Brave new world or dystopian nightmare?

Scientists the world over are trying their best to make our future lives better than the past. They want us to be healthier and happier, with all our wants and needs provided for, faster transport and communication, all risks banished, and our life expectancy doubled. It is all coming to pass.

Technological advances scarcely imaginable a few years ago are now commonplace. Just look at driverless electric cars, the super-fast planes and trains, the instant communication, the tweets and new drugs. And there’s plenty more on the horizon with new sources of cheap energy, cloning perfect babies, and replacing lost or damaged organs and limbs. Versatile algorithm-programmed robots will do the work of accountants, doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers etc, and resuscitative technology will redefine death.

It is becoming abundantly clear that we are living through sciencefiction times.

But not everybody is looking forward to the technological future. They feel the ground is moving too quickly under their feet. With his fake news and alternative facts, US President Donald Trump is corrupting the community’s grasp on reality and the future. Many fear that new technologies will lead to new kinds of disastrous mistakes – that cloned babies might generate superhuman soldiers or cyborgs with a licence to kill. Or that, with all our needs met, we might become little more than domesticated animals.

In his book Homo Diem, Israeli philosopher Yuval Noah Harari warns that the age of the cyborg is already upon us and he worries that the rich and powerful might turn gene editing and artificial reproductive technology to their exclusive advantage by generating a closed meritocracy, with two classes of people – a superior upper caste and a dim-witted lower caste.

Harari thinks we have become self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, wreaking havoc on nature, only to ensure our own comfort and amusement.

American philosopher Francis Fukuyama warns us that we are heading for a ‘‘post-human stage of history’’.

Sci-fi envisages a world where elections, politics and nation states may no longer exist, where humanity is reduced to the size of flies, or to twitching jellyfish washed up on deserted shores, or where we can be instantly beamed to the edge of the universe. Others argue that science fiction has been outstripped and rendered obsolete by the mad stampede of events.

In his book Black Swans, polymath Nassim Nicholas Taleb has some sensible things to say about the future. He specialises in the workings of randomness, probability, and uncertainty and, as hedge fund and derivatives trader, made huge fortunes out of the global financial crashes of 1986 and 2007. Taleb argues that nobody can predict the future because all history is shaped by unexpected, seemingly impossible, unimaginable events.

He cites the start of the Great War, the 1918 flu epidemic, the collapse of the Soviet regime, 9/11 and the invention of the internet. Taleb thinks the next 50 or 100 years will see vast changes on an unimaginable scale, making last century’s changes look like child’s play. The future? Expect the unexpected.