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

by Joel Garreau

  Vinge digresses: “The reason it’s not going to be effectively ruled illegal to do that research is there are so many reasons for going in that direction. There are military reasons for wanting it. There are economic reasons for wanting it. There are, by God, artistic reasons for wanting it.”

  Back to the hard takeoff. “So let’s suppose it’s the military, which is in an environment where it could spend a lot of money. And the other side knows that. Both sides have some idea of what’s going on, on the other side. They can occasionally steal breakthroughs. Okay, at this point, you begin to take more chances. Any sort of controls that they might otherwise do or take are kind of left behind. It’s sort of a single-minded thing. As you’re making it better, you might hook it up with things that are effectors.” He’s talking about robotic arms and legs and eyes and ears and hands. “So basically you wind up with a self-fueled advancement of The Singularity. You know, like one side says, ‘Our best intelligence is the other side is 100 hours away from having this.’ ‘Oh, okay. Well, we can do it in 48 hours.’ And then the other side says, ‘Well, if we throw all this overboard, we can do it in three hours.’ And what comes out of that is one of the worse scenarios.” The superhuman intelligence is a war fighter.

  Phew. Okay, so what’s your scenario for soft takeoff look like, Professor Vinge?

  “Soft takeoff, I suppose, takes 50 to 150 years. It’s a scenario in which the notion of corporate identity becomes not a legal metaphor.” In this version, global business is seen as an ecology in which many organisms contribute to a web of survival. Some of them are human. And some of them are increasingly intelligent machines, such as the ones that know your credit card has been stolen before you do. “The back ends become gradually more and more smart. Corporate infighting is about as unpleasant as we now imagine it, only now it’s being undertaken by self-aware entities.”

  The good news is that customer service provided by the machines “becomes much nicer, and in fact these guys really are very nice to humans. That’s the nicest form of soft takeoff that I can imagine.” One of the charming things about such a gradual, ecological scenario is that the machines might still need us to change their batteries and tend to their networks for a very long time.

  That’s the good news in this scenario? I ask.

  “It would be more safe if it took a long time to happen,” Vinge replies. “For all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I’d be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove—instead of twenty,” Vinge writes.

  “Okay, well, come back to today,” I say to Vinge. “How would we know if this were not all fairy tales? How would we know if The Singularity was approaching?”

  Vinge has given some thought to that. “We will see automation replacing higher and higher level jobs,” he has written. Think of librarians displaced by Google. In such a world, “the work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.” A symptom might be that throughout the world, “ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.” Another mark could be filmmakers and fiction writers having an increasingly hard time imagining a credible future more than a generation or so out.

  As sunset approaches, I tell him about the guys I have been hanging out with at the Shadow Bowl, and what they’ve been doing. Someday summoning up smartness about everything in our environment around us may be routine. It may be as easy and unremarkable as is the process today of calling up music to surround us, anytime, anywhere. One wonders what our ancestors of a few centuries ago would have thought of that ability today. Would they have viewed us as godlike?

  Right now, the Shadow Bowl is basically just a pretty cool hack. I remember that the most frequent word heard at DARPA is fun. I think of the best definition of fun encountered yet—“one more variable than you can handle.”

  But of course the really interesting part of this is figuring out what it all means, both metaphorically and literally—what the signals are trying to tell us about our future.

  You know, there’s another possible early indicator of The Singularity, says Vinge, smiling as the sky turns russet over the Pacific.

  Your friends out at The River, he says.

  Their stuff might work.

  * * *

  What Are Scenarios?

  Scenarios are rigorous, logical, but imaginative stories about what the future might be like, designed to help people plan. Scenarios are not predictions. They are tools for preparation. Recall how pilots just returning from combat—no matter how complex the conditions they encountered—frequently say, “It wasn’t as bad as the simulator.” That is the value of scenarios. Simulators do not predict the future; they allow those who use them to carefully and calmly anticipate and rehearse their response to almost any sudden eventuality.

  Scenario planning was pioneered in the early 1970s by Shell, the multinational oil company. Since then, it has been adopted by many important organizations, including IBM, Coca-Cola, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, AT&T, the California Energy Commission, Texaco, Intel, the CIA, Cementos Mexicanos, Clorox, Dow Chemical, Deutsche Bank, DARPA, Eastman Kodak, DuPont, Fannie Mae, First Union, GlaxoSmithKline, Heineken, Kellogg, Lucent, Mattel, Morgan Stanley, Motorola, the National Education Association, Nissan, Pacific Gas & Electric, Pitney Bowes, Procter & Gamble, Scottish Enterprise, the Republic of Singapore, Sun Microsystems, UPS, Xerox and the World Council on Sustainable Development. When such organizations use the process, they create multiple scenarios out of the same set of existing facts, in order to describe as wide a variety of possible futures as imagination allows. The point is to allow these decision makers to prepare for them all. That’s because a careful reading of history suggests that all past futures have turned out to be a combination of the scenarios that might have been written to anticipate them. Finally, if the future that actually appears turns out not to match any particular scenario, that is an early warning that history is taking a turn.

  Scenarios have rules:

  • They must conform to all known facts.

  • They must identify “predetermineds.” These are future events so locked in by those of the past that they can usefully be viewed as inevitable. For example, a predetermined element of a U.S. presidential election is that it will occur every four years.

  • Scenarios then identify “critical uncertainties.” These are possibilities that logically might occur in the future but which are both highly uncertain and highly important. For example, a critical uncertainty about any U.S. presidential election is who might win.

  • Sometimes scenarios identify “wild cards.” These are possible but highly improbable eventualities that would have great impact should they occur—for example, the leading presidential candidate being assassinated just before the vote.

  • Scenarios reveal “embedded assumptions.” These are frequently unprovable and often unexamined foundations on which our thinking about the future rests. For example, no one expects the U.S. military to so dislike the outcome of a vote as to overthrow the government.

  • It is useful to identify in advance certain “early warnings” that serve as an alert that a particular scenario is coming to pass. For example, professional political operatives have known for decades that in a close presidential race, the mathematics of the Electoral College is such that if one party has California and the other has Texas, the outcome likely will be decided in Florida.

  From time to time, you will find in this book boxes like these that identify the critical elements of scenarios that have been described in the text. They are meant to help you see the structure of these scenarios, and perhaps imagine alternative ones. They also might give you early warning, either if the scenarios turn out accurately to describe events as they unfold or if it turns out that history is taking a significantly different path.

  * * *

  * * *

  The Curve Scenario
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  In this scenario, information technology continues to explode at a rate comparable to that from 1959 through the early 21st century. These unprecedented rapid doublings of information power and dramatically reduced costs continue to spawn new transformative technologies, such as genetics, robotics and nanotechnology. Those in turn also proceed to grow at an unprecedented rate, merging and intertwining to produce novel opportunities and challenges. Within the current human generation, these events transform society and ultimately test the meaning of human nature itself.

  Predetermined elements:

  • There are Curves of exponential change.

  • Many of these describe the realities of technology.

  • These Curves especially describe the increase in capabilities of information technology.

  • The Curves of information technology increasingly enable new Curves of exponential change to emerge in other fields, especially genetics, robotics and nanotechnology.

  • All of these Curves of exponential change have major impacts on society, culture and values.

  Critical uncertainties:

  • Are The Curves of exponential change smoothly accelerating, or will they display unexpected slowdowns, stops or reversals?

  • Are these Curves of exponential change under the control of society’s culture and values, or are they impervious to human intervention?

  * * *

  * * *

  The Singularity Scenario

  (Builds on The Curve Scenario)

  In this scenario, The Curve of exponentially increasing technological change is unstoppable because new discoveries confer great advantage on those who adopt them—economically, militarily and even artistically. Either intentionally or accidentally, this leads, before 2030, to the creation of greater-than-human intelligence. This greater-than-human intelligence in turn proceeds to replicate and improve itself at such a rate as to exceed comprehension. This produces an inflection point in history called The Singularity, comparable to that in which humans rose from the lower animals. (Alternatively, The Singularity is triggered simply by the rate of change accelerating so greatly as to be beyond understanding, with or without the creation of greater-than-human intelligence.) The impact on everyday life is profound, as if we are being swept up by an avalanche.

  Predetermined elements:

  • There are Curves of exponential technological change.

  • These Curves of exponential change especially describe information technology.

  • These Curves of information technology increasingly enable new Curves of exponential change in other fields, especially genetics, robotics and nanotechnology.

  • All of these Curves of exponential change have major social, cultural and value impacts.

  Critical uncertainties:

  • Are The Curves of exponential change smoothly accelerating, or will they display unexpected slowdowns, stops or reversals?

  • Are these Curves of exponential change under the control of society’s culture and values, or are they impervious to human intervention?

  • Will software improve at a rate as great as hardware, or will human ingenuity be stymied by the sheer size, complexity and bugginess of the software required?

  • If these Curves are predetermined, must they result in the creation of infinite change?

  • If these Curves are predetermined, must they result in greater-than-human intelligence?

  • If infinite change or greater-than-human intelligence is inevitable, will this happen soon—that is, before 2030?

  Embedded assumption:

  • The only event that can alter this path is a cataclysm that will ruin civilization, such as nuclear war.

  * * *

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Heaven

  Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

  —Katharine Hepburn, in John Huston’s The African Queen, 1951

  We are as gods and might as well get good at it.

  —Stewart Brand, in the statement of purpose of The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968

  WELLESLEY, MASSACHUSETTS, is a crucible of the past and future. This stately village is not far from the gritty cities of Rhode Island and Massachusetts where modern America began. In those places, starting in 1793, waterfalls powered the continent’s first textile mills, launching the Industrial Revolution in the New World.

  Wellesley today is just outside the fabled Route 128 corridor, where, in the 1950s and 1960s the Information Age arose. That circulator highway curves west around the great research centers of Boston and Cambridge—especially the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In low-rise office campuses that MIT researchers built for their companies along Route 128, the world’s high-tech revolution blossomed. In fact, at one point, if one of these fellows came to the First National Bank of Boston to ask for money and he had a government contract associated with a high-technology scheme, the loan officers had standing orders: No matter how crazy either this person or his idea seemed, neither could be turned down without authorization from a senior vice president.

  Wellesley is also just south of Walden Pond, where, starting in 1845, Henry David Thoreau lived for two years and two months in a 10-by-15-foot hand-crafted cabin, considering the prospects for human transcendence. In his book Walden, or Life in the Woods, he came to the studied conclusion that “men have become the tools of their tools.”

  Now the Route 128 area is as much an incubator of biotech as of information technology, creating new opportunity and wealth. That’s why the village of Wellesley today is the sort of idealized spot where the 18th century meets the 21st. Wellesley is a place where emporia don’t so much sell sandwiches as offer “savories.” Shop windows are full of marvelously slinky dresses, without price tags, aimed at those who timed their stock options right. There are an impossible number of art galleries and sophisticated craft shops with names like The Gifted Hand. Wellesley is the kind of place where the sidewalks are accented by brick and are cleaned more often than some kitchen floors. The tavern of the old Wellesley Inn on the Square is called Brix° 576. Brix° with that little degree symbol is a measure of the sugar content in the juice of wine grapes before it is fermented. In parts of Silicon Valley, too, such as Burlingame, you can see a lot of this crafted balance between old and new—between greensward and gigapixels. Wellesley has taken to heart the words of Alan Kay, the father of the mouse-driven, point-and-click computer desktop, when he said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it yourself.”

  Not far from this village, predicting the future by inventing it himself is clearly what Ray Kurzweil is up to. A two-lane blacktop named Walnut Street, as it nears an on-ramp to Route 128, crosses the Charles River. In a dozen miles the broad Charles will define Boston and Cambridge. But here it is easily spanned by an ancient stone bridge as it burbles on its way to a waterfall that once powered one of those venerable textile mills. Between the bridge and the dam today is an isolated office building with marvelous river views from three sides. The office building demonstrates that the future still needs a little work. It offers a shockingly butt-ugly example of how badly precast concrete exteriors can age. This is the headquarters of Kurzweil Technologies.

  In the lobby of the second floor, where Kurzweil has his office, is a museum-worthy Ediphone, created by Kurzweil’s hero, Thomas Edison. Billed as a “Voice Writer,” the Ediphone was produced by the Edison Company in the 1920s. It has a tube you speak into the size of a powder horn. It was the world’s first mass-market business dictation device, transforming speech into electrons and then back into speech. As Edison famously said, “I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent it.”

  Not far away is an equally museum-worthy Kurzweil Reading Machine from the 1970s. It goes the Ediphone one better. It can read out loud any book on your shelf. It looks like a photocopier that can talk, which is basically what it is. You lay the open book down on the scanner. Presto—the mechanical voice reads it to you. It is
the first consumer device to use artificial intelligence. To be able independently to read books not published in Braille was a huge breakthrough for the blind. Kurzweil sold the first one to Stevie Wonder.

  A minion demonstrates the old machine to me, laying a printed copy of the Gettysburg Address on its platen. “Four score and seven years ago,” the mechanical voice promptly starts. Then it gets to the word liberty. “Li-bah-dee,” it says. Still a few bugs in the system—the machine has a Boston accent.