Tai-Chi Policy

William Gibson just announced that he’s given up writing about the future as it happens to quickly and is too hard to predict. Incidentally, I had a discussion with several friends a little while ago that I didn’t expect that society would really be surprised by any more technologies in the future, as in previous times we were surprised by electronics or computation. Yesterday’s announcement regarding the Casimir effect is one of the outside shots that could make my prediction completely false. What I meant by my comment was that previous societies, as they came to understand the physics of electromagnetics or computational logic were completely blindsided by devices utilizing these forces, and society rapidly changed in ways no one had even been able to conceive of — they didn’t understand even the domain of what that area of physics allowed. Today, for the most part, it seems like most of the technology advances we expect to occur are in things such as biotechnology or nanotechnology, areas that we can understand even today what they’re capable of, although no doubt our predictions of exactly how they change our society will be off. Casimir effects, frictionless surfaces, and vacuum particles, on the other hand, represent an entirely new area of physics where we don’t even remotely understand what they can do, let alone what technologies we could build with them when we do start to understand the physics.