We’ve proven we can change the genetic makeup of plants and animals, so how about us? We don’t need to wait for natural selection: we can start selecting right now. The cost of genomic sequencing, the key to moving modern medicine from reactive standards to personalized prevention, has fallen astronomically. When the Human Genome Project was announced in 1990, deciphering the genome of one man was budgeted at $3 billion. By 2001 the cost was down to $3 million. In 2010 it was below $5,000. By 2012 it was below $1,000. At this rate, in ten years a fully sequenced human genome should cost about $10.
As genetic screenings become more common, designing the body to alter genetic weaknesses will be more common as well. Angelina Jolie getting a double mastectomy because of a gene in her body that makes her more susceptible to breast cancer is just the start. It may one day be possible to change the gene rather than the result. The negative aspect is that many genes perform more than one function. Changing a gene to match a given result may have unintended consequences. Trial and error will be necessary here.
What will be the big forces behind genetic manipulation? The University of Washington’s Peter Ward sees parents as strong selective forces, since many will want their offspring to live long, look good, and be brainy. “If the kids are as smart as they are long-lived—an IQ of 150 and a life span of 150 years—they could have more children and accumulate more wealth than the rest of us,” wrote Ward in a January 2009 article for Scientific American. Socially they would be drawn to others of their kind, which could lead to speciation.
Parental desires could provide the big necessary push for the creation of designer genes if only to ensure that their children will be talented, the right height, or the right weight. Such considerations could be a major force for not just designer genes but designer children. Stanford University’s Rob Jackson speculates, “What would happen if women could order Brad Pitt’s sperm from the back of a magazine? Even better, what if they could mix Will Smith’s smile and George Clooney’s eyes from a catalog? It will fundamentally change the human race.”
What if we could alter male genes to make the perfect soldier? According to Henry Harpending, “The Chinese talk about that often—without batting an eye.” The perfect soldier . . . what about the perfect nuclear physicist?
Each of our cells contains our entire genome. Every one of your cells has the genetic blueprint to make an entire you. In 2009, Chinese scientists took skin cells from a mouse and turned them into stem cells. Then they took those stem cells and allowed them to regrow, differentiate, and give birth to a live mouse. Which could then reproduce normally.
The mouse, Xiao Xiao (“Tiny” in Mandarin), was born from one of its mother’s skin cells. What this means is that, in theory, it should be possible to take any one of our cells and create a clone. Remember Dolly, the cloned sheep? Though society has frowned on repetitions of cloning, how long will it take before someone decides they are so special that there needs to be more than one of them? The ability to clone ourselves from skin cells, to change our organs at will, could lead to an explosion of hominid species.
UPLOADING THE MIND
There are other variations on this copying thing. One is uploading your brain. Ed Boyden, a synthetic neurobiologist at MIT, is currently attempting to map the human brain. There are more than 100 billion computational elements in our brain. So Ed designed his own way of isolating brain circuits. He learned how to take stuff out of algae and use it to illuminate and activate specific brain pathways. He can then use the light to watch what is happening inside a brain as a mouse moves an arm, sees, touches, or smells something.
To get beyond simple neural mapping, I hopped a fast train from London Paddington to Oxford station and then took a cab that circled the Oxford campus through stately old buildings that I recognized from watching British mysteries, finally arriving at the Future of Humanity Institute at the edge of the Oxford University campus.
Nick Bostrom, a confident, cerebral man of medium height and slim build, met me in his second-story office overlooking the historic city. Bostrom likes to spend his time contemplating the various threats to our existence—their probabilities and what we might do about them. Bostrom thinks there is a big gap between the speed of technological advance and an understanding of the dangers it has for man.
That overcast day, however, we were talking about the possibilities involved in uploading one’s mind, though Bostrom didn’t ignore its dangers. Bostrom believes that as technology accelerates, “at some point the technology of mind uploading becomes available and we may transform the human brain into software.” He said this could be possible by making high-resolution scans of thinly sliced layers of the brain and then uploading those scans to a computer. He felt it was not that far away.
The idea is that human consciousness could well exist in a machine after the body has been discarded or, more likely, outlived. “The main pressure for this could come from people who are terminally ill and want to try immortality,” Bostrom said. He thought our neural architecture might exist on a computer, but our consciousness might “reside in a robot in the real world or as an avatar in a virtual reality.”
There is precedent for this in the computer game world. Second Life is a 3-D online community that has millions of users who take regular walks in a virtual world where everyone is beautiful. It is the creation of Linden Lab in San Francisco and provides its users with a real-time experience on their personal computers, allowing them to wander around castles, deserted islands, other fantastic 3-D environments, and meet thousands of online participants, talk, and even have simulated sex. The company reports that the average player spends about twenty hours a week in these environments.
Bostrom claimed that once society is uploaded, it would be practical to separate our abilities into nodules that could perform different tasks. After all, it would be more efficient to hire a math nodule rather than waste a lot of time doing math. One of the goals of artificial intelligence—to make all knowledge accessible to all people—could be accomplished much more easily if we were all connected pieces of software. And Bostrom feels this will naturally breed specialization.
Once specializations are standardized, copying oneself would become logical, because it would increase the worth and the assets of the individual. He said that there would still be people who would like to do things themselves—for example, hobbyists who would enjoy planting vegetables or knitting their own sweaters—but they would be outcompeted by people that didn’t need such things. The old argument that man needs rest and relaxation once in a while would disappear in an uploaded world, since software packages don’t need to rest.
In such a world, Bostrom sees simulated life splitting into two groups. One group would replicate current human values by engaging in such enjoyable stuff as humor, love, game-playing, art, sex, dancing, social conversation, food, and the like. Though Bostrom thinks those activities may have been adaptive in our evolutionary past, he wonders if they would be adaptive in the future. “Perhaps what will maximize fitness in the future will be nonstop high-intensity drudgery—work of a drab and repetitive nature—aimed at improving the eighth decimal of some economic output measure,” said Bostrom.
The competing superpowers of Bostrom’s future uploaded world would be the all-work-and-no-fun group, or what he calls the “fitness-maximizing competitors,” versus the “happiness and well-being group.” He envisions the fitness-maximizing competitors as eventually taking over the capital of the day from the happiness-and-well-being group, since the latter might still like to play now and then—an activity okay for today’s organic brains, but unnecessary, time wasting, and fruitless to our future software selves.
This would result in a future world where everyone is a fitness-maximizing competitor or where some happiness-and-well-being agents continue to survive, but their activities would go on underground.
Bostrom thinks that if we want to continue with this interest in occasional happiness, we might need to pass laws
that tax fitness-maximizing activities while subsidizing happiness-and-well-being cognitive architectures. For example, some fraction of our resources might be set aside in a happiness-and-well-being conservation fund. We might also have to pass laws against building artificial intelligences that are hostile to human values—another of Bostrom’s worries.
THE AI PROBLEM
James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, also worries about runaway AI. Part of this results from the fact that national defense institutions are among the most active investors in AI. Their emphasis gives a competitive edge to whoever can advance the furthest and the fastest, and much of their research is designed to kill humans.
Computers have grown exponentially. Still, there are enormous hurdles to overcome for advanced AI on a level with human intelligence to become a reality. Visual recognition software currently can’t tell the difference between a dog and a cat. Using AI to diagnose ailments could be a tremendous advantage, since the computer can access so much more data and so much faster than a physician, but if vision is part of the diagnosis, a computer might analyze all symptoms and not notice there was a bullet hole in the patient.
But those things will eventually work out, whether through advanced computing or by reverse engineering of the human brain, copying its biologically inspired methods rather than trying to duplicate its results with a different technology. The worry is that once advanced machines are in place, their own progress will be turned over to the other AI computers and they will grow exponentially.
The turnover of power might seem gradual, painless, and fun, but the consequences could be fatal. They might treat us as the boss or they might treat us as we treat our primate ancestors: monkeys, apes, and orangutans, who’ve been kept in zoos, used as laboratory animals, and whose wild populations are all endangered, with little chance of surviving into the distant future. With advanced AI we will have introduced another species to our planet that could outcompete us.
Bostrom’s simulation argument takes into consideration the idea that we may already be in a virtual reality. He says it’s one of only a few possible descriptions for real life today. Civilizations like ours will go extinct before they can create virtual worlds run by uploaded minds. Or they will lose interest in creating computer simulations detailed enough that the simulated minds within them would be conscious. Or, lastly, we’re almost certainly living in a computer simulation. You’re an avatar and so am I.
BACKING AWAY FROM THE CLIFF
But what if society doesn’t want to upload? What if slicing your brain up like a baked ham hits the market and tanks? What if the computers get hung up on the dog-versus-cat problem? Perhaps we should just continue our ways, procreating, consuming resources, and hope for the best.
Georgii Gause pondered the options of “continuing our ways” some time ago. While a student at the University of Moscow in the 1920s, he performed a classic experiment in which he placed half a gram of oatmeal in water, boiled it to create a broth, and poured the concoction into small, flat-bottomed test tubes. Into each of those tubes he placed a small amount of two different single-celled microorganisms, one species per tube. Each test tube was a unique ecosystem, a food web with a single mass of tissue. He then set them aside in a warm place for a week and came back to review the results. His book, The Struggle for Existence, published in 1934, detailed these findings.
At first the number of organisms grew slowly. On a graph with time on the bottom and numbers of microorganisms on the side, the line rose gradually as the number of organisms increased. But the line hit an inflection point, and the number of organisms exploded as the line rose suddenly steeper. The frenzied expansion of organisms continued skyward until they exhausted their food, after which the line leveled and then plummeted as the organisms began to die, the line plunging toward zero.
If we look at the growth of Homo sapiens, there are similarities between the ongoing human population experiment and that of the microorganisms that Gause described in the 1930s. If geneticists are correct, Homo sapiens exited Africa with no more than a few hundred people and migrated over the world, enjoying a series of Edens. Yet, at our greatest expansion, we barely numbered five million. But then about ten thousand years ago we invented agriculture, and the human population began to rise steeply.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries we discovered ways to thicken grain stalks, along with methods of producing fertilizers and better systems of irrigation, and in just two hundred years our population went from one billion to seven billion, with two or three billion more on the way. The bulk of this growth has been in the last fifty or sixty years, a single lifetime. We are definitely like a virus—or at least a single-celled organism. Part of the reason for the frenzied rise in Gause’s experiment was the lack of competing species in the test tube. Competing species would have slowed things down, formed buffers, created competition. But we’re eliminating that possibility . . . aren’t we?
In 2000, Dutch chemist Paul J. Crutzen gave a name to our time: the “Anthropocene,” the age of man. He regards the influence of human behavior on the earth’s atmosphere as so significant as to constitute a new geological epoch.
But is there a limit to this influence? What if, like Gause’s microorganisms, our numbers rise to an apex but then plummet back down? What if overpopulation, starvation, disease, and the obliteration of native species aren’t healthy and we end up with perhaps 20 percent of the numbers of our current species—back to maybe a population of one or two billion, where we were just two hundred years ago—although isolated perhaps by the aftermath of the devastation?
Ian Tattersall, curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and author of Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins, doesn’t believe in the emergence of another species under present conditions. “Man has spread all over the world, and mass transportation has made it too easy for us to intermingle,” says Tattersall. But when we propose the idea of a crash similar to what Georgii Gause witnessed in the petri dishes, Tattersall says, “Then all bets are off.”
If man’s future development mirrors Gause’s experiment, then it might be possible for a member of Homo sapiens to develop into another species in a world with far fewer of us present.
The next species could arise out of isolation created by mass extinction as well. It could also be isolated within the present modern cultural context, because of cultural stigma and prejudice. Or genetic engineering could create a “superspecies” that finds it repugnant to mate with “less-than-super” beings.
Coexistence with the next species must begin by recognition: knowing who they are and what they look like. And how would we do that? The difference could start with something as simple as a few genes that could help the next species consume some more efficient food, as the Indo-Europeans did, or make men more resistant to the future plague of diseases, as were the conquistadors. However, neither the Indo-Europeans nor the conquistadors were different species, so we’d need more.
Science warns against the utopian view that selection will continue to upgrade nature much like a new cell phone. Selection promises only that a new species will be able to outcompete its ancestors in a given region at a given time. Evolution might create a wiser individual with a better, more long-term perspective of the world, but it would happen only as a side benefit; the primary benefit would address maximum fitness right now.
Still, suppose this could happen. Is this around the corner, far off in the distance, or has it already happened and we just don’t know it? If you were to take a Neanderthal, clean him up, give him a haircut, put him in some new clothes, and shove him out onto the street, few would recognize him as out of place. Douglas Palmer, in Origins: Human Evolution Revealed, claims that Neanderthals were a little broader than modern man, the brow a little more pronounced, the arms a little stronger, but he could be a track star, a football player, or a character actor for all we know.
The next species might be a little leaner, continuing the trend from past hominid development, with a larger head for a larger brain, and with a diminished nose, brow ridge, and other facial features. Still, could you pick the next species out of a crowd any better than a Neanderthal? And—get this—even if you are the next species and you’re reading this, trying to get a better understanding of those you are about to replace: you’re doomed, too. As Smithsonian’s Hans-Dieter Sues says, 99.99 percent of all the species on earth have gone extinct. There is no reason to think that man—or his immediate descendants—will, in the long run, outlive them all.
Time is part of the problem. Man has difficulty contemplating the enormous range of times that have passed in the history of our planet and how our own history compares with that. “Deep time” is what the scientists call it, and man is, apparently, not a “deep” thinker. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould impressed this on his Harvard students by giving them this simple analogy: if our planet’s beginning is the end of your nose and its present your outstretched fingertip, then a single swipe of a file on the finger’s nail wipes out all human history. This doesn’t refer to the brief period of human civilization but the entire existence of Homo sapiens and all his hominid ancestors.
Scientists also like the clock metaphor, which gives human time another perspective. If we look at the 4.5-billion-year history of our planet in terms of a twenty-four-hour day, then the Cambrian explosion doesn’t occur until about 10 p.m. Dinosaurs don’t appear until after 11 p.m. and the big asteroid marks their end at twenty minutes before midnight. Man doesn’t appear until the last few seconds.
Man just might be the ultimate live-fast-die-young animal. Consider that the average longevity for a mammalian species is only one to two million years. We’ve been around only one-tenth of that, about two hundred thousand years, and our existence is gravely threatened. Sam Bowring at MIT thinks the paleontological record for man will expose but a thin layer of metals that Homo sapiens dug out of the ground.
The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man Page 27
