So, this evening, we have one of the most distinguished members of the House of Lords, Martin Rees.
Martin has been Astronomer Royal since 1995. He's a former master of Trinity College, Cambridge
and a former president of the Royal Society. In 2007 he was made a member of the Order of Merit,
a personal gift of Her Majesty the Queen, and this evening he's going to speak to us about the most urgent issues of our era
the challenge that they pose to humanity, and the importance of working together to address them.
Now it's my very great honour and pleasure to hand over to Martin Rees.
My Lord Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, it's a great honour, a rather daunting one, to address this audience in these surroundings.
A few years ago, I met a well-known tycoon from
India. Knowing I had the English title of
‘Astronomer Royal.’ He asked,
“do you do the Queen’s horoscopes?”
I responded, with a straight face: “If she
wanted one, I’m the person she’d ask.”
He seemed eager to hear my predictions. I
told him that stocks would fluctuate, there
would be new tensions in the
Middle East, and so forth. He paid rapt attention
to these ‘insights’. But then I came clean.
I said I was just an
astronomer—not an astrologer. He abruptly
lost all interest in my predictions. And rightly
so—scientists are rotten
forecasters—almost as bad as economists.
Nor do politicians and lawyers have a sure
touch. One rather surprising futurologist
was F. E. Smith, Earl of
Birkenhead, crony of Churchill and Lord Chancellor
in the 1920s. In 1930 he wrote a book titled
The World in
2030.
i
He’d read futurologists of his era like
Wells and JBS Haldane’; he envisaged babies
incubated in flasks, flying
cars, and such fantasies.
In contrast, he foresaw social stagnation.
Here’s a quote:
‘In 2030 women will still, by their wit
and charms, inspire the most able men towards
heights that they could never
themselves achieve’.
Enough said!
I’ll make a few predictions, but very tentatively.
They will draw on my recently-published book
“On the Future:
Prospects for Humanity” where I try offer
a balance between scientific optimism and
political pessimism
The theme is this:
Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries.
But this century is special: it’s the first
when one species, ours, has
the planet’s future in its hands. We’re
deep in the anthropocene. We could irreversibly
degrade the biosphere -
- or misdirected technology could cause a
catastrophic setback to civilization. But
there would be the capability
to provide a bright and sustainable future.
Bio, cyber, robotics and space all offer huge
potential benefits but also expose us to novel
vulnerabilities. I’ll
address these in my second part of my talk
– though they’re hard to predict even
twenty years ahead.
But before that let’s focus on two things
we can predict even with a cloudy crystal
ball: the world in 2050 will be
more crowded -- and it will be warmer.
Fifty years ago, world population was about
3.5 billion. It’s now about 7.7 billion.
The growth’s been mainly in
Asia and Africa. The number of births per
year, worldwide, peaked a few years ago and
is going down, nonetheless
world population is forecast to rise to around
9 billion by 2050. That’s partly because
most people in the
developing world are young. They are yet to
have children, and they will live longer.
The age histogram in the
developing world will become more like it
is in Europe.
Population growth seems underdiscussed. That’s
partly, perhaps, because doom-laden forecasts
by for instance,
the Club of Rome— proved off the mark. Also,
some deem population growth to be a taboo
subject—tainted by
association with eugenics in the 1920s and
’30s, with Indian policies under Indira
Gandhi, and more recently with
China’s hard-line one-child policy. As it’s
turned out, food production and resource extraction
have kept pace
with rising population; famines still occur,
but they’re due to conflict or maldistribution,
not overall scarcity.
To feed 9 billion in 2050 will require further-improved
agriculture – low-till, water-conserving,
and GM crops –
and maybe dietary innovations: converting
insects—highly nutritious and rich in proteins—into
palatable food;
and making artificial meat.
To quote Gandhi – enough for everyone’s
need but not for everyone’s greed.
By mid-century, Africa will have 5 times Europe’s
population – Lagos and other megacities
could have populations
around 40 million. Moreover, if families in
Africa remain large, then according to the
UN that continent’s
population could double again by 2100, to
4 billion, thereby raising the global population
to 11 billion. Nigeria
alone would by then have as big a population
as Europe and North America combined. .
Optimists say that each extra mouth brings
two hands and a brain. But it’s the geopolitical
stresses that are most
worrying. As compared to the fatalism of earlier
generations, those in poor countries now know,
via internet,
etc, what they’re missing. And migration
is easier. However, the advent of robots,
and ‘reshoring’ of
manufacturing, mean that still-poor countries
won’t be able to grow their economies by
offering cheap skilled
labour, as the Asian Tiger states did. It’s
a portent for disaffection and instability
– multiple mega versions of the
tragic boat-people crossing the Mediterranean
today.
Wealthy nations, especially those in Europe,
should urgently promote growing prosperity
in Africa, and not just
for altruistic reasons.
And another thing: if humanity’s collective
impact on land use and climate pushes too
hard, the resultant
‘ecological shock’ could cause mass extinctions–
we’d be destroying the book of life before
we’ve read it.
Already, there’s more biomass in chickens
and turkeys than in all the world’s wild
birds. And the biomass in
humans, cows and domestic animals is 20 times
that in wild mammals.
Biodiversity is a crucial component of human
wellbeing. We're clearly harmed if fish stocks
dwindle to extinction;
there are plants in the rain forest whose
gene pool might be useful to us. And insects
are crucial for the food
chain and fertilization. But for many environmentalists,
preserving the richness of our biosphere has
value, over
and above what it means to us humans to quote
the great ecologist E O Wilson ‘mass extinction
is the sin that
future generations will least forgive us for’.
So the world’s getting more crowded. And
there’s a second firm prediction: it will
gradually get warmer. In
contrast to population issues, climate change
is certainly not under-discussed, though it
is under-responded-to
The fifth IPCC report presents a spread of
projections, for different assumptions about
future rates of fossil fuel
use. Moreover, it’sstill unclear how much
the climatic effects of CO2 are amplified
by associated changes in water
vapour and clouds – that’s a further uncertainty.
And the need for urgent action was highlighted
in the update
published last October.
However, despite the uncertainties there are
two messages that most would agree on:
1. Even within the next 20 years, shifts in
weather patterns, and more extreme weather,
will aggravate
pressures on food and water, and enhance migration
pressure.
2. Under ‘business as usual’ scenarios
we can’t rule out, later in the century,
catastrophic warming, and
tipping points triggering long-term trends
like the melting of Greenland’s icecap.
But even those who accept both these statements
have diverse views on the policy response.
These divergences
stem from differences in economics and ethics
-- in particular, in how much obligation we
should feel towards
future generations.
The Danish campaigner Bjorn Lomberg has bogyman
status among environmentalists – somewhat
unfairly, as he
doesn’t contest the science. But his ‘Copenhagen
Consensus’ of economists downplays the priority
of addressing
climate change in comparison with shorter-term
efforts to help the world’s poor. That’s
because he applies a
‘standard’ discount rate – and in effect
writes off what happens beyond 2050. But if
you care about those who’ll
live into the 22nd century and beyond, then,
as economists like Stern and Weitzman argue,
you deem it worth
paying an insurance premium now, to protect
those generations against the worst-case scenarios.
So, even those who agree that there’s a
significant risk of climate catastrophe a
century hence, will differ in how
urgently they advocate action today. Their
assessment will depend on expectations of
future growth, and
optimism about technological fixes. But, above
all, it depends on an ethical issue – in
optimizing people’s lifechances, should
we discriminate on grounds of date of birth?
(As a parenthesis, I’d note that there’s
one policy context when an essentially zero
discount rate is applied –
radioactive waste disposal, where the depositories
are required to prevent leakage for 10000
years – somewhat
ironic when we can’t plan the rest of energy
policy even 30 years ahead)
What will happen on the climate-policy front?
The pledges made at the Paris conference are
a positive step.
But politicians and won't gain much resonance
by advocating unwelcome lifestyle changes
now or a high carbon
tax – when the benefits accrue mainly to
distant parts of the world and are decades
into the future.
Jean-Claude Juncker famously said in a different
context ”we know what to do, but we don’t
know how to get reelected if we do it”
`But there’s one ‘win win’ roadmap to
a low-carbon future. Nations should accelerate
R and D into all forms of
low-carbon energy generation. And into other
technologies where parallel progress is crucial
– especially storage
(batteries, compressed air, pumped storage,
flywheels, etc.) and smart grids.
The faster these ‘clean’ technologies
advance, the sooner will their prices fall
so they become affordable to, for
instance, India, where more generating capacity
will be needed, where the health of the poor
is jeopardized by
smoky stoves burning wood or dung, and where
there would otherwise be pressure to build
coal-fired power
stations.
Sun and wind are of course front-runners,
but other methods have geographical niches.
Geothermal power for
instance, is readily available in Iceland;
Harnessing tidal energy seems attractive where
the topography induces
especially large-amplitude tides. Britain’s
West Coast is one such place and there are
proposals for tidal barrages
or lagoons
Because of local intermittency we’ll need
continental-scale DC grids – carrying solar
energy from Morocco and
Spain to the less sunny Northern Europe, and
east-west to smooth peak demand over different
time-zones in
North America and Eurasia – perhaps all
the way along the Belt and Road to China.
.
And despite ambivalence about nuclear energy,
it’s surely worthwhile to boost R and D
into a variety of ‘Fourth
Generation’ concepts, which could prove
to be more flexible in size, and safer. And
the potential pay-off from
fusion is so great that it is surely worth
continuing experiments
and prototypes.
It would be hard to
think of a more inspiring challenge for young
scientists than devising clean and economical
energy systems for the world.
And, incidentally, in talking about ‘science’
I include technology and engineering. Indeed
the latter are more
challenging. My engineering friends like a
cartoon that shows two beavers looking up
at a vast hydroelectric dam.
One says to the other ‘I didn’t actually
build it but it’s based on my idea’. Armchair
theorists like me should be
very modest compared to those who build things
that work and meet public demand.
Let me turn now to other technologies.
We should be evangelists for new technology,
not luddites – without it the world can’t
provide food, and
sustainable energy, for an expanding .and
more demanding population. But we need wisely-directed
technology.
Indeed, many of are anxious that it’s advancing
so fast that we may not properly cope with
it. – and that we’ll
have a bumpy ride through this century.
We’re ever more dependent on elaborate networks:
electric-power grids, air traffic control,
international finance,
just-in-time delivery, globally-dispersed
manufacturing, and so forth. Unless these
networks are highly resilient,
their manifest benefits could be outweighed
by catastrophic (albeit rare) breakdowns that
cascade globally --
real-world analogues of what happened in 2008
to the financial system.
Our cities would be paralysed without electricity.
Supermarket shelves would be empty within
days if supply
chains were disrupted. Air travel can spread
a pandemic worldwide within days. And social
media can spread
panic and rumour, and psychic and economic
contagion, literally at the speed of light.
And, by the way, pandemics cause far more
societal breakdown than in earlier centuries.
English villages in the
14th century continued to function even when
the black death halved their populations.
In contrast, our societies
would be vulnerable to serious unrest as soon
as hospitals were overwhelmed– which would
occur before the
fatality rate was even one percent. (And there’s
likewise huge societal risk from cyber attacks
on infrastructure,
etc.)
Advances in microbiology -- diagnostics, vaccines
and antibiotics -- offer prospects of containing
pandemics. But
the same research has controversial aspects.
For instance, in 2012 groups in Wisconsin
and in Holland showed that it was surprisingly
easy to make the
influenza virus both more virulent and more
transmissible – to some, this was a scary
portent of things to come.
In 2014 the US federal government decided
to cease funding these so-called ‘gain of
function’ experiments.
The new CRISPR-cas 9 technique for gene-editing
is hugely promising, but there are already
ethical concerns ---
for instance, about Chinese experiments modifying
embryos-- and anxiety about possible runaway
consequences
of ‘gene drive’ programmes to wipe out
species – as diverse as mosquitos or grey
squirrels.
Governments well surely adopt a stringent
and precautionary attitude to biotech. But
I’d worry that whatever
regulations are imposed, on prudential or
ethical grounds, can’t be enforced worldwide
– any more than the
drug laws can --- or the tax laws. Whatever
can be done will be done by someone, somewhere.
And that’s a nightmare. Whereas an atomic
bomb can’t be built without large scale
special-purpose facilities,
Biotech involves small-scale dual-use equipment.
Indeed, biohacking is burgeoning even as a
hobby and
competitive game.
We know all too well that technical expertise
doesn’t guarantee balanced rationality.
The global village will have
its village idiots and they’ll have global
range. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy
groups(or even individuals),
by bio as well as cyber technology will pose
an intractable challenge to governments and
aggravate the tension
between freedom, privacy and security.
These concerns are relatively near-term – within
10 or 15 years. What about 2050 and beyond?
The smartphone, the web and their ancillaries
– ubiquitous today -- would have seemed
magic even just 25 years
ago. So, looking several decades ahead we
must keep our minds open, or at least ajar,
to transformative advances
that may now seem science fiction.
On the bio front we might expect two things.
A better understanding of the combination
of genes that determine
key human characteristics --- and the ability
to synthesis genomes that match these features.
If it becomes
possible to ‘play God on a kitchen table’
(as it were), our ecology (and even our species)
may not long survive
unscathed.
And what about another transformative technology:
robotics and artificial intelligence (AI)?
Already AI can cope with complex fast changing
networks -- traffic flow, or electric grids.
It could enable the Chinese to
gather and process all the information needed
run an efficient planned economy that Marx
could only dream of. And in
science, its capacity to explore zillions
of options could allow it to discover recipes
for better drugs, or a material that
conducts electricity with zero resistance
at room temperature.
And Deep Mind’s ‘Alpha Go Zero’ computer
achieved world-championship level in the games
of Go and Chess in just a few
hours – it was given just the rules and
learnt by playing against itself repeatedly.
But it could complete several games every
second.
And it’s of course the speed of computers
that allows them to succeed by ‘brute force’
methods. They learn to
identify dogs, cats and human faces by ‘crunching’
through millions of images – not the way
babies learn. They
learn to translate by reading millions of
pages of multilingual text – EU documents
for instance (their boredom
threshold is infinite!).
The implications for our society are already
ambivalent. If there is a ‘bug’ in the
software of an AI system, it is currently
not always possible to track it down; this
is likely to create public concern if the
system’s ‘decisions’ have potentially
grave
consequences for individuals. If we are sentenced
to a term in prison, recommended for surgery,
or even given a poor
credit rating, we would expect the reasons
to be accessible to us—and contestable by
us. If such decisions were delegated
to an algorithm, we would be entitled to feel
uneasy, even if presented with compelling
evidence that, on average, the
machines make better decisions than the humans
they have usurped.
AI systems will become more intrusive and
pervasive. Records of all our movements, our
health, and our financial
transactions, will be in the ‘cloud’,
managed by a multinational quasi-monopoly.
The data may be used for benign
reasons (for instance, for medical research,
or to warn us of incipient health risks),
but its availability to internet
companies is already shifting the balance
of power from governments to globe-spanning
conglomerates.
There will be other privacy concerns. Are
you happy if a random stranger sitting near
you in a restaurant or on
public transportation can, via facial recognition,
identify you, and invade your privacy? Or
if ‘fake’ videos of you
become so convincing that visual evidence
can no longer be trusted? Or if a machine
knows enough about you to
compose e-mails that seem to come from you?
The ‘arms race’ between cybercriminals
and those trying to defend against them will
become still more expensive
and vexatious when drones, driverless cars
etc proliferate.
Many experts think that AI, like synthetic
biotech, already needs guidelines for ‘responsible
innovation’.
[Moreover, the fact that AlphaGo Zero achieved
a goal that its creators thought would have
taken several more
years to reach has rendered DeepMind’s staff
even more bullish about the speed of advancement.]
But others,
like the roboticist Rodney Brooks (creator
of the Baxter robot and the Roomba vacuum
cleaner) think that for
many decades we’ll be less concerned about
artificial intelligence than about real stupidity.
And machines are still clumsy compared to
children in sensing and interacting with the
real world.
Be that as it may, it’s crucial to be aware
of the burgeoning potential of artificial
intelligence, even though we
may worry more about the impacts of real stupidity.
The incipient shifts work has been addressed
in several excellent books by economists and
social scientists.
Clearly, machines will take over much of the
work of manufacturing and retail distribution.
They can replace many
white-collar jobs: routine legal work, accountancy,
computer coding, medical diagnostics, and
even surgery. Many
‘professionals’ will find their hard-earned
skills in less demand.
In contrast, some skilled service-sector jobs—plumbing
and gardening, for instance—require non-routine
interactions with the external world and will
be among the hardest jobs to automate.
The digital revolution generates enormous
wealth for an elite group of innovators and
global companies but
preserving a healthy society will surely require
redistribution of that wealth. There is talk
of using it to provide a
universal income. It is better when all who
are capable of so doing can perform socially
useful work rather than
receive a handout.
Indeed, to create a humane society, governments
will need to vastly enhance the number and
status of those
who care for the old, the young and the sick.
There are currently far too few, and they’re
poorly paid, inadequately
esteemed, and insecure in their positions.
Far more fulfilling than work in call centres
or Amazon warehouses.
I can see this happening in Scandinavia, though
there might be ideological barriers here.
Be that as it may, it’s likely that society
will be transformed by autonomous robots,
even though the jury’s out on
whether they’ll be ‘idiot savants’ or
display superhuman capabilities.
Leading the gung-ho enthusiasts is the futurologist
Ray Kurzweil. He wrote a book called ‘The
age of spiritual
machines’ where he predicted that humans
would transcend biology by merging with computers.
In old-style
spiritualist parlance, they would 'go over
to the other side'.
But Kurzweil is worried that his nirvana may
not happen in his lifetime. So, he signed
up with a company in
Arizona that will freeze and store your body,
so that when immortality’s on offer you
can be resurrected, or your
brain downloaded.
I was surprised to find that three academics
in England had gone in for these cryonics.
Two have paid the full
whack; the third has taken the cut-price option
of wanting just his head frozen. I was glad
they’re from Oxford,
not from my university.
I told them I’d rather end my days in an
English churchyard than an American refrigerator.
But some think ageing is a ‘disease that
can be cured. More generally, it’s surely
credible that human mentality
and physique may become malleable via genetic
and cyborg technologies.
This is a game changer. When we admire the
literature and artefacts that have survived
from antiquity, we feel
an affinity, across a time gulf of thousands
of years, with those ancient artists and their
civilizations. But we can
have zero confidence that the dominant intelligences
a few centuries hence will have any emotional
resonance
with us—even though they may have an algorithmic
understanding of how we behaved.
And now I turn briefly to another technology
– space. This is where robots surely have
a future, and where I‘ll
argue that these changes will happen fastest
and should worry us less.
We depend every day on space for satnav, environmental
monitoring, communication and so forth. Europe
has
a strong aerospace industry. ESA is fully
a match for NASA in space science
During this century the whole solar system
will be explored by swarms of miniaturized
probes – far more
advanced than the probes that have beamed
back pictures of Saturn’s moons, Pluto and
beyond -- 20,000 times
further away than the Moon)
Think back to the computers and phones of
the 1990s, when these probes were designed,
and realize how much
better we can do today.
The next step will be the deployment in space
of robotic fabricators, which can build large
structures under zero
gravity, – for instance, solar-energy collectors
or giant telescopes with huge gossamer-thin
mirrors.
What about manned spaceflight? The practical
case gets ever-weaker with each advance in
robots and
miniaturization.
Were I an American I would only support NASA’s
un-manned programme. And I certainly wouldn’t
support a
manned programme done by ESA. – I would
argue that private-enterprise ventures -- bringing
a Silicon Valley
culture into a domain long-dominated by NASA
and a few aerospace conglomerates -- should
‘front’ all manned
missions. They can take higher risks than
a western country can impose on publicly-funded
civilian astronauts.
There would still be many volunteers --- some
perhaps even accepting ‘one-way tickets’
-- driven by the same
motives as early explorers, mountaineers,
and the like.
By 2100 courageous thrill-seekers may have
established ‘bases’ independent from the
Earth – on Mars, or maybe
on asteroids. Elon Musk (aged 47) says he
wants to die on Mars – but not on impact.
But don’t ever expect mass emigration from
Earth. Nowhere in our Solar system offers
an environment even as
clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest.
Here I disagree with Musk and my late colleague
Stephen Hawking.
It’s a dangerous delusion to think that
space offers an escape from Earth's problems.
Dealing with climate change
on Earth is a doddle compared to terraforming
Mars. There’s no ‘Planet B’ for ordinary
risk-averse people.
But those pioneer adventurers who escape the
Earth could be cosmically important. This
is why. They’ll be illadapted to their new
environment; they’ll be beyond the clutches
of our terrestrial regulators. They will use
all
the resources of genetics and cyborg technology
to adapt – they will change faster and could
within a few
generations become a new species.
Let me conclude by focusing back closer to
the here and now. My book emphasizes how our
society is brittle,
interconnected and vulnerable.
We fret unduly about small risks – air crashes.
carcinogens in food, low radiation doses,
etc. But we’re in denial
about some newly emergent threats that could
be globally devastating. Some of these are
environmental – the
pressures of a growing and more demanding
population. Others are the potential downsides
of novel
technologies.
A wise mantra is that ‘the unfamiliar is
not the same as the improbable’.
And of course, most of the challenges are
global. Coping with potential shortage of
food, water, resources -- and
transitioning to low carbon energy --- can’t
be solved by each nation separately. Nor can
threat reduction. Indeed
a key issue is whether nations need to give
up more sovereignty to new organizations along
the lines of the IAEA,
WHO, etc
Science is a universal culture, spanning all
nations and faiths. So, scientists confront
fewer impediments on
straddling political divides. They owe it
to their fellow citizens to maximize the societal
benefits of their
discoveries and minimize the downsides.
Universities have a special role as opinion-formers
-- partly because they’re full of young
people who will live to
the end of the century. And partly because
they can use their staff’s expertise, and
their convening power, to
assess which scary scenarios -- Eco threats,
or risks from misapplied technology -- can
be dismissed as science
fiction and how best to avoid the serious
ones.
Scientists have an obligation to offer their
expertise directly to government, though they
can often have more
leverage indirectly -- by involvement with
NGOs, via blogging and journalism, so that
the public and the media
amplify their voice.
Of course, no political decision is purely
scientific – it involves economics and ethics
and politics where scientists
have no special expertise but are just engaged
citizens.
Two recent instances:
Scientists in the Pontifical Academy provided
input to the Papal encyclical Laudato Si – which
had a world-wide
influence in the lead-up to the Paris climate
conference 
in 2015. There’s no gainsaying the church’s
global reach,
long-term vision and concern for the world’s
poor.
And in UK, I doubt that Michael Gove, would
have become exercised about non-degradable
plastic waste had it
not been for the public impact of BBC’s
Blue Planet 2 programmes fronted by David
Attenborough – especially
the images of albatrosses returning to their
nests and regurgitating plastic debris.
But though we may be political pessimists,
we must remain techno-optimists. Advances
in AI, biotech, nanotech
and space can boost the developing as well
as the developed world. Undiluted application
of the ‘precautionary
principle’ has a manifest downside.
“Space-ship Earth” is hurtling through
the void. Its passengers are anxious and fractious.
Their life-support system
is vulnerable to disruption and break-downs.
But there is too little planning -- too little
horizon-scanning,
We need to think globally, we need to think
rationally, we need to think long-term—empowered
by twenty-firstcentury technology but guided
by values that science alone can’t provide.
I give the last word to one of my scientific
heroes -- the eloquent biologist Peter Medawar:
“The bells that toll for mankind are like
the bells of Alpine cattle. They are attached
to our own necks, and it must
be our fault if they do not make a tuneful
and melodious sound.”
