A Talk About the Future

This Thursday, March 14, 2013, I will be giving a talk at Vanier College in the auditorium (room A103) entitled "Robo Sapiens" at 2:30 pm.  The one hour presentation is about the reasonably near-term future of mankind: the next three decades.  It deals specifically with physiological enhancement by way of robotics and biomedical engineering as well as artificial intelligence and the technological singularity.

As most of my readers will not be in attendance, I will briefly discuss some of the content below.

In particular, I want to address the very notion of predicting the future.  Perhaps you have heard the term 'futurist' or 'futurologist' - such a designation befits a person whose predictions for the future are sought by industry, world leaders, and members of society.  It is a sweet gig: state what you think is going to happen in the world of technology, the economy, societies, and our civilization at large some time from now, and no one will fault you if you turn out to be wrong.  Who will bother to look it up?  Rather than dwell on the past, people will still wish for insight into the future.

What process does one use to predict the future anyway?  One usually examines historical trends, takes a close look at the current state of things and the directions in which they are currently headed, and then extrapolates forward.  The result is a guess, but an educated one.

Quantum Discomfort

Quantum physics has always been this mystical thing to me.  Throughout my years of academic studies in engineering, the word quantum may have been uttered by a professor, but it was never explored in any kind of depth.  Engineers are practical, and while quantum physics is fascinating, it is of little practical importance to most engineers at present.

A physics professor might say, "Classical physics is not theoretically sound, as it is only an approximation, and may only be accurately applied to things that do not move too fast and are not too small."  An engineering professor might then respond, "Most things are reasonably large and move reasonable slowly... In any case, any error less than 5% is good enough for me."

For nearly all engineers, the entire field of study may be ignored, and is.  For theoretical physicists on the other hand, it appears that there is not much outside quantum physics to ponder anymore.

In reality, for an object of reasonable size, the amount of error introduced by simply ignoring quantum aspects is negligible.  Still, this field of study is so fundamentally different from all of the science that came before it, that it is always categorized separately; that is, there is quantum physics, which centers around wave functions and probabilities, and then there is classical physics, which is everything else.

Quantum physics as a field of study was established in the mid-1920s with physicists such as Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Neils Bohr, and Werner Heisenberg.  The fundamental principle of quantum physics was discovered by Heisenberg, who showed that one could not be 100% certain of both the momentum and position of a given particle.  The law is known as the 'uncertainty principle', not to be confused with the 'what the heck is going on principle' commonly exemplified by certain physics students.  

Are we Just Bags of Chemicals?

About two decades ago, I was taking the train home with a friend who looked at me, and asked a very direct question.  He said, "Steve, am I just a bag of chemicals?"  This friend was at the start of his studies at Medical School, so it is a reasonable thing to wonder.  Actually, it is a reasonable thing for any one of us to wonder.  His question struck me so hard that it never really left my brain.

 What am I?  There are many ways to answer this philosophical question, but let us take a scientific approach.

The universe is composed of indivisible building blocks.  An electron is one example of such a building block, and physicists today seek to find other yet unknown examples of such particles.  All matter in the universe is composed of atoms, which are composed of the aforementioned subatomic particles.  The over one hundred known elements (kinds of atoms) all originate in stars, where extremely high energy collisions occur between atoms.  These collisions cause atoms to fuse together to form bigger ones in a nuclear process known as fusion. 

Ninety nine percent of the fusion reactions in stars involve hydrogen and helium.  But, if not for the remaining 1% of collisions, which fill in the periodic table, there would of course be no carbon, and then, no organic matter, and no life.  Life is an unlikely and bewildering occurrence in so many ways.

Chemicals are combinations of atoms that have bonded together.  While there are only about one hundred known elements, there are millions of known chemicals, each with specific properties.

A person is an organism, which is composed of many systems, which are collections of organs, made up of tissues, which consist of cells.  The biological building blocks of a person are cells.  While cells are living matter, they are matter just the same; cells are made up of the atoms, whose origins lie not in the heavens, but in the stars.  I can thus state with no ounce of trepidation that I am composed entirely of atoms that were once upon a time within a star.  What a privilege it is to be alive at a time in history when I get to know that.