It's Not Time To Worry Yet

~ Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

Clematis 2013 by Katinka Matson

Every year, the online magazine Edge - the so-called smartest website in the world - asks top scientists, technologists, writers, and academics to weigh in on a single question. This year, that question was: "Tell us something that worries you (for scientific reasons), but doesn't seem to be on the popular radar yet — and why it should be."

Edge's mission statement is:

To arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.

Previous questions put to the experts and published online have included: What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?, What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?, How is the Internet changing the way you think?, What have you changed your mind about and why?, What is your dangerous idea?, and What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?

The following blog is totally subjective. Anyone who reads this could invest the time if they wanted to, to read the entire book-length article and come up with their own selection of quotes. Also, I am not being completely fair to the respondents, because to a certain extent I am editing their thoughts to fit my parameters. But that's okay, and you and they both can thank me (or sue me) later.

This year's respondents include former presidents of the Royal Society, Nobel prize-winners, famous SF writers, and a compendium of top theoretical physicists, psychologists, and biologists. There are 150 considered responses that worry the planet's biggest brains. 

We worry because we are built to anticipate the future. Nothing can stop us from worrying, but science can teach us how to worry better, and when to stop worrying.

Even with all this brainpower, the number one answer was, "That we worry too much." I have rejected all of these out of hand.

The remaining answers are a hodgepodge of concerns that science and technology will replace us, destroy us, save us, should save us but won't, should destroy us but won't, that the Internet will destroy us, that the Internet will save us, that the Internet should save us but won't, and that the Internet should destroy us but won't.

But certainly with all these great minds working overtime and waxing philosophic, there must be some true gems of wisdom, and those are the ones we will explore. That being said, most of the responses I read were so esoteric as to be incomprehensible. But for those who wish to verify this for themselves, the complete transcript can be found at: http://www.edge.org/responses/q2013

Be forewarned - this is a VERY long blog. I don't realistically expect that many people will read it all the way through (perhaps my grandson in sixteen years will get a term paper out of it), but it is my sincere hope that you will devote the effort to read to the end, because it is worth it. For some of the responses, I have quoted only a sentence or paragraph, for others I have quoted whole blocks that I felt were important to the context of this discussion.

Additionally, if any of these insights appeal to you, I encourage you to pursue your own line of inquiry. Without exception, all the respondents are published authors in their respective fields. For anyone who is TRULY interested in a specific topic or academic, just Google them for titles.

Even with the necessary editing, I have endeavored to allow the participants to be clever where they are clever, any funny where they are funny.

[Lastly, the responses appear here in the order they appear in Edge, except for the final quote, which I deliberately chose to end this blog.]

THE 2013 EDGE QUESTION: "WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?"

Geoffrey Miller, evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico

The BGI Cognitive Genomics Project would allow all Chinese couples to maximize the intelligence of their offspring by selecting among their own fertilized eggs for the one or two that include the highest likelihood of the highest intelligence. This method might allow IQ within every Chinese family to increase by 5 to 15 IQ points per generation. After a couple of generations, it would be game over for Western global competitiveness.

Dan Sperber, social and cognitive scientist, CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris

The ever-accelerating current scientific and technological revolution results in a flow of problems and opportunities that presents unprecedented cognitive and decisional challenges. Our capacity to anticipate these problems and opportunities is swamped by their number, novelty, speed of arrival, and complexity.

Martin Rees, former president of the Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Master, Trinity College

Much has been written about possible ecological shocks triggered by the collective impact of a growing and more demanding world population on the biosphere, and about the social and political tensions stemming from scarcity of resources or climate change. But even more worrying are the downsides of powerful new technologies: cyber-, bio-, and nano-. We're entering an era when a few individuals could, via error or terror, trigger a societal breakdown with such extreme suddenness that palliative government actions would be overwhelmed.

Barbara Strauch, Science Editor, The New York Times

So what we have is a high interest and a lot of misinformation floating around. And we have fewer and fewer places that provide real information to a general audience that is understandable, at least by those of us who do not yet have our doctorates in astrophysics. The disconnect is what we should all be worried about.

John Tooby, founder of the field of Evolutionary Psychology; Co-director, Center for Evolutionary Psychology; Professor of Anthropology, UC Santa Barbara

We are menaced by gamma ray bursts (that scrub major regions of their galaxies free of life); nearby supernovae; asteroids and cometary impacts (which strike Jupiter every year or two); Yellowstone-like supereruptions (the Toba supereruption was a near extinction-event for humans), civilization-collapsing coronal mass ejections (which would take down the electrical grids and electronics underlying technological civilization in a way that they couldn't recover from, since their repair requires electricity supplied by the grid; this is just one example of the more general danger posed by the complex, fragile interdependence inherent in our current technology); and many other phenomena including those unknown to us. Here is one that no one talks about: The average G-type star shows a variability in energy output of around 4%. Our sun is a typical G-type star, yet its observed variability in our brief historical sample is only 1/40th of this. When or if the Sun returns to more typical variation in energy output, this will dwarf any other climate concerns.

David Gelernter, computer scientist, Yale University; chief scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies

Gradually, as the time invested by the average writer and the average reader in the average sentence falls, society's ability to communicate in writing decays. And this threat to our capacity to read and write is a slow-motion body-blow to science, scholarship, the arts — to nearly everything - in fact, that is distinctively human, that muskrats and dolphins can't do just as well or better.

Brian Eno, artist, composer, recording artist, recording producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon

Whatever the reasons for our quiescence, politics is still being done  — just not by us. It's politics that gave us Iraq and Afghanistan and a few hundred thousand casualties. It's politics that's bleeding the poorer nations for the debts of their former dictators. It's politics that allows special interests to run the country. It's politics that helped the banks wreck the economy. It's politics that prohibits gay marriage and stem cell research but nurtures Gaza and Guantanamo.

W. Daniel Hillis, physicist, computer scientist, Chairman of Applied Minds, Inc.

Search engines have long been judges of what is important; now they are also arbiters of the truth. Different search engines, or different collections of knowledge, may evolve to serve different constituencies - one for mainland China, another for Taiwan; one for the liberals, another for the conservatives. Or, more optimistically, search engines may evolve new ways to introduce us to unfamiliar points of view, challenging us to new perspectives. Either way, their invisible judgments will frame our awareness.

David M. Buss, Professor of Psychology, University of Texas at Austin

Sexual deception, the difficulties of attracting viable marriage partners, intimate partner violence, infidelity, mate poaching, divorce, and post-breakup stalking — these diverse phenomena are all connected by a common causal element: an unrelenting shortage of valuable mates. The dearth of desirable mates is something we should worry about, for it lies behind much human treachery and brutality.

The competition to attract the most desirable mates is ferocious. Consequently, those most valuable are perpetually in short supply compared to the many who desire them. People who are themselves high in mate value succeed in attracting the most desirable partners. In the crude informal American metric, the 9s and 10s pair off with other 9s and 10s. And with decreasing value from the 8s to the 1s, people must lower their mating sights commensurately. Failure to do so produces a higher probability of rejection and psychological anguish.

David Rowan, Editor, Wired UK

Absolute power is accruing to a small number of data-superminers whose influence is matched only by their lack of accountability. Your identity is increasingly what the data oligopolists say it is: credit agencies, employers, prospective dates, even the US National Security Agency have a fixed view of you based on your online datastream as channeled via search engines, social networks and "influence" scoring sites, however inaccurate or outdated the results. And good luck trying to correct the errors or false impressions that are damaging your prospects: as disenfranchised users of services such as Instagram and Facebook have increasingly come to realize, it's up to them, not you, how your personal data shall be used.

Nicholas G. Carr, author

If we assume that networks will continue to get faster — a pretty safe bet — then we can also conclude that we'll become more and more impatient, more and more intolerant of even microseconds of delay between action and response. As a result, we'll be less likely to experience anything that requires us to wait, that doesn't provide us with instant gratification.

That has cultural as well as personal consequences. The greatest of human works — in art, science, politics — tend to take time and patience both to create and to appreciate. The deepest experiences can't be measured in fractions of seconds.

Kevin Kelly, Editor at Large - Wired

We've all seen the official graph of expected human population growth. A steady rising curve swells past us now at 6 billion and peaks out about 2050. Currently UN demographers predict 9.2 billion at the top. 

But curiously, the charts never show what happens on the other side of the peak. The second half is so often missing that no one even asks for it any longer. It may be because it is pretty scary news. The untold story of the hidden half of the chart is that it projects a steady downward plunge toward fewer and fewer people on the planet each year — and no agreement on how close to zero it can go.

Our global population is aging. The moment of peak youth on this planet was in 1972. Ever since then the average age on Earth has been getting older each year, and there is no end in sight for the aging of the world for the next several hundred years! The world will need the young to work and pay for medical care of the previous generation, but the young will be in short supply.

Andrian Kreye, Editor The Feuilleton (Arts and Essays) of the German Daily Newspaper - Munich

Take a great Rock or Soul song or concert. In the perfect case there will be an exhilarating opening, after which the rhythm will slow down below the speed of a heartbeat. If the drumming and the groove are convincing, the human pulse will adapt. Step by step the music will accelerate as the rhythms speed up past the regular heartbeat. Lighting, movement and volume will help to create a state of ecstasy. Those tricks are borrowed from faiths like Voodoo or Baptism. Ever wonder why U2 concerts are always experiences of an ecstatic event? They openly borrow from the traditions of Catholicism.

Kate Jeffery, Professor of Behavioural Neuroscience; Head, Dept. of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences, University College, London

Every generation our species distills the best of itself, packages it up and passes it on, shedding the dross and creating a fresher, newer, shinier generation. We have been doing this now for four billion years, and in doing so have transmogrified from unicellular microorganisms that do little more than cling to rocks and photosynthesize, to creatures of boundless energy and imagination who write poetry, make music, love each other and work hard to decipher the secrets of themselves and their universe.

And then they die.

The prolonging of the human lifespan is often lauded in the media but it is almost never questioned. Nobody seems to doubt that we should push forward with aging research, identify those genes, tinker with them, make them work for us. For nobody wants to die, and so we all want this research to succeed. We want it for ourselves, and our families. We want ourselves and our loved ones to live as long as possible — forever - if we can.

But is it the best thing for our species? Have four billion years of evolution been wrong? We are not Antarctic sponges or blue-green algae — we die for a reason. We die so that our youth — those better versions of ourselves — can flourish. We should worry about the loss of death.

Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran, Colombian philosopher

It is a common idea that crime, as in movies, is about bad guys confronting good guys. However, data shows that a gray area of massive collaboration and co-optation between good and bad guys is constantly forming: subversive and counter-subversive groups, public servants, politicians, candidates, and different private agents working together to define the rules of societies, to shape institutions according to their partial and criminal interests.

Civil and penal laws are at the base of everyday life; what we think and how we behave result of interactions between our brain and the codes, rules and institutions around us. When those codes and institutions are based on criminal interests, the social and cultural references of right and wrong change. Then we obtain societies in which illegality is the norm. The result is a vicious circle that strengthens criminal networks that operate across different countries; networks involved in massive corruption, mass murder, human trafficking, kidnapping, extortion and cruel violence.

Helen Fisher, biological anthropologist, Rutgers University

Men fall in love faster, perhaps because they are more visual. Men experience love at first sight more regularly. Indeed, men are just as physiologically passionate. When my colleagues and I have scanned men's brains (using MRI), we have found that they show just as much activity as women in neural regions linked with feelings of intense romantic love. Interestingly, in the 2011 sample, I also found that when men fall in love, they are faster to introduce their new partner to friends and parents, more eager to kiss in public, and want to "live together" sooner. Then, when they are settled in, men have more intimate conversations with their wives than women do with their husbands — because women have many of their intimate conversations with their girlfriends. Last, men are just as likely to believe you can stay married to the same person forever (76% of both sexes). And other data show that after a break up, men are 2.5 times more likely to kill themselves.

Jessica L. Tracy, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of British Columbia

Hubristic pride is distinct from the more triumphant and confident authentic pride felt in well-earned achievements. While authentic pride motivates hard work, persistence, and empathic concern for others, hubristic pride motivates hostility, aggression, intimidation, and prejudice. And this makes sense, because feeling hubristically proud does not mean feeling genuinely good about oneself; it is not a true sense of self-worth. Instead, hubristic pride involves inflated, inauthentic, and superficial feelings of grandiosity, which are used strategically and defensively to compensate for deep-seated, often unconscious, insecurities. People who frequently feel hubristic pride are narcissistic, but have low self-esteem and a proneness to shame. 

Their arrogance is their way of coping with, and keeping hidden, their partially suppressed self-doubts. And, because any kind of pride feels so much better than shame, those who are prone to feeling hubristic pride seek to maintain it at any cost. This means constantly finding new ways of self-promoting, self-enhancing, and derogating others. Like a drug, hubristic pride makes getting ahead feel essential, as it is the only way to keep those insecurities at bay.

But the insecurities still occasionally bubble to the surface of awareness, reminding the hubristically pride-prone that they are not good enough, smart enough, or fast enough, and leaving them with no option but to go beyond what they can achieve on their own. They use force, aggression, lying, and cheating to maintain the power and pride they have come to depend on. And, as a side effect, hubristic pride makes them feel invincible, convincing them that they can get away with their abhorrent behaviors.

Haim Harari, physicist; former President, Weizmann Institute of Science

Today's world introduces us to energy issues, new media, genetic manipulations, pandemic flu, water problems, weapons of mass destruction, financial derivatives, global warming, new medical diagnostics, cyber wars, intellectual property, stem cells, and numerous other issues that cannot be tackled by people lacking a minimal ability to comprehend scientific arguments, accompanied by simple quantitative considerations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of senior decision makers in most democracies do not possess these rudimentary abilities, leading to gross errors of judgment and historic mistakes which will impact many generations. We need scientifically trained political decision makers.

Sam Harris, neuroscientist; Chairman, Project Reason

So he joins a gang. In order to remain a member in good standing, however, he must be willing to defend other gang members, no matter how sociopathic their behavior. He also discovers that he must be willing to use violence at the tiniest provocation — returning a verbal insult with a stabbing, for instance — or risk acquiring a reputation as someone who can be assaulted at will. To fail to respond to the first sign of disrespect with overwhelming force, is to run an intolerable risk of further abuse. Thus, the young man begins behaving in precisely those ways that make every maximum security prison a hell on earth. He also adds further time to his sentence by committing serious crimes behind bars.

Lee Smolin, physicist, Perimeter Institute

One response is the 'many worlds' interpretation which claims that reality is vastly bigger than the world we observe and contains an infinitude of histories, one for every sequence of outcomes for which quantum mechanics predicts probabilities. The world we experience is only one of these histories.

I do not believe in this vast expansion of reality. I believe there is only one real world in which there are definite outcomes of experiments, in which only one history is realized of the many possible.

P. Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry; member of the Duke Institute of Brain Sciences

Today, somewhere around 40 million Americans are thought to be suffering from a mental illness. In 1975, only about 25% of psychiatric patients received a prescription but today almost 100% do and many receive multiple drugs. The use of these drugs has spread so rapidly that levels of common antidepressants, like Prozac, have been detected in the US public water supply.

Andrew Lih, Associate Professor of Journalism, Annenberg School for Journalism

Users of social media content systems still have sole copyright of their content, though the terms of service users agree to is fairly typical: "You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, reproduce, process, adapt, modify, publish, transmit, display and distribute such Content in any and all media or distribution methods (now known or later developed)."

Eric R. Weinstein, mathematician and economist; Managing Director of Thiel Capital

Within the same century, we have unlocked the twin nuclei of both cell and atom and created the conditions for synthetic biological and even digital life with computer programs that can spawn with both descent and variation on which selection can now act. We are in genuinely novel territory which we have little reason to think we can control. Surviving our newfound god-like powers will require modes that lie well outside expertise, excellence, and mastery.

Arianna Huffington, Chair, President, Editor-In-Chief, The Huffington Post Media Group; nationally syndicated columnist

One of the things that worries me the most is the growing incidence of stress in our society. Over the last 30 years, self-reported stress levels have gone up 25 percent for men and 18 percent for women. Stress is a big contributor to the increase of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. So it's a much bigger problem than most people realize, but thankfully there does seem to be a growing awareness of the destructive power and cost of stress — in terms of both dollars and lives. Stress wreaks havoc not just on our relationships, our careers and our happiness, but also on our health. On the collective level, the price we're paying is staggering — stress costs American businesses an estimated $300 billion a year, according to the World Health Organization. This is partly because stress was also the most common reason for long-term health-related absence in a survey conducted by CIPD, the world's largest human resources association. 

Xeni Jardin, tech culture journalist; partner, contributor, co-editor, Boing Boing; executive producer, host, Boing Boing Video

According to the National Cancer Institute, about 227,000 women were diagnosed with breast cancer in the US in 2012. And rates are rising. More women in America have died of breast cancer in the last two decades than the total number of Americans killed in World War I, World War II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War, combined.

Sure, there has been progress. But how much, really? The best that evidence-based medicine can offer for women in 2013 is still poison, cut, burn, then poison some more. A typical regimen for hormone-receptive breast cancer might be chemotherapy, mastectomy and reconstruction, radiation, at least 5 years of a daily anti-estrogen drug, and a few more little bonus surgeries for good measure.  

We're still using the same brutal chemo drugs, the same barbaric surgeries, the same radiation blasts as our mothers and grandmothers endured decades ago — with no substantially greater ability to predict who will benefit, and no cure in sight. The cancer authorities can't even agree on screening and diagnostic recommendations: should women get annual mammograms starting at 40? 50? Or no mammograms at all? You've come a long way, baby.

What can make you even more cynical is looking at how much money there is to be made in poisoning us. Do the dominant corporations in fast food, chemicals, agri-business, want us to explore how their products impact cancer rates? Isn't it cheaper for them to simply pinkwash "for the cause" every October?

Christine Finn, archaeologist, journalist

What is the future for fingers, as tools, in the digital age? Where the latest interface is a touch which is smooth and feather-light, where the human to machine commands are advancing to be spoken, or breathed, or blinked, even transmitted by brain waves, would finger-work be the preserve of artists and childs-play? Fingers could still form churches and steeples, and all the peoples, be in the play of poets, peel an orange. But in the digital age would there be pages still to turn, tendrils to be untangled, a place for hard key-strokes, not simply passing swipes?

John Naughton, academic; newspaper columnist; Vice-President, Wolfson College

We now live in a digital world in which copying is not only effortless, non-degenerative and effectively free but is actually intrinsic to digital technology. What is a computer, after all, but a copying machine? Copying is to digital technology as breathing is to animal life; you can't have one without the other. So trying to apply an IP regime designed for analog circumstances to a world in which all media and cultural artefacts are digital offends against common sense.

Bruce Schneier, security technologist

If we're not trying to understand how to shape the Internet so that its good effects outweigh the bad, powerful interests will do all the shaping. The Internet's design isn't fixed by natural laws. Its history is a fortuitous accident: an initial lack of commercial interests, governmental benign neglect, military requirements for survivability and resilience, and the natural inclination of computer engineers to build open systems that work simply and easily. This mix of forces that created yesterday's Internet will not be trusted to create tomorrow's.

Battles over the future of the Internet are going on right now: in legislatures around the world, in international organizations like the International Telecommunications Union and the World Trade Organization, and in Internet standards bodies. The Internet is what we make it, and is constantly being recreated by organizations, companies, and countries with specific interests and agendas. Either we fight for a seat at the table, or the future of the Internet becomes something that is done to us.

Kai Krause, software pioneer; philosopher

New kinds of classes could be offered, such as how to find answers and solutions, how to search, how to deal with security, the pleasures and pitfalls of the social networks — all those issues which are of much higher importance to kids now than the literally "old-school" curriculum — and which they are left to deal with on their own right now.

And there you are with where I feel we should be worried: That this is not happening.

And the only way out of all this is applied Sciences, if you think about it. Smart thinking, intelligent planning, systematic analysis. Beyond partisan opinions, outside corporate brands, without financial gain. Dealing with it almost as an art form: the beauty of an optimal path, the pleasure of finding a solution.

Randolph Nesse, Professor of Psychiatry, UM Medical School; Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan

Geomagnetic storms sound like a pretty serious threat. But I am far less concerned about them than I am about the effects of many possible events on the complex systems we have become dependent on. Any number of events that once would have been manageable now will have catastrophic effects. Complex systems like the markets, transportation, and the Internet seem stable, but their complexity makes them inherently fragile. When they work they are wonderful, but when they fail we will wonder why we did not recognize the dangers of depending on them.

Gregory Benford, Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC - Irvine; novelist

The black expanses over our heads promise places where our industries can use resource extraction, zero-gravity manufacturing, better communications, perhaps even energy harvested in great solar farms and sent down to Earth.

Companies are already planning to do so: Bigelow Aerospace (orbital hotels), Virgin Galactic (low Earth orbit tourism), Orbital Technologies (a commercial manufacturing space station), and Planetary Resources, whose goal is to develop a robotic asteroid mining industry.

A similar synergy may operate to open the coming interplanetary economy, this time wedding nuclear rockets and robotics. These could operate together, robot teams carried by nuclear rockets to far places, and usually without humans, who would compromise efficiency. Mining and transport have enormously expanded the raw materials available to humanity, and the rocket/robot synergy could do so again. As such fundamentals develop in space, other businesses can arise on this base, including robotic satellite repair/maintenance in high orbits, mining of helium 3 on the moon, and metal mining of asteroids. Finally, perhaps snagging comets for volatiles in the outer solar system will enable human habitats to emerge within hollowed-out asteroids, and on Mars and beyond.

David Berreby, journalist

Out of the 9 billion people expected when the Earth's population peaks in 2050, the World Health Organization expects 2 billion — more than one person in five — to suffer from dementia. Is any society ready for this? Is any really talking about how to be ready?

Bruce Parker, Visiting Professor, Center for Maritime Systems

We should be worrying about a growing dominance of the Fourth Culture and how it may directly or indirectly affect us all. Because of its great communication capabilities, and its appeal to people's egos, their sexuality, their prejudices, their faith, their dreams, and their fears, the Fourth Culture can easily shape the thoughts of millions. It promotes emotion over logic, self-centeredness over open-mindedness, and entertainment value and money-making ability over truth and understanding. And for the most part it ignores science.

They simply need to convince people to vote for them, by whatever emotional means their campaign teams can come up with. Because of the Fourth Culture it has become easier to elect uninformed and even stupid candidates through emotional manipulation in the form of appeals to religion, patriotism, class distinctions, ethnic biases, etc. (all fueled by huge amounts of money, of course). Superficial sound bites and campaign ads that look like movie trailers win out over carefully thought-out logical discourse.

The Press, once called the fourth branch of a democratic government because it kept the other three branches honest, is now just "the media" and has distressingly lost much or even most of it watch-dog capabilities. In an attempt to survive financially in this Internet-dominated media world, the press has: cut back newsrooms, relied more on unsubstantiated sources from the Internet, treated pop stories as news (reducing the space devoted to important stories, especially scientific stories), and allowed even the most idiotic and abusive comments to be left on their websites (in the name of free speech, but really to have as many comments as possible to prove to advertisers that their websites are popular).

Paul Saffo, technology forecaster; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University

The two camps forming this divide need a name, and "Druids" and "Engineers" will do. Druids argue that we must slow down and reverse the damage and disruption wrought by two centuries of industrialization. "Engineers" advocate the opposite: we can overcome our current problems only with the heroic application of technological innovation. Druids argue for a return to the past, Engineers urge us to flee into the future.

Giulio Boccaletti, physicist; atmospheric and oceanic scientist; partner, McKinsey & Company

Concerns for water don't stop at issues of quantity. In developed countries, thousands of soluble chemical compounds are making their way into water bodies in trace concentrations. Pharmaceuticals, from anti-inflammatories to anti-depressants, personal care products, detergents, pesticides, various hydrocarbons, the list is long and growing. Whether or not some of these will turn out to have significant epidemiological consequences remains to be seen, but in most cases standard treatment technologies are not designed to intercept them.

Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Royal Society University Research Fellow and Full Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London

There's a lot of concern about the hours some teenagers spend online and playing video games. But maybe all this worry is misplaced. After all, throughout history humans have worried about the effects of new technologies on the minds of the next generation. When the printing press was invented, there was anxiety about reading corrupting young people's minds, and the same worries were repeated for the invention of radio and television. Maybe we shouldn't be worried at all.

It's possible that the developing brains of today's teenagers are going to be the most adaptable, creative, multi-tasking brains that have ever existed. We don't know whether the effects of new technologies on the developing brain are positive, negative or neutral. We need to find out.

Victoria Stodden, Computational Legal Scholar; Assistant Professor of Statistics, Columbia University

I'm not saying we should independently verify every fact that enters our daily life — there just isn't enough time, even if we wanted to — but the ability should exist where possible, especially for knowledge generated with the help of computers. Even if no one actually tries to follow the chain of reasoning and calculations, more care will be taken when generating the findings when the potential for inspection exists. If only a small number of people look into the reasoning behind results, they might find issues, provide needed context, or be able to confirm their acceptance of the finding as is.  In most cases the technology exists to make this possible.

Marcel Kinsbourne, neurologist & cognitive neuroscientist

Protracted face-to-face interaction...is a mechanism for bonding, parent with child, partners with each other. The entrainment into amicable conversation implements the bonding; eye contact, attention to facial expression (smile? smile fading?) and an automatic entrainment of body rhythms, a matching of speech intonation, unconscious mimicry of each other's postures and gestures, all well documented, which is underwritten by an outpouring of oxytocin. Vigilant anticipation of the other's body language and continual adjustments of one's own demeanor in response, make for an outcome of a higher order, aptly called "intersubjectivity" or "extended mind."

Indeed, the harmony goes beyond the concrete and the conceptual. It ranges into the emotions, as one person's insistent bleak ruminations diffuse and scatter as their mind mingles with the mind of an intimate or congenial companion.

Douglas T. Kenrick, Professor of Psychology, Arizona State University; Editor, Evolution and Social Psychology

If the population of less educated religiously conservative individuals increases, and continues to vote as they have been voting, funding for education and scientific research is also likely to decrease. A less educated population could contribute not only to an upward shift in population size, but also to a downward economic spiral.

Sherry Turkle, psychologist, MIT; Internet culture researcher

Unlike time with a book, where one's mind can wander and there is no constraint on time-out for self-reflection, "apps" bring children back to the task at hand just when the child's mind should be allowed to wander. So in addition to taking children away from conversation with other children, too much time with screens can take children away from themselves.

One of the things that modeling clay and paints and blocks did for children is that they slowed them down. When you watch children play with them, you see how the physicality of the materials offer a resistance that gives children time to think, to use their imaginations, to make up their own worlds. 

Ed Regis, science writer

Traveling at significantly faster speeds requires prohibitive amounts of energy. If the starship were propelled by conventional chemical fuels at even ten percent of the speed of light, it would need for the voyage a quantity of propellant equivalent in mass to the planet Jupiter. To overcome this limitation, champions of interstellar travel have proposed "exotic" propulsion systems such as antimatter, pi meson, and space warp propulsion devices. Each of these schemes faces substantial difficulties of its own: for example, since matter and antimatter annihilate each other, an antimatter propulsion system must solve the problem of confining the antimatter and directing the antimatter nozzle in the required direction. Both pi meson and space warp propulsion systems are so very exotic that neither is known to be scientifically feasible.

Indeed, these and other such schemes are really just mathematical abstractions, not working systems: they are major extrapolations from states of matter that exist today only at nano levels (antimatter, for instance, requires huge accelerators to make even tiny amounts of, at stupendous costs). Still other systems depend on wild possibilities such as making use of extra dimensions that are not known to exist, physical forces or influences that are not known to be real, or are sheer flights of the imagination (such as altering the value of Hubble's constant to make the universe smaller).

Even if by some miracle suitable propulsion systems became available, a starship traveling at relativistic speeds would have to be equipped with sophisticated collision detection and avoidance systems, given that a high-speed collision with something as small as a grain of salt would be like encountering an H-bomb. Star voyagers face further existential threats in the form of prolonged exposure to ionizing radiation, boredom, alienation from the natural environment, the possible occurrence of a mass epidemic, the rise of a charismatic leader who might derail the whole project, crew mutiny, religious factionalism, and so on. It is far more likely, therefore, that an interstellar voyage will mean not the survival but rather the death of its crew.

Daniel Haun, Director, the Research Group for Comparative Cognitive Anthropology, the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

More than ever we depend on the successful cooperation of nations on planetary scale decisions. Many of today’s most dire problems cannot be solved by actions taken within single countries, but will only find solutions if the global community joins forces in a collective action. More often than not, however, global cooperation is failing, even if the problem is well defined, and the options for action fairly well understood. Why? One answer that comes to mind very easily is that humans’ narrow pursuit of their own interests will trump any possibility for collective action. We are not going to change human nature in time.

Joel Gold, psychiatrist; Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry, NYU School of Medicine

The numbers are staggering: anxiety disorders are the most commonly diagnosed psychiatric disorders, afflicting nearly 20% of all adult Americans each year and almost 30% over the course of their lives.

Alison Gopnik, psychologist, UC, Berkeley

This leads me to the stuff that we don't worry about enough. While upper middle-class parents are worrying about whether to put their children in forward or backward facing strollers, more than 1 in 5 children in the United States are growing up below the poverty line, and nearly half the children in America grow up in low-income households. Children, and especially young children, are more likely to live in poverty than any other age group. This number has actually increased substantially during the past decade. More significantly, these children not only face poverty but a more crippling isolation and instability. It's not just that many children grow up without fathers, they grow up without grandparents or alloparents [unrelated adults] either, and with parents who are forced to spend long hours at unreliable jobs that don't pay enough in the first place. Institutions haven't stepped in to fill the gap — we still provide almost no public support for childcare, we pay parents nothing, and child-care workers next to nothing.

Seirian Sumner, senior lecturer in Behavioural Biology School, University of Bristol

This is what I am worried about... we could potentially recreate any living organism on the planet; animal populations on the brink of extinction could be re-stocked with better, hardier forms. We are a stone's throw away from re-creating extinct organisms.

I worry about the impact of bio-synthetic aliens being introduced to a naïve and vulnerable environment, becoming invasive and devastating native ecosystems. I worry that if we can recreate any animal, why should we even bother conserving any in the first place?

Keith Devlin, Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford University

Given the degree to which the advances in science, engineering, technology, and medicine that created our modern world have all depended on advances in mathematics, if advances in mathematics were to come to an end, then it's hard to see anything ahead for society other than stagnation, if not decline.

The world is unlikely to ever again see the kinds of discoveries made in earlier eras by mathematical giants. The notebooks they left behind showed that they spent many, many hours carrying out long hand calculations as they investigated primality and other properties of numbers. This led them to develop such a deep understanding for numbers that they were able to formulate profound conjectures.

The focus was on solving novel problems for which you don't have a standard procedure available, in some cases constructing rigorous proofs of results. This kind of work is highly creative and intrinsically symbolic, and can really be done only by covering sheets of paper (sometimes several sheets of paper) with symbols and little diagrams — sometimes using notations you devise specially in order to solve the problem at hand.

We have, it seems, become so accustomed to working on a keyboard, and generating nicely laid out pages, we are rapidly losing, if indeed we have not already lost, the habit — and love — of scribbling with paper and pencil. Our presentation technologies encourage form over substance. But if (free-form) scribbling goes away, then I think mathematics goes with it. You simply cannot do original mathematics at a keyboard.

Susan Blackmore, psychologist

Could our future be heading this way? The analogy implies a world in which humans manage the power supplies to feed an ever-increasing number of inventions in return for more fun, games, information and communications; a world in which we so value the fruits of our machines that we willingly merge both physically and mentally with them.

The prospect looks bleak. The demands of this evolving system are insatiable and the planet's resources are finite. Our own greed is insatiable and yet its satisfaction does not make us happier. And what if the whole system collapses? Whether it's climate change, pandemics, or any of the other disaster scenarios we worry about, there might indeed come a time when the banks collapse, the power grids fail, and we can no longer sustain our phones, satellites and Internet servers. What then? Could we turn our key-pressing, screen swiping hands to feeding ourselves? I don't think so.

Larry Sanger, Co-founder of Wikipedia and Citizendium

Internet silos are news, information, opinion, and discussion communities that are dominated by a single point of view. That's one of the problems. Silos make us overconfident and uncritical. Silos worry me because critical knowledge — the only kind there is, about anything difficult — requires a robust marketplace of ideas. Silos give too much credence to objectively unsupportable views that stroke the egos of their members; in a broader marketplace, such ideas would be subjected to much-needed scrutiny. Silos are epistemically suspect. They make us stupider.

The rise of the Internet seems to correlate with the rise, in the late 1990s and 2000s, of a particularly bitter partisan hostility that has, if anything, gotten worse and made it increasingly unpopular and difficult to reach meaningful political compromises. This threatens the health of the Republic, considering that compromise has been the lifeblood of politics since the founding.

Gary Klein, Senior Scientist, MacroCognition LLC

I worry that the number of things we need to worry about keeps growing. I worry that the shrillness of worries keeps increasing. In a sea of worries, a new worry can only stand out if its consequences are almost apocalyptic. If it doesn't threaten our civilization it won't get much air time. And I worry about the proposed remedies for each new danger. To be worth its salt, a new threat has to command rapid and extreme reactions. These reactions have to start immediately, eliminating our chance to evaluate them for unintended consequences. The more over-the-top our fears, the more disproportionate the reactions and the greater the chances of making things worse, not better.

Melanie Swan, systems-level thinker; Futurist; applied genomics expert; principal, MS Futures Group; founder, DIYgenomics

Malicious hacking of personal biometric data could occur, and would need an in-kind response.  Not only could this include biometrics like cortisol (e.g.; stress) levels, galvanic skin response, heart rate variability, and neurotransmitter levels (e.g.; dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin), but also robust neurometrics such as brain signals and eye-tracking data that were formerly obtainable only through lab-based equipment. These data might then be mapped to predict an individual's mental state and behavior.

Timothy Taylor, archaeologist; Professor of the Prehistory of Humanity, University of Vienna

We should be worried about Armageddon not as a prelude to an imaginary divine Day of Judgement, but as a particular, maladaptive mindset that seems to be flourishing despite unparalleled access to scientific knowledge. Paradoxically, it may flourish because of this. Ignorance is easy and science is demanding; but, more tellingly, being neither tribal nor dogmatic, science directly challenges ideologues who need their followers to believe them to be infallible. We should not underestimate the glamour and influence of anti-science ideologies. Left unchecked, they could usher in a new intellectual Dark Age.

Amanda Gefter, consultant, New Scientist; founding editor, CultureLab

It's a physicist's worst nightmare: after nine billion dollars, three decades of calculation and the dedicated work of ten thousand scientists, CERN's Large Hadron Collider—an underground particle accelerator spanning two nations, the largest machine mankind has ever built, the shining hope of reality hunters worldwide — hasn't turned up a single surprise.

Noga Arikha, historian of ideas

As it is, ours is an age of information glut, not deep knowledge. Ten-year-old scientific papers are now ancient — after all, over a million new papers are published each year. As a result, some groundbreaking work from the 1920s in, say, zoology, lies forgotten, and produced in new labs as if it had never been done before. Almost everything is archived; but nothing can be found unless one knows to look for it.

But our world is geared at keeping up with a furiously paced present with no time for the complex past; and the fact that a very large number of literate people with unprecedented access to advanced education and scanned sources has no sense of what the world was like only yesterday does point to the possibility of eventually arriving at a state of collective amnesia. 

Jonathan Gottschall, English Department Washington & Jefferson College

Violence is a great — perhaps the great — staple of the entertainment economy. As a society we guzzle down huge amounts of fake violence in television shows, novels, films, and video games. But the messages found in most video games are strongly pro-social. Adventure-style video games almost always insert players into imaginative scenarios where they play the role of a hero bravely confronting the forces of chaos and destruction. When you play a video game you aren't training to be a spree shooter; you are training to be the good guy who races to place himself between evil and its victims.

Esther Dyson, Catalyst, Information Technology Startups, EDventure Holdings; former Chariman,Electronic Frontier Foundation and ICANN

We all know of artists and others who were at least somewhat crazy. Many of them avoided treatment for fear — justified or not — of losing their creative gifts. Other people simply want to be themselves, rather than some medicated version.

And while much medical knowledge may be true, not all of it is. Certainly, it keeps changing! Many drugs and other medical treatments don't do much; others cause collateral damage. How much is an extra month of life worth if you're diminished by the side effects of life prolongation?

So the questions are: What duty do we have to live properly? What responsibility do we have for the consequences if we do not? How much can we blame on our parents, or society, or whomever — and even so, what responsibility do we bear? Should society pay for prevention but not for remediation of avoidable outcomes? Should we force special responsibilities on people with particular vulnerabilities?

Peter Schwartz, Futurist; business strategist; Senior Vice President for Global Government Relations and Strategic Planning, Salesforce.com

We are now living in a world of perpetual crisis and the high anxiety it produces. Our huge overreactions to 9-11 and to drug use have led to a perpetual security state from which we cannot return. Vast numbers of people are incarcerated at a huge cost for something that should not even be a crime. And we all pay the Bin Laden Tax when we put up with the costs and disruptions of airport security. And of course our political systems play into this with a vengeance, because they are notoriously poor at systemic and long term solutions and those perverse instincts are amped up by the public sense of perpetual crisis. There has been an inevitable loss of faith in institutions' ability to get ahead of the curve and tamp down the trembling state of anxiety the world now seems to be unable to shake off.

Antony Garrett Lisi, theoretical physicist

The greatest lie ever told was that there is a mystical afterlife. This lie has been used for millennia to steel the courage of young men before sending them to kill and die in wars. Even worse, most people lie to themselves when confronting suffering and loss, with stories of a better life after this one, despite there being no credible evidence for any such thing.

But why is it so damaging to share and believe pleasant fantasies of an afterlife when nonexistence is both too horrific to confront and inevitable? It is damaging because it leads to bad decisions in this life — the only one we have. Knowing that our lives are so short makes each moment and each interaction more precious. The happiness and love we find and make in life are all we get. The fact that there is no supernatural being in the universe that cares about us makes it that much more important that we care about each other.

Daniel L. Everett, linguistic researcher; Dean of Arts and Sciences, Bentley University

The teacher-scholar is a moderately paid individual who models problem-solving and a cultivation of thirst for knowledge. The home in which this modeling takes place, the modern college or university, is the descendant of the academy of Plato. The greatest accomplishments of western civilization have come from university and college students, past and present, the disciples of professionals who have taken them under their wings, taught them in classes, worked with them in research labs, and talked about the glories of learning over a beer (or a coffee) in campus pubs and student unions.

The driving force behind universities as they have come to be defined in the USA and other countries has been the idea of present and future discovery — learning new insights from the past, new cures for human ailments, new methods for thinking about problems, new ways of understanding of value and values, new flows of capital and labor, and new methods of quantifying and interpreting the knowledge so laboriously attained.

Yet this vision of the university as an incubator of discovery is dying. As a generation we are acquiescing to the misinterpretation of universities as certifiers of job readiness, rather than as cultivators of curiosity and fomenters of intellectual disruption of the status quo. The student who aspires to "find themselves" and change the world is being replaced by the student who wants to "find a job." The tragedy is that people believe that these objectives represent a stark choice, rather than a compatible conjunction.

Stephon H. Alexander, Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Dartmouth College

One challenge that the scientific community faces now is to go beyond tolerance of difference in order to genuinely appreciate difference, including those that make us feel uncomfortable, especially those who see the world and think differently from us.

Margaret Levi, political scientist, University Professor, University of Washington & University of Sydney

We all live in communities of fate; our fates are entwined with others in ways we perceive and ways we cannot. This contemporary form of tribalism, and the ideologies that support it, enable [people] to deny complex and more crosscutting mutual interdependencies — local, national, and international.

David Dalrymple, researcher, MIT - Mind Machine Project

When you can literally wire your brain to others, who's to say where you stop and they begin? When you can transfer your mind to artificial embodiments, and copy it as a digital file, which one is you? We'll need a new language, a new conceptual vocabulary of everything from democracy to property to consciousness, to make sense of such a world.

Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer, SETI Institute

The conclusion is simple: It's too late to worry about alerting the aliens to our presence. That information is already en route at the speed of light, and alien societies only slightly more accomplished than our own will easily notice it. By the twenty-third century, these alerts to our existence will have washed across a million star systems. There's no point in fretting about telling the aliens we're here. The deed's been done, and the letter's in the mail.

Azra Raza, M.D., Professor of Medicine, Director of the MDS Center, Columbia University

Chances of getting cancer in a lifetime are 1 in 2 for men and 1 in 3 for women. It is a well appreciated fact that most cancers thrive in a pro-inflammatory microenvironment and pathogens are capable of altering a normal microenvironment to a pro-inflammatory one, thus providing the required conditions for a mutated cell to grow. The Human Microbiome Project is only defining the communities of bacteria (and they have shown 10,000 species!) that live in our bodies. Evolution will eventually teach the malignant cells that the only way they will truly succeed in perpetuating themselves is by immortalizing rather than killing the host.

David Pizarro, psychologist, Cornell University

It is increasingly clear that human intuitions — particularly our social and moral intuitions — are ill-equipped to deal with the rapid pace of technological innovation. Even if we know for a fact that no human eyes have actually seen our emails, it can still feel, well... creepy. It's as if we're not quite convinced that there isn't someone in the back going through our stuff, following us around, and possibly talking about us behind our back.

Of course, we are not necessarily at the whims of our psychological intuitions. Given enough time we can (and do) learn to set them aside when necessary. However, I doubt that we can do so quickly enough to match the current speed of technological innovation.

Tania Lombrozo, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of California

As interfaces improve and barriers between mind and machine break down, information of all kinds isn't simply at our fingertips, but seamlessly integrated with our actions in the world.

What does worry me is the illusion of knowledge and understanding that can result from having information so readily and effortlessly available. People suffer from illusions of understanding even in the absence of fancy technology, but current trends towards faster, easier, and more seamless information retrieval threaten to exacerbate rather than correct any misplaced confidence in what we truly comprehend.

Thomas Metzinger, Philosophisches Seminar, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität - Mainz

The number of untested, but freely available psychoactive substances is dramatically rising. In the European Union new drugs were detected at the rate of roughly one per week during the previous year.

All of the new compounds reported in 2011 were synthetic. They are cooked up in underground labs, but increasingly organized crime begins to develop the market and import them, for example from China. Almost nothing is known about pharmacology, toxicology, or general safety; almost all of these substances have never been tested in vivo or in animal models. This makes the situation difficult for medical staff at psychiatric emergency units, with kids coming in tripping on substances the names of which doctors have never even heard during their university education. The doctors have not heard of these substances because the substances did not yet exist while the doctors were being trained.

Recipes for many of these new illegal substances, as well as first-person reports about the phenomenology associated with different dosages, are available on the Internet — easily accessed by the alternative psychotherapist in California, the unemployed professor of chemistry in the Ukraine, or the Chinese mafia.

More kids are going to die. It would be starry-eyed optimism to think that we can still control the situation.

Matt Ridley, science writer; founding chairman of the International Centre for Life

What worries me most are the people who make others worry about the wrong things, the people who harness the human capacity for superstition and panic to scare us into doing stupid things.

Superstition can help bring down whole civilizations.

There is a particular reason to worry that superstition is on the rise today — a demographic reason. The fundamentalists are breeding at a faster rate than the moderates within all the main religious sects: Sunni, Shia, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Amish. The differential is great and growing.

If secular folk don't breed while superstitious ones do, the latter will soon dominate.

It is not just religious superstition that bothers me. Scientific superstition seems to be on the rise, too. Dissidents and moderates are all too often crowded out by fundamentalists when science gets political.

Paul Kedrosky, Editor, Infectious Greed; Senior Fellow, Kauffman Foundation

How many calls to a typical U.S. fire department are actually about fires? Less than 20%. If fire departments aren't getting calls about fires, what are they mostly getting calls about? They are getting calls about medical emergencies, traffic accidents, and, yes, cats in trees, but they are rarely being called about fires. They are, in other words, organizations that, despite their name, deal with everything but fires. 

This isn't just about fire departments. This is about history, paths, luck, and "installed base" effects. Think of incandescent bulbs. Or universities. Paper money. The post office. These are all examples of organizations or technologies that persist, largely for historical reasons, not because they remain the best solution to the problem for which they were created. They are often obstacles to much better solutions.

History increasingly traps us, creating paths — and endowments and costs, both in time and money — that must be traveled before we can change directions, however desirable those new directions might seem.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, psychologist; Director, Quality of Life Research Center, Claremont Graduate University

In one or two generations, children will grow up to be adults who will not be able to tell reality from imagination. Of course humanity has always had a precarious hold on reality, but it looks like we are headed for a quantum leap into an abyss of insubstantiality.

What I did not have the sense to imagine was that the engagement offered by the new technology would become a Pandora's box containing bait for the reptilian brain to feast on. 

Virginia Heffernan, national correspondent, Yahoo News; Ph.D., English, Harvard

Networked computing and digital experience has decentralized the self. It has found the hallucinatory splendor in the present moment. It has underscored our fundamental interdependence. We are one. Limiting beliefs about the past and the future destroy our lives.

There is nothing to worry about, and there never was.

Luca De Biase, journalist; Editor, Nova 24, of Il Sole 24 Ore

Science, economics, politics, entertainment and even social relations grow in the mediasphere. And ideologies, misinformation, superstition also develop in the information ecosystem.

We are looking for ways to let our imagination be free, to breathe new ideas, to think in a way that is not explained only by the logic and the incentives of the mediasphere. How can it be possible? Poetry is a kind of research that can help. Digital humanities are a path to enhance our ability to think differently. Freedom of expression is not only the quantity of different ideas that circulate, the wealth of which has never been so rich as today.

Terrence J. Sejnowski, computational neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute

A new technique that could revolutionize the treatment of depression and other brain disorders such as Parkinson’s disease is based on stimulating neurons with light rather than microelectrodes.

Steve Giddings, theoretical physicist; Professor, Department of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara

In short, the crisis is a deep conflict between fundamental physical principles, that form the foundation of our most basic framework for describing physics. These pillars are quantum mechanics, the principles of relativity (special or general), and locality. These pillars underlay local quantum field theory, which serves as the basis for our description of physical reality — from the shining sun to creation of matter in the early Universe.

In a context where one or more supposed bedrock principles must be discarded, we obviously need to be a little crazy — but not too crazy!

It appears that the basic picture of reality as underlain by the fabric of space and time may well be doomed. 

Karl Sabbagh, writer and television producer

There is much psychological research into the nature of evil. This usually starts from the basis that people are naturally good, and tries to explain why some people depart from this 'norm'. Isn't it time we took the opposite view and looked into why some people, perhaps not many, are 'good'?

Dylan Evans, founder and CEO of Projection Point

There may be better forms of political organization that we can aspire to. But the spread of democracy may actually make it harder to discover these alternatives. The mechanism of voting tends to anchor society in the political middle ground. The resulting social stability has obvious advantages, in that it helps guard against political extremism. But it has less understood disadvantages too. In particular, it hinders the development of better political systems.

Laurence C. Smith, Professor of Geography, UCLA

If everyone alive today were to adopt the current lifestyles of North Americans, Western Europeans, Japanese and Australians, global resource consumption would rise eleven-fold. It would be as if the world population suddenly rose from 7 billion to 72 billion.

Ask yourself this: What do you (the modern, educated urban dweller who is most likely reading this essay) need to give up, to align your resource needs closer to those of someone cultivating rice on the Irawaddy delta?

Neil Gershenfeld, physicist; Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms

My understanding is that wizards must train for years to master their spells; any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

Eric J. Topol, MD, Professor of Genomics, The Scripps Research Institute

I think a significant portion of genomic instability is due to environmental effects. For example, exposure to increased radiation is a prime suspect — be it man-made thermal radiation from atmospheric greenhouse gases, or via medical imaging that uses ionized radiation. There are probably many other environmental triggers in our "exposome" that have yet to be unraveled, such as the interaction of our native DNA with our gut microbiome, or the overwhelming, pervasive exposure that we have to viruses that can potentiate genomic instability.

Stanislas Dehaene, neuroscientist, Collège de France, Paris

Like many other neuroscientists, I receive my weekly dose of bizarre e-mails. My correspondents seem to have a good reason to worry, though: they think that their brain is being tapped. Thanks to new "neurophonic" technologies, someone is monitoring their mind. They can't think a thought without it being immediately broadcasted to Google, the CIA, news agencies worldwide, or...their wife.

Should we worry then? Millions of people will rejoice instead. They are the many patients with brain lesions, whose lives may soon change thanks to brain technologies. In a motivated patient, decoding the intention to move an arm is far from impossible, and it may allow a crippled quadriplegic to regain his or her autonomy, for instance by controlling a computer mouse or a robotic arm. My laboratory is currently working on an EEG-based device that decrypts the residual brain activity of patients in a coma or vegetative state, and helps doctors decide whether consciousness is present or will soon return. Such valuable medical applications are the future of brain imaging, not the devilish sci-fi devices that we wrongly worry about.

Rodney A. Brooks, roboticist; Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus), MIT; founder, Chairman & CTO, Heartland Robotics, Inc.

Many recent press stories have worried that smarter robots will take away too many jobs from people. What worries me most right now is that we will not find a way to make our robots smart enough quickly enough to take up the slack in all the jobs we will need them to do over the next few decades. If we fail to build better robots soon then our standard of living and our life spans are at risk. 

The demographics shift that is underway will mean there are less younger people to provide services to more older people, and supply and demand will increase their labor costs. Good for nurses and elder care workers, but it will further stretch the meager incomes of the elderly, and ultimately lower their standard of living, perhaps below that of our current elderly and infirm.

This is the new frontier for robots. We are going to need lots of them that can take up the slack doing the thankless and hard grunt work necessary for elder care, e.g., lifting people into and out of bed, cleaning up the messes that occur, etc., so that the younger humans can spend their time providing the social interaction and personal face time that we old people are all going to crave.

George Dyson, science historian

Sooner or later — by intent or by accident — we will face a catastrophic breakdown of the Internet. Yet we have no Plan B in place to reboot a rudimentary, low-bandwidth emergency communication network if the high-bandwidth system we have come to depend on fails.

In the event of a major network disruption, most of us will have no idea what to do except to try and check the Internet for advice.

We need a low-bandwidth, high-latency store-and-forward message system that can run in emergency mode on an ad-hoc network assembled from mobile phones and laptop computers even if the main networks fail. We should keep this system on standby, and periodically exercise it, along with a network of volunteers trained in network first aid the way we train lifeguards and babysitters in CPR. These first responders, like the amateur radio operators who restore communications after natural disasters, would prioritize essential communications, begin the process of recovery, and relay instructions as to what to do next.

Max Tegmark, physicist, MIT; researcher, Precision Cosmology; Scientific Director, Foundational Questions Institute

As our "Spaceship Earth" blazes though cold and barren space, it both sustains and protects us. It's stocked with major but limited supplies of water, food and fuel. Its atmosphere keeps us warm and shielded from the Sun's harmful ultraviolet rays, and its magnetic field shelters us from lethal cosmic rays. Surely any responsible spaceship captain would make it a top priority to safeguard its future existence by avoiding asteroid collisions, on-board explosions, overheating, ultraviolet shield destruction, and premature depletion of supplies? Yet our spaceship crew hasn't made any of these issues a top priority, devoting (by my estimate) less than a millionth of its resources to them. In fact, our spaceship doesn't even have a captain!

Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist

The truth is that we simply don't know enough about the potential biotechnology, nanotechnology, or future iterations of artificial intelligence to calculate what their risks are, compelling arguments have been made that in principle any of the three could lead to human extinction.

Daniel Goleman, psychologist

Much of the ongoing damage stems from systemic side-effects of our industrial platforms. For instance, we make concrete, bricks, glass and steel by heating ingredients at very high temperatures for long periods — a technology with roots in the Bronze Age.

Michael Shermer, Publisher, Skeptic magazine; monthly columnist, Scientific American

We know from evolutionary theory that the principle of reciprocal altruism — I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine — is universal; people do not by nature give generously unless they receive something in return.

We know from evolutionary psychology that the principle of moralistic punishment — I'll punish you if you do not scratch my back after I have scratched yours — is universal; people do not long tolerate free riders who continually take but never give.

Douglas Rushkoff, media analyst; documentary writer

We should be worried about the decline of the human nervous system. We should be worried that something — likely environmental, but possibly more subtle than that — is hampering our ability to parent new human beings with coherently functioning perceptual apparatuses. We should be worried about what this means for the economic future of our society, but we should also be worried about what this means for the future of our collective cognition and awareness as a species.

The vast majority of children with spectrum disorders also suffer from "co-morbidities" such as anxiety disorder, sensory processing disorder, intellectual disabilities, and social disorders.

And spectrum disorders are just the most visible evidence of neural breakdown. Once we begin worrying about such things, we must also consider the massive use of SSRIs and other mood enhancement drugs. Unlike psychedelics and other psycho-social learning substances, SSRI's were designed for continuous use. By treating stress, anxiety, and even transient depression as chronic conditions, the doctors prescribing these medications (influenced by the companies peddling them) are changing people's neurochemistry in order to dampen their responses to real life.

So, on the one hand we should be worried about a future society in which there are only few of us left to keep the lights on, caring for a huge population of neurally-challenged adults. And we are seeing the beginnings of this in a media-influenced society of imbecilic beliefs, and inappropriate reactions to stimulus. The reasonable people, on whom we depend for restaurants, hospitals, and democracy itself to function seem to be dwindling in numbers, replaced by those with short tempers, inferiority complexes, and an inability to read basic social cues.

Not to mention that all these drugs end up in the water supply and beyond, likely leading to increases in spectrum disorders among children. (Taking SSRIs during pregnancy, for instance, leads to double the probability of delivering a child on the autism spectrum.) So we come full circle, increasingly incapable of doing anything about this feedback loop, or even caring about it. We're soaking in it.

But, there's an even greater concern. We should worry less about our species losing its biosphere than losing its soul.

Roger Highfield, Director, External Affairs, Science Museum Group

What a difference it would make to how science is regarded by the public if we had a few more contemporary scientific heroes.

David Christian, Professor of History, Macquarie University, Sydney

Here's an old, old question that has dropped off the radar: What is a "good life?"

To enjoy a good life we need food, security, and protection from the elements.

[But] many components of the good life do not require more consumption because they are renewable resources. They include: friendship, empathy, kindness and generosity, good conversation, a sense of beauty, a sense of physical well-being and security, a sense of contentment, a sense of intimacy, a sense of humour, and (the Edge's forte) a delight in good ideas.

The biosphere is rich in resources and extraordinarily resilient. But there are limits. If the resources of the biosphere are limited, then [consumption] cannot continue indefinitely. So we have to start imagining what a good life will look like in a world of limited resources.

Juan Enriquez, Managing Director Excel Venture Management

It used to be only royalty, presidents, mega stars, and superstar athletes who had every aspect of their daily lives followed, analyzed, scrutinized, criticized, dissected. Now ubiquitous cameras, sensors, tolls, RFIDs, credit cards, clicks, friends, and trolls describe, parse, analyze our lives minute by minute, day by day, month by month. Habits, hatreds, opinions, desires, are recorded and will be visible for a long, long time. What you wore and ate, with whom and where, what you said and did, where you slept.... There is more than enough data and inside dirt on almost all of us to enable a weekly Page 6 embarrassment, a People magazine hero profile, and a detailed biography, bitter and sweet.

Cheap, high-def cameras and sensors have spread like bedbugs; we are surrounded by thousands of cameras. It is not just the filming itself that is the game changer; rather it is the almost negligible cost of archiving. This used to be expensive enough that tape was simply over recorded, after a few minutes or hours. Now all is kept. We now see and know each other in ways previously unimaginable

Every time we blog, charge, debit, Tweet, Facebook, Google, Amazon, YouTube, LinkIn, Meetup, Foursquare, Yelp, Wikipedia, we leave electronic nuggets, some more visible than others, of who we are, whom we are with, and what we like or are interested in. In a sense, we electronically tattoo ourselves, our preferences, our lives.

Every pair of eyes judges and thinks it knows who you are, what you believe in, whom you play with. Tattoos publicly advertise fidelity, dedication, love, hate, and stupidity. That which, after a few tequilas in Vegas, may have seemed a symbol of never ending romance can become a source of bitter conversations during a future honeymoon. Now multiply that embarrassment, disclosure, past history a thousand fold using electronic tattoos.

We are at immediate risk of having the world know what we do, what we did, as ever more available for scrutiny from our peers, rivals, bosses, lovers, family, admirers, as well as random strangers.

Facial recognition technologies enable you, with a 90%+ accuracy to use a smart phone to identify someone standing behind a bar. Add name recognition and location to your phone and likely you can quickly access a series of details on whether that cute person over there has any criminal convictions, where she lives, what her property is worth, how big a mortgage, Yelp preferences, Google profile, and Facebook status.

Charles Seife, Professor of Journalism, New York University; former journalist, Science Magazine

Over time, regulatory agencies are systematically drained of their ability to check the power of industry. Even more strikingly, they're gradually drawn into the orbit of the businesses they're charged with regulating — instead of acting in the public interest, the regulators functionally wind up as tools of the industry they're supposed to keep watch over. This process, known as "regulatory capture," turns regulators from watchdogs into lapdogs.

Regulatory capture is just a small part of the story. In my own profession, journalism, we like to think of ourselves as watchdogs, fierce defenders of the public good. But we, too, are being captured by the industries we're supposed to keep watch on. There's journalistic capture just as there's regulatory capture. It's most marked in fields such as tech reporting, business reporting, White House reporting — fields where you're afraid of losing access to your subjects, where you depend on the industry to feed you stories, fields where your advertising revenue comes from the very people you're supposed to critique.

Aubrey De Grey, gerontologist; Chief Science Officer, SENS Foundation

Consider automation. The step-by-step advance of the trend that began well before, but saw its greatest leap with, the Industrial Revolution has resulted in a seismic shift of work patterns from manufacturing and agriculture to the service industries — but, amazingly, there is virtually no appreciation of what the natural progression of this phenomenon, namely the automation of service jobs too, could mean for the future of work. What is left, once the service sector goes the same way? Only so many man-hours can realistically be occupied in the entertainment industry. Yet, rather than plan for and design a world in which it is normal either to work for far fewer hours per week or for far fewer years per lifetime, societies across the world have acquiesced in a political status quo.

Nicholas Humphrey, Emeritus School Professor, The London School of Economics

We should worry that the dimension of individual intelligence is disappearing, and with it that flirtatiousness that leads to the marriage of ideas. Soon no one will be more or less knowledgeable than anyone else. But it will be knowledge without shading to it, and, like the universal beauty that comes from cosmetic surgery, it will not turn anyone on. 

Clifford Pickover, author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book Trilogy

I used to worry that we will understand less and less about more and more. Mathematicians like Keith Devlin have admitted in The New York Times that "the story of mathematics has reached a stage of such abstraction that many of its frontier problems cannot even be understood by the experts."

As mathematics and subatomic physics progresses in the 21st century, the meaning of "understanding" obviously must morph, like a caterpillar into a butterfly. The limited, wet human brain is the caterpillar. The butterflies are our brains aided by computer prosthetics.

Should we be so worried that we will not really be able to understand subatomic physics, quantum theory, cosmology, or the deep recesses of mathematics and philosophy?

W. Mark Richardson wrote, "As the island of knowledge grows, the surface that makes contact with mystery expands. When major theories are overturned, what we thought was certain knowledge gives way, and knowledge touches upon mystery differently. This newly uncovered mystery may be humbling and unsettling, but it is the cost of truth. Creative scientists, philosophers, and poets thrive at this shoreline."

  

Mary Catherine Bateson, Professor emerita, George Mason University; Visiting scholar, Sloan Center on Aging & Work Boston College

Global warming was a bad description of a danger because it sounded comfy, and even climate change sounds fairly neutral. Extreme weather conditions causing humanitarian disasters can get more attention. Regional warfare for access to resources or arable land may be more salient than a few degrees of temperature change or rising ocean surfaces. It is entirely possible that global warming will lead to nuclear war as a side effect, but that is not where our concern needs to be.

There is a need for research on the social psychology of fear and anxiety, which is undoubtedly going to be different from what we know about the individual psychology of fear and anxiety. For instance, it seems probable that a sense of chronic threat is a permanent element in some populations. What has replaced fear of the "red menace" in Americans and how has this replacement affected attitudes to immigration or to the deficit? How consciously has the United States government manipulated the fear of terrorism in US politics? How does the fear of "stranger danger" displace the fear of domestic violence? Arguably, humans may require a certain amount of worry to function effectively, whether this worry is fear of hell or fear of the neighbors. If this is the case, it might be safer to focus on worrying about the Red Sox winning the pennant. 

Steven Pinker, Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University

Today the vast majority of the world's people do not have to worry about dying in war.

Will nations go to war over the last dollop of oil, water, or strategic minerals? It's unlikely. Physical resources can be divided or traded, so compromises are always available; not so for psychological motives such as glory, fear, revenge, or ideology.

There are many reasons to worry about climate change, but major war is probably not among them. A major war requires a political decision that a war would be advantageous.

No doubt cyberattacks will continue to be a nuisance, and I'm glad that experts are worrying about them. But the cyber-Pearl-Harbor that brings civilization to its knees may be as illusory as the Y2K bug apocalypse.

It's obviously important to worry about nuclear accidents, terrorism, and proliferation because of the magnitude of the devastation they could wreak, regardless of the probabilities. But how high are the probabilities? 

What the misleading risk factors have in common is that they contain the cognitive triggers of fear: they are vivid, novel, undetectable, uncontrollable, catastrophic, and involuntarily imposed on their victims.

It's natural to worry about physical stuff like weaponry and resources. What we should really worry about is psychological stuff like ideologies and norms. As the UNESCO slogan puts it, "Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed."

Roger Schank, psychologist & computer scientist, Engines for Education Inc.

I am worried about stupid. It is all around us. When the Congress debates an issue, both sides appear to be wrong. Worse, our representatives can't seem to make a reasoned argument. Candidate after candidate in this last election said things completely unsupportable by the evidence. Supporters of these candidates can't usually explain in any coherent way what they are really in favor of.

Or, consider experiences in customer service where it is clear that the person with whom you are speaking is reading from a script and incapable of deviating from the script because they really don't know what they are talking about.

Our high school graduates are very good at test taking. Story after story comes out about how cheating occurs even in the best schools and even involves teachers. No one asks what students are capable of doing after they graduate because no one cares. We just worry about what they have memorized. I worry about whether they can think. Talk to a recent graduate and see if they can.

I worry that young people don't talk any more. LOL and OMG do not a conversation make. It is conversations that challenge beliefs, not emoticons.

I worry that since no one thinks they need to think that the news has become a mouthpiece for views that can be easily parroted by their listeners. Challenging beliefs is not part of the function of the news anymore.

We glorify stupid on TV shows, showing what dumb things people do so we can all laugh at them. We glorify people who can sing well but not those who can think well. We create TV show after TV show that make clear that acting badly will make you rich and famous. The fact that most exchanges on these shows are done without thought and without the need to back up one's opinions with evidence seems to bother no one.

I worry that behind this glorification of stupidity, and the refusal to think hard about real issues, are big corporations who make a great deal of money on this. The people who sell prescription drugs don't want people to be capable about asking about how the drug works or how the clinical trials went or what bad the drug might do. The people who debate spending cuts don't want people asking about why they are never talking about cuts in defense or cuts in the gigantic sums we give to other countries. The people who run corporations that profit on education don't want anyone to ask if there aren't already many unemployed science and math PhDs, they just want to make more tests sell more test prep. The people who run universities don't want anyone to ask about whether college is really necessary for the majority of the population or even well done at the majority of our colleges. The people who run news organizations have an agenda and it isn't creating good thinkers who understand what is going on in the world.

So I am worried that people can't think, can't reason from evidence, and don't even know what would constitute evidence. People don't know how to ask the right questions, much less answer them.

And I am worried that no one, with the exception of some very good teachers who are much unappreciated, is trying to teach anyone to think.

I am worried that we will, as a society, continue to make decisions that are dumber and dumber and there will be no one around smart enough to recognize these bad decisions nor able to do anything about it.

Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education

Over more drinks and more meals that I care to remember, I have argued with colleagues and friends about the existence of free will.

But I've come to the conclusion that the belief or lack of belief in free will is not a scientific matter. Rather, we are dealing here with fundamental assumptions that scientists and other scholars bring to the work that they do. And as such, the existence or the denial of free will, like the question of whether human nature is basically universal or inherently varied, is not one that will ever be settled. And so I have stopped worrying about it.

Colin Tudge, biologist; Editor at New Scientist

Science is increasingly equated with high tech. "Vocation" used to mean a deep desire to engage and seek out the truth, insofar as human beings are able. Now it means getting a job with Monsanto.

Science, in short, is in danger of losing its integrity and its intellectual independence — of becoming the handmaiden of big business and the most powerful governments. Since we cannot assume that increasing wealth and top-down technical control are good for the human race as a whole, or for our fellow creatures, science for all its wonder and all its achievements is in danger of becoming the enemy of humankind.

Daniel C. Dennett, philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University

We have become so dependent on technology that we have created a shocking new vulnerability. We really don't have to worry much about an impoverished teenager making a nuclear weapon in his slum; it would cost millions of dollars and be hard to do inconspicuously, given the exotic materials required. But such a teenager with a laptop and an Internet connection can explore the world's electronic weak spots for hours every day, almost undetectably at almost no cost and very slight risk of being caught and punished. Yes, the Internet is brilliantly designed to be so decentralized and redundant that it is almost invulnerable, but robust as it is, it isn't perfect.

Goliath hasn't been knocked out yet, but thousands of Davids are busily learning what they need to know to contrive a trick that will even the playing field with a vengeance. They may not have much money, but we won't have any either, if the Internet goes down. I think our choice is simple: we can wait for them to annihilate what we have, which is becoming more likely every day, or we can begin thinking about how to share what we have with them.

Gary Marcus, cognitive scientist

There are known knowns and known unknowns, but what we should be worried about most is the unknown unknowns.

Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time