Outcomes

Advances in human knowledge should make life better. That's hard to measure. However, we can measure if human life gets longer (it does), healthier, richer (if not more rewarding), etc.

The rest of this post is philosophizing--feel free to skip. And in a previous post, I talk about the Outcomes Fallacy. But if you want thinking on the issue of human knowledge and outcomes, click to read more.

The human population has doubled in my lifetime. Despite this, the percentages of those who are starving, miserably poor, dying in the first five years of their life, dying while giving birth, living under brutal dictatorships, are illiterate and innumerate--all of these are going down. I think this good news is down to advances in human knowledge. (I'll put links onto each of these later.) The sad fact that so many still need to be brought under the umbrella of better living through better knowledge doesn't change the incredible improvements in living--in life--that advances in knowledge have brought us.

I almost facetiously said it couldn't be because human nature is getting better, and then I started to think that maybe advances in human knowledge, and improved access to human knowledge, might actually improve human nature. I might do some checking on this.

But the outcomes of human existence are measurably better for more than half the human race, and there are good prospects that these outcomes will be extended to large portions of those who don't have the chance of finding these good outcomes today.

• The outcome of improved knowledge in a knowledge economy is higher economic growth, which leads to a reduction in poverty. This is happening now.
• The outcome of advances in medical technology has been the flattening of the hurdles that each human must cross over to live a full lifespan--infant mortality, infectious diseases of childhood, dying in childbirth or battle, heart attack, stroke and cancer are all being addressed by more and better educated scientists--and we can see the results. Now we are devoting resources to the hurdles at the end of life, such as Alzheimer's--and who knows what chronic conditions will bedevil centenarians when that becomes the normal sum of our years?

But human knowledge has grown so quickly that very few are able to get a handle on what we know and how we use this knowledge. Despite the fact that Russia (quite recently) and China (5 years ago) instituded national strategies for pursuing nanotechnology, I'll wager that half the stuff I've found while writing this weblog has passed under their radar. It's just moving too quickly. In 2006 alone, one database of scientific information (Scirus) logged the publication of 7,810 journal articles and 1,668 patents relating to nanotechnology--that's a lot to keep up with. I don't think many do, whether Russian, Chinese, British or American.

This is further complicated by the fact that many of the major changes in the past 50 years are invisible. A century ago, the lighting and heating of houses was very visible, as well as their being equipped with refrigerators, washing machines and a car in front. A lot of the changes that are rocking our world don't look very dramatic. Nanotechnology, applications of genome and proteome research, computer science improvements--nothing looks different when things change in these fields.

So knowledge gets more obscure and esoteric, and its results less obvious. And this may have led to an attitude I've referred to elsewhere in this blog--a lazy assumption that knowledge has become driven by an external force with its own physical laws and a crazy momentum that is beyond human understanding, let alone control.

But if this blog has shown anything, it has shown that advances in human knowledge are the result of choices--choices on where to spend money, what to study at university, what projects to fund, whether public funds or private should be used for research and development, etc. We see that knowledge follows funding and is specific to sectors that become fashionable and and that advances in human knowledge slow down when these sectors go out of fashion.

The Western world has chosen in the past 50 years to advance human knowledge in certain areas, like nanotechnology, global warming, studying the genome, certain cancers, genetic modification of living organisms, etc. I think most of these choices were sound--but I don't know who made these choices.

I don't know if these sectors should be voted on--I come from a country that elected Richard Nixon twice--but I would like to know who made the decisions and how they were made. Because steps towards the advancement of knowledge in nanotechnology or global warming are steps away from improved understanding of other subjects.

Now, if we are ignoring possible improvements in dental technology for the sake of a better understanding and treatment of cancer, not many will object. But as research becomes more expensive, the stakes get higher, and I wonder if there's a roadmap.

A roadmap! I'd like to see one if it exists. I'd like to build one if it doesn't. I think further research into those who champion the Singularity might be helpful here. Do they know what we need to know to get to that magic point in human development?