Will future generations look back at our time with envy? That was the suggestion made in a recent article in The Economist, looking at how a world with falling populations might play out. The result, at least according to a paper by Stanford economist Charles Jones, is a decline in scientific and technological progress that will make the current period look like a golden age.
Is that really something we should be worrying about? Global populations already look like they will start falling in the next few decades. Some rich areas, especially Europe, Japan and maybe China are already starting to see populations decline.
Does that inevitably mean progress will slow? Fewer people mean fewer new ideas, at least according to Jones. Couple that with the suggestion made in a paper last year that new ideas are getting harder to find, and the outcome seems to be a rapid fall in the rate of idea generation.
Fewer new ideas, all else being equal, means less innovation and progress. That would have profound implications for the economic systems our societies are based on. We’ve grown used to the idea that technology is accelerating. Entire industries, from computing to the stock market, are built around this idea. If the acceleration ends, or even goes into reverse, all that might start falling down.
A closer inspection, however, reveals things are not quite so simple. Take first the suggestion that new ideas are getting harder to find. That is probably true. The easy ideas, the low-hanging apples if you will, are quickly found and limited in number. The harder ideas, the apples high in the tree, take more effort and time to pick.
There can be little doubt that science is getting harder. Each new step is more difficult to understand than the last. Newton’s theories of physics — which stretch from gravity to optics — can be taught in high school. Quantum Chromodynamics, a branch of quantum physics, takes years of study to even get started.
Why this is true — by the way — is not immediately clear to me. It’s not obvious why we need more and more advanced mathematics to understand more fundamental theories of physics. At some point, perhaps, we may find a deeper theory is completely beyond our comprehension. That, though, is a topic for another day.
The result, anyway, is that more and more researchers are required for each new breakthrough. Four centuries ago Isaac Newton, more or less alone, could make major contributions to several different areas of physics. Now it takes a team of thousands to uncover a single new particle.
This increasing difficulty seems to suggest that progress should already be slowing. Why isn’t it? Simply put, we are throwing more brainpower at the problem. In Newton’s day the number of people studying physics was tiny, only a few hundred in the world. Today we have millions of researchers, with more trained every year.
Part of this is down to the increasing population. There are roughly fifteen people alive now for every person living in 1687, the year Newton published his work. Crucially, the number of educated people devoted to research has grown even faster.
What’s more, as technology has advanced so has our ability to do research. Newton had to make do with paper and calculus. Today’s researchers have particle accelerators and supercomputers. Each new breakthrough helps to speed up progress towards the next one.
It’s fashionable to claim that this lies behind the recent technological acceleration. It probably doesn’t, at least not completely. New ideas seem to be getting harder faster than our tools are getting better. The number of people needed per breakthrough is increasing — and that’s despite the growing computer power available to them.
If more powerful tools could accelerate innovation, we’d expect the number of people needed for a breakthrough to be falling. If computers and particle accelerators are so good, then why do we need thousands of people to find a single particle? The opposite should be true — the more technology advances, the less people should be needed for each breakthrough.
Since that isn’t the case, the claim that computers alone will be able to advance technology looks dubious. True, the field of artificial intelligence is booming and might soon enable rapid breakthroughs. But if it is to result in accelerating growth, it will need to start replacing huge numbers of scientists. That doesn’t seem to be happening, at least not so far.
If artificial intelligence isn’t a sure-fire saviour, then what is? An obvious place to look is the still untapped human potential. Vast numbers of people lack proper education. As nations develop and more people train to become researchers, we can expect the fraction of the population devoted to science to keep rising for a while, even if overall populations start to fall.
That means we can sustain accelerating progress for a while. But whether we can transform that acceleration into something more permanent remains to be seen. Artificial intelligence may end up being the solution, a paradigm changer that once unlocked powers endless advancement. But equally, it may just represent one more incremental advance that fades in the face of ever harder theory.
Eventually declining populations must result in slowing progress. Take it to an extreme: if the population fell to zero, there would be no progress at all. But projecting that far into the future is foolish. We don’t know, and cannot know, what the future of science or society will look like. Better not, then, to worry too much about progress slowing down just yet.
NASA’s decision to select SpaceX to build a landing system for the Moon has been protested by two rivals. Both Blue Origin and Dynetics argue that NASA changed the rules of the selection process, thereby treating them unfairly. The source of the protest was the space agency’s decision to select only one company to develop a lander, instead of the promised two.
Though NASA say they will award contracts for actually landing on the Moon later, without financial support it will be difficult for either Blue Origin or Dynetics to develop and test a lander capable of doing so. This means, they argue, that SpaceX have effectively been locked in as a partner for years to come.
The spectacle of two of the richest men in the world, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, fighting over a few billion dollars in public funding is eye opening. Either of the two could reach the Moon, or even Mars, with a small fraction of their own fortunes.
Ingenuity, a small helicopter carried by the Perseverance Rover, made its first flights on Mars. Though the flights were short, each lasting no more than two minutes, they proved that flying in the thin Martian atmosphere is possible. Ingenuity has now been approved for an extended mission, which may see longer flights around Jezero crater.
So much reporting around health, science and space exploration is unrealistic, hyperbolic and misleading. These are complicated topics, and there are often no easy or straight forward answers. Instead what is needed is analysis, discussion and an exploration of the possible ways forward.
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