The Future? No Such Thing.

Scott Adams, yes, the cartoonist behind Dilbert, has listed out some smart ideas about the global warming debate over at his blog:

5. The people predicting likely doom because of global warming have not made their case. Humans are incredibly adaptive. And technological breakthroughs happen in steps, not predictable straight lines. Every other predicted type of global doom hasn’t happened because of human resourcefulness. No climate model can predict human resourcefulness.

6. Some say that even a small chance of worldwide catastrophe is worth the “insurance” of working to reduce the risk to zero, even at astronomical expense. But how small is a “small” risk? And how does the risk of global warming stack up to the other global risks for which we could use our limited resources? That’s where I hit the wall on my understanding of the issue.

This is, I think, incredibly important to remember: the development of technology is unpredictable, even by those who’re closely involved with the study of a particular scientific area.  Not only do we not know what’s around the corner in terms of technological development, we don’t really know what sector major breakthroughs are going to come from.  The lack of imagination of so many people when talking about the future–especially when discussing economics–can be incredibly frustrating, as the general assumption seems to be that thing swill always be more or less the way they are now, or that, at the very least, we can draw fairly accurate conclusions about how technological development will progress.  But we can’t, and that sort of major uncertainty makes it very, very difficult to accurately assess how things will be (especially systems as complex as the Earth’s climate) decades into the future.