Letter to my Grandchildren-2

Dear Henry, Linus, Maya, Leela, Kaspar, Anarkali, Neerja and Arjuna.

Four years ago I wrote you what I thought were reasonable speculations and warnings about what I expect to happen in your future lives. I felt that major changes are going to happen in the 21st century and that I had a little insight, looking at the future from a scientific viewpoint. And I wanted to share this with you as it might be useful. It's a blog post with URL https://www.dam.brown.edu/people/mumford/blog/2020/Letter.html. In particular, I described the power of both artificial intelligence and of genetic engineering to transform your lives. Of course, the first has come true in spades in just a few years. I expanded this letter in the last chapter of my book "Numbers and the World, Essays on Math and Beyond" giving more details and references to buttress my arguments. But a number of new things have shocked me since then and made me now a good deal more pessimistic about the trajectory of 21st century culture. It may be worthwhile for everyone to know that some terrible cataclysm could happen. In this case, I hope I'm wrong. I am also well aware that pessimism is a well known trap that snares people who live a long time (I'm now 87). But humor me and read this blog post describing my chain of thought.

My first point is that I think I grossly underestimated most people's tendency to ignore anything unpleasant that lies in the future and need not be faced right now, though it really ought to be faced now. A prime example of this point: the Republican denial of the reality of climate warming and sea level rise and the gigantic displacements this will cause, is hard to believe. I know people distrust scientists' predictions but the melting of glaciers and the increased weather extremes are undeniable facts. A simple thing made this startlingly clear to me. Gasparilla Island, home of the Boca Grande community, was hit hard by Hurricane Ian in September 2022. In fact, had it not turned inland just south of the island, it would have suffered a tidal surge exactly like that which hit Fort Myers Beach. Nothing on the island is higher than ten feet above sea level. A century ago, the whole island was flooded by another hurricane. I assumed that no sensible people would take the risk of buying at the crazy multi-million dollar prices that were being asked for even modest dwellings there. And, in fact, insurance rates did double. Unbelievably, house prices also doubled! What don't people understand about the persistence of weather changes? They behave as though everything will continue normally and apparently don't believe or don't know that 10 foot storm surges are happening.

Then I noticed something else. The national debt of the United States is roughly 35 trillion dollars, some 125% of the Gross Domestic Product of around 28 trillion dollars. Having a debt greater than the GDP is supposed to be something that only happens to third world countries (also Greece, Italy and, surprisingly, Japan) and usually leads to calls for intervention by the International Monetary Fund. An aside: these days, one needs to orient yourself to trillions, for example the US GDP is about a quarter of the global GDP that is a bit over 100 trillion dollars. I remember when I was young, I thought a million dollars were a lot, enough to finance a major project, and that a millionaire was truly wealthy. Then I got used to billions and billionaires. But now, with inflation, growth and tripling of the earth's population, it's time to get used to thinking in trillions. Going back to the debt, historically 30 year government bonds have sold at around an average of 4.75% interest. Surely everyone knows how to multiply. As these bonds are rolled over, it stands to reason to expect the interest on them to cost the federal government at least $1.6 trillion dollars per year. And the annual deficit is running around 2 trillion (5 trillion taxes vs. 7 trillion federal expenditures) so we're financing our debt by adding debt so then the interest will also grow. Don't just take my word: download a pile of data from https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/historical-tables. Those troglodyte Republicans who opposed raising the debt limit had a good point. It's raise taxes or go broke. At some point, the "full faith and credit" of the United States of America will be tested. But no-one seems to be aware of this cliff and raising taxes is political suicide. But it's not imminent so let's just ignore it. Financing their sovereign debt has brought many third world countries to their knees.

On to my second point: I read two terrific and terrifically scary books, first "Straw Dogs" by John Gray, a Professor at the London School of Economics and second "Dark Age Ahead", by the late Jane Jacobs, a journalist, author and activist. I'll discuss Gray's book first. Gray's primary point is that we humans are just one species in the animal kingdom. This is, in most senses, obvious. But consider this: (i) our genes are largely unchanged since the Paleolithic era of hunter-gatherers and (ii) we share the identical emotions and drives that shape the behavior of all mammals. We think we can be objective, weighing options and making rational decisions, but in fact neuroscience has confirmed Freud's assertion that almost all decisions are made unconsciously where our most powerful emotions are hidden. Gray therefore rejects the fundamental Christian claim that God made man unique, his final creation in his own image (Genesis 1:27), sharing his moral, spiritual and intellectual nature. To top it off, Genesis (1:26) asserts that God gave man dominion over all "lower" animals. On the contrary, he asserts that, though we certainly have unique intellectual skills, our morality is only skin-deep. In fact our genes drive us, just like other species, to violence and headlessness to approaching catastrophes (as in the two examples above).

Although religion has, in the 21st century, lost its central role in everyone's lives, he views the enlightenment and contemporary liberal thought, which he calls "humanism", as perpetuating the belief that we are uniquely destined to control the earth. But now, not destined by God, but by our superior intelligence and innate morality. Unfortunately, what has actually happened is that the species homo sapiens, from an ecological perspective, has become a plague that has overwhelmed the earth and that, like all plagues, it will run its course and end by some combination of the traditional trio: wars, starvation or disease. Climate change and ensuing refugees clearly increase the likelihood of all three.

Jacob's book, inspired by Jared Diamond's work, details the prevalence of "Dark Ages" for any culture following the collapse of their way of life and goes on to list the indications that 21st century American-European culture are showing indications of collapse. The classic dark ages referred to the European collapse during 600-1200 CE, but she traces the periodic collapse of almost every human culture back to the near extinction of hunter-gathering culture by the agrarian neolithic culture, These collapses are characterized not merely by poverty, starvation and disease but also the forgetting of how they lived when their culture was thriving. How many of us can make a bow and arrow and kill game to eat anymore? She writes "Losers are confronted with such radical jolts in circumstances that their institutions cannot adapt adequately, become irrelevant, and are dropped". The bulk of her book details "five jeopardized pillars" of our society that are being undermined:

1. Unstable families and loss of community support,
2. Colleges providing "credentials", but not "education",
3. Abandoning scientific reasoning based on evidence for policies based on bias and pre-conceived ideas,
4. Taxes assessed by remote opaque agencies for which tax payers do not see any benefits,
5. Professions not policing their professed standards.

These are bad signs. Re point 4, I have personally had long fights with the feds after they made an error and where I couldn't reach any individual to resolve the issue. But Jacobs also points to how some cultures how survived radical changes when defeated by a stronger power. Her main case is Japanese culture that assimilated both Western knowledge and defeat in WWII, yet preserves its unique culture. She warns "Ironically, societies (including our own) that were great cultural winners in the past are in special peril of failing to adapt successfully in the face of new realities. ...Formerly vigorous cultures fall prey to the arrogant self-deception for which the Greeks had a word, hubris."

Going back to Gray, his point is that we are fooling ourselves if we believe that humanity can "learn from past mistakes" and go on to evolve a utopian society where all are well off, work less and fill our days with recreation. We share all our basic emotions and drives with all mammals but hold to the illusion that we are unique. Yes, we have mastered a great deal of technology but our basic drives remain i) to control our environment and use the power that it gives us, and ii) to nurture our children and the love that brings us. Power, broadly speaking, is a stronger drive in males, love in females. Sex, for example, is not a distinct drive but rather a form of love that often blends with power and, after the invention of the birth control pill, has been reduced to a form of recreation (Jacob's first point). Our drives flow from our genes and they are in charge of our decisions, not rational thought. His book is a compendium of examples showing how shallow is the power of morality to effect our choices.

Every country, every leader whether dictator, strongman or elected official, is driven to preserve their country's strength and its traditions as well as his or her's own control. On the other hand, no countries are self-sufficient and our prosperity depends on mutual cooperation. Unfortunately, this global network is highly fragile and can readily break down. As Jacob emphasizes, city dwellers know only how to shop and have forgotten how to do anything to sustain themselves without this global cooperation. Even in the countryside, I have watched the disappearance of Mainers who could "make do", fixing most anything that wore out. This is what can lead to a dark age -- war, starvation and disease, that once started, can feed on each other and spiral downwards.

I can't end this blog without addressing the third of the above mentioned uniquely human characteristics besides intelligence and morality, namely "ispirituality". The issue of what is our spiritual nature seems to me to be much more subtle. Do all or some animals have souls? My own opinion is that, despite the 21st century popularity of "consciousness studies" as a new scientific area, most "research" in this area is quite superficial. I tried to pull together some thoughts on this in Chapter 10 of my book cited above. But I confess that I personally believe people have souls, whatever they are. Rather than by scientific studies, I suspect this will be heavily debated when truly intelligent robots begin to interact on a daily basis with humans, are these robots are fully "alive". That is, if our culture survives.

Of course, my dire fears of war, famine and disease are just speculation as are all predictions about the future. I sincerely hope this one is wrong. I write it purely as a warning to my 8 grandchildren who will live all or most of their lives in the 21st century, to let you know that an old geezer like me is worried by what he sees and reads.