There are many, many false technological alleys which continue to be pimped as things worth investing time and money into.
- Automotive Gas Turbines:
In the 1960s, several car manufacturers made gas turbines. The batmobile, for example. Turbines were supposed to be “jet age” machines of the future. You could get more fuel efficiency and energy per cubic meter out of the things, plus they were simpler in design (in theory, only one moving part), and easier to cool (they basically cool themselves). Unfortunately, gas turbines are lousy at acceleration in stop and go traffic. You might some day have one in your laptop though.
- Disco Space Colonies:
Back in the 1970s, when America had just been exposed to its first real energy crisis, a fellow by the name of Gerald Kitchen O’Neill came up with the marvelous scheme of blasting enormous chunks of glass and metal into space (presumably not using fossil fuels), which would produce clean solar energy and beam it back to earth in the form of microwave radiation. O’Neill wasn’t just some looney with a Pete Rose bowl cut; he invented the particle storage ring. His disco space colony idea was related to this in that he suspected the “mass driver” -a sort of particle accelerator for large pieces of matter he also invented, might one day be an important component for construction of such colonies. He also proposed this immediately after the Apollo Space program, which was a huge success, and made space travel look routine rather than extreme. He forgot to take into account that, at it’s peak, the Apollo program was consuming about 1% of the economic output of America. Just to send a couple of freemasons to the Moon, let alone skyscrapers filled with space colonists, giagantor microwave guns and mongo solar panels made of unobtanium the equivalent distance. Amusingly, a guy named Eric Drexler was one of O’Neill’s proteges via an MIT conference on space colonization in the 1970s. I like to think Drexler realized one could make a career out of making scientific sounding honking noises about impossible technology from hanging out with O’Neill.
- Nanotech:
I’d first heard of nanotech as a science fiction plot device. I never gave it much thought until I was writing my Ph.D. thesis. Sitting in the library alone with my laptop in my own personal hell, I did a ton of procrastination reading. One of the things I read was Drexler’s alleged science book on nanotech; “Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation.” I figured it would be interesting and inspiring, as it was a very famous Ph.D. thesis, and of course, nano-stuff is gonna change the world, right? Hell, there was a ton of funding coming into my lab to set up the center for nanotechnology (name changed to equally bullshittium “molecular foundry”); maybe I could stick out my hat and capture some low hanging fruit! By the time I was done this book, I finally made up my mind to go into finance and applied mathematics. It is the sheerest science fiction. Almost every assertion he made about what is possible is wrong. Much of the “science” asserted as fact is obvious baloney. Many of the things he waves around as trivial violate the laws of thermodynamics. Matter simply doesn’t work the way he wants it to. I remember running into a very bright surface scientist who had gotten on board the mighty gravy train of nano-nonsense at tea time shortly after reading this book. I was all, “dude; Drexler is smoking crack!” My pal gave a world weary moue, and agreed that one could make a living correcting Drexler. But, the money was good, and there was interesting material science to be done under the rubric of “nano.” - Fuel Cells:
Fuel cells are one of those ideas that’s been around for almost as long as regular chemical batteries; since the early 1800s. The problem with fuel cells has been obvious since then. They’re hugely expensive, big, fragile and they either require extremely clean fuels like liquid hydrogen, or they wear out fairly quickly. There isn’t much that technology can do about this, though mass production may lower the cost some. And nobody likes the idea of driving around with a bunch of hydrogen in the tank of their car. - Biotech:
Biotech provides employment for a lot of my smart friends. None of them have been able to tell me what their work actually does for humanity. In the realm of human health, it has enabled enormously fat people to live longer and eat more sugar, by making humulin cheaper than what they used to extract from dead racehorses. It also allows idiot bodybuilders to inject themselves with human growth hormone grown in toilet water, instead of HGH extracted from pineal glands of cadavers. There are also enormously expensive and mostly ineffective drugs used in certain kinds of cancer. In agriculture, it has provided some modest benefits, and created an entire industry of paranoids who think they’ll grow 8 heads if they eat genetically modified corn (which gets fed to cows anyway). While this could change in the future, I’ve been hearing about how biotech is going to change everything since Genentech was founded in 1976. - Stem Cell Research:
Remember stem cell research? How we were going to cure Parkinsons and chewing with your mouth open using stem cells? How the eeebil Jeebers creeps from the middle of the country were denying the progress of science by keeping the white jackets in test tubes from sticking embryos in a blender? Well, as I recall, nothing ever came of it. It’s not because it was banhammered (it isn’t, mostly); it’s just not useful. I mean, it was politically useful for beating up on people who are classically religious rather than politically religious people who “fucking love science.” But to first order, the political battle seems to have been the main contribution of stem cell research to human culture.
- Quantum Computing:
I opined that it was probably a big nothingburger 7 years ago, despite having myself expended some not-inconsiderable time thinking out the semiclassical dynamics of such a device. Nothing has happened since then to revise my opinion on the subject. It’s now been 32 years since David Deutsch had his big idea. He’ll most certainly die before a useful quantum computer exists. I probably will too, as will everyone reading this prediction, making me, alas, unable to collect on the bet. All you need do is look at history: people had working computers before Von Neumann and other theorists ever noticed them. We literally have thousands of “engineers” and “scientists” writing software and doing “research” on a machine that nobody knows how to build. People dedicate their careers to a subject which doesn’t exist in the corporeal world. There isn’t a word for this type of intellectual flatulence other than the overloaded term “fraud,” but there should be.
I don’t think people should abandon all thought of any of the above subjects. Nor any of the abundant subjects which are presently grossly overrated by futurologists. I do think these historical examples should give any young researcher pause when it comes to devoting their lives to future boondoggles. Do you really want to work in the technological equivalent of macro-economics?
The more hype there is around a subject, the more marketing personnel and quasi academic mountebanks there are involved in promoting it, the less likely it is to be important or useful. The really important breakthroughs of the last 20-40 years; networking protocols, photolithography improvements, cryptography, various improvements in statistics, signal processing and linear algebra and such; these have been relatively quiet occurrences.
If you want to make a difference in the world, learn some practical math, physics and chemistry. Ignore the wares of humbugs and quacks, keep your nose to the grindstone and read Phil Anderson (greatest physicist of our era);
Feynman’s cryptic remark, “no one is that much smarter …,” to me, implies something Feynman kept emphasizing: that the key to his achievements was not anything “magical” but the right attitude, the focus on nature’s reality, the focus on asking the right questions, the willingness to try (and to discard) unconventional answers, the sensitive ear for phoniness, self-deception, bombast, and conventional but unproven assumptions.