Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

by Bill McKibben

  To talk with Kurzweil is to remind yourself that there is something sweet and wistful to these dreams of immortality. His father, Fredric, died when Ray was young, and the son has filled a storage locker with boxes of his effects (letters, photos, even electric bills), in the hope of someday creating “a virtual avatar of his father and then populating the doppelganger’s mind with all this information.”15 So he can talk with him again, father to son. “I do think death is a tragedy,” Kurzweil told me. “That’s our immediate reaction to it. If someone dies, our immediate reaction—it’s considered a tragic thing, not a triumphant thing.”

  That is of course true sometimes, though not, I think, if someone has lived what seems a full life. You can read the obituary page with a sense of dread, but you can also read it as the chronicle of a world that works.

  * * *

  The obvious practical problems posed by no one dying can be waved away if you believe, like Kurzweil, that in just a little while, artificial intelligence will be providing us with a planet so rich in resources that no one will ever want for anything. “Overcrowded?” he asked me. “Take a train trip anywhere in the world and look out the window. Forty percent of the land we use is for horizontal agriculture. We can do a better job without any of that.” By growing our food on vertical stands, he means. “As we extend longevity, we radically expand the resources of life.”

  That’s an ethical improvement on, say, Michael West, currently chair of a California start-up called BioTime, which specializes in “regenerative medicine.” West, who organized the first effort to isolate human stem cells for cloning purposes, was once asked whether immortality wouldn’t lead to overpopulation. Sure, he said, but “why put the burden on people now living, people enjoying the process of breathing, people loving and being loved. The answer is clearly to limit new entrants to the human race, not to promote the death of those enjoying the gift of life today.”16 That level of selfishness makes Ayn Rand look like Mother Teresa.

  And it’s that incredible self-absorption that should be the clue to what a bad idea this all really is. I’ve taken the time to lay out the various advances we may be capable of if we fully embrace the newest technologies—we can “improve” our children; we may be able to live without work (or we may have to); we may be able, in some sense, to live forever—but none of that is living, not in the human sense.

  These threats to the human game are existential. Though the technologists at some level value individual humans too much—no one can be allowed to die; we must collect their heads in a giant thermos—they value humanness far too little. They don’t understand that some sadness and loss is not just bearable; it’s essential. There is an everyday heroism, if you think about it, in bringing up your children fully aware that they will supplant you. That’s what human civilization is. If it weren’t—if your children were just going to be other beings who perpetually trailed you through infinity by twenty or thirty years—then the most powerful of human connections would in effect be severed. What would you owe them, and vice versa? Those who exalt humans too highly devalue humanity.

  A world without death is a world without time, and that in turn is a world without meaning, at least human meaning. Go far enough down this path and the game is up.

  PART FOUR

  An Outside Chance

  19

  I don’t know—no one knows—if it is still possible to fundamentally alter our trajectory. Climate change is far advanced, and the march of some of these new technologies seems as rapid as it is unregulated. But no one knows that it is impossible, either, and so the last section of this book will be about resistance, about the tools and ideas that might help us keep global warming and technological mania within some limits and, in the process, keep the human game recognizable, even robust.

  Resistance is a subject I take up with some reluctance, because I know at least a little bit about its costs. I’ve spent much of the past thirty years as a volunteer in the fight against global warming. We’ve had more successes than I imagined we would, some of which I will describe in passing, but we have yet to turn the tide: the power of people is not yet mobilized in sufficient strength to outweigh the financial majesty of the fossil fuel industry, and so we continue down an ever-hotter path. Also, the price of even that mobilization has been enormous: in some parts of the world, environmental advocates are routinely murdered, and even in places where they operate with more freedom, the stress and strain are very real. I know so many people who have given over the prime of their lives to this fight. Some have been to jail, wrecked their careers, burned out their own emotional cores. They’ve been sued and surveilled by oil companies, attacked by guard dogs. I also know many people who’ve found their lives in this work, in burgeoning movements that are full of love and friendship. But none of it has been easy—and the climate fight at least has the advantage of being against something clearly ugly and wrong. Opposing wildfire and drought and inundation is conceptually easier than figuring out how to slow down the rush toward a pill that would let you live forever or a genetic tweak that would make sure your child turned out as cute as a button.

  Still, even the most powerful foes and effective propaganda have weaknesses that can be exploited. These battles over the human future potentially shake up our usual political categories. For instance, because I am concerned about inequality and about the environment, I am usually classed as a progressive, a liberal. But it seems to me that what I care most about is preserving a world that bears some resemblance to the past—a world with some ice at the top and bottom and the odd coral reef in between, a world where people are connected to the past and future (and to one another) instead of turned into obsolete software. And those seem to me profoundly conservative positions. Meanwhile, oil companies and tech barons strike me as deeply radical, willing to alter the chemical composition of the atmosphere, eager to confer immortality. There is a native conservatism in human beings that resists such efforts, a visceral sense of what’s right or dangerous, rash or proper. You needn’t understand every nuance of germline engineering or the carbon cycle to understand why monkeying around on this scale might be a bad idea. And indeed, polling suggests that most people instinctively oppose, say, living forever or designing babies, just as they want government action to stabilize the climate.

  This political mashup is either a split that will be widened by those who want to own the future, or it’s a potential source of great strength. The key, I think, lies in how we see ourselves. If, as the antigovernment rhetoricians insist, we view ourselves only as individuals, then the game is lost: we will never combine in numbers large enough to overcome the deep power and unrelenting focus of great wealth.

  But the opposite of libertarian hyperindividualism is not necessarily the Red Army kicking in the door of your father’s drugstore. It could also be a sense of social solidarity, an ethic of “We’re all in this together.” As Pope Francis said, after a closed-door meeting with oil company executives about climate change in 2018, “Decisive progress on this path cannot be made without an increased awareness that all of us are part of one human family, united by bands of fraternity and solidarity.”1 You can find plenty of actual examples of this ethic on the planet: Scandinavia, say, or to a lesser degree any of the “welfare states” where people concern themselves with one another’s … welfare. And it works. The World Happiness Report for 2018 found Finland the most cheerful country on earth, followed by Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. America came in eighteenth, “substantially below most comparably wealthy nations.”2 Even for Americans, though, it’s not some odd, impossible concept. In 2017, amid Trumpist triumphalism, polls found that 61 percent of Republicans and 93 percent of Democrats wanted to “maintain or increase spending for economic assistance to needy people.”3 Ayn Rand has carried the CEOs, but not the rest of us. By and large, humans continue to believe in humanity.

  And, luckily, we have two new technologies that could turn that belief into reality, two relatively new inventio
ns that could, in our own era, prove decisive if fully employed. One is the solar panel, and the other is the nonviolent movement. Obviously, they are not the same sort of inventions: the solar panel (and its cousins the wind turbine and the lithium-ion battery) is hardware, while the ability to organize en masse for change is more akin to software. Indeed, even to call nonviolent campaigning a “technology” will strike some as odd. Each is still in its infancy; we deploy them, but fairly blindly, finding out by trial and error their best uses. Both come with inherent limits: neither is as decisive or as immediately powerful as, say, a nuclear weapon or a coal-fired power plant. But both are transformative nonetheless—and, crucially, the power they wield is human in scale. They don’t threaten the game we’ve been playing all these years. Indeed, they threaten to make it more beautiful.

  * * *

  Before we discuss how we might best make use of these technologies, though, we need to engage the two most insidious ideas deployed in defense of the status quo. The first is that there is no need for mass resistance or government regulation because each of us should choose for ourselves the future we want. The second is that there is no possibility of resistance because the die is already cast.

  Choice first. It is the mantra that unites people of many political persuasions. Conservatives say, “You’re not the boss of me,” when it comes to paying taxes; liberals say it when the topic is marijuana. The easiest, laziest way to dispense with a controversy is to say, “Do what you want; don’t tell me what to do.” So, if someone says, “I want to genetically engineer my child,” many will defer to that person’s choice. Jennifer Doudna, for instance, after a book-length discussion of her CRISPR invention, ends by writing, “I find myself returning again and again to the issue of choice. Above all else, we must respect people’s freedom to choose their own genetic destiny and strive for healthier, happier lives. If people are given this freedom of choice, they will do with it what they personally think is right—whatever that may be.”4

  I’ve already explained the most obvious reason that this supposed freedom seems profoundly coercive: You can, with some effort, rebel against the ways you were raised. (Consider, say, the number of lapsed Catholics, despite all the combined and ferocious efforts of parents and nuns.) But you can’t rebel against the genes implanted inside you: The choice your parents make in the fertility clinic will govern. In fact, if they get the dopamine just right, the idea of rebelling may never cross your mind.

  There’s something deeper at work here, too, though. This is the kind of choice that, to a society, isn’t a choice at all. Once substantial numbers of people engage in genetic engineering, it will become effectively mandatory. Not by government diktat, but by the powerful forces of competition, as the possibility of improving your kids sets off a genetic arms race. The late MIT economist Lester Thurow posed the dilemma this way: “Suppose parents could add thirty points to their child’s IQ.… And if you don’t, your child will be the stupidest in the neighborhood.”5 This is one of those elections that happens only once: a fairly small number of people will make all the decisions for all time, in much the same way that a tiny clutch of people, by preventing us from addressing climate change, are making a decision that will stretch on deep into geological history. (This reasoning helps explain, by the way, why a large number of progressive feminists who support a woman’s right to choose an abortion nonetheless oppose the right to tweak a baby’s genes: in the second case, the effects extend to the entire society and pass down through the generations.) No one small group of people should get to make decisions like that by themselves. Such things should be decided (if anything should) by all of us.

  The libertarian ideal of individual autonomy, which to one extent or another every modern human understands and cherishes, runs aground when the stakes get as high as ecological hell or posthuman meaninglessness. Much as I enjoy talking to Ray Kurzweil, he and his friends at Google shouldn’t be allowed to unleash their vision on the world until we’ve all taken a vote.

  * * *

  If “Let anyone do what they want” is a flawed argument, then “No one can stop them anyway” is an infuriating one. Insisting that some horror is inevitable no matter what you do is the response of people who don’t want to be bothered trying to stop it, and I’ve heard it too often to take it entirely seriously.

  I remember, for instance, when investigative reporters proved that Exxon had known all about global warming and had covered up that knowledge. Plenty of people on the professionally jaded left told me, in one form or another, “Of course they did,” or “All corporations lie,” or “Nothing will ever happen to them anyway.” This kind of knowing cynicism is no threat to the Exxons of the world—it’s a gift. Happily, far more people reacted with usefully naïve outrage: before too long, people were comparing the oil giants with the tobacco companies, and some of the biggest cities in the country were suing them for damages. We don’t know yet precisely how it will end, only that giving them a pass because of their power makes no sense.

  Another example: seven years ago, some of us began fighting for fossil fuel divestment, and again we were told not to bother—if anyone did sell his stock, someone else would just buy it, and the world would roll on unchanged. But our little campaign became the largest of its kind in history—endowments and portfolios worth nearly $8 trillion have joined in—and it has clearly stung: recent academic studies have proved that it has helped move the climate issue to the fore and reduced the capital the fossil fuel companies can mobilize for new exploration. By 2018, after New York City and then Ireland had announced they were divesting, Shell Oil called the campaign a “material risk” to its business in its annual report, and Goldman Sachs analysts reported that the campaign had played a large role in devaluing coal shares. “It’s inevitable” is a powerful argument right up to the moment when people decide not to let it sap their energy.

  It’s true that effective regulation of bioengineering or artificial intelligence will also be hard. CRISPR is so easy to use that high school biology labs can play around with genetic tweaking, and indeed, there are DIY gene-editing kits. (One entrepreneur has started including live frogs in his $159 mail-order kit, in the hope that people will stop experimenting on themselves.)6 But hard is not the same as impossible: though scientists have edged up to the human germline, as of this writing, only Dr. He has actually crossed it, and the twin girls he modified in embryo actually led many scientists to call for more restrictions. His own clinical trials were shut down by the Chinese government. In most of the world where such work is possible, including all the European nations, heritable genetic modification is explicitly banned. Even if someone else decides to break the ban, a few designer babies are not like a few nuclear weapons: as the law professor Maxwell Mehlman once wrote, “If the number of enhanced individuals is sufficiently small, we may be able to ignore them.”7 A number large enough to matter would require investors to build clinics and chase payoffs, and that means the corporations involved would need to navigate the checkpoints of liability, of insurance, of large-scale financing. That is to say, they’d need to win the approval of the political system, which is not a gimme, at least not in a country like the United States, where strong majorities in every recent poll have serious reservations about such work: 83 percent of Americans told pollsters in 2015 that it was not appropriate to “change a baby’s genetic characteristics to make the baby more intelligent.”8 Americans both right and left share this outlook: nine senators with 100 percent pro-choice voting records joined evangelical politicians to vote for a cloning ban.

  It’s not too late, not quite. Fossil fuel came to dominate our economy a century before we realized that global warming was a threat. That’s one reason climate change has been so hard to bring under control. But human bioengineering and the most advanced forms of artificial intelligence haven’t happened yet. Yes, Ray Kurzweil and Google have big plans and big power, but so far, Kurzweil’s team is focused on auto-reply for Gmail. Yes, rob
ots are scary, but “robots in a recent government-sponsored contest were stumped by an unlocked door that blocked their path at an outdoor obstacle course,” the Wall Street Journal reported in 2017. (“One bipedal machine managed to wrap a claw around the door handle and open it but was flummoxed by a breeze that kept blowing the door shut before it could pass through.”9) Some start-ups are currently employing humans to pretend they’re robots: the software company Expensify had to hire humans to sort receipts because its robots couldn’t handle the job, and the speech tech firm SpinVox was hiring humans in foreign call centers to convert voice mails into text messages.10 Our Alexa is significantly less competent than our mutt, who is unflummoxed by breezy doors.

  None of this is to say that these technologies aren’t coming, and soon—they are. But we’ve got a window, even if it’s closing at exponential speed. It’s still possible to imagine regulating AI, and we should. “Nobody likes being regulated,” says Elon Musk, “but everything (cars, planes, food, drugs) that’s a danger to the public is regulated. AI should be too.” It’s the “rare case,” he told the National Governors Association, “where we need to be proactive.”11 With genetic engineering, it’s crucial not to cross the germline and produce heritable alterations—that’s as bright a line as 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. With AI, the boundaries remain harder to draw: the search for a fail-safe switch to keep them from becoming too smart might be the most important engineering and policy task of our time. Some of that work is already under way: on Wall Street, where real money is at stake, people have proposed a variety of technological limitations to keep AI traders from crashing markets.