There’s reason to think not. Times have changed since Einstein worked by day as a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office, and by night as a World-Historical Physicist. Early in the last century, science and technology were still largely the province of private patrons and individual inventors working in basement labs. These days vast networks of laboratories sponsored by governments, universities, corporations and venture capitalists are all pushing to find the next new thing. Discovery and invention–in developed countries, at least–have become regularized. The insights of individuals are still important, of course, but the overall effort relies less on any one genius. “In the late 19th century you had predominantly the private inventor,” says Yale historian Daniel Kevles. “Now you have the organized inventor. Even the big conceptual scientific leaps are much less likely to occur nowadays. Scientific fields are crowded with geniuses. Everybody’s working at the big problems all the time.” The advances we take for granted in 2012 will have sprung not from one mind but from an army of them.
What that means is our society has become more steady in producing earth-shattering advances. The need for breakthroughs-on-demand started during World War II, when the U.S. military wanted its antiaircraft shells to inflict damage even when they missed enemy planes. Nobody knew how to get the bombs to explode in midair at just the right moment, so the Pentagon funded the applied-physics lab at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and staffed it with experts in plastics, electromagnetics and other specialties. The proximity fuse they came up with was decisive in winning the war. And the effort to make it, along with the legendary Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb, set the precedent for organizing an array of expertise based on the need for a particular invention.
This shift in the methodology of discovery has complicated matters. It gave inventors the wherewithal to build ever more complex machines, but made the act of inventing more complex as well. The Pentagon awards a contract for a new jet fighter to a prime contractor, which passes the various subsystems and components down through layers of subcontractors. “Henry Ford could understand every piece of his assembly line,” says Don Kash, a technology expert at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. “Nobody can do that at Toyota.” Complexity has spread from big-ticket items like cars and planes to toasters, stuffed animals and Game Boys.
What’s different now, though, is how comfortable we’ve become with complexity. Innovation is part of our lives in a way it wasn’t for previous generations. In 1970 Alvin Toffler argued in “Future Shock” that technology was changing society so quickly that in the span of a single lifetime a person would find himself a stranger in his own culture. Toffler’s best-selling book struck home because many people thought new technologies–in those days television, the birth-control pill and the transistor–were bringing about change at a pace that was disorienting and not a little disturbing. These days we’ve learned how to ride the rocket of innovation. “My father thought the world would be the same,” says Kash. “My children wake up every day thinking the world will be different.”
Just because we have grown accustomed to, even jaded by, our scientific and technological progress doesn’t mean it hasn’t been mind-boggling. Certainly it’s easy to criticize the overheated rhetoric of the Internet boom. But we shouldn’t forget that even if the Web didn’t quite change everything, it certainly changed a lot of things. The past decade saw one of the most concentrated bursts of innovation ever–not just the Net but the decoding of the human genome and the cloning of a sheep named Dolly come to mind.
It’s possible that the next 10 years will render even those radical changes forgettable. Science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has said he seldom predicts the future; he merely extrapolates from the present. A decade ago, with the bloom just coming off Japan, few people predicted that the American economy would so thoroughly dominate the world’s. An equal number of visionaries now argue that by 2012, Europe will have supplanted the United States as the prime mover in the global economy. The Internet opened new worlds by linking PCs to other computers. Now its reach is already beginning to spread to tiny chips embedded in everyday objects (and even the human body). “Grid” computing is making it possible to spread massive computing tasks over many machines. As the Internet’s presence in our daily lives grows, we’ll continue to grapple with the issues of security and privacy.
Based on what’s happening in today’s labs, the most potentially explosive field is genetics, which requires no lightning bolts of insight to shake things up. In vitro fertilization already gives scientists the ability to create an embryo in a petri dish. Should the technology get good enough to make many embryos at once, genetic-screening techniques, which already exist, will allow scientists to pick the one with the most highly prized traits. Outlawing unsavory –practices, like eugenics, in the United States or Europe won’t help much if bio-technology is being practiced elsewhere without ethical constraints.
On the positive side, diagnostic tests using gene chips and other technologies may tell us if we’re susceptible to specific diseases or how we’ll respond to certain drugs. Armed with this kind of information, doctors may be able to tailor our diets and treatments to our own genetic idiosyncrasies. Genetically modified plants may someday yield the raw materials for gasoline, turning petroleum into a renewable resource. Since the plants take carbon out of the air, burning them wouldn’t add to global warming. “I’ve become a great believer in energy plants,” says Freeman Dyson, a mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.
All this change will have an even broader impact than what we’ve experienced so far: the steady churn of technological advances builds on itself, sometimes with unanticipated results. Birth control, which has made it commonplace to have fewer children later in life, means the world’s population will get grayer, posing problems for governments as well as opportunities for business. As women continue to win in the global job market, men will have to adapt or accept a change in status. (Since they’ll live longer, though, they’ll have plenty of time to work it out.)
To figure out what the future will be like, look around: innovation has a way of emerging from the wheels and gears of daily life. Einstein, for instance, used the technology around him as a mental springboard for his thoughts about physics and the nature of time. To synchronize clocks in all the Continent’s far-flung railway stations, European engineers sent out signals from Paris and Berlin through wires and radio links. Some of the many inventions needed for such a system–signal relays, electromechanical devices to reset the clocks and so forth–might even have passed across Einstein’s desk at the patent office. “Every day Einstein took the short stroll from his house, left down the Kramgasse, to the patent office,” writes science historian Peter Galison of Harvard. “Every day he must have seen the great clock towers that presided over Bern with their coordinated clocks, and the myriad of street clocks branched proudly to the central telegraph office.” So maybe his great mental leap didn’t come from left field at all, but had its genesis in the inventions of the day. Today’s budding scientists have an even more remarkable panorama to explore. What seeds of change are they sowing?
