Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human

by Joel Garreau

  The person credited with inspiring nanotechnology is the late Richard Phillips Feynman. He became widely known as an American original for his wildly best-selling 1985 autobiography Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! in which he discusses, in his relentless pursuit of knowledge, gambling with Nick the Greek, painting a naked female toreador, and accompanying a ballet on his bongos. Before that, Feynman was merely the renowned Caltech physicist who won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics.

  On December 29, 1959, at a meeting of the American Physical Society, Feynman gave an after-dinner talk entitled “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” At a time when the audience freshly remembered computers that used vacuum tubes the size of candy bars, he talked about storing “all the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world” in a cube “one two-hundredth of an inch wide—which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom!”

  In his lecture, Feynman described a world in which you “give the orders and the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance.” Make computers much smaller and therefore faster, he said. Make “mechanical surgeons”—nanobots—that could travel to trouble spots inside the body. To get things going he offered two prizes: $1,000 to the first person to make a working electric motor no bigger than 1/64 of an inch in any dimension, and another $1,000 to the first person to shrink text such that the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica would fit on the head of a pin. The prize for the motor was awarded almost immediately, in 1960. The text prize was awarded in 1985.

  Much of nanotechnology at the beginning of the 21st century involved zapping relatively large amounts of things until they become small enough to acquire unusual powers. For example, the marvelously surnamed Richard E. Smalley of Rice University shared the 1996 Nobel prize for chemistry for hitting a batch of pure carbon with a special laser beam until the atoms rearranged themselves into a previously unknown molecule—a ball made of 60 atoms that looked like the kind of geodesic domes pioneered by Buckminster Fuller. The molecule is nicknamed the “buckyball” in Fuller’s honor. Buckyballs and their cousins, the nanotube fibers, have many intriguing properties, including 60 times the strength of steel, the weight of plastic, the electrical conductivity of silicon, the heat conductivity of diamond and the size and perfection of DNA.

  The U.S. government is throwing big bucks at jump-starting this sort of nanotechnology, because, among other things, it sees national security implications. Boeing is working on cutting the weight of rockets, aircraft and satellites. Asian and European governments are also frantically attempting to achieve a lead in what is hyped as overwhelmingly The Next Big Thing. General Electric, Motorola, DuPont, Lucent and Kodak are pursuing nanotech. The first nano products trickling to market were not terribly impressive—self-cleaning windows and non-staining trousers. It is the promise, however, that drove Congress wild. What might you do with nanotechnology? Defeat biological warfare. Defeat all disease, in fact. Nano may be the basis of half of all pharmaceuticals by 2010. Heal the environment—lock up carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, consume toxic waste. End our dependence on oil—produce solar panels embedded with nanocrystals so efficient and flexible that they can be used in everything from roof shingles to clothing. Conquer space. The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration loves what you could do with enough carbon nanotubes—the strongest, lightest material ever made. You could stretch a cable 22,347 miles to a stable point in space. You could then run electromechanical vehicles along it full of people and payloads. What you’d have is a space elevator. Five-hour ride, one-way. Forget those preposterously expensive chemical rockets that haven’t changed much since the 1960s. Forget those painfully fragile landing craft so susceptible to burning up on reentry. This could be the breakthrough to the stars, NASA says.

  Mind you, that’s the mild version of nanotechnology. That’s not where you get the real excitement. The real excitement explodes from the second kind of nanotech. It starts with the work of K. (for Kim) Eric Drexler. In the 1970s, as an MIT undergraduate, Drexler noted that all life in every jot of its riotous variety is created by little biological machines like those in photosynthesis that manipulate basic elements of matter. Why not adapt those methods to build nonliving things? he wondered. Why not build computer-driven machines with parts the size of molecules to haul atoms to precisely the correct locations to build anything you pleased? Anything you pleased. In 1986, he single-handedly launched and named the nanotech industry with his book Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, which explained how his ideas could truly change the world. With nanotechnology, you could grow a house, or a car, or a completely real, molecularly accurate T-bone steak, or a new heart, from little more than software instructions and some handfuls of dust. It would enable digital control of the very structure of matter.

  Even as he approaches 50, Drexler maintains an uncanny ability to look like a graduate student. He’s as gaunt as a stray puppy. You want to take him home and feed him. Sitting in Silicon Valley’s Original House of Pancakes in Los Altos, his breakfast order seems promising—a robust plateful of ham and eggs. Then he lets them get cold as he quietly but intensely explains the vast implications of the world he sees us entering.

  If anything, Drexler is even more optimistic than Stock and Kurzweil. He wears a medallion around his neck that asks the finder, in case of Drexler’s death, to “Call now for instructions/Push 50,000 U heparin by IV and do CPR while cooling with ice to 10C/Keep PH 7.5/No embalming/No autopsy.” He and others believe that robots smaller than a red corpuscle will soon work like Pac-Man, gobbling up diseased cells and keeping the human body perpetually in tune. If he were to meet an untimely end before that day arrives, however, Drexler plans on coming back from the dead. That’s why he’s wearing the medallion. He wants to get frozen right next to Ted Williams so that when the appropriate technology arrives, he can be thawed, have a nanotech workover and a slap on the butt and get on with his efforts.

  Does he think this will make him immortal?

  “Depends on what you mean by immortal,” he says, still ignoring his eggs. “There is such a thing as proton decay.”

  Pause.

  He’s talking about the eventual collapse of subatomic particles in eons vastly beyond the time it will take for the solar system to die.

  Okay, what about merely geological time? Hundreds of thousands of years?

  “Oh yeah.” He smiles. “That. For sure.”

  One problem with a genie like strong nanotech is what it might demand in return for granting your every wish. Drexler now calls his original vision of nanotech “molecular manufacturing” to distinguish it from what he views as the promiscuous debasement of the word nanotech to include anything small, including ordinary chemistry. The key idea about his vision of nanotech is the creation of “assemblers.” Assemblers would be the molecular manufacturing machines that would seek out the appropriate atoms and put them in the right places. Of course, since it would take billions of assemblers to make a product of any significant size, the first thing an assembler would have to do is make a second assembler. Then each would make another one, and so on, up the exponential curve, doubling and redoubling their numbers. There are several pause-giving aspects to this. One is that nobody knows how to make an assembler—they are hypothetical. (In fact, those seeking venture capital for their near-term visions of nanotechnology dismiss Drexler as at best a daydreamer and at worst a “scarer of children.”) A second is that were the “assembler breakthrough” ever to start, it’s hard to know how to steer. The world might be transformed so utterly and abruptly by such a breakthrough as to resemble The Singularity. Another problem is that even if you got them started and steered, you’d better be awfully sure you know how to make them stop. If they can’t be made to stop, in principle they could blithely reproduce themselves until they’ve consumed every bit of en
ergy on the planet, wiping out all life. This is the “gray goo” plot that is a critical element of The Hell Scenario.

  Nonetheless, the promise is staggering. Nanotech is where the NSF gets the idea that the human body will soon start conquering age, the energy crisis will be solved, the environment will be cleaned, aircraft will be more adaptable than birds, and the American armed forces will be invulnerable.

  As in genetic engineering and nanotechnology, computer intelligence, the I in GRIN, has two meanings. There is strong artificial intelligence and weak machine intelligence. Weak essentially means that it does a pretty good job of imitating humans. Strong means that it is intelligent in important ways. It is conscious. It is a challenge to the identity of humans and their human nature. Weak machine intelligence is the United Airlines reservation computer that hears what you’re saying on the phone when you ask whether your plane will be on time, and responds to you usefully in a mechanical voice. Strong artificial intelligence, if it ever comes to be, is you not being able to tell whether or not you’re talking with another flesh-and-blood person. Weak machine intelligence can and does fly a jumbo jet 10,000 miles across the Pacific, setting it down in Hong Kong with such soft precision—and without the pilot touching the controls—that the passengers applaud the landing. Attempts at strong artificial intelligence cannot yet achieve the common sense we expect of a three-year-old when she dresses herself.

  Marvin Minsky is the grand old man of the notion that a successful computer model of the brain will be able to explain how it thinks. Young researchers now regard as quaint some of his views that consciousness can be described as machinelike. Nonetheless, Minsky is revered. In 1959 he co-founded what would become the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. (In fact, he was present when the term artificial intelligence was invented in 1960.) He is one of the last living links to the early pioneers of the Information Age, under some of whom he studied. His work on artificial intelligence is still regarded as the pushing-off point for discussions of machine intelligence. His students fill the field. He remains as inquisitive as a squirrel with a new bird feeder.

  It’s a treat to see Minsky perform. This winner of the Japan Prize—that nation’s highest honor in science and technology—thinks nothing of showing up at august academic forums in a palm-tree-decorated Hawaiian shirt. His very bald head is now marked by light liver spots and a wild fringe of long baby-fine white hair near his neck. His smile is as wide as a frog’s. He is a great waver of his arms over his head as he makes pronouncements like “There is nothing certain but taxes”—conspicuously excluding death. He sports a credit-card-sized digital camera on a silver cord around his neck, black leather sneakers with Velcro fasteners on his feet, and a telescope in his pocket with which he recognizes people blocks away. He wears a belt woven of 8,000-pound-test Kevlar filament that can be quickly unraveled into a single cord with which you can pull your car out of a ravine. On this belt hangs a pouch full of tools, including lasers and cutting implements. Seems reasonable to him. “Who would fix the plane if it got into trouble?” he asks.

  Minsky believes it is important that we “understand how our minds are built, and how they support the modes of thought that we like to call emotions. Then we’ll be better able to decide what we like about them, and what we don’t—and bit by bit we’ll rebuild ourselves. He views this project of understanding intelligence as comparable to “only two earlier inventions: those of language and of writing.” He sees it as a matter of urgency. “The more we can learn about how human minds work, the better we will be able to guide the development of our genetic successors or of beings whose making we’ll supervise,” he says.

  “Why should we alter ourselves instead of forever remaining the same? Because we have no alternative. If we stay unchanged in our present state, we are unlikely to last very long—on either cosmic or human scales of time. In the next hundred or thousand years, we are liable to destroy ourselves, yet we alone are responsible not only for our species’ survival but for the continuation of intelligence on this planet, and quite possibly in this universe.” He takes The Hell Scenario seriously. He recites a long list of ways that we can become extinct, from global warming to rogue asteroids. His solution? “We’ve seen many suggestions about dealing with these, but none of them yet seem practical. A more practical course might simply be,” he says, to focus “instead on finding ways to make ourselves more intelligent.”

  As with strong nanotechnology, strong artificial intelligence has not yet been achieved. Nonetheless, advances in machine intelligence are what the NSF has in mind when it discusses direct connections between you and your car, factory work, environment and weapons, as well as the creation of new arts, sports and ways to transcend cultural and language barriers between people.

  Robots, meanwhile, have come a long way from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R., for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” whence comes the word robot. The Japanese—especially Sony and Honda—love to create two-legged humanoid mechanical creatures. In the time-honored tradition of nearly life-sized Bunraku stage puppets, Honda has fielded a squad of Asimo robots, the company’s walking, talking, child-sized pseudohumans. The company says its long-term aim is to create “a partner for people.” Sony’s “corporate ambassador,” meanwhile, is a two-foot-tall humanoid called Qrio. Qrio is produced by Sony’s Entertainment Robot Company, which already sells Sony’s robot dog, Aibo. The company’s president, Satoshi Amagai, says that Japanese Aibo owners have a more emotional relationship with their mechanical pets than do Americans or Europeans. The AIBO ERS-7, at $1,599, promises to have six emotions—happiness, anger, fear, sadness, surprise and discontent. Pat one on the head and it appears to become happy enough to do tricks. Whack it on the nose, and it not only appears hurt, it learns not to repeat certain behaviors while prompting that profound philosophical question: Is it wrong to kick a robotic dog?

  In much of the rest of the world, meanwhile, robots—defined as digitally driven creatures that can sense and move—have taken on new forms of life. “We are trying to build robots that have properties of living systems that robots haven’t had before,” says Rodney Allen Brooks, chairman and chief technical officer of iRobot, the company that brought to market the Roomba—America’s first cheap, practical, sweeping and vacuuming robot. It looks like a portable CD player the size of a toilet seat. By all accounts, it really does clean the floors. Even under the bed. More than half the owners of these robots give them names. Finally in Brooks we have a roboticist whose achievements we can take seriously.

  Oh yes, Brooks has a few other credentials as well. He is director of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at MIT, and author of Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. (Did you say the name of his company, iRobot, reminded you of the title of the Isaac Asimov book mentioned above that influenced a whole generation of roboticists? Told you.)

  Actually, the person who led the robot charge toward The Heaven Scenario was Hans Moravec of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 1988 this pioneer published Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. In its first few sentences, it painted a picture in which humans were swept away. We “have produced a weapon so powerful it will vanquish the losers and winners alike,” Moravec said. But even though the Cold War was still on, he didn’t mean nuclear weapons. He meant the intelligent children of our minds, his beloved robots. By 2008, he thought, they would be able to perform like humans on the gear contained in a $10,000 personal computer. By 1998, in Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, Moravec acknowledged that his time frame was a trifle ambitious. (At the same time, his computer-price projections turned out to be laughably conservative.) Nonetheless, he predicted the near arrival of general-purpose robots that could figure out where they were in a room with the precision of a lizard, followed by robots with the adaptability of a mouse, followed by robots with the imagination of a monkey, followed by those with human reasoning. His predictions carefully copi
ed the biological evolutionary ladder up the scale as computers became more and more powerful. No more will that proud race called robot be sadly stuck welding Corolla fenders day after day. Moravec’s vision is one in which robots can be autonomous, responding innovatively to complex and unanticipated situations. Real robots roam.

  Indeed, by the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers’ 1903 flight, at least 32 countries were developing more than 250 models of flying robots, with 41 countries already operating them. (In the last week of the first Gulf War, five Iraqi soldiers waved white flags at a U.S. Pioneer unmanned air vehicle—the first time in history somebody tried to surrender to a robot.) Already in the air were reconnaissance robots the size of sparrows, such as the Black Widow. The next generation would be the size of insects. Such robots will find markets among firefighters, environmentalists, border patrols, film producers and farmers. The U.S. Department of Defense is expecting pilotless aircraft the size of F-16 jet fighters to suppress enemy air defenses and sensors by 2012. Cargo-lifting pilotless craft originally designed to supply soldiers were expected one day to replace FedEx vans. The story in aviation circles was widespread that in the future, passenger plane cockpits would only have a pilot and a dog. The pilot’s job would be to watch the robot’s computer screens. The dog would be there to bite the pilot if he tried to touch anything.

  But Brooks goes much farther than that. “We’re trying to build robots that can repair themselves, that can reproduce (although we’re a long way from self-reproduction), that have metabolism, and that have to go out and seek energy to maintain themselves.” Forget the image of a man in a can. “Our theme phrase is that we’re going to build a robot out of Jello. We don’t really mean we’re actually going to use Jello, but that’s the image we have in our mind. We are trying to figure out how we could build a robot out of ‘mushy’ stuff”—like flesh—“and still have it be a robot that interacts in the world.”