Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, it was easy enough to track down Paul Saffo, Silicon Valley’s favourite futurologist. He suggested a restaurant in leafy Burlingame, a plush little town south of San Francisco.
I spent the previous night reading his articles on my Kindle electronic book reader. The next day I plugged the address into the car’s sat nav and chose one of Saffo’s podcasts to listen to from the 6,000-plus items on my iPod. Then I joined a shuffling herd of similarly silicon-chipped-up drivers to crawl the 16 miles between San Francisco and our appointment. It took an hour.
So much for technology. Go back 100-plus years and scrap the sat nav, the car, the road even. A horse can canter comfortably at that speed.
Saffo has spent the past two decades staring into his crystal ball and seeing just these sorts of contrasts. Once director of the Institute for the Future think tank, he now teaches at Stanford University, alma mater to the founders of Google and many of the technology world’s hottest stars.
“The future whispers,” believes Saffo, and his ability to listen has made him the first destination of anyone looking for forecasts on how technology is likely to have an impact on society. He is a consultant to the Davos economic forum of global political and business leaders and regularly gives advice to the world’s top firms.
What divides him from his peers is his ability not just to outline the incredible advances that the technological revolution will bring, but also the accompanying challenges. His blue-sky thinking does not ignore any clouds that might also be gathering.
Saffo, an avuncular and garrulous fiftysomething, doesn’t like to be labelled a futurologist, preferring the less catchy term “technology forecaster”. “Futurists tend to be advocates,” he explained. They see the sat nav but not the traffic jam.
Saffo believes we are now on the cusp of a once-in-a-generation technological revolution that will throw up more dilemmas than ever.
We are about to enter a future where biology and technology fuse, robots are ubiquitous, cars drive themselves, diseases fall to miracle cures, and artificial limbs are better than the original, he says.
However, all this wonder will come in an increasingly fractured world, where the rich may even move towards becoming a different species from the rest of us and where the environment comes under increasing strain, with a battle raging between two tribes — “the druids” and “the engineers” — about how to fix it.
“The simple fact is that first we invent our technologies and then we turn around and use those technologies to reinvent ourselves,” Saffo said.
For good or for bad our technologies now were “so powerful that the things we can do are astonishing” — and sometimes alarming.
IF you want to know which way the world is moving, listen out for the latest chat-up lines.
“You can tell what’s hip by who is getting the hottest dates,” said Saffo. “In the 1950s it was ‘Why, yes, I’m a rocket scientist’. In the early 1990s it was the web entrepreneurs. These days it’s biotech and geneticists. That’s the hot field.”
Technology moves in waves, he says. Every 30 years or so a science becomes a technology and dominates our lives, and even the language we use.
At the turn of the 20th century chemistry was in the ascendant, but it gave way to physics, leading to Einstein, the atom bomb and the moon landings. The 1950s saw the advent of the transistor, the building block of all modern electronic devices. Now it is the turn of biology, genetic engineering, nanotechnology and the fusion of biology and technology.
Each wave of technology triggers the next, says Saffo. Physicists were the fathers of the transistor, which ushered in the computer revolution. In turn, the massive computing power available today has made biotech possible. In 2000 the decoding of the human genome was completed ahead of schedule and under budget because of exponentially increasing computing power.
All this power is allowing scientists to analyse, and potentially alter, the basic structures of our biology in ways that would have been impossible a decade ago. Now that technology is about to go public — if not yet mainstream.
“It takes society a while to catch on,” said Saffo. “Think about Einstein when he was interviewed in the 1950s: people had no idea what atomic physics was.” Eventually, however, the ideas become part of our everyday lives.
“When physics was hot, so were physics-based analogies. When information technology was hot, people talked about ‘interfacing’ with each other. Now the language of biology is all around us.
“I was shocked when I started hearing people use words in general conversation like ‘symbiosis’, ‘osmosis’ and biological analogies for organisations. In the 1960s people compared organisations to computers; now they are talking about computers as ‘organisms’ [and] organisations as ‘ecologies’.”
The good news, says Saffo, is that the rise of biology will change the way we think about the world.
“If it works out, people will understand how interdependent the world is — but there’s another side too,” he said. “I think it was HG Wells [the science fiction author] who said civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe.”
As the biological revolution spreads, Saffo sees many moral dilemmas ahead. For example, by using genetic testing and tailor-made drugs it may be possible to mitigate many common ailments that affect the ageing population — but such improvements will probably be available only to the super-rich.
In the future, they may be able to grow their own replacement organs, take specially designed drugs made just for them and use genetic research tools to alert them of any possible health dangers for them or their children.
“That’s social dynamite,” said Saffo. “I sometimes wonder if the very rich will become a completely separate species. Imagine if the very rich can live, on average, 20 years longer than the poor. That’s 20 more years of earning and saving. Think what that means about wealth and power and the advantages that you pass on to your children.”
And it is not just the rich who may change what it means to be human. Athletes may be able to choose to lose perfectly good limbs for stronger, faster artificial ones, presenting dilemmas that will make the fuss over the gender of Caster Semenya, the South African athlete, pale in comparison.
These kinds of biological innovations are decades away, says Saffo, even for the rich. But the next big thing is already here: robots.
“In the 1980s it was the personal computer: came out of the garage, changed the world. In the 1990s it was the web. The next big device to wander into our lives is robots,” he said.
Robots will soon appear in all areas of our lives and will take over things we now see as everyday tasks, said Saffo. Driving is a good example.
Sebastian Thrun, a colleague of Saffo’s at Stanford, predicts that by 2015 battlefield cars will be driven by robots, and that they will be common on public roads by 2030.
Thrun is a leading competitor in the Darpa Grand Challenge, a competition for driverless cars sponsored by the US defence department.
Saffo attended the first event in March 2004 in the Mojave desert. The scene was “pure Monty Python”, he said. None of the robot vehicles finished and the furthest any vehicle travelled was 7.36 miles.
At the second challenge, which took place just 18 months later, five vehicles completed the race and all but one of the 23 finalists surpassed the distance completed by the best vehicle in the 2004 race.
By the time of the third competition, in 2007, the vehicles of six teams were sophisticated enough to take on an “urban challenge”, negotiating a 60-mile course in less than six hours, obeying regulations and negotiating traffic.
“The same morning as the Darpa challenge there was a 108-car pile-up on a California freeway. The simple fact is that people shouldn’t drive,” said Saffo.
Eventually they won’t, he predicts, and it’s already happening. “People think that’s startling, but if you buy a high-end car these days you have a parking robot that parallel parks better than most people already. There’s going to be a steady rise in computation and at some point you will not be driving.”
Most people’s day-to-day interaction with robots will not come in the form of the super-brained robots of science fiction, however, but from a cloud of pea-brained electronic insects doing household tasks such as vacuuming, finding house keys and pumping petrol or co-ordinating everyday tasks.
Their impact could be just as profound. “We may find we are absolutely dependent upon these electronic insects, and that we don’t even know we are dependent upon them until something breaks,” said Saffo.
A few years ago, when the Galaxy IV communications satellite broke down, it caused chaos in parts of the US, hitting the Texas lottery, petrol pumps and credit card machines. As we rely more and more on technology, we can expect an exponential rise in events such as this.
It is these unseen perils that most worry Saffo. Though he describes himself as a “long-term optimist” for the future of humanity, he confesses to being a “short-term pessimist”.
He says a real concern is how we deal with all this new science and capability at a time when the planet looks like it’s in peril. As all these global changes occur, the bodies that used to monitor and control them are fracturing and losing their global reach.
“The nation state had a nice run but it’s coming to an end,” he said. “Globalisation made people think of themselves as global citizens, and that’s been furthered by air travel and cyberspace. [But] people look for meaning in the community.” In the past that community was the nation state but now, says Saffo, the centre cannot hold.
The growth of the European Union, devolution in the UK, David Cameron’s recent pledge that there would less government and more local autonomy under a Conservative administration, and the splits in the US states over gay marriage and healthcare all point towards an increasingly fractured future.
In a world increasingly facing problems that need global solutions, from financial catastrophe to climate change, the bodies that were once capable of imposing those solutions are cracking up. And technology is hastening their dissolution.
Conflict is inevitable. Take the looming environmental crisis. “The argument is shaping up to a monumental scrap between two communities: the druids and the engineers,” said Saffo.
“The druids say, ‘Look, the solution is we have to turn the clock back, go more lightly on the land’. The druids tend to be pessimists — everything dies.
“The engineers say the way out of this crisis is to engineer our way out. Engineers are by nature optimists. ‘Give me enough resources and I’ll take you to the moon.’ ”
In the UK, the fight is already on over genetically modified foods. Just last week the Royal Society warned that millions face starvation because of population growth and climate change.
Coming down firmly on the side of the engineers, the society said so-called “Frankenstein food” was essential if disaster were to be averted. Ranged against them are pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth, which called the report “dangerous”, and protesters who have destroyed fields of GM crops.
In the US, the war has taken on religious tones, with some Christians lobbying against stem-cell research as the work of the devil and likening it to Nazi experiments.
Saffo is not one to offer easy solutions. “Druid versus engineer is going to be the debate of the 21st century. I’m a sceptic of both camps. We can’t go back, it’s too late; and yet engineering is what got us into this trouble. There has to be a middle ground,” said Saffo.
Finding that middle ground is not going to be easy, especially as the landscape changes around us at an ever more alarming rate. But find it we must, warns Saffo, because all this new stuff is coming whether we like it or not.
“Hey, this is Silicon Valley,” he said, gesturing around him. “We don’t produce new products. We deliver revolutions.”
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