What will the next decade bring in science? Four UChicago scientists speculate

In the last 10 years, we saw discoveries scientists had only dreamed of—from the precise genetic engineering allowed by a little molecule called CRISPR to being able to detect ripples in the fabric of space-time.

So what could be next as the 2020s begin? Four eminent University of Chicago scientists consider the possibilities—and pitfalls—their own fields could see in the decade ahead.

Bryan Dickinson, synthetic biochemist

What do you think might be the most exciting result of scientific or technological advances in the next decade?

Drug discovery since the dawn of civilization has generally involved finding chemicals from our natural world or discovering molecules in the lab, and it’s mostly to treat the symptoms of disease. Now we are entering a new era, where one can go into a cell or organism and make permanent DNA changes. This precision will allow us to better treat disease, modify the natural world around us, and create more environmentally-friendly biotechnologies. I believe engineered biotechnologies are going to become a bigger part of our life—and key solutions to seemingly intractable problems dealing with food safety, human health, and pollution.

What’s a possible consequence of science or technology in the next decade that you worry about?

The public has a lot of misconceptions about engineered biological systems. The "GMO" fear is an especially worrying example of the backlash that can emerge if some bad commercial players drive a technology. So there are ethical questions to deal with—like when and how is appropriate to engineer humans?—as well as regulatory questions—like how can truly individualized genetic medicines be tested and approved?

Engaging the public in open dialogue—and ensuring that there is broad understanding and buy-in—is absolutely critical to fully capitalizing on the awesome potential of synthetic biology to address important problems in the next decade.

Daniel Holz, astrophysicist

What do you think might be the most exciting result of scientific or technological advances in the next decade?

Our gravitational wave detectors are getting more and more sensitive, so we’ll learn a ton about the universe as we get more data. Then there’s a few roll-of-the-dice things that could happen that would be amazing. Like if a supernova went off in our own galaxy—with all the ways we have to detect astronomical events now, that would be an incredible way to learn about everything from the physics of stars to the history of the universe. Those happen about once every hundred years, so it could be anytime. Or maybe something unusual will pop up in our gravitational wave detectors—we’ve picked up black hole collisions and neutron star collisions, but what if we detected waves from cosmic strings?

The most exciting thing is always something you haven't anticipated. In astronomy, whenever we’ve invented a new way to look at the sky, we discover something new that no one had ever thought of before. Our gravitational wave detectors haven't discovered anything profoundly unexpected, at least not yet.

What’s a possible consequence of science or technology in the next decade that you worry about?

Two things that worry me about the future are nuclear annihilation and climate change—both due to technological advancements. I’m a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which sets the Doomsday Clock, so that’s something we think about a lot.

The next 10 years will be critical for climate. We can impact just how bad things will get decades from now. If we act now, we might avoid some of the worst, civilization-threatening outcomes. The danger of nuclear annihilation is on the rise, too. These are compounded by the deliberate erosion of facts and truth, which pose grave threats to society.

The number of ways in which we walk blithely into Armageddon is very high. But that’s something all of us can help address. Agitate for change! It’s not too late.

Ayelet Fishbach, behavioral scientist

What do you think might be the most exciting result of scientific or technological advances in the next decade?

I hope for a breakthrough in improving our collective self-control. This will be necessary in addressing the most pressing challenge we face as humankind: climate change. If, 100 years ago, germs posed the greatest threat to humanity, today we are most threatened by a lack of self-control.

Let me explain: Failure of an individual's self-control bears direct consequences for that individual; take, for example, the failure of a person to modify their diet appropriately after a heart attack. But such a failure of a single person's self-control does not risk our entire species. Failures of our collective self-control do pose this threat. Such mass-scale failures happen when we, as a society, neglect our long-term goals in pursuit of short-term interests. When we don’t take necessary and dramatic action to reverse climate change, we choose our present comforts over our long-term survival. If our collective self-control prevails, we will take action as a society to invest in appropriate public policy and science that develops technological solutions. In this last decade, behavioral scientists started to pay attention to improving individual self-control. My hope is that, now, we will focus our attention on improving our collective self-control.

What’s a possible consequence of science or technology in the next decade that you worry about?

Science and technology make me more hopeful than worried. I do worry about misuse of scientific discoveries and new technologies, but no more than I worry about misuse of past discoveries. I look for answers in science.

Marshini Chetty, computer scientist

What do you think might be the most exciting result of scientific or technological advances in the next decade?

To me, advances in creating sustainable energy resources will be key for humanity at large as we deal with the effects of climate change, and to complement these advances, improvements in technologies to help with prediction of natural disasters and disaster relief are contributions that computer science can specifically address. I'm also excited to see how artificial intelligence and machine learning amplifies human abilities in ways that allow us to do bigger, better, greater things!

What’s a possible consequence of science or technology in the next decade that you worry about?

I worry that we are all becoming too involved and distracted by the pervasiveness of technologies in our daily lives, particularly in well connected environments and that we need to be mindful about making time to disconnect and reflect on how these technologies augment our lives. I also worry that we are overly optimistic about how artificial intelligence and machine learning can solve fundamental issues around fairness and bias which are inherent to human nature. We cannot outsource these issues to technology since as scholar Langdon Winner noted in "do artifacts have politics?" technologies themselves embody those biases we have ourselves!