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

by Joel Garreau

  Ahem. So, okay? This technological change in the nineties is supposed to be the biggest thing since fire, and the best we can do for headlines is a tawdry Oval Office sex scandal? You can see the reason for my confusion. Where was this social upheaval that history taught us to expect?

  As it happens, this is not the first time I’ve found myself covering worlds that do not seem to add up. In fact, I’ve come to welcome such assignments. They allow us to examine what’s going on really. My previous books on what makes our world tick—The Nine Nations of North America and Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, which identified realities already in play that were not yet obvious to everyone—were similarly preceded by bouts of unsettling perplexity.

  This time, two “aha” moments occurred in the course of my reporting. The first was the reminder that innovation arrives more rapidly than does change in culture and values. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the nineties were like the fifties. The fifties were a period of great technological upheaval—missiles with nuclear warheads, mass-produced suburban housing, mainframe computers. From television to Sputnik, the list was endless. And yet the fifties were the boring Eisenhower decade. The cultural upheaval of sex, drugs and rock and roll—enabled by The Pill, synthetic psychedelics and the transistor—did not occur until the sixties. You see similar upheaval in the earlier half of the century with the dawning of the age of automobiles, refrigeration, radio and telephones. The twenties, too, were a frivolous decade, promptly followed by the social upheaval of the thirties.

  Perhaps that is the way history works. Perhaps because culture and values lag technology, when upheaval occurs, it is often of seismic proportions. If that is so now, then the cultural revolution for which we are due is just beginning to emerge. That’s how tracing the outlines of that transformation became my beat during the early years of the 21st century.

  The second “aha” moment was more formidable. I remember it as being like the scene in Jaws where the captain finally glimpses the shark. He responds, famously: “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

  Such a moment came as I realized that this story was not about computers. This cultural revolution in which we are immersed is no more a tale of bits and bytes than the story of Galileo is about paired lenses. In the Renaissance, the big deal was not telescopes. It was about realizing that the Earth is a minor planet revolving around an unexceptional star in an unfashionable part of the universe. Today, the story is no less attitude-adjusting. It is about the defining cultural, social and political issue of our age. It is about human transformation.

  The inflection point at which we have arrived is one in which we are increasingly seizing the keys to all creation, as astounding as that might seem. It’s about what parents will do when offered ways to increase their child’s SAT score by 200 points. It’s about what athletes will do when encouraged by big-buck leagues to put together medical pit crews. What fat people will do when offered a gadget that will monitor and alter their metabolisms. What the aging will do when offered memory enhancers. What fading baby boomers will do when it becomes obvious that Viagra and Botox are just the beginning of the sex-appeal industry. Imagine that technology allows us to transcend seemingly impossible physical and mental barriers, not only for ourselves but, exponentially, for our children. What happens as we muck around with the most fundamental aspects of our identity? What if the only thing that is truly inevitable is taxes? This is the transcendence of human nature we’re talking about here. What wisdom does transhuman power demand?

  It’s been a long time since the earth has seen more than one kind of human walking around at the same time. About 25,000 years if you believe that Cro-Magnons were critters significantly different from “behaviorally modern” Homo sapiens. About 50,000 years if your reading of the fossil evidence suggests you have to go back to the Neanderthals with their beetle brows and big teeth to discover an upright ape really different from us. The challenge of this book is that we may be heading into such a period again, in which we will start seeing creatures walk the Earth who are enhanced beyond recognition as traditional members of our species. We are beginning to see the outlines of such a divergence now. In 2003, President Bush signed a $3.7 billion bill to fund research that could lead to medical robots traveling the human bloodstream to gobble up cancer or fat cells, for those who can afford the procedures. At the University of Pennsylvania, male mouse cells are being transformed into egg cells. If this science works in humans, it opens the way for two gay males to make a baby, each contributing 50 percent of his genetic material—and blurring the standard model of parenthood.

  As you get further into these pages, you will meet real people with real names and faces working today toward just such modifications of what it means to be human. The powerful driver of this roller coaster is the continuing curve of exponential change. Evolution is accelerating so fast, some claim, that the last twenty years are not a guide to the next twenty years, but at best a guide to the next eight. By the same arithmetic, the last fifty years perhaps are not a guide to the next fifty years. They are, some guess, a guide to the next fourteen. As I type this, the evening news is airing yet another report describing some advance as “science fiction coming close to reality.” Remember that phrase. You’re going to be hearing it a lot in the coming years. When that occurs, I would like you to remember this book.

  At least three alternative futures flow from this accelerated change, according to knowledgeable people who have thought about all this, as you will see in ensuing chapters. The first scenario is one in which, in the next two generations, humanity is rapidly replaced by something far more grand than its motley self. Call that The Heaven Scenario. The second is the one in which in the next 25 years or so, humanity meets a catastrophic end. Call it The Hell Scenario. You will find chapters on each, because both scenarios are plausible, and either would lead to the end of human history as we know it, and soon. The third scenario is more complex. It is the one we might call The Prevail Scenario. In this scenario, the future is not predetermined. It is full of hiccups and reverses and loops, all of which are the product of human beings coming to grips with their own destinies. In this world, our values can and do shape our future. We do have choices; we are not at the mercy of large forces. We can prevail.

  I approach these three scenarios with an open mind, but critically. I try not to advocate any of them—I report them. Nor am I aiming this book at the 90-percent-male alpha-geek population who devours Wired magazine, that talisman of the digitally hip. If they find merit in my work, I am honored. But I hope for a broader audience. I try to speak to some very bright people I know—my mother, my daughters—who care far more about humans than they do machines. Me too.

  If my interest in that third scenario—Prevail—marks me as an optimist, so be it. Heaven and Hell each might make a good summer blockbuster movie, featuring amazing special effects. But they tend toward the same story line: We are in for revolutionary change; there’s not much we can do about it; hang on tight; the end. The Prevail Scenario, if nothing else, has better literary qualities. It is a story of struggle and action and decision. In that way, it is also more faithful to history, which can be read as a remarkably effective paean to the power of humans to muddle through extraordinary circumstances.

  Scenario work shows that the future is usually a combination of all the stories you can construct to anticipate it. So I have done my best to present entertaining but accurate depictions of people who hold wildly different views. These are important thinkers and pioneers who deserve to be taken seriously. Most of them. Some are in there because I just couldn’t resist telling their tales.

  I hope this book serves as a road map and a guide to what we’ll all be living through, pointing out significant landmarks along the way, as well as the turns and forks we can expect in the road. At the very least, however, I hope Radical Evolution ends up saying something about the present. George Orwell’s most renowned work was entitled 1984 because he was really writing about 1
948. Scenarios are always about the present, really. The fact that they exist today teaches us something about who we are, how we got that way, what makes us tick and, most of all, where we’re headed.

  There’s one thing that I’ve already learned writing this book.

  If you have a choice between starting your story with a telekinetic monkey or an attractive teenager in a wheelchair whose life might be changed by the technology the monkey represents, you have to lead with the bright young woman every time. For that’s what people care about. And that’s why the focus of this book is not on engineering—it is on the future of human nature.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Be All You Can Be

  The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.

  —William Gibson

  AT A CERTAIN ANGLE, seated behind the dining room table in her ponytail, khaki slacks and pinstriped shirt, Gina Marie Goldblatt does not appear in any way remarkable.

  This particular January, she is a college sophomore home for the holidays from the University of Arizona. In Gina’s serious moments, she wants to go on for a master’s degree in business administration and a law degree and someday run her own company. But this week she’s focused on going skiing with her friends for the first time. So finding a good time to visit with her is an experience in teenage time management. “We’re the most last-minute people you’ll ever meet,” she says of her posse’s complicated lives. To find pattern in the way her crowd swarms, it helps to remind yourself that college kids, like the proteins that underlie much of human nature, really are much more organized than a tangle of spaghetti. There is logic in the complexity. Events do work out.

  Nonetheless, the idea of Gina going skiing is as astounding as is her ambition to someday go skydiving. Because of what Gina casually refers to as “medical malpractice,” she’s in a wheelchair for what is projected to be the rest of her life. “I have cerebral palsy. It’s a brain injury. It can be caused by a trauma or by a lack of oxygen to the brain,” she says of her birth. “I think I was pretty much a combination of both. Most of the kids with cerebral palsy are also born premature. I was, yes—by, like, two months. It’s just something that you’re born with.”

  It’s not like a spinal cord injury, she explains, which paralyzed the late Superman actor Christopher Reeve after he was thrown from his horse, landing on his head. It’s not like diabetes, which can appear when you’re older. Nor is it like muscular dystrophy, which can kill the young. Gina can live long, but with lasting difficulties. “Part of the reason why cerebral palsy patients have development difficulty is because I didn’t even start crawling until I was like maybe one or two, which meant that I didn’t start, like, picking up things until that age,” she says. “Doctors say whether you know it or not, like when you’re picking up stuff, your brain is learning how to count little by little. So since you don’t start that until you’re older, you can’t really catch up.

  “It’s something that I’ve learned to compensate for. Like, I read at the speed of a fifth-grader. I can understand everything that a college sophomore should understand, but I can’t read it quickly. It just takes me longer.” She speaks and types fluidly, although sometimes her writing needs editing because she can put sentences in the wrong order without recognizing it. Her handshake is soft, revealing low muscle tone. She needs help putting a clip on her shirt.

  Gina’s father, Michael Goldblatt, did not want her ever to think that she should be conquered by her limitations. So she became a pioneer. He enrolled her in public schools in affluent Oak Brook, outside Chicago, where they lived. She was the first seriously handicapped person to be fully mainstreamed at any of these schools. Her father was so determined that she be treated like everyone else that he even ran for the local school board and won. Nonetheless, Gina remembers the experience as “horrible.”

  “I had a teacher who would tell me that I didn’t deserve to be in her class. And when I asked her why, the only reason she could come up with was ‘Because you’re in a wheelchair and have a disability.’” This was a Spanish honors class her freshman year in high school. Gina is fluent in Spanish, as is her patrician Mexican-born mother, Marta. “I was just, like, ‘Okay, fine, whatever. You’re not the first person to tell me that I can’t do something.’”

  At college, she has hired pre-med students to help her with the nitty-gritty details of life—getting bathed, getting into her chair, getting her backpack strapped onto the chair, taking out the trash. She’s got a companion dog, Jinx, a yellow Lab, who can pick up books and take her socks off—he can even hold open doors with a harness on his back that includes suction cups and hooks. She also has what she describes as a “really cool” wheelchair that features two internal computers so that she can lie down in it, and put her feet up and sit back, at her command.

  So now she’s pretty dauntless. “We come up with these crazy ideas,” she says of her crew. “Like, I decided I wanted to go skiing. Yes. Because, like, I want to go skiing. They have sit skis. Yes. They’re like skis but you sit on them. It will be my first time.” In the past she has talked about skydiving. “My mom will just laugh—she’ll sit there and laugh.”

  Gina is impressive, but she is not yet a world changer. She simply hasn’t been around long enough.

  The telekinetic monkey may change all that, though.

  Gina’s father, Michael, is awfully proud of that monkey. He likes to talk about how the work being done with it someday may change Gina’s life. She may no longer need her wheelchair. Someday, because of that monkey, she may be able to control machines with her thoughts. Those machines may be embedded in her body. They might allow her to walk.

  Gina is getting a little tired of hearing about the telekinetic monkey. “In fact, I heard about the monkey over dinner last week while we were at a restaurant. We had family friends over and they wanted to know, like, what he was doing, and so he mentioned the monkey.”

  What her father is doing at the particular moment of the early 21st century captured here is running the Defense Sciences Office of the United States’ Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. DARPA is one of the world’s foremost drivers of human enhancement. Goldblatt readily acknowledges that his daughter is his inspiration. What he is doing is spending untold millions of dollars to create what might well be the next step in human evolution. And yes, it has occurred to him that the technology he is helping create might someday allow his daughter not just to walk but to transcend.

  The first telekinetic monkey that DARPA funded is named Belle.

  Belle is a cute monkey—an owl monkey, tiny, with huge brown globular eyes framed in white ovals two-thirds the size of her head. Her fur is russet and gray. Belle is astonishingly quick. One of her accomplishments is her prowess at an electronic game. She intently watches a horizontal series of lights in her lab at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. She knows that if a light suddenly shines and she moves her joystick left or right to correspond to its position, she gets a drop of fruit juice. Treats may not matter now, though. She’s gotten way into the game.

  Belle is not really telepathic, strictly speaking. That would mean that she could communicate from her mind directly to another mind. DARPA’s researchers haven’t gotten that far—yet. Although Michael Goldblatt can clearly see how they might.

  Belle is telekinetic. That means that simply by thinking, she can get a mechanical arm far away—in Massachusetts, in fact—instantly to move exactly the way her mind commands. Her Duke researchers line up probes thinner than the finest sewing thread right next to individual neurons in different regions of Belle’s motor cortex—the part of the brain that plans movements. These are linked to two computers, one in the next room and another 600 miles north, at MIT, via the Internet. The computers each control a robotic arm. Then the researchers disconnect her joystick and start Belle’s game. Sure enough, not only is she able to play it splendidly using just her thoughts, but the two robotic arms instantly mimic the motions that Belle’
s arm would make to control the joystick, “like dancers choreographed by the electrical impulses sparking in Belle’s mind,” her researchers report. The first time she did it, the two labs, in North Carolina and New England, erupted into loud celebration.

  Needless to say, there’s quite a story behind this. Especially since the reason you create a telekinetic monkey is ultimately to create a connection between any intelligence, silicon or human—any mind and any machine—anywhere. It is meant to lead to the day when a human might, for example, with her very thoughts control a robot orbiting Jupiter, causing its sensors to zoom in this way and that.

  The next step is to rig a distant machine such that it can pipe what it is sensing directly into the brain of its human host. The goal is to seamlessly merge mind and machine, engineering human evolution so as to directly project and amplify the power of our thoughts throughout the universe.

  If this sounds like superpowers, that is not far-fetched. In the 1930s and 1940s, in the hopes and dreams for society that we record in our comic books, we began to imagine what it would be like for people to transcend the mortal bonds of everyday humanity.