Why so serious?

WHAT SHOULD WE BE WORRIED ABOUT?
Edited by John Brockman
500 pages
Available at National Book Store

Having a weekly column, you’re always on the lookout for things going wrong. Crisis is your breakfast. What’s the next big frack-up, you wonder? This gives you material.

The people at Edge.org, a kind of online think tank, have a similar lookout. The difference is, they actually do something about it. Edge.org gathers some of the world’s most influential minds, and poses them interesting questions to discuss and try to offer up their humble opinions on how to make things better.

Derived from some of this online discussion, What Should We Be Worried About? compiles the essays and thoughts of 150 thinkers, creators, scientists and economists who tackle what they think will be our biggest crises in the unfolding century.

I must admit, the first name I immediately recognized was Brian Eno’s, so I thumbed straight to his concerns for the planet. In “We Don’t Do Politics,” the composer/artist/producer bemoans our dangerous apathy towards democratic participation. Here we are, at a point in history where democracy has filtered down to hundreds of nations, with more freedom to choose and direct our destinies than ever before, and most people in the West… just don’t care. As Eno puts it, “We expect other people to do it for us, and we grumble when they get it wrong. We feel that our responsibility stops at the ballot box, if we even get that far. After that, we’re as laissez-faire as we can get away with. What worries me is that while we’re laissez-ing, someone else is faire-ing.”

What would people rather be doing than voting? Well, jump over to “The Triumph of the Virtual,” an essay by psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and you realize people would much rather be playing dangerously seductive video games. Or check out Daniel Dennett’s essay, “Living Without the Internet for a Couple of Weeks,” and you find that people unconsciously fear their Facebook, Twitter and Instagram accounts could someday just… vanish. While the Internet has led to an amazing era of free knowledge and transparent policy, says the Tufts University philosopher, it also has created a “shocking new vulnerability.” We don’t have to worry about somebody using the Internet to build a nuclear bomb, because the materials to do so are scarce; but someone sitting around all day at a laptop, figuring out our electronic world’s gaping security holes — that very real possibility should sober us up.

What if some malicious group or person decided to really mess up things online? Goodbye, financial security, private information, and of course, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Will people stop buying things online so casually when they realize their credit card information is up for grabs? Scary, scary.

Yes, these are the types of thinkers who like to sit around and cook up the scariest scenarios ever. They’re not just writing Hollywood screenplays, either. These are world-class worrywarts, imagining the world’s worst cases, so that the planet can focus its resources on the right problems.

(Personally, I’m troubled by a recent discovery at Osaka University that makes it relatively easy to “rewrite” the human genome, in effect remapping our DNA to weed out undesirable characteristics. Gattaca, anyone? Or what if people started dumping world currencies, even the gold standard, and believed instead in some phantom, virtual monetary system that could vanish in the blink of an eye? Hello, Bitcoin!)

Neatly edited by John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, the book breaks down roughly into sections, covering our changing psychology, politics, science, population growth and online finances in the next century. You’ll find these thinkers giving themselves ulcers over singularity (the point where robots attain enough artificial intelligence to leave us dumb humans behind), the loss of literacy, declining populations (no worry of that in the Philippines), Armageddon, and even “The Danger from Aliens.” Phew! That’s a lot on their plate. These brains ought to cool down once in a while, sit on a white sand beach, umbrella drink in hand, and forget all our troubles.

And yet the weird part is, What Should We Be Worried About? does actually make for good summer beach reading. The truth is, it’s an insanely entertaining book, full of flights of conjecture that will at least stimulate your brain and give you something to think on.

There is the phenomenon of “the passback,” and what it means for future generations. In parental terms, this is the tendency of moms or dads to “pass back” an iPhone, iPad or other device to pacify the fussing child in the backseat. It’s the subject of the essay “Objects of Desire” by MIT professor Sherry Turkle. Basically, she fears the “shiny objects” we push on our kids at an early age encourage a culture of “constant connection, constant distraction and never-aloneness.” Not to mention wicked high Flappy Bird scores.

One interesting point of What Should We Be Worried About? is that the thinkers here all proceed from the non-logical: each essay springs from some innate fear, not necessarily supported by data, which the writers then try to justify in scientific or scholarly terms.

Another interesting point: none of them offer any solutions. That’s for a different forum altogether. Rather, they are the hand-wringers, the “Woe is us!” doomsayers, the Chicken Littles who are here to offer us a good dose of panic. I guarantee, at least some of these scenarios will scare the bejeezus out of you, if you have a halfway healthy pulse. And that, perhaps, is the point.