A Technologist's Guide to the Future | Nathan Myhrvold | Knowledge Project Podcast

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Make each decision as carefully as you can, then watch how it plays out and be willing to change your mind.

  That was Myhrvold's rule at Microsoft, which he joined when it bought the software company he'd started in grad school, taking a 'leave of absence' from his postdoc with Stephen Hawking. When he later retired, Hawking emailed to ask whether to clear out his office. Microsoft's slogan, 'a computer on every desk and in every home', drew grief at the time ('an absurd nerd fantasy'). In 1990 Myhrvold wrote a memo arguing you'd need one in every pocket. Cars are now 'computers with wheels': the easiest performance upgrade is a new chip.

• 02

  In environments built for machines, they beat humans. Roads are harder, and the real question is whether we'll accept better robots.

  No modern jet flies without an autopilot, yet even Star Trek has a human steering the starship. High-speed trains and most modern subways are effectively computer-controlled because people are slow, distractible and unreliable. Autonomous cars, he says, 'aren't really autonomous' today and don't yet match human drivers. Too many random things happen on roads. But little improvement would be needed to surpass us, and then society must decide whether to accept them. The Air Force, run by pilots, resisted drones. A missile can pull G-forces that make a pilot black out, 'and you've got to call their mom when they die.'

• 03

  Explore space with machines. Colonizing Mars is a holdover from the age of imperialism.

  Crewed spaceflight is now 'a reality TV show', with space tourism at its cutting edge, and keeping a fragile human alive in space is enormously costly. Against Mars colonization he asks, 'Is Antarctica full?' Antarctica is warmer and has air and water. Getting to Mars means long trips, cosmic radiation and frequent lost probes, and signal delays of minutes mean rovers must be semi-autonomous. If we truly needed a second home, the Moon or space habitats would be closer. Treating Earth as disposable means 'you're going to screw Mars up too'.

• 04

  We fix pollution that is local, short-lived and traceable. Climate change is none of those.

  Spain once had a quarter of a million cyanide-killed fish rotting in a river at Seville in August, and it got fixed fast, as did Love Canal and Los Angeles smog. Beijing will fix its air too, once residents demand it. Wildfires are more diffuse: forestry that suppressed every small fire left fuel for huge ones. Climate is the worst case: global, slow and hard to attribute. 'To first order, we're doing exactly nothing,' he says. Renewables are growing, but not fast enough to offset new coal in fast-growing China and India, and CO2 readings at Mauna Kea rise every year.

• 05

  Fossil fuels will only be displaced by something clearly better, as coal replaced wood and kerosene replaced whale oil.

  Britain's need for fuel and timber stripped Scotland of forests. Around 1875, the humor magazine Punch ran a cartoon of whales holding a ball to honor 'Colonel' Drake, whose Pennsylvania oil replaced whale oil in lamps. Soon after, the light bulb beat flames altogether. We have no such superior climate option yet. Momentum keeps getting interrupted: the 2008 crisis after An Inconvenient Truth, then the pandemic, then war. He argues Europe's natural gas was never clean, because leaked methane has about 120 times CO2's warming effect in its first year, and many estimates put gas worse than coal overall.

• 06

  Humans procrastinate and then panic. With climate, panic comes too late, because the physics doesn't forgive.

  We know we should eat well and exercise, yet the average American is overweight. With pandemics, people argued that heart disease and cancer kill daily while pandemics come once a century. His answer: fire sprinklers. Any one building rarely burns, but we protect them all. Panic can work. A Pfizer executive, he recalls, demanded a vaccine in eight months rather than eight years so teams would rethink the process instead of tweaking it. Pearl Harbor turned an isolationist US serious, and half the 'parade generals' were let go within three months. But CO2 lasts thousands of years. Halt all emissions on 'panic day' and temperatures keep rising for about a century and take about 145 years to return to that day's level.

• 07

  Geoengineering, such as dimming sunlight by about 1%, could offset warming. Treat it like emergency heart surgery.

  Sunlight averages about 300 watts per square meter, and extra trapped heat (radiative forcing) is about 2, less than 1%. Ice, high clouds and deserts reflect light; melting Arctic sea ice exposes dark ocean that absorbs it. White roofs and roads help a little. Solar radiation management would put reflective particles in the stratosphere, as Mount Pinatubo did in 1991, cooling the globe by 1–1.8°F for about a year. Cracking his chest open for a heart attack is awful but worth it. You wouldn't do it for a hangnail.

• 08

  Critics fear geoengineering will sap willpower and cause new problems. He replies that willpower fails, and trading problems is human history.

  To the 'Little Engine That Could' view that we just need resolve, he says that would mean no one was overweight, 'me included'. When CO2 falls year on year, he'll stop arguing. On side effects: agriculture enabled civilization and then brought famines. Cars rescued cities 'drowning in horse urine' and still kill far more Americans each year than died on 9/11, roughly double the number murdered, but we tolerate that for mobility.