The New New
Rogue A.I., Bioterror, and Other Ways Tech Might Take Us Out
British cosmologist Martin Rees argues that new technologies can save us — as long as they don’t destroy us first
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Martin Rees is the 15th Astronomer Royal, an actual senior post in the Royal Households of the United Kingdom. That means, as he writes half-seriously in his new book, On the Future: Prospects for Humanity, if the Queen of England wanted her horoscope done, “I’m the one she’d ask.” Rees isn’t actually an astrologer — he’s a cosmologist and astrophysicist, one who in a long and distinguished scientific career has made breakthroughs on black holes and the tantalizing possibility of the multiverse, while finding time to serve as president of the Royal Society and as master of Trinity College at Cambridge University, where he still works today at the age of 76.
But though Rees can’t read your future in the stars, he is in the business of prediction. In his 2003 book, Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-First Century?, Rees raised the alarm over the dangers that emerging technologies like genetic engineering and artificial engineering could pose to the future of the human race. (The book was published in the United States with the title Our Final Hour, because, Rees joked in a TED Talk, “Americans like instant gratification.”) The book was one of the first explorations of what are now called existential risks — threats, especially technological ones, that could plausibly lead to humankind’s extinction. Rees argued that we are living through a critical moment in the history of our species, and that we will either find a way to responsibly harness these technologies or be destroyed by them.
In On the Future, Rees casts a wider eye over humankind, which he sees threatened by powerful new technologies like gene editing and the accumulating pressures of growth and climate change. In a Skype conversation from his home in Cambridge, England, Rees discussed the limits of science, his political pessimism, and why humans of the future could be very different from you or me.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
