Predictions Are Hard: Michael Crichton

I really enjoy Michael Crichton books. They're fun, quick reads and I like his historical fiction even more than his science fiction.

Even some of my least favorite stories are fascinating to revisit simply because the things he was fervently concerned with seem so foreign now.

Rising Sun

Published in 1992, Rising Sun is a murder mystery set in LA—though most of the book really is about Japan's rising influence in the US. The cautionary message in the book is so strong it drowns out the story. Throughout the book, dialogue is overrun with statements like:

• "... even though the American economy is collapsing—it will soon be third in the world after Japan and Europe—it's still important to try and hold it together."
• "The decline of American business is starting to disturb even Congress. We've lost too many basic industries to Japan—steel and shipbuilding in the sixties, television and computer chips in the seventies, machine tools in the eighties... We've lost the ability to make components essential to our national security. We're entirely dependent on Japan to supply them."
• "Many Americans fear that we may become an economic colony of Japan, or Europe. But Especially Japan."
• "The Japanese are becoming much better in software. Soon they will surpass the Americans in that, as they already have in computers."
• "... ranches all around Montana and Wyoming have been sold. The remaining ranchers see Japanese cowboys riding on the range."

In case the message still hasn't sunk in after almost 400 pages, Rising Sun includes a two-page afterward from Crichton where he summarizes his view:

Sooner or later, the United States must come to grips with the fact that Japan has become the leading industrial nation in the world. The Japanese have the longest lifespan. They have the highest employment, the highest literacy, the smallest gap between rich and poor. Their manufactured products have the highest quality. They have the best food. The fact is that a country the size of Montana, with half our population, will soon have an economy equal to ours.
 
... the Japanese have invented a new kind of trade—adversarial trade, trade like war, trade intended to wipe out the competition—which America has failed to understand for several decades...
 
... the United States is now without question the weaker partner in any economic discussion with Japan.

And yet, we now know that Japan never equaled the economy of the US. In the early 1990s, Japan suffered an asset price bubble collapse and the country fell into an economic stagnation—known as the Lost Decades—which has lasted for over 30 years. The US has outpaced Japan and in 2024 it had a GDP over 6 times the size of Japan's.

Japan's population has been falling for 15 years. It's birth rate recently hit a record low. And the country is now facing historic labor shortages. Rather than fear an economic takeover, countries like the US are concerned that Japan's fertility and labor issues are a sign of what could be in its own future.

The Terminal Man

Crichton's 1972 novel, The Terminal Man, feels similarly lost in a different time. In the story, a man is suffering from epileptic episodes which lead to violent behavior for some reason. He receives a neural implant to stimulate his brain. The device is intended to reduce his violent episodes but instead it accelerates them.

In the Author's Introduction Crichton discusses the advances of psychosurgery from the early 1900s onward, including entries like this that suggest it is ramping up in the 1960s:

1965    Narabayashi (Japan) reports on 98 patients with violent behavior treated by stereotaxic surgery.
 
1965    More than 24,000 stereotaxic procedures on human beings have been performed in various countries by this date.
 
1968    Delgado and co-workers (U.S.A.) attach "stimoceiver" (radio stimulator plus radio receiver) to freely ambulatory hospital patients.

And he warns that the public is too complacent about the threat of "mind control":

Research in neurobiology is spectacular enough to appear regularly in Sunday supplements. But the public has never really taken it seriously. There has been so much ominous talk and so much frivolous speculation for many years that the public now regards "mind control" as a problem removed to the distant future: it might eventually happen, but not soon, and not in a way that would affect anyone now alive.

But as it turns out, the public had the appropriate level of concern. In the decades since, it wasn't brain surgery but antipsychotic drugs that became the norm. When people become erratic we suggest that they may have "gone off their meds" because medication has become the common remedy. Psychosurgery became rare. Today we're more concerned with the danger of people going untreated rather than the danger of the treatment itself.

In 2023—more than 50 years after The Terminal Man was published—the world's first epilepsy device was fitted into a UK boy's skull. And it was a success. The boy's daytime seizures were reduced by 80% and his mother describes him as happier and having a "much better quality of life."

There were a few other conjectures in the book that didn't hold up.

One idea was that we could see a rise of "elads"—electrical addicts who needed "jolts of electricity just as some men needed doses of drugs". These addicts would seek out illegal operations to have electrodes implanted in their brains to stimulate areas that produced pleasure. In 2025, people are still addicted to many things but applying electric shocks directly to their brains isn't one of them.

Another speculation was that we would eventually see computers made of living tissues due to size and power constraints:

A computer, like a human brain, was composed of functioning units—little flip-flop cells of one kind or another. The size of those units had shrunk considerably over the years. They would continue to shrink as large-scale integration and other microelectronic techniques improved. Power requirements would also decrease.
 
But the individual units would never become as small as a nerve cell, a neuron. You could pack a billion nerve cells into one cubic inch. No human miniaturization method would ever achieve that economy of space. Nor would any human method ever produce a unit that operated on so little power as a nerve cell.
 
Therefore, make your computers from living nerve cells. It was already possible to grow isolated nerve cells in tissue culture. It was possible to alter them artificially in different ways. In the future, it would be possible to grow them to specification, to make them link up in specified ways.

Yet, we've continued to find it easier to build smaller and more efficient machines than to turn nerve cells into computers. In 2021, IBM created the first 2 nanometer chip with 50 billion transistors packed into a space the size of a fingernail.

Imagine computers that need food and water to stay alive and could contract actual viruses. It's probably best that we've stuck with silicon.

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