I Am Not an Optimist, but I believe in Progress
While looking back upon the year 2020, it has been a terrible year for everyone. However, there have still been some impressive advancements despite the hardships of this year.
For one, this year SpaceX has launched their first astronaut crew into space with the Dragon rocket. Just earlier this month SpaceX has also launched astronauts to the International Space Station. These are examples of the first time a non-government or a private company has sent people into space. In terms of space innovation, this is a huge step forward to one of the major goals of humanity – which is becoming a multi-planetary civilisation. One of SpaceX’s major goals is to get a colony on Mars, the fabled red planet next door.
Another example of progress is the technological advancements on the general scales made in a short time. If one asked people a year ago if they would see entire universities, jobs, and businesses go online, there would probably have rather large doubts about this. Yet, a year into the future almost exactly just that has happened. As a result, significant technological progress was made with video conferencing and online teaching.
Even for the engines, it has been a good year. After watching the Computer Chess Championship in November, the strength of the engines due to ideas of neural nets has made jumps in the Elo ratings of the engines in a short time. A little over a year ago, just before Google DeepMind’s AlphaZero, the top chess engine Stockfish or “The Fish” for short had an Elo rating of about 3400. For comparison, the top-rated human player Magnus Carlsen has an Elo of about 2860. Based on the previous rates of improvements in the rating of the engines, a 4000 Elo rated engine looked very far in the future. After AlphaZero brought along neural nets, the top engines of now have gotten ratings of 3800 Elo in a little under a year! Years of expected performance happening in the span of months. Back then I kept trying to imagine 4000 rated Elo machines, simply because they felt so out of reach, but now it is not far in the horizon.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has brought a lot of grief and un-needed stress, but one can argue that advancements in medicine have also been made. I was not expecting to see any vaccines until at least May or June of 2021, based on similar pandemics; already, due to intensive research, some places in the world might be getting a decent vaccination by early 2021. Yet again surprising progress being made where some did not expect. Although these new vaccines will get to some places in 2021 people should still practice all the safety measures. I do not think the pandemic will start to fully resolve until 2022, and it is better to prepare for worst-case scenarios.
All these examples bring me to my final points. I do not see the future very optimistically; I can already see worse problems on the horizon for humanity. Some of these future problems are now just starting to present serious threats of extinction. Global warming is one such problem that is apparent. The energy crisis is another. Despite these grim realities of the future, I can also see many potential areas of innovation that will help humanity. For example, nuclear fusion looks like a promising solution to the energy crisis, and it is one of my main motivations for studying physics. A large number of problems can be solved by looking backwards in history, but some problems can only be solved by looking forwards. Simply trying to imagine how our future civilisations have already solved our problems can provide direction and insight into how to approach the problem. Though there are things beyond the imagination of any of us now. Imagine trying to explain aircraft to people in ancient Rome. Similarly, there will be technology that is far outside of our sight right now. So, I do expect worse problems to arise, but I also am expecting unimaginable innovations to follow in response. This is not optimism but rather, futurism.
I spend most of my time trying to imagine such future innovations and it is what dominates my thinking. Hence, the “futurist” written beside my name. I think it would be helpful to adopt a futurist view rather than an optimistic view. In the optimistic view, one imagines the good and pleasant, the futurist imagines the unknown and unknowable. One will see the problems and solutions and the other will remain blind to them.
N. Monk, Philosopher and Futurist
