A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century by Jacques Attali

Author:Jacques Attali [Attali, Jacques]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-10-09T04:00:00+00:00

Stagnating Technology

Two technological advances have so far guaranteed the expansion of the new form, one of them permitting continuous increase in the storage capacity of information through microprocessors, and the other the storage of energy by batteries. By 2030, these two advances will have reached their limits. Moore’s law (doubling microprocessor capacities every eighteen months) will have reached the end of the road, and around the same time the absolute limit of storage capacity for lithium batteries will be attained.

In other fields, linear innovations also seem to be slowing down. The automobile industry is stagnating, as is the home equipment industry. The cell phone and the Internet have made scarcely any progress for fifteen years; genetics is marking time; new drugs have not made their appearance; agriculture has made very little progress; new forms of energy have still to appear. Elsewhere, much false progress is heralded; personal computers are unnecessarily powerful, and cars too complex. In 2006 a laptop was ten times more powerful and ten times more expensive than those that could satisfy consumer needs today.

To meet our needs in energy, water, food, and clothing products, means of transport and communication, and to eliminate the wastes of a rapidly growing population, we must therefore solve scientific problems today beyond resolution by perfecting industrially effective logistical systems that are financially practicable and socially acceptable.

First of all, major progress should be made in the miniaturization of a great many processes, no longer by packing more and more energy into ever-shrinking spaces but by utilizing the infinitely small, living or not, as a machine. In particular, we must succeed in modifying sowing seasons to make agriculture less thirsty for water, fertilizers, and energy, and organize the storage of gaseous hydrogen in order to manufacture — in economically reasonable conditions — hydrogen under high pressure, and then hybrid motors continually producing hydrogen under high pressure via electrolysis. This is the goal of future technologies, both biotechnologies and nanotechnologies. But their validity, their practicability, their safety, and their political and social acceptability will not really be achieved until 2025 at the earliest.

What is more, to comply with the injunctions of the financial markets, the research laboratories of private enterprises will circulate their results more rarely and will take fewer and fewer risks. More generally, industrial businesses will be increasingly reluctant to take risks and invest in industry, preferring the benefits of financial speculation to those — more hazardous — of technique.

And finally, one scarcity seems very difficult to overcome: time.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.