Barbarism

When you think about what we can do today compared to a few millenia ago, it's a bit mind boggling. We can communicate with people on the other side of the world nearly instantaneously. We can access volumes of information in seconds that would have taken a lifetime to collect twenty years ago. We can power a city for years on a few pounds of radioactive material. We can fly. We can walk on the moon. You might be inclined think that we are approaching the pinnacle of technology, or perhaps that we are soon going to get stuck in a quagmire of diminishing returns. Sure, we'd all like flying cars and 3-D television, and teleporters, but all that stuff seems either silly or impossible. In a hundred years, I think life will be much the same as it is today, but there's one field in which I predict technological advances will make early 21st century theories look downright barbaric by 2100: medicine.

I've thought this for a while, but this article reminded me of it today. We are constantly adding and subtracting mental disorders from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders all the time, but do we have even the faintest idea of what the brain is actually doing in these disorders? How it is supposedly malfunctioning? No. Do we know how to cure cancer? No. We douse cancer cells (and normal, healthy ones) with toxic chemicals, or blast them with radiation. When someone's heart stops working, we cut open their chest and give them a dead person's heart. We stick plastic lenses onto our eyeballs to help us see better.

We suck at fixing people.

In a hundred years or so, we may not have walked on mars, we may not have figured out teleportation or time travel, we may even still be using computers with silicon-based microprocessors; but will we still be using circular saws to cut people's chests open when their organs aren't working right? I doubt it.