Critical Thinking in English (Patton): Fall 2011

The human need to predict Throughout history, people have made predictions for the future. Most of these people made inaccurate predictions, and as a result, they have been forgotten. Some, however, including Leonardo da Vinci, Jules Verne, and Nostradamus, have made accurate predictions that have led us to remember them for hundreds of years. This set of exercises revolves around people who think about the future, specifically Michio Kaku, a famous American physicist who just published an entire book full of speculations. Is this sci fi - or the near future? Michio Kaku, author of "Physics of the Future," describes a planetary civilization in which the next generation will lead "the lives of the gods." Physics of the Future By Michio Kaku Knopf Doubleday 389 pp By Nora Dunne posted April 18, 2011 at 6:05 am EDT In 1863 French novelist Jules Verne wrote Paris in the Twentieth Century, a remarkably prophetic piece of literature about the city in 1960. Verne envisioned glass skyscrapers, gasoline-powered cars, fax machines, and a communications network much like the Internet. Acclaimed physicist and author Michio Kaku has set himself the same bar for accuracy in his latest book, Physics of the Future. Though he acknowledges that predictions will always be flawed, Kaku asserts his book is the most authoritative attempt to describe our coming century. I spoke with Kaku about the future of technology, humanity, and why we should believe him. Q. How is Physics of the Future different from your 2008 bestseller Physics of the Impossible? Physics of the Impossible goes thousands of years into the future, when time travel, wormholes, and dimensional gateways may be a possibility. This new book is much more ambitious. Were talking about the next 50 to 100 years. I asked 300 of the worlds top scientists very concrete questions: Who will have jobs in the future? How long will we live? How will we communicate by computers? What about robots? Q. Moores law states that computer power doubles about every 18 months. How has this rule of thumb driven your predictions? For the next 10 years or so, Moores law will hold. After that it will sputter and eventually collapse. But it does mean that we can get a pretty good handle on how much computer power will be available and what we can do with it. For example, by 2020 computer chips will be distributed by the billions into the environment, including into our contact

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lenses. Youll blink and be online. Your contact lens will recognize peoples faces, print out their biography, and give you subtitles as they speak Chinese or German or what have you. The military, of course, is pioneering this technology. They have a version of this now. Ive tried it. Through a little eyepiece I saw an entire battlefield, with the positions of friendly troops, enemy troops, and tactics all marked. Our grandkids will lead the lives of the gods of mythology. Zeus could think and move objects around. Well have that power. Venus had a perfect, timeless body. Well have that, too. Pegasus was a flying horse. Well be able to modify life in the future. Q. How will humans move objects with their minds by 2100? Already we can put a chip in peoples brains, hook that chip to a laptop, and allow paralyzed people to surf the Web, write e-mails, and do crossword puzzles. Theres even a toy. A helmet picks up radio from your mind, and it moves objects around. The difference between my book and science fiction is that everything in my book has a prototype. Im not making anything up. Q. In this future world of disposable computer chips and Internet-projecting contact lenses, how will we ever disconnect? Do you find it at all unsettling? Well always have the off switch. There were a lot of people who denounced the telephone. They said that we wouldnt talk in person anymore, that wed just talk to voices in the air. But we love it. In the future well be able to mentally contact anybody we want, see whatever image we want. And when we dont like it, well just turn it off. Q. How are these new technologies going to affect us as a world society? The nature of the planet is changing. Were becoming a planetary civilization, which we physicists call a Type I civilization. The Internet is the beginning of a Type I telephone. The European Union is the beginning of a Type I economy. English will be the Type I language. The Olympics is a Type I sport. Rock n roll is the beginning of a Type I youth culture. But were Type 0 right now. But by 2100 we should make the transition. Q. What future technology do you wish we had in everyday life now? When I was a kid I knew that I would never live forever. Longevity and youth used to be considered a mystery by scientists. No longer. There is reproducible, testable, falsifiable evidence in this direction. Aging is the buildup of error, error in our genes. Were finding the genes that control these errors. This is what scientists are talking about now. Of course we dont have it yet I dont want to get peoples hopes up. But our grandkids may have the option of playing with their life span. Q. Do we have to worry about robots taking over human jobs in the future? Right now robots have the intelligence of a cockroach. But eventually theyll be as smart as a cat or dog or monkey. I figure its around 2100 when well have to put chips in all of our robots to make sure they dont rebel. But there are things that robots cannot do. Robots dont have common sense. They dont know that water is wet, or that strings pull, not push. We can program these rules, but how many rules of common sense are there? Hundreds of millions of tiny, obvious rules.

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The job market of the future will consist of those jobs that robots cannot perform. Our blue-collar work is pattern recognition, making sense of what you see. Gardeners will still have jobs because every garden is different. The same goes for construction workers. The losers are white-collar workers, low-level accountants, brokers, and agents. Already when you book a flight, do you really talk to anybody? No. People involved in software, ideas, human values, leadership, and creativity will still have jobs in the future. Nora Dunne is a Monitor contributor. What to Expect: X-Ray Vision, Doubled Life Spans and Lots of Robots By DWIGHT GARNER PHYSICS OF THE FUTURE How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 By Michio Kaku Illustrated. 389 pages. Doubleday. $28.95.

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Reading a dull, charmless nonfiction book is almost always better than reading a dull, charmless novel. With a nonfiction book, you might at least learn something. Dull and charmless are awfully harsh words to apply to Michio Kakus Physics of the Future, a book that examines, with exhaustive pluck, what life might be like at the end of the current century. But theyre the first words that popped into my mouth when a stranger asked me, in a coffee shop, Hows the book? Mr. Kaku is a quantum physicist, a founder of string field theory and the host of an appealing show on the Science Channel called Sci Fi Science. Hes a smart human who in the course of compiling this book became an even smarter one: he interviewed more than 300 scientists who are performing forward-looking work in areas like computers, medicine, nanotechnology, space exploration and energy production. A lot of the information Mr. Kaku rounds up and dispenses in Physics of the Future wont be new to people whove kept up with the work of Ray Kurzweil and other futurists. Yet its eye-popping. Well have X-ray vision and space elevators and live at least twice as long and be able to move things, perhaps even martinis, with our minds. Well go online, thanks to wired contact lenses, by blinking. We will view chemotherapy, he writes, like we view leeches of the past century. Well watch televised football games, if we wish, as if from the 50-yard line. Micromachines smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, he declares, will perform surgery. Next stop, as Rod Serling used to declare suavely, the Twilight Zone. This is not boring stuff, and it all somewhat makes me wish that I (born in 1965) were going to be around to witness it all. In terms of data delivery, Physics of the Future

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gets the job done. But airplane food gets the job done, too, and airplane food bland and damp is what Mr. Kakus prose too often resembles. Physics of the Future has few sentences so bad that you can tweezer them, like splinters from your toe, and put them on display. But theres barely an original turn of phrase in the books nearly 400 pages. Clichs pile up. Sometimes two or three fight it out in the same sentence. One example: Like a kid in a candy store, he delights in delving into uncharted territory, making breakthroughs in a wide range of hot-button topics. This kind of thing, if you are accustomed to real writing, hurts your insides. Mr. Kaku thinks in numbers better than he thinks in words, which is a problem only in that hes written a book and not a series of equations. His voice has an androidlike, take-me-to-your-leader tone. Describing the pleasure we get in watching Snooki or Regis or Morley or Oprah, he writes: We love to watch others and even sit for hours in front of a TV, endlessly watching the antics of our fellow humans. Such textureless prose inadvertently illustrates one of his key observations about computers: that they will, in the near future, be able to perform repetitive tasks for us, like doing the dishes or walking the dog. But they will not be able to tell meaningful stories or create art. Word geek roughs up math geek: thats this review so far, approaching overkill. Physics of the Future, let me add, has the ability to surprise and enthrall and frighten as well. Mr. Kaku probes the future of medicine. Our toilets will check our excretions for telltale signs of disease, he suggests. M.R.I. machines will be the size of cellphones; you might keep one at home. Sensors in our clothes will leap into action if we are hurt. In the future, he writes, hauntingly, it will be difficult to die alone. Nearly everything we touch will be connected to the Internet; we may not need laptops any longer. We may even have scrap computers the way we have scrap paper now. Our zoos will most likely fill with animals that are now extinct. We might be able to bring back the Neanderthal. Mr. Kaku is alert to ethical implications. He quotes Richard Klein, an anthropologist at Stanford, about Neanderthals: Are you going to put them in Harvard or in a zoo? Mr. Kaku suggests that we will have replicators, or molecular assemblers, capable of creating almost anything we want, the same way that nature can take hamburgers and vegetables and turn them into a baby. This books dark aspects pool around its margins. The author fears that Silicon Valley may become a rust belt, upending the economy, because computer chips will no longer be able to grow smaller. The postsilicon era is unknowable.

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He notes that many of our technological leaps from the global positioning system (GPS) to the Internet itself have come from the military. He looks forward to genial robots. He is less sanguine about the robots that are specifically designed to hunt, track and kill humans and about what might happen should they fall into the wrong hands or go berserk. Global warming will be quite real, he suggests, and predicts that by the end of the century, several major American cities will be underwater and that others (including New York) will be surrounded by looming seawalls. The futurist in him even fears more Islamic terrorists, who would prefer to go back a millennium, to the 11th century, rather than live in the 21st century. We will probably discover signs of intelligent life in the cosmos during this century, Mr. Kaku surmises. But Physics of the Future makes Earth seem like a very lonely planet, hurtling toward a destiny both exhilarating and dire.

Critical Thinking in English (Patton): Fall 2011

Warm-up Exercises 1. Test your knowledge: Can you think of any famous predictions that came true? Can you think of any incorrect predictions? 2. Give your opinion: Scientists at KAIST achieve new technological breakthroughs on a regular basis. If you could choose to study one of these breakthrough fields, which would it be? Which field is the most important for the future of humanity? 3. Vocabulary: Which word in the opening paragraph can be a synonym for prediction? Can you find any other words that mean nearly the same thing? Pre-reading: Vocabulary (lines are given in parentheses) Match the word on the left with its meaning on the right. Article 1: a) prophetic (4) 1) definite, not abstract b) flawed (12) 2) a book that has sold many copies c) authoritative (12) 3) to accuse something of being false or wrong d) bestseller (15) 4) trades such as construction and police work e) concrete (20) 5) how long something can last f) sputter (24) 6) imperfect, contains mistakes g) paralyzed (38) 7) predictive of the future h) denounce (44) 8) unable to move i) longevity (55) 9) to slowly stop functioning j) blue-collar (69) 10) used to describe the most important person Article 2: a) pluck (79) b) eye-popping (89) c) prose (99) d) clich (103) e) enthrall (116) f) haunting (121) g) alert (125) h) implications (125) i) aspects (131) j) berserk (138)

1) upsetting or saddening 2) paying attention, cognizant 3) features or parts 4) indirect conclusions drawn from something 5) crazy, violently insane 6) boldness or bravery 7) capture someones attention completely 8) style of writing that appears in books/newspapers 9) an unoriginal statement or expression 10) amazing, spectacular

Post-reading: Check your knowledge Try to answer the following questions without looking back at the articles. 1. How did Michio Kaku decide on these predictions? With whom did he consult? 2. What does Dr. Kaku think humans can achieve by 2020? 2100?

Critical Thinking in English (Patton): Fall 2011

3. What role does Dr. Kaku think robots will play in our future? 4. Which two adjectives does the author use to refer to Dr. Kakus book? Why does he feel this way? 5. What will happen with our zoos? Silicon Valley? Global warming?

Post-reading: Meanings Re-read the following lines from the text and try to answer the following questions. 1. What does Dr. Kaku mean by Type I Society (Lines 47-52)? What is different between a Type I Society and a Type O Society? 2. The author says that Dr. Kaku writes with an androidlike, take-me-to-yourleader tone. (108) What do you think this means? 3. What does the author mean when he makes the joke word geek roughs up math geek? (115) 4. Why does the author believe that Kakus predictions make Earth seem lonely? (144-146)

Evaluating the text The two articles have different tones. Scan the articles again for evidence that the author agrees or disagrees with Dr. Kaku. Which words provide evidence for agreement or disagreement? Group activities 1. Supporting details: Every prediction requires supporting details. Predictors need to give reasons why they believe in the predictions or else nobody will believe them. Michio Kaku provides evidence in the form of existing scientific knowledge and prototypes of future designs. Work with the members of your group to make a prediction, and then write down four or five supporting details that prove why your prediction will come true. 2. Compare the past to the present: In the early 1990s, some people were highly optimistic about our future. Specifically, the AT&T Corporation released a series of advertisements (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TZb0avfQme8) that showed many possible pieces of technology that would be available in the near future. Watch these advertisements with your group. Discuss which predictions came true and which did not. How were the producers able to be so accurate? Writing exercises 1. There is a website called The Arena For Accountable Predictions (viewable at http://longbets.org) where anyone can bet on a prediction for the future. For example, the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, has a bet with Craig Mundie, the

Critical Thinking in English (Patton): Fall 2011

CTO of Microsoft, that by 2030, commercial passengers will routinely fly in pilotless planes. Look through this website and write a paragraph that analyzes one of these long bets. With which bettor do you agree? Why? 2. Some people, like Michio Kaku, like to predict the effects science and technology will have on our world. Other people use religious books like the Bible or the Egyptian Book of the Dead to make predictions about what they call the end times the point at which the world will end. Compare and contrast these two types of predictions.

Extension exercise The second author uses a large number of metaphorical expressions that were not covered in the vocabulary. Find five of these expressions. Then, write new sentences using different situations in which the expressions can be applied.