A 30-year-old warning about how we think – and why we still don't.
I’m in the middle of reading Carl Sagan’s book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.
It’s a telling tale in so many ways.
Carl Sagan speaks at Cornell University. Around 1987.
Published in 1995—near the end of his life—and you can’t help but feel his sense of urgency, even a warning, that technology and all its complexity is outpacing “general” understanding, resulting in a scientifically illiterate public.
He didn’t mean a public that didn’t understand biology or physics—that’s not what scientifically literate means—but rather a public that can be easily duped because they don’t understand the reasoning process of science.
In other words, when people can’t distinguish evidence from assertion, or skepticism from cynicism, they become highly vulnerable to manipulation—whether that be by government, business, religious powers, pseudoscience or, God forbid, social media.
One thing that became glaringly obvious to me was his warning about overpopulation—when the world would be hosting 12 or more billion people by the end of the 21st century.
Of course, the irony is that we are now facing something close to the opposite problem. Population shrinkage… and a completely different set of concerns.
This isn’t a criticism of Sagan.
If anything, it highlights—yet again—the weakness of predictions.
We’re drawn to them. Especially the doom-and-gloom variety. They have a way of feeling convincing… because they’re built on what we can see.
But they almost always carry a quiet assumption: that the world will continue as it is.
History suggests otherwise.
Look at the current wave of predictions around AI. Almost all of them are built on some version of the present, extended forward. And yet AI itself may be the very thing that disrupts that trajectory in ways we can’t anticipate.
Which raises a more uncomfortable point.
Maybe the issue isn’t that predictions are wrong.
Maybe it’s how easily we trust them when they sound right.
Sagan’s book may be about science, but it feels more like a book about how to think… and what happens when we don’t.
And that part, at least, doesn’t feel like a prediction.
