Andrei Cornea: The world is aging

We often have the feeling that we, the people of these times, are caught in an irrepressible flight forward, which at times resembles a scramble. Just when we manage to familiarize ourselves with one technology, it seems outdated; we struggle to assimilate the one that follows, and when we think we have succeeded, the horizon of novelty has receded again, and the flight forward must be resumed. It seems that humanity is not moving forward, but rather running, even sprinting at a speed that increasingly takes our breath away. When we thought we had become modern, postmodernity challenged us, but it only stayed with us for a short while and bore a post-postmodernity, which, as it was settling in, generated a successor and so on. We are in post-capitalism, post-history, post-truth; are we also in post-humanity? And if we, humans, are perhaps at the end of our powers, AI takes the baton: it seems that soon robots will be able to generate better versions of themselves; the process being recursive, some believe, will advance in analytical and synthetic capabilities, in short, in knowledge, to unimaginable levels. Compounded with our machines, we will become gods, or we will be discarded by them as superfluous, or perhaps some of us will survive in special reserves for primitive species on the verge of extinction...

On the other hand, I observe something curious (and I am not the only one, of course): the most impressive technologies of the present – if we neglect numerous improvements and the force of quantity and extension – are, in essence, quite old. A symbolic case is that of the Artemis program, through which NASA wants to put humans back on the Moon, fifty years after the abandonment of the Apollo program. There is no revolution in space travel technologies: the same liquid fuel engines, the same type of multi-stage rockets, the same type of space capsules, of course with the necessary improvements, but nothing fundamental. The ionic, photonic, or other types of spacecraft that were talked about in my youth have remained in the pages of science fiction. In contrast, the mundane satellites have become an essential component of our civilization, but they are far from a technological revolution. The same goes for other fields: the famous nuclear fusion, which would "cleanly" and entirely solve the energy problem, remains a desideratum, although for decades we have been hearing news about small progress in this field. Too small...

And in other cases, looking a bit more closely, we discover everywhere relatively old technologies (of several decades, at least), extremely refined and quantitatively amplified, which have conquered us through quantity and extension: the Internet, solar batteries, computers, new materials, etc. I believe that there has been somewhat more fundamental progress in biotechnologies, but that is also because they had lagged far behind. Look around you: the automobile is a 150-year-old invention, refrigerators, televisions, air conditioning units, all date back many decades. Even the mobile phone existed long before 1990. The first commercial copier appeared in 1959. The transistor hit the market in 1948. Plastics also date back to the middle of the last century, antibiotics – also from then or even earlier (1928); vaccines (which some reject with indignation) date back to the end of the 18th century. To be fair, they have been greatly improved and diversified recently, but the brilliant idea behind them is old.

But perhaps there is something important to note here: fundamental knowledge, which underpins technologies, has remained, in essential fields, at the level reached in the middle of the 20th century. We have not advanced much further in fundamental knowledge (and especially at a truly deeper level) than the sacred monsters of modern physics – Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrödinger, Pauli, Feynman, and still some others. The integration of gravity theory and quantum physics (the generalized field theory that Stephen Hawking dreamed of or the "theory of Everything") has not succeeded, the "string theory" remains a hypothesis, the problem of "dark matter" remains unresolved, as does that of "dark energy" – that is, the cause that produces the acceleration of the Universe's expansion. We still do not know why life appeared on Earth and, consequently, we do not know if life is a current emergent phenomenon in the Universe or a huge exception, and even more so intelligent life. If we were to speak in the terms of Thomas S. Kuhn, we have a lot of "normal science," with an enormous number of improvements, but we seem to lack "revolutionary science." A recent hypothesis suggests that this is related to the increase in statistics, in recent decades, of the average age of scientists who start research after their doctorate and, in general, with the tendency for those who engage in science and technologies to age. Young people are revolutionary in thought as well as in everything else, while the older ones tend to be conservative. A community, a society whose average age is increasing becomes more fixed in ideas, less permeable to risky adventures – in life, in thought, in meaning.

We could therefore live off the knowledge and innovation dividends that the immense capital of genius from humanity's past still produces. We accelerate, as we are still pushed from behind by predecessors. But, as in more and more countries and regions (including in China and now also in India) the young population is decreasing proportionally, the engine itself will slow down. In more and more regions of the globe, the population is aging. As for robots, I doubt that they, mere imitators of ours in good and bad, can do anything other than continuously perfect everything that is about quantity, effort, coverage, speed, but they will not break the remaining mysteries of the Universe.

For three hundred years we have believed that progress is inevitable, always faster and has no end. We might be mistaken and there may be limits – either given by nature in general, or by the human condition – just as it could be just a passing stage. We have already seen that, regarding society and its administration, we cannot really progress: old conflicts, traditional ruptures return and often overwhelm us. Beyond traditional political-social and economic systems, we have not invented anything better or more efficient. History, which keeps us prisoners, thwarts our efforts to control it "scientifically." Utopias have crumbled one by one. In arts and philosophy, we increasingly live off the capital of past miracles. Here we are now that even in essential knowledge we have slowed our advance: we take shorter steps, by older people. Perhaps, indeed, the acceleration of civilization is just an epiphenomenon of a determined historical moment. Knowledge, societies, populations, in fact, are aging. Mundus senescit.

https://www.dilema.ro/situatiunea/mundus-senescit