MULTIPLE FUTURES

A writer looking forward from 1900 might have anticipated rockets. He might have anticipated nuclear explosives. The nuclear balance of terror, one of the central facts of the second half of the century, required both. Through most of this book, I have taken futures one at a time. They will not come that way.

One interaction among technologies was discussed in Chapter 5. If cyberspace is private and realspace public, how much privacy we have depends on how much of our lives is lived in each. That in turn depends on another technology: virtual reality. In the limit of deep VR, everything important is happening in cyberspace, leaving the automated cameras of the transparent society very little to watch.

Another example appeared in Chapter 21. How large a role space plays in our lives over the next century depends on how expensive it is to get there. That, in turn, depends on the strength-to-weight ratio of the materials available to us. With sufficiently strong and light materials, it becomes possible to build a space elevator, drastically reducing the cost of getting off earth. Short of that, better materials make possible launch vehicles with a much higher payload and much lower costs. One way of getting very strong and light materials, such as single-molecule carbon fibers, is nanotechnology.

In some cases, one technology eliminates problems raised by another. Genetic testing makes genetic risks uninsurable.

A list of the half dozen most important figures in the early history of economics would have to include David Ricardo; it might well include Thomas Malthus and John Stuart Mill. A similar list for geology would include William Smith and James Hutton. For biology it would surely include Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel, for physics Isaac Newton.

Who were they? Malthus and Darwin were clergymen, Mendel a monk, Smith a mining engineer, Hutton a gentleman farmer, Mill a clerk and writer, Ricardo a retired stock market prodigy. Of the names I have listed, only Newton was a university professor – and by the time he became a professor he had already come up with both calculus and the theory of gravitation.

There were important intellectual figures in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries who were professional academics – Adam Smith, for example. But a large number, probably a majority, were amateurs. In the twentieth century, on the other hand, most of the major figures in all branches of scholarship have been professional academics. Most started their careers with a conventional course of university education, typically leading to a Ph.D. degree.

Why did things change? One possible answer is the enormous increase in knowledge. When fields were new, most scholars did not need access to vast libraries. There were not many people in the field, the rate of progress was not very rapid, so letters and occasional meetings provided adequate communication.

The previous chapter discussed changes in what we can do to ourselves and our descendants, and possible consequences. This chapter discusses changes in what we know – and possible consequences. More knowledge is, on the whole, a good thing – but there may be exceptions.

WISE FATHERS

Human mating patterns have varied a good deal across time and space, but long-term monogamy is far and away the most common. This pattern – male and female forming a mated pair and remaining together for an extended period of time – is uncommon in other mammalian species. It is, oddly enough, very common among birds, possibly because their offspring, like ours, require extended parental care. Swans and geese, for example, have long been known to mate for life.

Modern research has shown that the behavior of most varieties of mated birds is even closer to that of humans than we once supposed. As with humans, the norm is monogamy tempered by adultery. While a mated pair will raise successive families of chicks together, a significant fraction of those chicks – genetic testing suggests figures from 10 to 40% – are not the offspring of the male member of the pair. Similar experiments are harder to arrange with humans, but such work as has been done suggests that some significant percentage – estimates range from about 1 in 100 to 1 in 3 – of the children of married women cohabiting with their husbands are fathered by someone else.

In some ways the future has been a great disappointment. When I was first reading science fiction, space travel was almost a defining characteristic of the genre, interplanetary at the least, with luck interstellar. Other technologies are well ahead of schedule; computers are a great deal smaller than most authors expected and used for a much wider variety of everyday purposes, and genetic engineering of crops is already a reality. But serious use of space has been limited to near-Earth orbit – our backyard. Even scientific activity has not gotten humans past a very brief visit to the moon. We have sent a few small machines a little farther, and so far that is about it.

One possible explanation is that the slow rate of progress is due to the dominant role of governments, itself in part a result of the obvious military applications. Another is that getting into space was harder than writers thought. The problem with the latter explanation is that we have already done the hard part. The next steps, now that we have learned to get free of the terrible drag of Earth's gravity, should be much easier. Perhaps, after a brief pause for rest and refreshment, they will be.

VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM OF A WELL

In one of Poul Anderson's more improbable science fiction stories, a man and a crow successfully transport themselves from one asteroid to another in a spaceship powered by several kegs of beer.

A few years ago I attended an event where the guest speaker was a Cabinet member. In conversation afterwards, the subject of long-term petroleum supplies came up. He warned that at some point, perhaps a century or so in the future, someone would put his key in his car's ignition, turn it, and nothing would happen – because there would be no gasoline.

What shocked me was not his ignorance of the economics of depletable resources – if we ever run out of gasoline it will be a long, slow process of steadily rising prices, not a sudden surprise – but the astonishing conservatism of his view of the future. It was as if a similar official, 100 years earlier, had warned that by the year 2000 the streets would be so clogged with horse manure as to be impassable. I do not know what the world will be like a century hence. But it is not likely to be a place where the process of getting from here to there begins by putting a key in an ignition, turning it, and starting an internal combustion engine burning gasoline.

This book grew out of a seminar on future technologies that I taught for a number of years at the law school of Santa Clara University. Each Thursday we discussed a technology that I was willing to argue, at least for a week, could revolutionize the world.

The previous chapter dealt with the use of new technologies by criminals; this chapter deals with the other side of the picture. I begin by looking at ways in which new technologies can be used to enforce the law and some associated risks. I then go on – via a brief detour to the eighteenth century – to consider how technologies discussed in earlier chapters may affect not only how law is enforced but by whom.

HIGH-TECH CRIME CONTROL

Criminals are not the only ones who can use new technologies; cops can too. Insofar as enforcing law is a good thing, new technologies that make it easier are a good thing. But the ability to enforce the law is not an unmixed blessing – the easier it is to enforce laws, the easier it is to enforce bad laws.

There are two different ways in which our institutions can prevent governments from doing bad things. One is by making particular bad acts illegal. The other is by making them impossible. That distinction appeared back in Chapter 3, when I argued that unregulated encryption could serve as the twenty-first-century version of the Second Amendment – a way of limiting the ability of governments to control their citizens.

For a less exotic example, consider the Fourth Amendment's restrictions on searches – the requirement of a warrant issued upon showing of reasonable cause.

What I am and where in my body I am located is a very old puzzle. An early attempt to answer it by experiment is described in Jomsviking saga, written in the thirteenth century. After a battle, captured warriors are being executed. One of them suggests that the occasion provides the perfect opportunity to settle an ongoing argument about the location of consciousness. He will hold a small knife point down while the executioner cuts off his head with a sharp sword; as soon as his head is off, he will try to turn the knife point up. It takes a few seconds for a man to die, so if his consciousness is in his body he will succeed; if it is in his head, no longer attached to his body, it will fail. The experiment goes as proposed; the knife falls point down.

We still do not know with much confidence what consciousness is, but we know more about the subject than the Jomsvikings did. It seems clear that it is closely connected to the brain. A programmed computer acts more like a human mind than anything else whose working we understand. And we know enough about the mechanism of the brain to plausibly interpret it as an organic computer.

I pay for things in one of three different ways – credit card, check, or cash. The first two let me make large payments without having to carry large amounts of money. What are the advantages of the third?

One is that a seller does not have to know anything about me in order to accept cash. That makes money a better medium for transactions with strangers, especially strangers from far away. It also makes it a better medium for small transactions, since using cash avoids the fixed costs of checking up on someone to make sure that there is really money in his checking account or that his credit is good. It also means that money leaves no paper trail, which is useful not only for criminals but for anyone who wants to protect his privacy – an increasingly important issue in a world where data processing threatens to make every detail of our lives public.

The advantage of money is greater in cyberspace, since transactions with strangers, including strangers far away, are more likely on the Internet than in my realspace neighborhood. The disadvantage is less, since my ecash would be stored inside my computer, which is usually inside my house, and hence less vulnerable to theft than my wallet.

Despite its potential usefulness, there is as yet no equivalent of cash available online, although there have been unsuccessful attempts to create one and successful attempts to create something close.

New technologies change what we can do. Sometimes they make what we want to do easier. After writing a book with a word processor, one wonders how it was ever done without one. Sometimes they make what someone else is doing easier – and make it harder for us to prevent him from doing it. Enforcing copyright law became more difficult when photo typesetting made the cost of producing a pirated edition lower than the cost of the authorized edition it competed with, and more difficult again when inexpensive copying put the tools of piracy in the hands of any college professor in search of reading material for his students. As microphones and video cameras become smaller and cheaper, preventing other people from spying on me becomes harder.

The obvious response is to try to keep doing what we have been doing. If that is easier, good. If it is harder, too bad. The world must go on, the law must be enforced. Let justice be done, though the sky fall.

Obvious – and wrong. The laws we have, the ways we do things, are not handed down from heaven on tablets of stone. They are human contrivances, solutions to particular problems, ways of accomplishing particular ends. If technological change makes a law hard to enforce, the best solution is sometimes to stop enforcing it. There may be other ways of accomplishing the same end – including some enabled by the same technological change.

Technical letters are used for communicating scientific or engineering results that are limited in scope. The letters may describe a single experiment or investigation of which the results need to be rapidly communicated. Technical letters are a common form of communication for engineers or scientists in industry. Technical letters can also be used for undergraduate laboratory report writing in which a less formal presentation is appropriate. This chapter describes the organization and basic format of a technical letter. Two examples of letter reports are given at the end of the chapter.

Organization

Organization of the letter should begin with why the letter is being written, conclusions of the investigation, and what actions the recipient needs to address. This first paragraph is sometimes called an action summary. The body of the letter should support the conclusions and recommended actions. The letter can be organized into three levels of presentation. At the first level, the first paragraph and the figures provide the necessary information to understand the conclusions and recommendations of the investigation. Figure captions must be informative and summarize the findings presented in the figures. At this level, a supervisor can ascertain with minimal reading the major findings of the investigation. The body of the letter should provide greater depth. There should be a summarizing paragraph at the end of the letter. Appendices, where calculations, derivations, and special test procedures are presented, constitute a third portion. Information in the appendices should be supplemental and referenced in the text.

The ability to communicate clearly is the most important skill engineers and scientists can have. Their best work will be lost if it is not communicated effectively. In this chapter, elements of the technical style of writing are examined. Technical writing differs in presentation and tone from other styles of writing; these differences are described first. The most important elements of the technical writing style to be discussed are conciseness and unambiguity. The chapter ends with a discussion of proofreading and some helpful hints in developing technical writing skills.

Presentation and Tone

Technical communication differs from fiction in many ways. In mystery novels the reader is kept in suspense because the writer has hidden important clues that are explained at the end of the story to produce a surprise. In contrast, the readers of technical writing are given the important conclusions at the beginning, followed by evidence supporting those conclusions. The following example illustrates the difference. The simple question Do we have any mail today? can be answered by a man sitting on his porch in two ways.

He could say: “I got up out of my chair and sauntered out to the mailbox. I looked up before opening the box and saw the mailman going down the street past our house. When I opened the mailbox there was nothing in it, so I don't think we'll have any mail today.”