Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?
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You’d need strong international regulations, too, across nations with very different notions about progress. The Chinese, for instance, seem significantly less worried about human genetic engineering—at least for somatic therapies, they’re pushing ahead with human trials faster than anywhere on Earth,12 though they reacted quickly to stop Dr. He after the news of his unauthorized designer babies. Meanwhile, China’s AI start-ups now rival Silicon Valley’s in size.13 Vladimir Putin, touring a Moscow tech firm in late 2017, asked the CEO how long it would be before superintelligent robots “eat us.” He added, “Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world.”14 Elon Musk agrees—the competition for AI superiority, he posited, is “the most likely cause of World War III.”15 But that’s exactly what diplomats are for (or used to be, when we had them). Since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they’ve managed (knock on wood) to keep anyone else from exploding nuclear weapons in anger. They were aided in that task by the fact that all of us could envision the mushroom clouds that would come with failure, and that’s not as easy with these other threats. Yet every nation on earth eventually signed on to the Paris accords to start dealing with climate change—and the U.S. was the first to drop out, which makes you wonder if China is really the main obstacle to international progress. And if we can’t set up an international regime that lasts forever, that’s not our responsibility. Our job is to keep the human game going through our time, and to pass it on.
Which means we should have a discussion, a long, deep, engaged discussion that involves all of us, everywhere. That’s why I wrote this book, obviously, and perhaps it’s the best argument for the set of digital tools we’ve evolved for global communication, flawed as those tools are. We should decide what we want. If it’s to keep burning fossil fuels, or to craft designer babies, then, okay, we’ve made the decision. But we shouldn’t pretend there’s no decision to make, that it’s simply inevitable. And we shouldn’t leave the technicians to themselves, because if we do, they will simply press ahead, not because they’re evil and only partly because they want to make a lot of money. Mostly they press ahead because it’s what they do, and because there’s great satisfaction in the work itself. The physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, reflecting on building the atomic bomb, once said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it, and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success.”16 That technological focus is further distorted by the way science rewards innovators: as the pioneering AI analyst Eliezer Yudkowsky once explained, “Many ambitious people find it far less scary to think about destroying the world than to think about never amounting to much of anything at all. All the people I have met who think they are going to win eternal fame through their AI projects are like this.”17 We shouldn’t let biologists and engineers decide whether and how to deploy these technologies, any more than we should let physicists decide where to drop nuclear weapons or let petroleum geologists decide how many wells to drill. They have special insight into how to do these things, but not into whether doing these things makes sense. When the effects of a decision will fall on the entire society, then entire societies should get to make the call.
But what if societies are just too timid or conservative? I talk often to technologists who say, “But what if we’d stopped innovating in 1800 or 1900 because we were worried about the effects?” “We romanticize humanity,” Kurzweil insisted when we last spoke. “Read Thomas Hobbes, or even Dickens. Everyone lived in dire poverty; there was no social safety net. We have a moral imperative to continue on the pathway away from that because despite the substantial progress we’ve made, we still have suffering.” Sure. But as every financial services firm has to tell you in its ads, “Past performance is no guarantee of future results.” We’re in a different world—in 1800 or 1900, the technologies on the horizon did not reasonably raise existential questions. The game was safe.
Innovation doesn’t scare me (as you’ll see when the discussion turns to solar panels), and it’s not that we don’t have problems left. (I’ve spent much of this book laying out the looming disaster of global warming and the deep harm done by our unprecedented levels of inequality.) The question is whether we can deal with those problems short of running the risks to human meaning that I’ve also described. I think we can. I think that if we back off the most crazed frontiers of technology, we can nonetheless figure out how to keep humans healthy, safe, productive—and human.
* * *
Again, though, not everyone agrees. Some harbor a deep pessimism about human nature, which I confess, as an American in the age of Trump, occasionally seems sound. Of all the arguments for unhindered technological growth, the single saddest (in the sense that it just gives up on human beings) comes from the Oxford don I mentioned earlier, Julian Savulescu. His proposal is important for our discussion because it unites the two halves of this book: in essence, he contends that the only way to solve global warming before it destroys our planet is to genetically alter human beings so that they become more altruistic and willing to make more sacrifices for the common good. He argues that we have “a moral obligation to overcome our moral limitations.” People, he says, evolved to form groups of about 150 individuals, and to be violent to those outside their tribe. “We’re far from perfect,” he says, but “science offers us the opportunity … to directly overcome those limitations” by producing embryos with improved “intelligence, impulse control, self-control—some level of empathy or ability to understand other people’s emotions, some willingness to make self-sacrificial decisions for other people,” all qualities that “have some biological bases.”18
Left to themselves, he insists, democracies can’t solve climate change, “for in order to do so a majority of their voters must support the adoption of substantial restrictions on their excessively consumerist lifestyle, and there is no indication they would be willing to make such sacrifices.”19 Also, our ingrained suspicion of outsiders keeps us from working together globally. And so, faced with the need to move quickly, we should “morally bioenhance” our children, with the use of drugs or, more likely, genetic engineering, so they will cooperate. The changes will, Savulescu insists, be liberating: “Moral enhancement of a person does not restrict freedom; it rather extends it, by making the subject more capable of overcoming urges which counteract the doing of what is seen as morally good.” It “hurts our pride,” he theorizes, to “acknowledge our moral deficiencies,” and yet we must do so, because the threats to our future must be answered by “morally responsible people.”20
This whole scheme is roughly akin to “geoengineering the atmosphere” to prevent climate change—some people, having given up on taming the fossil fuel companies, want to instead pump the atmosphere full of sulfur to block incoming solar radiation. In both cases, it’s an ugly workaround, based on the premise that we humans won’t rise to the occasion. I hope that Savulescu seriously underestimates the power of both technology and democracy—of the solar panel and of nonviolence. As we shall see, we have the means at hand to solve our problems short of turning our children into saintly robots—which, in any event, wouldn’t do a damned thing to solve climate change, given that by the time these morally improved youths had grown into positions of power, the damage would long since have been done. And I’m convinced he’s wrong about people’s selfishness presenting the main obstacle to solving climate change: around the world, polling shows that people are not just highly concerned about global warming, but also willing to pay a price to solve it. Americans, for instance, said in 2017 that they were willing to see their energy bills rise 15 percent and have the money spent on clean energy programs—that’s about in line with the size of the carbon taxes that national groups have been campaigning for.21
The reason we don’t have a solution to climate change has less to do with the greed of the great unengineered unwashed than with the greed of the almost unbelievably small percentage of people at the top of the energy he
ap. That is to say, the Koch brothers and the Exxon execs have never been willing to take a 15 percent slice off their profits, not when they could spend a much smaller share of their winnings corrupting the political debate with a broadside of lies and corrupting the political system with rolls of cash. If you wanted to “morally enhance” anyone, that’s where you’d start—if there are Grinches in need of hearts, it’s pretty obvious who should be at the head of the line.
But let’s not win that way. Let’s figure out how to solve the problems we face within the bounds of the game we’ve been playing all these millennia. Let’s be, for a while, true optimists, and operate on the assumption that human beings are not grossly defective. Let’s assume we’re capable of acting together to do remarkable things.
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You reach Moshono, on the outskirts of the Tanzanian city of Arusha, by following a badly rutted road that, at night, is both crowded with people and almost entirely dark. The town is about forty miles overland from the Olduvai Gorge, one of the places where anthropologists surmise humans first emerged, but until about a year ago, Lembris Andrea relied on a dim and flickering kerosene lantern to illuminate the home where he lives with his wife and two children. Thanks to a small solar panel on his roof, he now has five lights, including one by the corrugated tin front door, which he showed me several times. A “security light,” he said. “To keep away criminals?” I asked. “Yes, crime is here, but also dangerous animals. Especially snakes, so it is good to have a light.”
In the cocoa-farming village of Daban, in northern Ghana, I sat with several chiefs and elders on plastic chairs, discussing the new solar micro-grid that had gone into service the week before in their small settlement. It was blistering hot, as usual—we were six degrees from the equator—and one of the village leaders kept handing me the small plastic bags of water that are ubiquitous across West Africa. You just chew off a corner and then drink. I was grateful for the water, but it took me a good fifteen minutes to realize, in my clueless Western way, why the village elder was so proud. These bags were icy cold. This had not been possible until the switch was flipped on those solar panels the week before. For the first time ever in Daban, something could be cold.
Petite Boundiale, a rural village in the cocoa and rubber heartland of Côte d’Ivoire, is not prosperous: pretty much the only billboards on the nearby highway advertise machetes, and kids amuse themselves by pushing old motorcycle tires with sticks. But electricity had arrived, via solar panel, a couple of months before my visit, and so, a small crowd was gathered in the courtyard of Naore Abou’s small house to watch the nineteen-inch flat-screen he’d set out on a bench. What does he like to watch? Football, of course. (The village is split between Manchester United and Liverpool, with a few Real Madrid supporters). But even more the National Geographic channel—that is, the electronic outlet of an institution that made its fortune showing pictures of remote African villages.
* * *
Solar power is a miracle, or at least close enough for our purposes. Like genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, it has roots in nineteenth-century science, but it came of age in the twentieth century and has reached true takeoff velocity in the twenty-first. Andrew Carnegie watched a Portuguese priest demonstrate an early “heliophore,” which concentrated sunlight to produce temperatures of six thousand degrees, at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, a gathering that also saw the debut of the club sandwich, the hot dog, cotton candy, and the ice-cream cone. The sight stuck in Carnegie’s mind—his steelworks having used by far the largest share of the world’s coal supply, he predicted the best hope for humanity’s future lay in “the sun-motor,” whose “rays render the globe habitable, and may yet be made to produce power through solar engines.”1 Only in 1954, however, did the folks at Bell Labs manage to produce a working solar cell for generating electricity, and it was so expensive that at first its only use was in the earliest orbiting satellites. Taking advantage of the same learning curve that Kurzweil found with computing power, though, makers of solar saw the price begin to drop—indeed, the steady decline has taken solar power from a hundred dollars a watt in the 1960s to less than thirty cents a watt by 2018, making it the cheapest way to generate electricity across most of the world. No longer do you have to dig or drill for coal or gas or oil, and then ship it to a massive power plant, and then burn it at a high temperature, and then use the heat to spin a turbine, and then step the current up for transport through a far-flung grid, and then step it down again for home use. Now you can point a pane of glass at the sky, and out the back flows light and cold and information. That’s Hogwarts-level magic.
I’d long understood the environmental benefits of the solar panel, of course. For thirty years environmentalists have been explaining that we need to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy in order to stanch the flood of carbon into the atmosphere. But I didn’t really grasp the power of a solar panel to change lives until I got to rural Africa on a recent reporting trip. There are about as many humans living without electricity today as there were the day before Thomas Edison lit his first bulb, and most of them are in Africa. While Europe, North America, and South America are pretty close to fully electrified, and Asia is heading briskly in the same direction, the absolute number of Africans without power keeps increasing as population growth beats back the (minimal) efforts of the continent’s utilities—a World Bank report that came out in May 2017 predicted that, based on current trends, there could still be half a billion Africans without power by 2040.2 That’s because conventional grids are expensive to build and maintain, and Africa is poor.
“The belief was you’d eventually build the U.S. grid here,” said Xavier Helgesen, CEO of one of the most dynamic start-ups, Off-Grid Electric. “But the U.S. is the richest country on Earth and it wasn’t fully electrified till the forties, and that was in an era of cheap copper for wires, cheap timber for poles, cheap coal, and cheap capital. None of that is so cheap anymore, at least over here.” But solar—solar is suddenly cheap. And so, just as the spread of cheap cell phones a decade ago meant Africa could dispense with the need to wire landlines, so, too, solar may enable Africa to leapfrog at least some of the traditional ways of generating power. It’s the ultimate in what the business gurus happily call disruption, and it’s been a siren song for entrepreneurs with ambitions higher than the next Snapchat plug-in. Helgesen, for instance. Tall, with long lank hair, he could be the bassist in an indie band, but the Y Combinator T-shirt he’s wearing gives the game away. He didn’t actually do a stint at Silicon Valley’s most famous incubator (his wife did), but that’s his lineage, the same one that produced Airbnb and also the company that wants to embalm your brain so you can be digitally scanned and reimplanted in an android. The Y Combinator T-shirt reads, “Make Something People Want,” which pretty much defines cheap solar power. Africans are desperate for electricity.
* * *
“This is how the solar revolution happens,” Kim Schreiber, Off-Grid’s communications director, whispers to me. “One hot sales meeting at a time.” She and I, and the company’s sales manager, Max-Marc Fossouo, are squeezed onto a bench in a courtyard outside of a hut in the Ivorian village of Grand-Zattry, which is not so grand. We’re listening in as one of the company’s newest salesmen, Seko Serge Lewis, tries his pitch. A couple of village dogs are growling and tussling nearby; a scooter rolls by with six people somehow on board. Next to us in the courtyard, a woman does the day’s laundry in a bucket with a washboard—it’s her husband the salesman is trying to woo. Right now he’s showing him pictures on his cell phone of other customers in the village he’s talked to already.
“That’s to build up trust,” says Fossouo in my ear. He’s been providing a play-by-play throughout the hour-long sales call. “This customer is on a big fence. He’s stuck in the trust place. And I’m pretty sure the decision maker is over there washing the clothes anyway.”
Fossouo was born in Cameroon and went to school in Paris, but his real
education seems to have come in the seven summers he spent in the United States selling books for Southwestern Publishing, a Nashville-based titan of door-to-door marketing. (Rick Perry is another alum; ditto Ken Starr.) “I did Los Angeles for years,” he said. “‘Hi, my name is Max. I’m a crazy college student from France, and I’m helping families with their kids’ education. I’ve been talking to your neighbors A, B, and C, and I’d like to talk to you. Do you have a place where I can come in and sit down?’” All selling, he insists, is the same: “It starts with a person understanding they have a problem. Someone might live in the dark but not understand it’s a problem. So, you have to show them. And then you have to create a sense of urgency to spend the money to solve the problem now.”
After an hour of trying, Serge strikes out with that first customer—the man is flush now but worried that he won’t be able to make the monthly payments down the road, in the lean stretch before the next cocoa harvest. “That’s crap,” Max whispers, pointing again to the wife bent over the laundry. “He loves this woman. He can move the world for her.” So, as we move to the next small courtyard, Max takes over, so he can demonstrate his technique to the slightly abashed Serge. This prospect is a farmer and a schoolteacher, and we settle down in his classroom, which has a few low desks with slates—literal shards of slate—resting on top. Max quickly figures out that the man has two wives, and he starts sprinkling their names liberally through the conversation. “There’s no pressure. It’s okay. I don’t want to sell you anything,” he says, as they move through the steps familiar to anyone who’s seen an infomercial. First Max has the man catalogue everything he’s spending now on energy: kerosene, flashlight batteries, even the gas money for the scooter he borrows to travel to the next village when he needs to recharge his phone. Then he shows him what Off-Grid offers: a radio (“plus fort”) and four lights, each with a dimmer switch. “Where would you put the lamp? In front of the door? Of course! And the big light in the middle of the room, so when you have a party, everyone could see. Now, tell me, if you went to the market to buy all of this, how much would it cost?”