What field of engineering has the most potential to influence the future and the way things are?

Innovation Diffusion: What do you think about this article?

• In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote,  which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply  because it is 'human'. Changing what it means to remember changes what it means to be. New studies show that these comprehensive lifestyle changes may change  gene expression in hundreds of genes in only a few months "turning on"  (upregulating) disease-preventing genes and "turning on"  (downregulating) genes that promote heart disease, oncogenes that  promote breast cancer and prostate cancer, and genes that promote  inflammation and oxidative stress. As genomic information for individuals becomes more widely available via  the decoding of each person's complete genome (as Venter and Watson  have done) or partially (and less expensively) via new personal genomics  companies this information will be a powerful motivator for people to  make comprehensive lifestyle changes that may beneficially affect their  gene expression and significantly reduce the incidence of the pandemic  of chronic diseases. We're in the midst of an ongoing revision of our understanding of what  it means to be human we are struggling to redefine humanity, and it's  going to radically influence our future. Animal models are generally inadequate for chronic human diseases  because the disease in animals is almost never quite the same as the  human disease. Think about the potential for new generations of "smart" technologies,  with the capacity to adapt, indeed to evolve and transform, in response  to changing conditions. In addition to new technologies, we need a new consciousness, a new  worldview, and new metaphors that establish a more harmonious  relationship between the human and the non-human. Of course, the concept of "changing everything" makes no up-front value  judgments, and I can envision evolution's net contribution as being  either positive or negative, depending on whether the shift in human  consciousness keeps pace with the radical expansion of new (and  potentially even more exploitative) technologies. This powerful alliance of different technologies has provided not only a  brand new way of producing, storing and retrieving information, but a  giant network of ranking and rating systems in which information is  valued as long as it has been already filtered by other people. Notice that this won't mean a world of collective ignorance in which  everyone has no other chances to know something than to rely on the  judgment of someone else, in a sort of infinite chain of blind trust  where nobody seems to know anything for sure anymore: The age of  reputation will be a new age of knowledge gathering guided by new rules  and principles. Information technology has provided novel ways for brains to align across great distances and over time. What is game-changing is that only recently have researchers begun to  frame questions about brain function in terms not of individual brains  but rather in terms of how individual brains are embedded in larger  social and environmental systems that drive their evolution and  development. This new way of framing brain and cognitive science together with  unforeseen technological developments promises transformational  integrations of current and future knowledge about how brains interact. On the contrary, the humans who wrote those works had the same needs and  desires that we have today, though the means of meeting those needs and  of fulfilling those desires may have changed in some of the details. (This statement is certainly not meant to minimize the tragedy of the  millions of lives lost in these catastrophes.) Though we worry about the  possible dramatic effects that an anthropogenically changed global  climate might have, humankind itself will survive such changes (because  of its science and technology), though we cannot predict how many people  might tragically die because of it. From this human perspective, the last "event" that truly changed  everything was over some period of time around 50,000 years ago when  evolutionary advances finally led to intelligent humans who left Africa  and spread out over the rest of the world, literally changing everything  in the entire world. We are here today as both a species and a society because of those gene  changes and the natural selection process that over this long time  period weeded out the bad changes and allowed the good changes to  remain. With humans, artificial selection (selective breeding) was never a  serious replacement for natural selection possibility, and as a result  there have been no significant changes to the human species since its  societies began. But now, with the recent great advances in genetic engineering, we are  in a position to change the human species for the first time in 50,000  years. When selecting particular genes that we want while perhaps not  understanding how particular gene combinations work, might we  unknowingly begin a process that could change our good human qualities?  Therefore, well before we understand how brains work, we will find  ourselves able to digitally copy the brain's structure and able to  download the conscious mind into a computer. If the computational hypothesis of brain function is correct, it  suggests that an exact replica of your brain will hold your memories,  will act and think and feel the way you do, and will experience your  consciousness irrespective of whether it's built out of biological  cells, Tinkertoys, or zeros and ones. Unless your simulated experiences change the structure of your simulated  brain, you will be unable to form new memories and will have no sense  of the passage of time. As of this moment, we have no neuroscience technologies geared toward  ultra-high-resolution scanning of the sort required and even if we did,  it would take several of the world's most powerful computers to  represent a few cubic millimeters of brain tissue in real time. If it doesn't happen earlier, this level of AI will arrive once  computers achieve the computational power to run real-time simulations  of an entire human brain. Education, too, will fundamentally change, as engineers and cognitive  sciences begin to leverage an understanding of brain code into ways of  directly uploading information into the brain. From the Neolithic revolution to the information age, the major changes  in the human condition none of them changing everything, needless to say  have been consequences of new technologies. There is now a glut of new technologies in the offing that will alter  the way we live more rapidly and radically than anything before in ways  we cannot properly foresee. Many new technologies can provide new weapons or new ways to use old ones. One must hope that, in part thanks to the changes brought about by novel  technologies, new forms of social and political understanding and  action will develop to help address at the root issues that otherwise  might give rise to ever more lethal conflicts. the concilience of the sciences of life and technology of artificial  intelligence, advanced computing and software (including life  programming a la Venter and possibly consciousness programming) towards  the "cylon" creation; It is quite likely that we will at some point see  people starting to make deliberate changes in the way the climate system  works. "Geoengineering" technologies for counteracting some aspects of  anthropogenic climate change such as putting long-lived aerosols into  the stratosphere, as volcanoes do, or changing the lifetimes and  reflective properties of clouds have to date been shunned by the  majority of climate scientists, largely on the basis of the moral hazard  involved: any sense that the risks of global warming can be taken care  of by such technology weakens the case for reducing carbon-dioxide  emissions. But what I see as world changing about this technology is not the extent to which it changes the world. To live in a world subject to purposeful, planetwide change will not, I  think, be quite the same as living in one being messed up by accident. Unless geoengineering fails catastrophically (which would be a pretty  dramatic change in itself) the relationship between people and their  environment will have changed profoundly. All climate change, whether intentional or not, has different outcomes  for different regions, and geoengineering is in many ways just another  form of climate change. And that intentional change in the relationship between people and planet might be the biggest change of all. The quantum world is a New New World far more alien and difficult of access than Columbus' Old New World. While discovery of the Old New World roughly doubled the land area  available to humans, the New New World exponentially expands the  dimension of physical reality.* (For example, every single electron's  spin doubles it.) Our fundamental equations do not live in the  three-dimensional space of classical physics, but in an (effectively)  infinite-dimensional space: Hilbert space. Based on our new methods there was an explosion of new data from decoded genomes of many living species including humans. Just as Darwin observed evolution in the changes that he saw in various  species of finches, land and sea iguanas, and tortoises, the genomics  community is now studying the changes in the genetic code that are  associated with human traits and disease and the differences among us by  reading the genetic code of many humans and comparing them. Science is changing dramatically again as we use all our new tools to understand life and perhaps even to redesign it. As we learn from 3.5 billion years of evolution we will convert billions  of years into decades and change not only conceptually how we view life  but life itself. Though the grid system would be hard pressed to have the transformative  power the World Wide Web (also developed at CERN), the jump in  computational power that can be possible with processors coordinated the  way that data currently is can have enormous transformational  consequences. At the beginning of last century, the average life expectancy was 30-40  years, while the current world average life expectancy is almost 70  years. Right now, people don't easily grasp insidious environmental factors or  subtle differences in health care that result in dramatic individual  differences in the long term (approximately ten years of life between  the wealthy and the poor living in the same country), but they will  immediately grasp the beneficial effects of brain stimulation, and will  demand not to be excluded anymore. One might suppose that, with all its zillions of transistors and  billions of human minds, the world brain would be thinking some pretty  profound thoughts. The wires "vibrating thousands of miles in a breathless point of time"  are not just carrying messages between human minds, they are  participating in the decisions of the world mind as a whole. For the world mind to truly perceive, it will need a way of sharing more  general forms of knowledge, in a format that can be understood by both  humans and machines. However, for the larger scale of human lifetimes, change for change sake is not a worthy mantra. Straightforward answers are found in these pages: Climate catastrophy,  extra terrestrial life and asteroid collisions are interspersed with  solutions 'from the lab': meddling with genes, conjuring up super  intelligence and nano-technology, waiting for the singularity of hard  A.I., fearing insurgent robots or clamoring for infinite human life  span. While carniculture may not change everything in the same way agriculture  changed everything, certainly it will transform our economy and our  relationship to animals. There would be a strange Gulliver-like period of transition where giants  would still live with the next smaller generations, but on a longer  run, the planet might look very different and the change of scale in  relation to animals, plants, lanscapes could generate completely new  ideas perceptions, representations and ideas. Essentially, for this aggregating intelligence to communicate with  humans for it to understand what we mean by a question or want by a  request, it will have to become equipped with accurate models of the  native intelligences that inhabit human minds. For decades, evolutionary psychologists have been devoted to  perpetrating the great reductionist crime working to create a scientific  discipline that progressively maps the evolved universal human  mind/brain the computational counterpart to the human genome. If we understand our minds as we understand the physical world that will change everything. But if we are to take seriously the question of what will change  "everything", then the candidate really has to be something that  underlies all other changes, and hence my candidate remains  understanding the mind. Whether the question is how we will deal with new life forms when we  encounter them, or how we will design our lives as we prepare to live  forever, or how we will generate the courage to stop environmental  devastation, understanding the mind will change everything. Even at the current rapid rates of progress of current computer  technology, with the computer components halving in size every two years  or less, and computers doubling in power over the same time, quantum  computers should not be available for forty years. I could tell you that quantum computers will drastically change the way the world works during our lifetime. The world was rich compared to its human population; there were new  lands to conquer, new thoughts to nurture, and new resources to fuel it  all. But suppose the feeling changes: that people start to anticipate the  future world not in that way but instead as something more closely  resembling the nightmare of desperation, fear and suspicion described in  Cormac McCarthy's post-cataclysm novel The Road. It is obvious that many of the most powerful new technologies are likely  to flow from biology, but one of the most game changing is likely to be  neural control of devices. But neuro-transmitting by itself will be sufficiently game changing, and  also will be a step along the way to a radically different world of  computer mediated reality in every sense. But since it is the brain that experiences change, only changing the brain itself can possibly change everything. Changing the human brain is not new, when it is a matter of correcting psychopathology. But it will happen nonetheless, and it will change how humans experience  the world and how they relate to each other in as yet unimagined ways. Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds  Technologies; Author, Mirror Worlds; Machine Beauty Since the nineteenth  century, its advocates have promised that science will explain  everything in terms of physics and chemistry; science will show that  there is no God and no purpose in the universe; it will reveal that God  is a delusion inside human minds and hence in human brains; and it will  prove that brains are nothing but complex machines. If such profound restatements of how the world works arose universally  the last time we had a transition on the scale of that from biological  evolution to cultural evolution, is it logical to think it is happening  again as we move from cultural evolution to radical technological  evolution? This change comes from the deepest and most difficult  problems facing contemporary science: those having to do with the nature  of time. For instance, one could estimate the time people require to divide a  number by 10; this value could then be subtracted from the time people  require to find the mean of 10 numbers, with the idea being that the  residual should indicate the time to add up the numbers. Of course, these radical adjustments may not happen, or not happen in  time, and then climate will shift to either a chaotic mode or a  different stable state with the carrying capacity for just a fraction of  present humanity, and that will really change everything. And to know that the universe is teeming with life would make it far  more likely that there is also intelligent life elsewhere in the  universe. One way to start to think about this is to look at the last "change everything" innovation, and work back fifty years from it. So to me the challenge is to look at what we have now, some of which may  be quite mature; other pieces of which may be only emerging; and to  think of how they could combine in ways that will affect social and  cultural processes in ways that will "change everything," which I take  to mean: will make a big difference to the day to day life of many  people. All these will change life in the Global South on scales and with values  that they will swamp, from the perspective of a broad concern with  human values, whatever effects lengthening life in the wealthier North  will have. In such a world, biotechnology, nanotechnology, information technology,  and manufacturing technology merge into a kind of universal technology  of embodied information. The changing nature of kinship networks, such as the growth in blended  families whether due to changing divorce patterns in the developed world  or AIDS killing off parents in Africa has implications for the network  of obligations and entitlements within families. Human knowledge changes the world as it spreads, and the spread of knowledge can be observed. If we could change the rules of the mind, we would alter our perception  of the world, which would change everything (at least for humans). In each case, new observations revealed new physics, physics that went  beyond the standard models physics that led to new technologies and to  new ways of looking at the universe. Understanding that the outside world is really inside us and the inside world is really outside us will change everything. By understanding the mechanisms of how humans create knowledge, we will  be able to break through normal human cognitive limitations and think  the previously unthinkable. Understanding how our evolved machinery both helps and constrains us in  creating knowledge, will allow us to create new knowledge, either by  using our old mental machinery in yet new ways, or by using new and  different machinery for knowledge-making, augmenting our normal  cognition. When we study the mechanics of knowledge building, we are approaching an  understanding of what it means to be human the very nature of the human  essence. Brain scanning; genetic studies; antidepressant drug use; estrogen  replacement therapy; testosterone patches; L-dopa and newer drugs to  prevent or retard brain diseases; recreational drugs; sex change  patients; gene doping by athletes: all these and other developments are  giving us data on how the mind works and opening new avenues to use  brain chemistry to change who we are and what we want. As the field of epigenetics takes on speed, we are also beginning to  understand how the environment affects brain systems, even turns genes  on and off further enabling us (and others) to adjust brain chemistry,  affecting who we are, how we feel and what we think we need. Scientific ideas change when new instruments are developed that detect something new about nature. I believe these will be the most interesting times in human history  (Remember the old Chinese curse about "interesting times?") Humanity  will see, before I die, the "Singularity," the day when we finally  create a human level artificial intelligence. That is, part of the computation is done in this universe by you and  your part of the quantum computer, and the other parts of the  computation are done by your analogues with their parts of the computer  in the other universes of the multiverse. Quantum computer running an AI program, direct conversion of matter into  energy, the ultimate rocket that would allow the AI's and the human  downloads to begin interstellar travel at near light speed, depend on  the same physics, and should appear at the same time in the future. We may not have enough people in the next twenty years to sustain the  technology we already have, to say nothing of developing the technology  allowed by the known laws of physics that I describe above. However, I remain cautiously optimistic that we will develop the  ultimate technology described above, and transfer it with faltering  hands to our ultimate successors, the AI's and the human downloads, who  will be thus enabled to expand outward into interstellar space, engulf  the universe, and live forever. The contraceptive pill "changed everything" for people living in parts  of the world where it is available and the Internet "changed everything"  for those of us who are connected. From the way individual people live their lives, to the way wealth and power are spread across the globe. It has always been not only the human way, but the way of all living things, to multiply and colonize new frontiers. There are so many possible solutions for the survival of humans (or  posthumans) in solar orbit or on "inhospitable" planets that I expect we  will find some way to make it work long before generational or  faster-than-light voyages to faraway star systems; in fact, I expect it  in my lifetime. Historical and futuristic speculation about events that change  everything features time compression and overestimates the rate of  cultural and psychological change. I think an inititiative that markets the virtues of science on every  corner of the planet, with the same urgency as the basketball scouts on  corners of street ball courts, would change the world. Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, first presented in the fall of  1915, and his earlier Special Theory of Relativity have changed very  little of our day to day world, but they have radically altered the way  we think about both space and time and have also launched the modern  theory of cosmology. The way this is usually imagined is a process of human ingenuity  creating wonderful technology as tools for human benefit, and with us in  control. Well, if you think of the universe as everything, then something that  changes the universe or at least changes our whole conception of it  would change everything. It took until early modern times and the development of new technologies for a real "world-wide web" of societies to develop. These changes reflect brain changes. For most of human history babies and toddlers used their spectacular,  freewheeling, unconstrained learning abilities to understand fundamental  facts about the objects, people and language around them the human core  curriculum. While brain cells are certainly capable of structural and functional  changes throughout life, an extensive scientific literature has shown  that plasticity in the nervous system is greatest early in development,  during the so-called critical periods. That wall is the belief that genetic change happens at such a glacial  pace that there simply was not time, in the 50,000 years since humans  spread out from Africa, for selection pressures to have altered the  genome in anything but the most trivial way (e.g., changes in skin color  and nose shape were adaptive responses to cold climates). This was the period after the spread of agriculture during which the  pace of genetic change sped up in response to the enormous increase in  the variety of ways that humans earned their living, formed larger  coalitions, fought wars, and competed for resources and mates. But whatever consensus we ultimately reach, the ways in which we now  think about genes, groups, evolution and ethnicity will be radically  changed by the unstoppable progress of the human genome project. I expected cancer and the flu and all illnesses to be cured, robots  taking care of labor, the biochemistry of life fully unraveled, the  possibility of recreating damaged organs in every hospital, the nations  of the Earth living prosperously in peace thanks to new technology, and  physics having understood the center of a black hole. We now face dramatic changes in the climate that require equally  dramatic changes in our technologies connected with energy generation,  farming, travel, and human life-style in general. In conclusion, I see the deep conceptual changes that are currently  happening in biology as a prelude and accompaniment to the cultural  changes that are occurring in culture, facilitating these and ushering  in a new age of sustainable living on the planet. If these developments are not life changing enough, they will, in the  longer-term usher in a new era in which our minds, the thing that we  think of as "us", can become separated from our body, or nearly  separated anyway. Discovering a counterexample or new ways to preserve information could  be a real game-changer: one that alters our understanding of the  fundamental laws of nature, transforms our concept of space and time,  triggers a reconstruction of the history of the universe and leads to  new prognostications about its future. This is a change that will create a livable world for the next  generations, both in affluent societies and, especially, in the  developing or not-even-yet-developing parts of the world. Just as we are beginning to learn that it is not "the" gene that  controls what happens in our bodies, but rather the interplay of many  genes, proteins, and environmental influences that turn genes on and  off, we will learn how the interplay of various neural tissues, the  chemicals in our body, environmental influences, and possibly some  current unknowns, come together to affect how the brain works and that  will change everything. (c) determine ways in which human and nonhuman brains function similarly  and differently, whether human and nonhuman intelligences are  distinctly separate or whether a measureable gradient exists, the extent  of any overlap of function, and whether the critical issues involve  modules or a constellation of inter-functioning areas that both match  and are disparate. Neurology will change the game of human life drastically, as soon as we  develop the tools to observe and direct the activities of a human brain  in detail from the outside. A system of 10^5 tiny transmitters inside a brain with 10^5 receivers  outside could observe in detail the activity of an entire human brain  with 10^11 neurons. To make radiotelepathy possible, we have only to invent two new  technologies, first the direct conversion of neural signals into radio  signals and vice versa, and second the placement of microscopic radio  transmitters and receivers within the tissue of a living brain. A society bonded together by radiotelepathy would be experiencing human life in a totally new way. The one development that really could change everything would be a radical, genetically programmed, alteration of human nature. But, while human beings continue to reproduce by having sex and each new  generation goes back to square one, then every baby begins life with a  set of inherited dispositions and instincts that evolved in the  technological dark ages. To believe that anything "will change things" focuses one on the  superficial surface of things, which indeed change all the time. And nothing, at the deepest level, therefore will ever change a  postulated 'everything' not so long as we keep imagining possible  "change" which only reinforces the psychic dwelling of our un-changing  selves in a "future" that is always imaginary and beyond us. Because the human brain, like any physical organ, is a product of  evolution, and since natural selection works without recourse to  intelligent forethought, this mental apparatus of ours evolved to think  about God quite without need of the latter's consultation, let alone his  being real. Although cross-cultural communication for the masses requires  translation techniques that exceed our current capabilities, the  groundwork of this technology has already been laid and many of us will  live to see a revolution in automatic translation that will change  everything about cooperation and communication across the world. I believe that we will see within our lifetime the convergence of  developments in artificial intelligence, knowledge representation,  statistical grammar theories, and an emerging field computational  anthropology (informatic-based analysis and modeling of cultural values)  that will facilitate powerful new forms of machine translation to match  the dreams of early pioneers of computation. If there is life in the universe, the form of life that will prove to be  most successful at propagating itself will be digital life; it will  adopt a form that is independent of the local chemistry, and migrate  from one place to another as an electromagnetic signal, as long as  there's a digital world a civilization that has discovered the Universal  Turing Machine for it to colonize when it gets there. With computing power doubling every year or two cheap personal computers  should match the raw processing power of the human brain in a couple of  decades, and then leave it in the dust. As the fast evolving devices improve they will begin to outperform the  original brain, it will make less and less sense to continue to do one's  thinking in the old biological clunker, and formerly human minds will  become entirely artificial as they move into ultra sophisticated,  dispersed robot systems. Philosopher; Professor, Oxford University; Director, Future of Humanity  Institute; Editor, Human Enhancement Arguably, human brain power is the  chief rate-limiting factor in the development of human civilization. Given these considerations, it is possible that one day we may be able  to create "superintelligence": a general intelligence that vastly  outperforms the best human brains in every significant cognitive domain. All sorts of theoretically possible technologies could be developed  quickly by superintelligence advanced molecular manufacturing, medical  nanotechnology, human enhancement technologies, uploading, weapons of  all kinds, lifelike virtual realities, self-replicating space-colonizing  robotic probes, and more. Also, unless you are a vampire (and there were times in my past when I  wished I were one) and thus beyond submitting to the laws of physics,  you can't really escape the second law of thermodynamics: even an open  system like the human body, able to interact with its external  environment and absorb nutrients and energy from it, will slowly  deteriorate. Though the generative capacity of the brain, especially the human brain,  is spectacular providing us with a system for massive creativity, it is  also highly constrained. In a nutshell, for the first time we have a science that enables us to  understand the actual, the possible and the unimaginable, a landscape  that will forever change our understanding of what it means to be human,  including how we arrived at our current point in evolutionary theory,  and where might end up in ten or ten million years. A method to eliminate 'pattern D' will lead to the most significant  change ever in the way humans and therefore societies behave. I think he is wrong: the evolution of the biosphere, the economy, our  human culture and perhaps aspects of the abiotic world, stand partially  free of physical law and are not entailed by fundamental physics. In this open universe, beyond entailment by fundamental physics, we have  partial lawlessness, ceaseless creativity, and forever co-dependent  origination that changes the Actual and the ever new Adjacent Possible  we ceaselessly self-consistently co-construct. Nothing we've done in the past couple of hundred thousand years has  truly changed everything, so I don't see us doing anything in the future  that would change everything, either. To encounter an other, whether a god, a ghost, a biological sibling, an  independently evolved life form, or an emergent intelligence of our own  creation, changes what it means to be human. Based on these experiments, social scientists soon recognized that the  major unsolved problem of galactic colonization was the social  psychological problem, How could humans live together for up to 52  years, raising children who would become the explorers of the blue  planets? If by 'happen' we only think of personal and historical events,  we miss the most crucial novelty the way that new things, new physical  objects, devices and techniques, insinuate themselves into our lives. The Amish (a quaint static ripple whose way of life will never uncover  the simplest new technological fix for the unfolding hazards of a  dynamic universe) have long recognized that material culture embodies  weird inspirations, challenging us, as eventual consumers, not with  'copy what I do', but a far, far more subversive 'try me.' Anyone who  has worked with numerous young people over the years knows that some  catch on quickly, almost instantly, to new skills or understandings,  while others must go through the same drill, with little depressingly  little improvement over time. Long before the computing capacity of a plug-in computer overtakes the  supposed computing capacity of a human brain, the web encompassing all  its connected computing chips will dwarf the brain. And because this synthetic intelligence is a combination of human  intelligence (all past human learning, all current humans online) and  the coveted zip of fast alien digital memory, it will be difficult to pinpoint what it is as well.

• Answer:

  I think it's very long and I don't want to read it all.  If a summary were presented, I might say what I thought of that  (or I might find that I'm interested and will read it.)