectly conventional munition. The internal combustion engine of a Formula One car is just that — the internal combustion engine, of 18th century vintage. HTML has given way to PHP, a more supple language for writing for the web, but what is thrown to the browser is still mostly HTML, created on the fly by PHP. Technology is actually bad at keeping up with expectations. Moore’s Law, the observation that the density of transistors on a silicon chip roughly doubles every two years, was seen as a speedometer. Now, with silicon real estate overcrowded and overheated, Moore’s Law is seen as a speedbreaker, inviting wistful speculation about the quantum computer, which will burst the bonds of traditional electronics, as Justin Trudeau famously explained. This would indeed floor the pedal on computing, but the disruptionists forget to inform us that the quantum computer would need supercooling and isolation from ambient radiation. It won't be mass market for ages. Artificial intelligence, to which humanity volubly fears losing control, could also fail to deliver the terminal Armageddon, simply because it would be bad for business. The autonomous, replicating machine is a sci-fi nightmare. AI embedded in websites and washing machines, on the other hand, is a unique selling proposition. It helps us buy and sell smarter while clad in cleaner clothes. Technology is a market product but, as Mega Tech warns, we regard it as an autonomous force, on par with an earthquake or a whirlwind, and that is a fallacy. But technology is human-created and market directed. While we may not really know what it will look like in 2050, we have a fairly clear idea of what it is unlikely to become.
