But if you feel that this shows in me a childish reluctance to give up
thoats and zitidars and beautiful Martian princesses until forced to, I
won’t argue with you — I’ll just wait.
(i) I must hedge number thirteen; the “cent” I meant was scaled by the 1950
dollar. But our currency has been going through a long steady inflation,
and no nation in history has ever gone as far as we have along this route
without reaching the explosive phase of inflation. Ten-dollar hamburgers?
Brother, we are headed for the hundred-dollar hamburger — for the
barter-only hamburger.
But this is only an inconvenience rather than a disaster as long as there
is plenty of hamburger.
(j) This prediction stands. But today physics is in a tremendous state of
flux with new data piling up faster than it can be digested; it is
anybody’s guess as to where we are headed, but the wilder you guess, the
more likely you are to hit it lucky. With “elementary particles” of nuclear
physics now totaling about half the number we used to use to list the
“immutable” chemical elements, a spectator needs a program just to keep
track of the players. At the other end of the scale, “quasars” —
quasi-stellar bodies — have come along; radio astronomy is now bigger than
telescopic astronomy used to be; and we have redrawn our picture of the
universe several times, each time enlarging it and making it more complex —
I haven’t seen this week’s theory yet, which is well, as it would be out of
date before this gets into print. Plasma physics was barely started in
1950; the same for solid-state physics. This is the Golden Age of physics —
and it’s an anarchy.
(k) I stand flatly behind prediction number fifteen.
(I) I’ll hedge number eighteen just a little. Hunger is not now a problem
in the USA and need not be in the year 2000 — but hunger as a world problem
and problem for us if we were conquered . . . a distinct possibility by
2000. Between our present status and that of subjugation lies a
whole spectrum of political and economic possible
shapes to the future under which we would share the
worldwide hunger to a greater or lesser extent. And
the problem grows. We can expect to have to feed
around half a billion Americans circa year 2000-our
present huge surpluses would then represent acute
shortages even if we never shipped a ton of wheat to
India.
(m) I stand by prediction number nineteen.
I see no reason to change any of the negative predictions which follow the
numbered affirmative ones. They are all conceivably possible; they are all
wildly unlikely by year 2000. Some of them are debatable if the terms are
defined to suit the affirmative side — definitions of “life” and “manlike,”
for example. Let it stand that I am not talking about an amino acid in one
case, nor a machine that plays chess in the other.
(n) Today the forerunners of these synthesists are already at work in many
places. Their titles may be anything; their degrees may be in anything — or
they may have no degrees. Today they are called “operations researchers,”
or sometimes “systems development engineers,” or other interim tags. But
they are all interdisciplinary people, generalists, not specialists — the
new Renaissance Man. The very explosion of data which forced most scholars
to specialize very narrowly created the necessity which evoked this new
non-specialist. So far, this “unspecialty” is in its infancy; its
methodology is inchoate, the results are sometimes trivial, and no one
knows how to train to become such a man. But the results are often
spectacularly brilliant, too — this new man may yet save all of us.
I’m an optimist. I have great confidence in Homo Sapiens.
We have rough times ahead — but when didn’t we? Things have always been
“tough all over.” H-bombs, Communism, race riots, water shortage — all
nasty problems. But not basic problems, merely current ones.
We have three basic and continuing problems: The problem of population
explosion; the problem of data explosion; and the problem of government.