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

by Joel Garreau

  Is Brooks worried about this all going too far? Well, he admits that Bill Joy—who in the next chapter details his fears about technology overrunning mankind—has stimulated him. “I have several interesting robotics projects underway,” he says. “One of the robots I must say was inspired by Bill Joy, probably to his dismay. We have a robot now that wanders around the corridors, finds electrical outlets and plugs itself in. The next step is to make it hide during the day and come out at night and plug itself in. I’d like to build a robot vermin,” Brooks says. He loves the idea of building a robot that could be killed only by locking it in a room with no power outlets or by going after it with a hammer. “I’m trying to build some robots like that as thought-provoking pieces—and just because Bill Joy was afraid of them,” he says. Just what the world needs—a roboticist with a sense of humor.

  Brooks is also trying to build robots made out of Legos that can make copies of themselves out of more Legos. There is a deep mathematical question of whether this is possible, but basically he says that’s what machine self-reproduction will look like. After all, he points out, biological molecules can do that. Meanwhile, his iRobot company is big into PackBots. These are emergency and military robots weighing some 50 pounds that can be carried by one person. They can be dropped from a reasonably low-hovering helicopter and do search and rescue, disarm bombs, or perform reconnaissance in caves into which humans don’t want to stick their heads. (DARPA loves the experimental versions being pioneered at the University of California at Berkeley that want to climb straight up walls and hang from ceilings, like those gecko lizards with suction pads on their feet after which they are modeled. DARPA also gets dizzy at the thought of air-dropping entire networks of tiny “throwbots” that can work with each other to saturate a battlefield.) Making these bots impervious to the abuse and neglect of a 19-year-old American is a very big challenge. But the troops so far deem them worth humping—no small compliment.

  Brooks is both enthusiastic and sanguine about The Heaven Scenario. “Fairly soon, we may have to start banning kids with neural Internet connection implants from having them switched on while taking the SATs,” he says. Shortly after that, he thinks, such implants will be mandatory after the SATs are revised to accommodate such people. As a result, “we will become a merger between flesh and machines. We will have the best that machineness has to offer, but we will also have our bioheritage to augment whatever level of machine technology we have so far developed. So we (the robot-people) will be a step ahead of them (the pure robots). We won’t have to worry about them taking over.”

  This merger of flesh and machine is what the NSF is thinking of when it talks about machines operating “on principles compatible with human goals, awareness, and personality.” That’s also what it’s talking about when it contemplates “construction of extraterrestrial bases, and profitable exploitation of the resources of the Moon, Mars, or near-Earth asteroids.”

  Who knows if all these GRIN technologies collectively will produce “world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment,” as the National Science Foundation would have us believe. If a fraction of these technologies has non-negligible possibilities, however, even that will have an overwhelming impact on humanity.

  HOW WOULD WE KNOW if we were achieving The Heaven Scenario? I ask Kurzweil. How would we know if we were transcending human nature? What would the milestones be?

  “Well, it depends on how you define human nature,” he replies.

  Kurzweil defines humans as “that species that seeks to extend its own horizons—that represents the cutting edge of evolution.” It embodies “evolution towards ever greater knowledge and intelligence and creativity.” If you buy that definition, he holds, “then there is no transcending it. It is, ultimately, the cutting edge of transcendence.”

  If, however, you “define it in more limited ways, such as human beings are a certain biological species that has brains organized in this certain biochemical way, then we will transcend that. Since the technology is going to grow exponentially, ultimately the non-biological portion will dominate.”

  One nice thing about our becoming less biological, he says, is that we’ll be easier to upgrade. The way we do things now is a nuisance. For example, for most of human and prehuman history, every last calorie was precious—you never knew when famine would hit, so it was better to hold on to all those calories while you could, as the extra fat might be crucial to your survival.

  “But now we live in a completely different period—at least I do—in a period of abundance,” Kurzweil says. “We don’t need all those calories. I have a low fat percentage, but I have to do that by controlling my eating. Ultimately we’ll separate that. We’ve actually identified the gene that does that.”

  Is that the marker of transcendence? When we can eat all we want and never be fat? “That’s going to be one step, among many,” Kurzweil replies. “When we do that, it will be considered a conservative, sensible thing to do. After you have done hundreds and thousands of those changes, we will be very different than we are today.”

  At a conference at Boston University, I once was told that we’ll know we have transcended when The Enhanced start having difficulty telling the difference between Naturals and dogs. We will have evolved so far that all those carbon-based life forms will tend to blur. Is that what Kurzweil is talking about?

  “Okay, the MOSHs,” Kurzweil replies. “The Mostly Original Substrate Humans.Well, I think enhanced humans will become greatly enhanced compared to MOSHs. But I think there will be a continued respect for human life. I think that is built into our species. That is not necessarily an ultimately moral position. It’s a species-centric position. That one is deeply rooted in our nature.”

  Really? I ask. What about our predecessor species? I don’t see any Cro-Magnons or Neanderthals left—with the possible exception of a couple of editors.

  “My view is that there will be respect for our species and where we have come from. It will take an absolutely trivial portion of the intellectual output of enhanced humanity to meet all of the material and other needs of the rest of humanity. So from the perspective of unenhanced humans, these new nonbiological entities will appear to be their transcended servants. But from the perspective of nonbiological intelligence, they are devoting a very trivial portion of their intellectual output to providing that service.”

  Do you believe in a God you plan on meeting when you die? I ask.

  “I’m not planning to die,” Kurzweil responds. “I expect to use the power of ideas. I am a survivor as an entrepreneur and a human being. It’s my plan to be involved in this next phase of humanity where we get past some of the frailties of these Version 1.0 bodies we have. The way to ‘meet our maker,’ so to speak, is, in fact, by staying alive. We will be part of this very rapid explosion of intelligence, and beauty, and a very rapid acceleration of this evolutionary process. And that, to me, is what God is. Evolution, I think, is a spiritual process because it moves closer to what we have considered God. It moves closer to infinity.”

  I am nonplussed by this answer. He is not talking about us someday meeting God.

  He is talking about us becoming God.

  Aware of how this sounds, he rephrases a little. “I don’t think we actually ever become God. But we do become more God-like,” he clarifies.

  He then barrels right back to a grand view of The Heaven Scenario. “I see it, ultimately, as an awakening of the whole universe. I think the whole universe right now is basically made up of dumb matter and energy and I think it will wake up. But if it becomes transformed into this sublimely intelligent matter and energy, I hope to be a part of that.”

  He is talking about participating in the creation of Heaven.

  * * *

  The Heaven Scenario

  Ray Kurzweil and others in his camp do not consider their description of the future a scenario. They consider it a prediction. That is, they do not see the future they
describe as one logical possibility among several for which it would be prudent to prepare, as is the case in scenario planning. They see the logic of their position as patently inescapable and their version of the future as inevitable. They frequently argue against the possibility that the other two scenarios described in this volume might ever occur. Nonetheless, since others disagree, and those with different versions of the future frequently end up debating each other, the vision of the future that in this volume is called Heaven, in which The Curve is inevitable and the outcome good, is treated here as a scenario.

  Predetermined elements:

  • There are Curves of exponential change governing technology.

  Critical uncertainties:

  • Are The Curves of exponential change accelerating smoothly? If so, how fast? Or are they displaying unexpected slowdowns, stops or reversals?

  • Are The Curves of change leading to progress, disaster or both?

  Embedded assumption:

  • Technology drives history.

  Early warning signs that we are entering The Heaven Scenario:

  • Almost unimaginably good things are happening, including the conquering of disease and poverty, but also an increase in beauty, wisdom, love, truth and peace.

  • Predictions that recently seemed like science fiction are routinely exceeded.

  • Even in the face of such wonders, humans are more or less spectators. Technology seems in control.

  • The phrase “The Singularity” enters common usage, as did the phrase “global warming” at the turn of the 21st century.

  Early warnings that we are not entering The Heaven Scenario:

  • The growth of complexity slows or starts proving erratic.

  • Almost unimaginably bad things start happening. (This would be an early warning that we are entering The Hell Scenario.)

  • Culture and values gain control of technology such that events that once seemed inevitable are now consciously being avoided over significant periods of time, and by everyone on the planet. (This would be an early warning that we are entering The Prevail Scenario.)

  * * *

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Hell

  Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.

  —Albert Einstein, letter to a friend, 1917

  Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall . . . be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

  —C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1944

  THE PILOTS WHO ENJOY flying the United run into Aspen, Colorado, tend to be former Navy aircraft-carrier fighter jocks. They greatly admire bucking the downdrafts swirling around the young, incisorlike peaks very deep in the Rocky Mountains. On approach, they get to evade the fang of Triangle Mountain as it fills up the windows just off their left wing. Then, when the tiny island of flatness that is the airport finally appears at the bottom of the very narrow Roaring Fork Valley, they drop on it like a raptor. To snag the end of the runway, they’ve got to lose 4,400 feet in three minutes. That plunge never fails to thrill the passengers, especially when it is followed by reverse thrust that shudders the plane to a stop just before the asphalt ends. In a snowstorm. In May. The pilots love this—reminds them of their youth.

  Aspen is by no means the most isolated settlement in the Intermountain West. But no matter which parlous path you use to make your way to this town, on the ground or in the air, there is no way to avoid feeling vulnerable to the towering forces that surround you. The mountains stretch out endlessly, dusted with snow like powdered sugar on a chocolate cake. Coming into these mountains—on which trees as tall as 10-story buildings seem like no more than beard stubble—it’s hard to escape thinking about how fragile the human situation is, how we cheat death every day.

  Compared to other outposts in the formidably empty land between Denver and Salt Lake, Aspen is urbane. From frontier days, it always served the needs of wealthy entrepreneurs. From 1877 to 1893, it was a silver boomtown. In fact, locals insist, you can still get from the mountains on one side of town to those on the other side through the mine shafts deep beneath your feet. Now Aspen’s main offering is white gold—boundless snow and 300 days a year of sunshine. Its antique Western brick and sandstone buildings with their pressed tin ceilings are full of $100 wines sold in shops covered with fairy lights. Women with long curves of blond hair, wearing snug white spangly jumpsuits and bejeweled chokers, sweep into memorable restaurants that feature old-timey heavy green drapes held back by gold swags. Chaps with British accents serve smoothies costing more than five bucks at a coffee joint called Zélé, across from the Louis Vuitton shop, which is next to Christian Dior, which is next to Gucci. The mountains are so close—they so loom over the rooftops, blocking the sky—that you have to crane your neck to examine the clouds being trapped between their peaks. They are so close that offices near the center of the business area are only a five-block stroll from the ski lifts that take off dramatically from the edge of town.

  It is in this rarefied place that you’ll find Bill Joy, “the Edison of the Internet,” when he’s willing to be found. His office has a six-inch rule: Six inches of powder and the office closes. Skis and ski boots hang by the door. The skiing is not really why he’s here, though, he says. And it certainly isn’t Aspen’s glitz—if anything, Joy finds that an annoyance. Joy is in Aspen because in 1989 he decided to get away from everything he hated about Silicon Valley, about cities, about California—the maniacal ambition, the traffic jams, the earthquakes. He could afford to search for serenity just about anywhere. Sun Microsystems, of which he was co-founder, could whistle up for him a Citation X whenever he needed one. At the time it was the world’s fastest private jet, capable of flying from Silicon Valley to Washington at Mach.92 in under four hours. He settled on Aspen, population 5,914, he says, because it was at the end of the road. That was important to him. There’s nobody just passing through. It is far removed from the madding crowd. But most critically, he says, this was the most remote town in the Intermountain West with a decent bookstore.

  Joy is not really part of the Aspen community, he admits. He was the commencement speaker at the local high school once. But mention his name to the locals, and generally you draw a blank. His house is nothing particularly special in Aspen terms. It is only in the neighborhood of 5,000 square feet—comparable to America’s first supermarkets. In Aspen, he wryly explains, a house is not considered significant unless it has a 2,000-square-foot master suite. Some houses run to 40,000 square feet. His is nothing like that. In fact, what he likes best about it is the crabapple tree in his little backyard, under which, in the fall, a bear sleeps.

  But Aspen’s not secluded enough for him. What genuinely lights him up is his real retreat, called Three Meadows. It’s a ranch sufficiently farther west into the Colorado wilds that it looks like Wyoming—mostly sagebrush, a few aspen trees, elk, deer, coyote and more bear. His cabin there is tiny. His bedroom is barely bigger than the bed into which he tucks his gaunt 6-foot-3-inch frame. But it surveys enough of a spread that he doesn’t talk about how many acres it adds up to. There, Joy is unlikely ever to see a human being who is not a guest. It is not even on civilization’s utility grid. Joy must employ a fair amount of his technological ingenuity just to make it habitable. His phone there is the size of a brick. The receiver has to beam directly to orbiting satellites, for there are no phone lines anywhere nearby. No power lines go to his cabin. He generates his own electricity with a wind turbine and solar panels connected to batteries almost the size of file cabinets; in Japan, such batteries power passenger trains. To get to the Internet, he fires up a satellite dish. Don’t tell Bill Joy no man is an island. He will never send to know for whom the bell tolls. He will never hear
any steeple bell.

  The Edison of the Internet. Joy has gotten inured to being called this, but such adulation still makes him cringe. “We’re both from Michigan,” he says of the comparison to the father of the electrical age, the Wizard of Menlo Park. “We like to stay up late at night, and we’ve done some things that have succeeded and some that have been spectacular failures. But I’m not yet deaf and I don’t work as hard as he did.”

  Yet the comparison is not all wrong. Joy’s had a hand in some of the most important aspects of the Net. In 1978, while still a grad student, Joy became the principal programmer for a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency project inventing the Berkeley Systems Distribution (BSD), the first operating system linking computers over this newfangled thing that would come to be called the Internet. (“It was fun,” he says, predictably enough.) In the early 21st century, the BSD architecture was still the main rival to Microsoft’s server system, being the basis of Apple’s OS X operating system and Sun’s machines, and an underpinning of Linux. In 1982, Joy married that system to a cheap but powerful computer called the S.U.N. workstation, after the Stanford University Network. This is how he wound up as chief scientist of Sun Microsystems, until he resigned the post in 2003. In 1984, he and a colleague developed a revolutionary new reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC) processor with extraordinary performance.