Is it end of road for technology?

Technology dominates our lives. To many in the world it has become an ideology, which has banished ancient superstitions and now promises a happy, prosperous and healthful future for all of mankind. But is this not expecting too much? Could it be that technology is overrated? Could it be that it has limits and that those limits are now approaching? The evidence suggests that this may well be so and that, in some cases, these limits were reached years or decades ago.
Consider space travel: It takes the greatest nations on Earth, working at the outside edge of their abilities, with their best minds and resources, to put a few people in low Earth orbit. And how do these “conquerors” of space ride into orbit? The answer is: Through the “technology” developed by the Chinese millennia ago for fireworks. For all their sophistication, modern space vehicles are large Roman Candles powered by the same principles that to this day lift fireworks into the air. More “sophisticated” systems for lifting spacecraft into orbit while mooted remain firmly in the domain of science fiction. In the meantime lighting a fire under a rocket remains the only way to make it to space.
Or take air travel: It took about half century for airplanes to go from a speed of about 10km per hour at which the Wright Brothers’ biplane took to the air at Kitty Hawk in 1903, to speeds of 900 km per hour of the jet-powered airliners such as the Boeing 707 and DC 8, which started to see service in the late 1950s.
A little more than half a century separates us from the flight of the first Boeing 707, and yet, all passenger airliners in service today still fly at about the same speed as the 707. Yes, the innards of these new airliners have changed dramatically. Hydraulics and cables have been replaced by computers, motors and wires. Engines have seen dramatic improvements in efficiency due to improved metallurgy and computer-aided design. But the planes still travel at the same subsonic speeds, using the same fuel as their predecessors. Indeed the technology to push airplanes to supersonic speeds has also existed for more than half a century, yet it remains confined — for reasons of cost and practicality — to military aircraft.
Even electronics is starting to push up against physical limits. Gordon Moore — a founder of Intel — wrote in a paper published in 1965 that the number of transistors that could be placed on a semiconductor would grow exponentially, roughly doubling every two years. Moore’s law has turned out to be remarkably prescient. Transistor counts have indeed doubled every two years over the past four decades or so. But, as with all things physical, limits are eventually reached. Miniaturization in printed circuits has reduced conductor widths to an atomic scale. It is unlikely that Moore’s law will hold for the future as it has for the past. Conventional silicon- based computing will no longer see breathtaking advances in computation speed. There is talk of shifting to other materials, or relying exclusively on optics, or on “biological” computing. But all of this remains — like power through fusion — a mirage, tantalizingly close but magically evanescent.
In biology, the breakthrough moment was in 1963 when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered, in Crick’s words, “the secret of life.” And, for a while, it seemed like they had. What they had discovered was the structure of deoxyribonucleic acid — DNA. This molecule — an elegantly simple “double helix” — resides at the center of all living cells. “Encoded” in the double helix is the entire genome of the creature to whom the cell belongs. This means, theoretically, that it if one had a single cell of any creature — living or dead — it should be possible to “reconstruct” an exact replica of that creature. And indeed, this was the sort of dream that scientists dreamed. But it was not to be.
Several decades later, when the “tools” became available to manipulate DNA, the true power of Watson and Crick’s discovery was unleashed. Biotechnology was born. Scientists started to “read” the double helix, to cut and paste it, and to “unzip” it. In doing so they were able to come up with some marvelous discoveries and drugs. But even here, the initial excitement at discovering “the secret of life” has given way to a realization that things are much more complicated than they appear; the more the scientists discover it seems the less they know. Great expectations of cures to debilitating and fatal diseases have not materialized. Read the literature on cutting edge research in biotechnology and you will be struck by the number of times the phrase “is not understood” appears. Nature, it seems, has secrets it will not reveal.
There is no doubt that technology has served us well. And will continue to do so. But it is not panacea, or magic, or for that matter ideology.

- Nadeem M. Qureshi is chairman of Mustaqbil Pakistan