by Joel Garreau
When it comes to remedies, Rees preaches the gospel of the “precautionary principle”—humans should not create something new unless they are reasonably certain something awful will not result. This is hard to argue with, in the abstract. The world might indeed be a better place if Queen Isabella had asked Christopher Columbus to file an environmental impact statement before setting sail. Columbus’ heirs would probably be writing it still. But it seems to me that proponents of this principle bear a certain responsibility. Caution overcoming curiosity is not a conspicuous aspect of human history. As the renowned British satirist Terry Pratchett famously notes, “Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, and a sign on it saying ‘End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH,’ the paint wouldn’t even have time to dry.” Nor does Pratchett attribute this simply to perversity. It may be hardwired. Of our species, he writes, “Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up the evolutionary ladder.” Humans seem driven by “that strange ability to look at the universe and think ‘Oh, the same as yesterday, how dull. I wonder what happens if I bang this rock on that head?’ ”
Where you want Rees to explain how he proposes to constrain this behavior, however, he is disappointing. For example, he notes, “The surest safeguard against a new danger would be to deny the world the basic science that underpins it. . . . Should support be withdrawn from a line of ‘pure’ research, even if it is undeniably interesting, if there is reason to expect that the outcome will be misused? I think it should.”
Okay, but you’re going to do this how? On the very next page, he is intellectually honest enough to note that U.S. restrictions on stem cell research are resulting in a “brain gain” in places with more permissive guidelines, such as the United Kingdom and Denmark. “By offering a still more enticing regime to researchers and to their fledgling biotech industry, Singapore and China aim to leapfrog the competition,” he adds.
Rees shoots a hole even in Fukuyama’s courageous idea for a vast global regulatory scheme. “The difficulty with a dirigiste [government-controlled] policy in science is that the epochal advances are unpredictable. . . . X-rays were an accidental discovery by a physicist, not the outcome of a crash medical program to see through flesh. . . . In more recent times, the pioneers of lasers had little concept of how their invention would be applied (and certainly did not expect that one of the first uses would be for operations to repair detached retinas).”
All in all, Our Final Hour is a sober, sane, serious catalog of hideous threats, accessibly and compactly written, with useful and nuanced insights and even moments of unexpected humor about, say—anthrax. Rees writes: “To say that a few grams of an agent could in principle kill millions may be true, but it may also be misleading (just as it would be misleading to say that one man could father a hundred million children; spermatozoa are plentiful enough, but dispersal and delivery would be a real challenge).”
Nonetheless, given how broad his inventory of Medusa’s snakes are, you find yourself asking Rees, “Why you telling me this stuff?” If we are shocked and convinced by his Hell Scenario, what should we do?
At the end of Our Final Hour he muses about one reasonably surefire way to preserve humanity: disperse it into space. At which point this advocate of the precautionary principle grows quite excited about a novel way to colonize Mars. He rhapsodizes about taking this virgin planet—on which no one can say for certain life does not exist—and suggests we precede its human habitation by landing on it a nuclear reactor bolted to a chemical processing factory.
What a human is Sir Martin.
One thing Rees’ work does point up is that the road to hell is paved with a rich variety of scenarios. Hollywood has offered a nice array. In Blade Runner and The Terminator, the androids and cyborgs, respectively, are out to get us. In The Matrix, the machine intelligence is out to get us. And in X-Men, the genetically engineered are out to get us. (Actually, in the American Film Institute ranking of film’s 50 greatest heroes and villains, The Terminator shows up on both lists.)
Baronness Susan Greenfield, a neuroscientist and the author of Tomorrow’s People, provides another Hell Scenario. Greenfield is one of the exceedingly few women so far prominent in this debate. (There is also a conspicuous absence of blacks or Hispanics.) She speculates in her chapter “Human Nature: How Robust Will It Be?” that ultimately we will end up losing our individuality and identity in “a more atavistic state of consciousness where we permanently ‘blow’ our minds.” She acknowledges that she started out trying to write her Hell Scenario as a science fiction novel featuring a ravishingly beautiful and brilliant female neuroscientist but couldn’t handle the problems of plot, character and dialogue. So she tried to make her book nonfiction. Be that as it may, she consoles herself that her Hell Scenario may be grimly adaptive. Since “large-scale death and suffering if not global nuclear war” seem imminent to her, “then the materially comfortable, anodyne existence in which we lose the essence of our humanity, our human nature, might, amazingly enough, seem more desirable,” she writes. She swears she is not a technophobe, yet in the end she quotes the philosopher and social critic Bertrand Russell: “Science has not given men more self-control, more kindliness, or more power of discounting their passions. . . . Men’s collective passions are mainly for evil; far the strongest of them are hatred and rivalry directed toward other groups.” In the end she argues that the ultimate priority should be “not just the preservation, but also the celebration of individuality.” She also quotes the physicist and social activist Freeman J. Dyson: “The central problem of an intelligent species is the problem of sanity.”
A more immediate version of a Hell Scenario comes from those who focus on the haves and have-nots. This is the case for the renowned digital divide. It envisions a desolate future in which The Rest never have access to The Curve of exponentially increasing technology. They are left behind in irreparable misery, on a planet that is hotter, more crowded, and utterly degraded. “On a visit to North-East Asia, I saw this future,” says Bob Carr, the premier of New South Wales in Australia, seeing in China a replay of the film Blade Runner. “The landscape was simple,” he says. “There were clusters of shoebox-style tower blocks. They were linked by clogged expressways in a flattened, cleared landscape. It was so bleak, so denatured, that it could have been a place rebuilt after a nuclear blast. The air was heavy with smog. Acid rain fell. . . . This will be how more people will live in 100 years.”
The critical uncertainty in the potential divide between The Enhanced and The Rest is access to the GRIN technologies—access to the ability to evolve. If developing peoples can progress—economically, socially and technologically, then this Hell Scenario may be less imminent. The good news is that such a future is not unimaginable. A have/have-later world would be considerably less scary than a have/have-not world.
In have/have-later, it goes without saying that the haves will get first crack at whatever is new. Rich people tend to get first pick in every society throughout all of history. As recently as 2002, the makers of films such as The Bourne Identity signaled that you were supposed to understand their characters as rich, powerful, worldly and sophisticated because they were peering into their tiny cell phones.
As a matter of fact, however, in the decade leading up to 2002, cell phones—the real personal computers of the early 21st century—increased phenomenally among people who are not rich, powerful, worldly or sophisticated. In developing countries the proportion of people with access to a phone grew an astonishing 25 percent in the 1990s, according to the Worldwatch Institute, an organization devoted to “an environmentally sustainable and socially just society.” One in five of the world’s population had used a mobile phone by 2002—up from 1 in 237 in 1992. Because of The Curve, the price of mobiles had dropped precipitously—below the cost of landlines. In 2002, for the first time, the number of global mobile phone subscribers (1.15 billion) was great
er than the number of fixed-line connections. In 1999, Uganda became the first African nation to have more mobiles than traditional phones. Thirty other African nations followed by 2002. Judging from the billboards in the megacity of Lagos, Nigeria, cell phones were one of the three largest industries there, neck and neck with religion and nutritional supplements. This remarkable pattern fueled connections to the Net. In 1992, just 1 in 778 of the world’s population had used the Internet. By 2002, 1 in 10 had. This has a tangible benefit for people’s lives, Worldwatch reports. “By linking rural farmers to market information, craft workers to customers, patients to doctors, and students to teachers, the Internet can aid economic development,” it says.
To be sure, in places capable of great technological sophistication, such as China and Russia, governments who fear their own dissidents—and thus try to control information—have attempted to intentionally slow the revolution, the RAND Corporation noted. Some Middle Eastern societies recoil at dissemination of Western ideas in general, and pornography in particular. Latin America is hampered by low literacy rates. There are some failed places on earth marked by such outrageous politics, pathetic infrastructure, abysmal annual incomes and few cities that it’s hard to imagine how they will achieve any significant development. Singapore researchers examining Internet uptake in Asia pointed to a familiar list of failed suspects—Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kazakhstan, Laos and Myanmar, for example.
Nonetheless, the gap between the haves and have-nots has hardly proven to be hopelessly rigid, as the migration of software-writing jobs to India has demonstrated. The International Telecommunication Union, tallying broad measures of connectedness worldwide, including affordability, found Slovenia tied with France. Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan were ahead of the United States. In the Caribbean basin, access for the Bahamas, St. Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, Costa Rica, St. Lucia and Grenada was ahead of Russia. The Eastern European nations of Estonia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, the Slovak Republic, Croatia, Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Belarus and Romania were ahead of China. The Singapore researchers found that a lack of English-speakers did not necessarily correlate with poor technology pickup. In a postliterate world—in which the Internet increasingly becomes something you watch and listen to, rather than read—low literacy rates were less a barrier than one might expect, at least in Asia. The digital divide seems to be narrowing, a University of Toronto study says. The demographic lag between those who use the Internet in developing countries and those who use it in the United States was about five years, the Canadian researchers reported. This technology is getting to the masses a lot faster than did electricity, radio, washing machines, refrigerators, television, air conditioners and automobiles.
The big difference between the GRIN technologies and others separating the haves from the have-nots is price. Because The Curve rules, costs of the GRIN technologies drop dramatically. The transformative stuff quickly becomes affordable and ubiquitous, even in developing countries. This was not the case with older technologies. Heart transplants, for example, never became a bargain because transplantable hearts never became abundant. This may change. Growing replacement organs on demand is one of the promises of the GRIN technologies. It will be interesting to see what happens when genetic engineering becomes sufficiently sophisticated, cheap and unremarkable that it becomes common in a place such as India. The reincarnation implications alone are staggering.
Cost is hardly the only barrier to the global diffusion of the GRIN technologies. Probably more important is the “yuck factor”—the visceral rejection of technologies that are seen as anti-human. Headlines about human cloning produced one of the more vivid Hell Scenarios. That prospect caused Bill McKibben to wonder if there was any way to preserve human nature as it exists.
McKibben is most renowned for his environmental writing, especially his 1989 best seller, The End of Nature, the most influential early warning of the impact of global warming. It has been translated into 20 languages. In his 2003 book—greatly inspired by the Bill Joy alert that he calls “one of the great Paul Revere moments of our time”—he argues in favor of humans embracing their limits. He considered calling that volume The End of Human Nature, but discarded that title as too self-referential. Instead, he called it Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age. As a result, those people I call The Naturals—who have access to human enhancement but pass it up for moral, esthetic or political reasons, may very well end up calling themselves “the Enoughs.” McKibben has written their manifesto.
McKibben begins with a tale of running the Boston Marathon at the age of 41. He finishes 324th, an hour and a quarter off the world record. Yet his saga is one of achieving his personal best. “When it was done, I had a clearer sense of myself, of my power and my frailty. For a period of hours, and especially those last gritty miles, I had been absolutely, utterly present, the moments desperately, magnificently clarified. As meaningless as it was to the world, that’s how meaningful it was to me. I met parts of myself I’d never been introduced to before, glimpsed more clearly strengths and flaws I’d half suspected. A marathon peels you down toward your core for a little while, gets past the defenses we erect even against ourselves. That’s the high that draws you back for the next race, a centering elation shared by people who finished an hour ahead and two hours behind me.” He feels connected to early humans, for few experiences are a more primal part of our nature than long-distance running. And yet, he fears, he will be among the last humans to be touched by this epiphany. He worries that enhancements will make such efforts meaningless. In his view, soon you will not know if anything you ever achieve will be because of your striving or because of your technology. “It’s not the personal challenge that will disappear. It’s the personal,” he writes.
Yet the problem is not the plausibility and persuasiveness of his Hell Scenario. He hardly lacks eloquence in conjuring that fright. Again, the problem is what to do about it. McKibben’s proposed solution is to renounce technologies that separate our essence, our beings, from our past.
He devotes a chapter—“Is Enough Possible?”—to how exactly you would do that. He offers three existence proofs that technological refusal is possible: the modern Amish, and the medieval Chinese and Japanese. Only people making the case exactly the opposite of McKibben’s usually cite the last two. Yes, it is possible to renounce technology. The Chinese turned against global maritime exploration in the 1400s, and the Japanese gave up guns in the 1600s. But as a result, even he acknowledges, “the West, not the East, was to dominate world trade and come first to commercial and industrial might.” He doesn’t mention it, but Islam also ignored the global threats created by the scientific and industrial revolutions of the once-undeveloped Europeans. The Middle East, too, is still shaped by that decision. All of these are examples of once-great civilizations brought to their knees. They were forced to endure humiliation and exploitation by supposedly backward people who weren’t overly scrupulous about the technologies they embraced. These are not confidence-inspiring illustrations of how to avoid The Hell Scenario.
In fact, if you want to pace the floor at night, playing with your own personal Hell Scenario, ask yourself a question. The first licensed gene therapy came out of China. The first cloned human embryos came out of South Korea. Suppose a machine suddenly achieved intelligence greater than that of humans. Suppose it continued to improve so rapidly as to evolve way past human capabilities, triggering The Singularity, as Vinge predicts. Would it matter if people from China originally shaped that intelligence? Would the super-intelligence share their cultural attitudes? Would it be different if the super-intelligence first arose in Europe? Or the United States? Or North Korea?
Suppose that super-intelligence first came out of the military, where the point is to win conflicts. Now suppose instead that the super-intelligence first comes out of some corporate back-end shop such as customer relations, where the point is to be very, very nice to us.
Would that matter?
Such thought experiments show why the much more interesting case is that of the Amish, who do not reject all technology. In 1991, for example, a team of Amish carpenters gathered to build a clinic for the somatic gene therapy of children with an inherited illness prevelant among Amish and Mennonite children. The Amish use cars—if somebody else is driving them. They use phones—if they are not in the house. Their test is whether or not a technology serves the building of their community. That is a profoundly valuable analysis.
“Can we, even if we want to, actually rein in these technologies?” McKibben asks. “Can the opposition to them ever be more than academic?” Is it possible that “the visceral recoil from the loss of meaning that I’ve been describing will translate into effective political resistance”? Good questions.
There is great merit in McKibben’s argument that we should pick and choose which technologies are right for us. For example, in the 1960s Americans rejected the technology then available to build supersonic airliners, on the grounds that it would damage the upper atmosphere. Their decision was vindicated in the early 21st century when the Europeans, who went ahead with the Concorde, allowed it to go out of service without a replacement because few could afford the tickets. We’ve also taken a pass on DDT, massive new hydroelectric dams and additional nuclear reactors.
It’s not clear that such picking and choosing—“fine-grain relinquishment,” it is called—would seriously deflect The Curve, however. After all, if people in one country such as the United States can’t even agree on abortion and stem cells, it will be a formidable task to get a global consensus on the entire array of GRIN technologies coming at us ever faster. Nonetheless, when trying to figure out what to do about his Hell Scenario, McKibben admirably throws in his lot with democracy. He does not propose to hand the problem over to a carefully appointed commission of wise men. He’s still willing to slog it out in the marketplace of ideas with that seething mass of the great unwashed, the voters.
