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What Are You Optimistic About?: Today's Leading Thinkers on Why Things Are Good and Getting Better

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Here is the 2007 EDGE question, put by the editor to prominent scientists all over the world:

"As an activity, as a state of mind, science is fundamentally optimistic. Science figures out how things work and thus can make them work better. Much of the news is either good news or news that can be made good, thanks to ever deepening knowledge and ever more efficient and powerful tools and techniques. Science, on its frontiers, poses more and ever better questions, ever better put. What are you optimistic about? Why? Surprise us!"

I counted 153 essays. Naturally, with only a half-page to four pages each, they are not greatly detailed. Certain themes caught the attention of many contributors:

1. Organized violence is at an all time low. You wouldn't believe it by listening to the news, but the statistics are clear. In the future, live internet access to anywhere on earth by GPS will cause exploiters of all cloths to have to resort to "Are you going to believe us or your lying eyes."

2. We're on the threshold of an era of unbelievable abundance. We will be able to make a self-replicating machine that will absorb energy through solar cells, eat rocks, and be working for humanity by the millions. We will figure out ways to harness solar energy and not need to use energy sources that pollute the environment.

3. Research in physics has been dominated by string theory in recent years which so far is untestable. New technologies will produce astounding insights very soon. The LHC (proton-proton collider) will advance the Standard Model and will find the Higgs boson or perhaps something unexpected. The new LIGO detectors may find gravitational waves. Arrays of wide-field telescopes on earth are being programmed to rapidly scan the universe. PLANCK is Europe's first space mission to study the relic radiation from the Big Bang, cosmic microwave background radiation. The AUGER array in Argentina will collect and quantify this same radiation. The GLAST satellite will place a telescope in orbit in May, 2008 to study the extreme universe without having to deal with earth's atmosphere. All these projects involve multiple nations and are guaranteed to provide astronomers and physicists with a new plethora of evidence to glean over for years.

4. There are many mentions of religion, only a few of them sympathetic, all of them seeing a decrease in the conflict between science and religion: "The number of people who realize how much of religious belief is non-sensical will continue to grow...I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion...a final scientific enlightenment will deal an overdue deathblow to religion and other juvenile superstitions...we will learn to shed the unessential dogmas, rules, definitions, and prejudices that religions have built up over the centuries and millennia...people will begin to see science as a vehicle for mutual understanding and for respecting life. Science will teach people these lessons, instead of simply trying to rob them of their faith and offering nothing in return.

5. Climate change and its solutions draw much attention. The consensus is that technology exists now to reverse the trend with fairly simple engineering techniques. Unfortunately, getting the politicians to steer the world in the correct direction will be like herding cats. At the same time, the political winds are blowing the right way and if we don't pass a tipping point, we will solve the problem. Solar power capturing technologies of the future will eventually do away with the need for polluting fuels.

Every reader will undoubtedly find some articles that he/she thinks are too optimistic, too unrealistic, too uninteresting, or just wrong. However, most provide good food for thought and every third or fourth one provides a nice "aha!" The book covers such a wide range of topics, I have barely touched the surface in this review. Most anyone should find parts of it fascinating and I highly recommend it.

I make it a rule to always read through a book entirely before reviewing it. It seems only fair but in this case I'm breaking my rule having only made it through about half of "What Are You Optimistic About". I'm breaking my rule because I may well never finish the book.

The cover lists the name of six contributors as well as "many others". Let me tell you, there are many many many others. There are in fact one hundred and fifty three contributors. With three hundred and sixty one pages in the book that leaves each contributor less than two and a half pages. Brian Greene, for instance, has a mere one hundred and seventy one WORDS. Jared Diamond has even less. Combined they take up just slightly more than one page and they constitute over 30% of the writers prominent enough to get their names on the cover. The point is that each writer is only afforded a scant amount of space and there's nowhere near enough time to write anything more than some brief musings.

My second problem is that many of the authors optimism is related to the decline of religion. The author groups like subjects together and the anti-religious sentiments come near the start of the book. You wont find too many people more critical of organized religion than myself but I always hope to see science take the high ground. I encourage science to defend itself against spurious attacks such as the ones leveled at evolution and climate change but I cringe when science returns fire. Daniel C Dennett writes, `I'm so optimistic that I expect to live to see the evaporation of the powerful mystique of religion' while Geoffrey Miller refers to the `Gutless' talking heads of the extreme religious right. It's bad enough that the religious are extremely paranoid and xenophobic; I really don't think scientific scholars need to fuel their paranoia.

Each piece by the contributors is so brief it's hardly worthwhile and the book itself is very tedious. The book also feels rather lazy. John Brockman just asked hundred of thinkers what makes them optimistic and packed their responses into a book. I really can't recommend this book to anyone. It is intellectually and philosophically shallow and boring to boot. I recommend giving this one a big pass.

I purchased this book some time ago when my life seemed to be falling apart. I guess I hoped it would give me something to be optimistic about myself. Unfortunately that didn't happen; things just got worse, not only for me but for many people like me in the country and actually the world. At the time I had set the book aside after only reading a few chapters, but when I came across it again recently while thinning out my library, I decided to read it. I decided it might be fun to see if any of the author's imaginings had come true. While few of them seemed to have done so, I can see now that most of their optimisms had to do with things that would happen during the 21st century.

The book is actually a series of short essays, some only a paragraph in length, that bring together some of the thoughts on progress as conceived by various individuals successful in a wide range of intellectual endeavors, well known physicists, psychologists, medical researchers and so. While the reader will find that there is a degree of repetition--the same TOE and GUT on the Christmas list of two different physicists, for instance--there is still much that recommends the book in its very diversity of specialties. If you know something about theoretical physics, you may already know about the hopes of physicists for the future of their science, but most of us don't have a handle, even a tenuous one, on all of the scientific and technological fields out there. This book at least gives the reader a chance to find out something about what these bright people are doing and what they hope to achieve within the next century. It's more or less a sampler of what there is to know out there, and a marvellous guide to further topics for personal study.

My first expectation had been that the book would give the personal hopes of these very bright people for the world at large, so I was a little disappointed that the various essayists had not expressed pie in the sky hopes for world peace, etc. I'm not sure why I had this hope, since their opinion on the topic is probably no better or worse than my own. Too many variables enter into the equation. However, in their own field of professional experience, their opinions on the future do hold weight. It's not even that what they believe about the future will actually come to pass, so much as it is that it has a greater likelihood of doing so than what the average person might believe will happen in that particular field. I may think that physicists will or won't come up with a "theory of everything" or a "grand unified theory," but what do I know about it?! Each contributor to the book is very knowledgeable about his or her field. They have a better handle on what is accomplishable and are also making active contributions towards furthering their goals.

My favorite essays came from Robert Sapolsky (the author of one of my favorite books, Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers, Third Edition), Gloria Origgi (of whom I had not heard before this), Diane Halpern (whose name I recognize but not the context), and Geoffrey Carr (again an unknown to me):

Sapolsky was very realistic about human us/them interactions, suggesting that we are "hardwired" to make them. Though he feels it's possible we might circumvent these almost automatic and often prejudicial behaviors, he doesn't think it will happen anytime soon. I tend to agree.

Ms Origgi on the other hand seems to think that an increase in the number of multilingual individuals, especially those who come by it through bicultural parentage, will make the world a better place. Certainly this is possible, but somehow I think that these individuals tend to get marginalized and over extended by having a foot in two cultures. Maybe in the "ivory tower" world of science and technology these types of people "fit in," but they always have; it's a pretty rarified environment. To judge by the issues arising in Europe today among various cultural groups, the increase in numbers of the bicultural individual has not mitigated much. The multilingual kid is still swamped by the average kids in his environment.

Ms Halpern argues that the world is being reshaped by technology by making the activities of closed societies more open to inspection and subject to world opinion. I would agree with this. Nothing is more telling in this respect than the world wide outcry over the death of the young Iranian woman during the recent political protests in that country. While little was achieved or actually changed because of that specific event, I suspect that over time even very powerful nations will not be able to withstand the pressure of world opinion over unacceptable behavior for long. People are social animals and the opinions of others in their environment matter to them; classic research on group behavior reveals just how influencial and often how subtle it is. Certainly anyone who has lived in a small town for any length of time knows just how much impact the opinion of their neighbors has on behavior. As Ms Halpern suggests because of technology, the back fence has just gotten way bigger, and the gossip over it a whole lot more powerful.

Mr. Carr's observation that increased wellbeing of the human condition will bring down the rate of and even a reverse in population growth was very impressive. Stewart Brand had noted this also in his essay, but focused entirely on the welfare of women as they migrate to cities where increased opportunities provide them with better lives. The latter's note that an entire secondary economy arises as a result of the migration, while interesting, does not actually explain the effect on population. As both of these authors note, it seems counter intuitive that an improvement in standard of living would reverse the birthrate rather than raise it. The former author, however, more informatively suggests that it is caused by the same r- and K- selection factors that produce changes in birthrate in animals whose living conditions are either precarious or more predictable. That makes so much sense. What's particularly important is that it seems to operate through the female animal, indirectly determining the reproductive strategy in each environment. That is so logical and so possible I wonder it hasn't been suggested before now. Research on the behavior of animals subject to different mothering techniques also shows that Mom's wellbeing makes a difference.

Whatever one might say, what happens to women is important to what happens in the world. That so much of the world takes the welfare of women as so unimportant has never made sense to me. Even their relative worth vis à vis men in a society can have a major impact as came home to me after one of my visits to Egypt. In the 1980s Egypt was trying to reduce population growth--it had a population of about 40 million living in that little fertile stretch of the Nile and expected to see a doubling soon--but seemed unable to do anything about it. The legal system was based on the Koranic assumption that a woman's testimony in court was only worth ½ that of a man. Obviously if one had 11 children who were all female, and ones future well being before the law and that of the 11 girls was based on having at least one male child to represent you all before legal society, the likelihood that you would have another pregnancy to achieve that much treasured male child was nearly 100%. So the likelihood that the birthrate of Egypt would decline substantially was 0%. It has since doubled to 80 million. Go figure.

Some interesting information about "what's going on out there" over a wide spectrum of human social, scientific, and technological activity.

I don't know how many people are familiar with the Edge [...] online publication where the world's leading scientists and thinkers tell us their thoughts on the the "question of the year" posed by the founder of the site. The third book, a compilation of these questions, called "What are you optimistic about," is the book I'm making a reference to here.

Being an optimist, I tend to have a positive outlook on the future of humanity and my life. This book gave many good examples of why everyone should be too. Though the read was slow and drudgeries for me because it was filled with so many interesting facts about what these thinkers were basing their optimism on, it was nevertheless very interesting to ponder and consider their ideas.

Steven Pinker (who I type as ILE), contributed an entry where he observed the decline of overall human violence and cruelty towards one another. This, I believe will help human beings be more caring towards each other and help us work together to solve problems instead of wasting time and energy fighting undo and unnecessary wars.

Being a humanist, I'm always happy about technology that improves human well-being. There are so many aspects of this book I enjoyed. Finding medical and scientific discoveries, getting past our differences in an increasing globalized world, I'm optimistic that there will finally be peace through sharing of knowledge especially where it's needed most now, in the third world. I'm optimistic that everyone will own an iPad and we won't need to use paper products. I find that people are making impressive efforts to be more human and one such example is Evelin Hospital's new thing about dressing their window washers in superman and spider-man outfits to inspire joy in the hearts of the their young patients (children).

I especially enjoy books like these because I get to read what smart people say on an issue from many perspectives before I make my own value judgement. With new and emerging technology on fighting global warming and creating sustainable agriculture, meeting energy challenges, helping people consider scientific thinking and approach, we're looking forward to a future where we'll cure poverty (a big concern of mine), expand healthy living past a century, and solve more interesting problems. This book's made me even more hopeful and optimistic as well as given me some good reference material to use because it is a non fiction book. I have this capacity (call it pathology, if you're so inclined like my ESE boss is set to do so) to feel for others I've never met before and I hope someday they'll really find out why (by probing around my brain) .

Good news for pessimists and "negativists." Randolph M. Ness, discusses the usefulness of the pessimistic emotional state. He says while optimism is useful in propitious situations, pessimism is useful in dangerous ones because negativists tend to worry and because they worry, they work things out in their minds and plan better than optimists who are fine and positive that things will turn out well. Optimists tend to take insufficient actions or insufficient preparedness. He calls Pessimism as a necessary force for taking action.

This is one of a series edited by John Brockman that consists of brief but fascinating essays by leading scientists and thinkers. Rich and pleasurable insights abound.

I found I didn't care what a lot of the authors thought. Seems I can't read my way into optmism. It's an inside job.

Many of the essays in this collection are short 1-pagers. Nonetheless, reading through the book, one gets the sense that one is in the midst of great thinkers, peering over their shoulders as they speak candidly about their worldviews.

This is an excellent text: brief statements by a variety of top flight scientists, giving me much more to be optimistic about!

The 2007 Edge Symposium contains one- hundred sixty answers to the questions, "What are you optimistic about?' As many of the same respondents to previous Edge questions are present here, there is a great deal that in one way or another has been said before. There are also many interesting new ideas, and insights into what is presently happening now in academic, and most particularly, in scientific worlds.
In the oft- heard of , and repeated ideas category star the super-brights, Dennett and Dawkins each in his own separate way is looking for a new Age of Enlightenment in which most of mankind will be `cured' of `religious faith'. Dawkins even goes farther and looks forward to the time when Humanity will be cured of itself, and our central interest will be in our successors in colonizing the universe. This answer is indicative of what I found to be a general failing in the work, a very skewed and mistaken view of the human situation, ignoring major problems, and exhibiting a lack of sensitivity to what is of ultimate value in human life and experience.
It is true globalwarming is worried about. This more than any other problem features. One optimist tells us that while it will wipe out cities and cause millions of deaths the good news is that Mankind will survive. Thank you. Other optimists tell us that we will soon be harnessing the sun's energy and beating the fossil fuel, carbon- emissions cause of it all. Unfortunately those of us who have been hearing these promises for half - a - century now are perhaps a bit less optimistic that this is what is going to happen soon. Keep the sun and wind coming you guys in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Russia and other enlightened points in the world. Keep the sun coming at thirty forty fifty sixty seven eighty ninety one - hundred two hundred dollars a barrel.
Another of our great optimists, Ray Kurzweil of `Intelligent machine' fame does not preach this time about how we are all going to disappear into the Singularity by 2030. Instead he promises us one hundred year plus life- spans and disease-less lives. Apparently Kurzweil has not seen how wonderfully we have extended the lives of millions of chronically ill people whose continued existence weighs so heavily not only upon the health system but above all on their relatives and themselves. .
In another area Paul Horgan and Steven Pinker look forward to the new era of Universal peace, no more war soon to be upon us. Pinker ignores the Holocaust, the Gulag, Mao's one -hundred million murders, Hiroshima and Nagasaki and tells us that mankind overall is killing less people over time than we have ever before in our history. He hasn't apparently been reading another of the respondents Martin Rees who has been envisioning for some time now various ways our technically advanced civilization might find for making an end of all of us. No comet needed, just a few vicious nuts somewhere manufacturing a bit of biotech viral newness, and goodbye to us all. No global warming required just a few Ahmadinejads loaning a few nuclear weapons to one of the many creative terrorist organizations in the world. Well, we won't all be dead, just hundreds of millions of us.
Another area of perhaps false Optimism has to do with the coming online in late May 2008 of the Large Hadron Collider Project in Geneva. This is going to provide in the sub- atomic realm the first significant hard- data in thirty years, and perhaps tell us whether the much sought after Higgs Boson is more than just a phantom of the Standard Model's imagination. However as one boldly honest respondent Martin Seiff points out that is occurring as American physicists are losing not simply their pre-eminence but their jobs. They are too, it would seem, losing the possibility of making the kind of brilliant individual contributions made the greats of twentieth- century physics. All those thousands of collaborators examining the statistical results of the sub- atomic collisions may well be only further evidence to confirm the idea that the really dynamic and significant area for achieving significant results today is the life- scientists and not the world of physics.

Finally I would have appreciated it had a few more of the respondents had something like the voice of William Faulkner when in his famous Nobel Speech he spoke about the enduring of the human voice and character. I simply find it hard to be tremendously enthusiastic about the great Future promised to Mind , Intelligence , Singularity, Cosmic Civilization etc. if along with this there should be no human beings left in the world.