Статьи 5 семестр / _The uncertainties of technological innovation 2

tals and purify Pharmaceuticals without imperfections caused by gravity. Yet the costs associated with spaceflight remain high, which means that building these factories in space and lofting raw materials to them would be neither easy nor in­expensive. Moreover, improvements in competing ground-based technologies are continuing to eat away at the justifi­cation for building the zero-gravity facilities.

Government policies and decisions can also influence the development of new technologies. Yawn-inducing federal de­cisions about standards for electronic devices and the avail­ability of the broadcast spectrum for commercial use indi­rectly dictate the rate and results of electronic device devel­opment. International disputes about who owns the mineral rights to the seafloor sapped the incentive that many na­tions and corporations had to invest in undersea mining technologies. Competing industrial standards can also stymie progress-witness the wrangles that froze work on high-definition television.

And sometimes the worth of one technology does not really become clear until other small but crucial in­ventions and discoveries put them in perspective. Personal computers looked like mere curiosities for hob­byists for many years; not until Dan Bricklin and Mitchell Ka-por invented the first spreadsheet programs did personal computers stand out as useful business tools. CD-ROMs did not start to become common accessories of PCs until the huge size of some programs, particularly reference works and interactive games, made the optical disks convenient al­ternatives to cheaper but less capacious floppies.

In short, the abstract quality of an innovation matters not at all. Build a better mousetrap, and the world may beat a path to your door—if it doesn't build a better mouse instead, or tie up your gadget in environmental-impact and animal-cruelty regulations.

Of course, many technologies do succeed wildly beyond anyone's dreams. Transistors, for instance, were at first seen merely as devices for amplifying radio signals and later as sturdier replacements for vacuum tubes. Ho-hum. Yet their solid-state nature also meant they could be mass-produced and miniaturized in ways that vacuum tubes could not, and their reliability meant that larger devices incorporating great­er numbers of components would be feasible. (Building the equivalent of a modern computer with vacuum tube switch­es instead of transistors would be impossible. Not only would its size make it too slow, the tens of millions of rubes would break down so frequently that the machine would be permanently on the fritz.)

Of those advantages, the microelectronic revolution was born. Similar Horatio Alger stories can be told for lasers, fiber optics, plastics, piezoelectric crystals and other linchpins of the modern world. In fact, it is tempting to think that most great innovations are unforeseen, if not unforeseeable. As computer scientists Whitfield Diffle and John McCarthy re­minded panelists this past spring at a public discussion on the future hosted by scientific american, "A technology-of-the-20th-century symposium held in 1895 might not have mentioned airplanes, radio, antibiotics, nuclear energy, elec­tronics, computers or space exploration." '< Given the pitfalls of prognostication, why would scientif­ic american dare to venture an issue on key technologies of the 21st century? First, technology and the future have al­ways been the province of this magazine. When scientific

american was founded 150 years ago, the industrial revolu­tion was literally still gathering steam. Those were the days before the birth of Edison, before Darwin's On the Origin of the Species, before the germ theory of disease, before the in­vention of cheap steel, before the discovery of x-rays, before Mendel's laws of genetics and Maxwell's equations of elec-tromagnetism. This magazine has had the privilege of re­porting on all the major technological advances since that time (see pages 12-17 for examples). We could think of no more fitting way to celebrate our own birthday than by tak­ing a peek ahead.

Second, to paraphrase Valery, the future is now not even when it used to be. The new century—make that the new mil­lennium—begins in less than five years (six for the calendri-cal purists). The next few decades will be when the technolo­gies that now exist and look most promising either flourish or wither on the vine.

In selecting technologies to include in this issue, we decided to forsake the purely fabulous and concentrate on those that seemed most likely to have strong, steady, enduring effects on day-to-day life. What, some readers may exclaim, no faster-than-light star-ships? Immortality pills? U-Clone-'Em personal duplication kits? Sorry, but no, not here. In the words of that famous or­acle and child's toy the Magic 8 Ball: "Reply hazy, try again." Naturally, this issue makes no pretense of being an ex­haustive list of all the technologies that will contribute pow­erfully to the years ahead. Any attempt to make it one would have sacrificed useful detail for nominal thoroughness. Our more modest intention is only to convey the excitement and real rate of substantive progress in many pivotal fields.

The truth is that as technologies pile on technologies at an uneven pace, it becomes impossible to predict precisely what patterns will emerge. Can anyone today truly foresee what the world will be like if, for example, genetic engineering matures rapidly to its full potential? If organisms can be tai­lored to serve any function (even becoming living space­ships, as Freeman J. Dyson seems to hint in his article), can anyone guess what a 21st-century factory will look like?

New technologies also pose moral dilemmas, economic challenges, personal and social crises. For example, after the Human Genome Project is completed in a decade or so, the genetic foundations of any biological question will become transparent to investigation. The controversial genetic as­pects of intelligence, violence and other complex traits will then be available for direct scrutiny—and, conceivably, ma­nipulation. How much will that transform the basis and practice of medicine, law and government? So in addition to articles on the nuts and bolts of technological development, readers will find here more essayistic commentaries that meditate on the consequences (both good and bad) of the work in progress.

Perceptive readers will also note that some of these au­thors implicitly or explicitly disagree with one another; they do not share a consensus on tomorrow. It is precisely out of the tensions between differing predictions that the real fu­ture will pull itself together. Check back with scientific american in a century or so to evaluate our technology scorecard. We fully intend to be here—and who is to say that you won't be, too?

JOHNRENNIE is editor in chief of Scientific American.

58 scientific american September 1995