The Next Fifty Years by John Brockman

From The Week of October 03, 2010

Unless someone has secretly built a time machine by which they can experience the future, no living person can possibly have a clear picture of what life will be like in 50 years. Futurists have made valiant attempts, and I'm sure corporations have launched investigations into the question as a means of anticipating business trends, but in a world evolving this quickly, in a world populated by more experts in more fields than ever before, life in 2050 is simply too vast, shaped by too many variables, for any one person to grasp. Okay, so, screw it. Let's all go home, right? Not so fast. Maybe one mind isn't up to the challenge, but what about many minds, each with specialized expertise?

While the accuracy of their predictions won't be known for some time, the experts assembled here, from environmentalists, to health care professionals, to technologists, do not let uncertainty stop them from opining, in a series of fascinating and entertaining essays, on the future of human life. Will we have robot companions? What diseases will we have eliminated? Will we considerably extend our lifespans? What sort of physics will have been uncovered? All these queries and more are attacked by some of the sharpest scientific minds we have and their answers will at times surprise and terrify. The world they collectively describe may not be a world you wish to live in, but it is a world we will have adjusted to, a world of our own creation. If nothing else is certain, we can know this much. It will be a world that will look nothing like the world of now.

The highlights here are numerous, but my favorite essay is by Judith Rich Harris who composes her entry in the form of a letter from 2050 to us in the present. It's a surprisingly effective device which is filled in with a convincing narrative. Lowlights include essays on philosophy and psychology which, while interesting, come across as far too abstract to edify, but then this has always been the curse of such mental sciences. They must necessarily deal in a world of theories and models which cannot be put to mathematical tests. A good balance between the technical and the superficial and, as such, is a wonderful, edifying read. Bring on 2050! (3/5 Stars)