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

by Joel Garreau

  In this world, humans exist who are machine-based. They no longer have neurons, flesh or blood. They don’t have “wetware.” Instead, their brains are based on electronic and photonic equivalents. That’s because the human brain has been reverse-engineered. It has been fully scanned, analyzed, understood and translated into machine analogues.

  In Kurzweil’s 2099, these “software-based humans” vastly exceed in number those still using native neuron-based brains for their thinking. Such a software-based human is not dependent on a physical body. Whenever and however they want, they can create a physical presence either through virtual reality or by creating the kind of reconfigurable nanobot swarms that Michael Crichton wrote about in his novel Prey, set in his usual day-after-tomorrow near-present. In this world, even those human intelligences still using carbon-based neurons plentifully augment how they think, feel, see and sense. “Humans who do not utilize such implants are unable to meaningfully participate in dialogues with those who do,” Kurzweil writes. People in the early 21st century without e-mail got left out of a lot of conversations, too.

  In his dialogue with the Molly of 2099, Molly acknowledges, “The spiral of accelerating returns lives on.”

  “I’m not surprised,” responds the Kurzweil character. “Anyway, you do look amazing.”

  “You say that every time we meet.”

  “I mean you look twenty again, only more beautiful than at the start of the book.”

  “I knew that’s how you’d want me.”

  “Great, now I’m going to be accused of preferring younger women.”

  “My body right now is just a little fog swarm projection. Neat, huh?”

  “Not bad, not bad at all. You feel pretty good, too.”

  “I thought I’d give you a hug, I mean the book’s almost over.”

  “This is quite a technology.”

  Molly has transcended. She has become essentially indistinguishable from the Christian portrayal of angels. She no longer has a permanent physical body. She can, however, project a material or virtual body at will, as she did to hug the Kurzweil character and dazzle him with her beauty. Bit by bit, over the years, everything that makes Molly herself was scanned into the larger knowledge base of human creations. There is no distinction any longer between humanity and its creations. As a result, Molly is immortal. She has, in Kurzweil’s words, gone over to the other side. She has become pure knowledge.

  Kurzweil introduces the idea of MOSHs—Mostly Original Substrate Humans. The drollery here is that substrate, for the last third of the 20th century, usually referred to silicon—the stuff that computer chips were built on. In Kurzweil’s 2099, it means meat. A Mostly Original Substrate Human is one of those people who, for esthetic or ethical or moral reasons, insists on primarily using the flesh that humans were heir to for her living and thinking. MOSHs are honored and legally protected by “grandfather legislation,” in Kurzweil’s projection. They deserve it for being the progenitors of what humankind has become. But they cannot compete with those who have gone over to the other side. For those like Molly, it happened one incremental step at a time, as they chose to move on. Shedding the physical body was like shedding a large house that was a nuisance to maintain and no longer matched people’s lives. It simplified things.

  Work is still the point of human life in 2099. But those on the other side can do things of which MOSHs never dreamed. Molly is creating symphonies with frequencies, tempos and musical structures that MOSHs are not capable of understanding. All humans are now entrepreneurs, creating new knowledge, for which other people are willing to pay. A lot of time is filled by family, of which there are now many generations. To get to a point of peace and serenity, Molly meditates. She lives for moments of spiritual experience—“an artful expression, a moment of serenity, a sense of friendship.”

  Back in the early 21st century, in his office near Wellesley, I ask Kurzweil how he originally got into this prediction business. “Fairly conservatively,” he replies. “I realized I needed to do some better modeling of technology trends to be a better inventor and entrepreneur. The world really was different by the time I finished a project. Early conceptions didn’t necessarily pan out. Either they were too fast or too slow. I really needed to understand where technology would be—what the enabling forces would be. That’s part of the craft of being an inventor. So that’s how I got into this. Then it did take on a life of its own. This is what comes out of a scientific examination of technology trends. You come up with these perspectives and try to examine what that means for human civilization. It does create a philosophy. I try to actually overcome some of the older ways of thinking that are more death-oriented. But I came to it through the scientific route. I wasn’t trying to reverse-engineer a religious vision.”

  THE ESSENCE OF The Heaven Scenario is stealing fire from the gods, breathing life into inert matter and gaining immortality. Our efforts to become something more than human have a long and distinguished genealogy. Tracing the history of those efforts illuminates human nature. In every civilization, in every era, we have given the gods no peace.

  Efforts to transcend our origins begin in the most primitive of times. Sorcerers would create a likeness of a living thing and, with the rituals of magic, seek to animate it. In our earliest epic, the Sumerian tale of Gilgamesh, the climax is the king seeking, finding and losing the secret of immortality. Barely three pages into Genesis, the serpent is telling Eve that she doesn’t have to worry about losing immortality by tasting of the fruit of knowledge. “No! You will not die! God knows in fact that on the day you eat it your eyes will be open and you will be like gods,” he says. (Not coincidentally, one of the biggest attractions of Christianity, even as an upstart religion, was its promise of eternal life.) Ancient Greece was full of heroes harassing the deities. Prometheus not only created humans, teaching them many of their useful skills, but he filched fire for them. Daedalus confounded King Minos by crafting wings of wax and feathers to flee Crete. His son Icarus, of course, flew too close to the sun, giving us one of our earliest warnings against taking presumptuous pride in our technologies. But remember, Daedalus did succeed—his mythic wings worked, and ancient Greece gave us the tools of logic, skepticism and natural philosophy that became the underpinnings of science. The market for harvest and fertility goddesses has never been the same.

  The cultural humanism of the Renaissance pushed ancient pieties aside. Make something of yourself! was its message to mankind. Human nature was not predetermined by anybody’s secondhand image and likeness, in this view. We could shape ourselves to make the world better. Pico della Mirandola’s 1486 Oration on the Dignity of Man, the manifesto of the Italian Renaissance, eloquently centers all attention on human capabilities. In it, says God to Adam: “We give you no fixed place to live, no form that is peculiar to you, nor any function that is yours alone. According to your desires and judgment, you will have and possess whatever place to live, whatever form, and whatever functions you yourself choose.” Indeed, in 1580, the kabbalistic Jews of Prague imagined creating a Golem—an artificial man made from clay—who would protect them from persecution. Galileo, as he laid the foundations of modern science, believed that for peering directly into the mind of God, there was nothing like a telescope. It was more profitable to study the deity’s handiwork than it was to study scripture. “Philosophy,” he wrote, “is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze.”

  The Age of Enlightenment elevated scientists over priests. The notion was that the logically deduced laws that governed human behavior were an even purer expression of God’s law than that which could be gathered from scripture. Since God’s law will always work to good ends, the same must be true of the natural laws governing our individual lives, this hypothesis concluded. Francis Bacon was among the first to see critical reasoning as a means of finding the destiny and nature of man. “The formation of ideas and axioms by true induction is no doubt the proper remedy to be applied
for the keeping off and clearing away of idols,” Bacon wrote in Novum Organum in 1620. He saw it as a new grounding for morality and, indeed, the perfection of society. The idea of a rationally discovered natural law to achieve a heaven on earth would fuel both the American and French revolutions. Is the universe like clockwork? Then we, too, could be universal clockmakers. One of the wonders of the Paris salons of the 1730s was a complex mechanical duck created by the ingenious engineer Jacques de Vaucanson. It was able convincingly to waddle, eat fish and poop. It was the incarnation of René Descartes’ idea of nature as machine. It was all the rage.

  “Unlimited progress” was the future seen by Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, in his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. A world in which “death would result only from extraordinary accidents” was foreseen by Condorcet, who was a friend of Voltaire. “No doubt man will not become immortal, but cannot the span constantly increase between the moment he begins to live and the time when naturally, without illness or accident, he finds life a burden?” This was published in 1795.

  In 1780, Benjamin Franklin wrote to the chemist, biologist and minister Joseph Priestley, “The rapid progress true science now makes, occasions my regretting sometimes that I was born too soon. It is impossible to imagine the height to which may be carried, in a thousand years, the power of man over matter. We may, perhaps, deprive large masses of their gravity, and give them absolute levity, for the sake of easy transport. Agriculture may diminish its labor and double its produce: all disease may by sure means be prevented or cured (not excepting even that of old age), and our lives lengthened at pleasure, even beyond the antediluvian standard. Oh that moral science were in as fair a way of improvement, that men would cease to be wolves to one another, and that human beings would at length learn what they now improperly call humanity.”

  If wresting power from the gods and seeking to transcend the human condition is fundamental to who we are, being terrified by the implications of our audacity is equally primal. Are we alarmed by the prospect of computers becoming human? Could that come from guilt? From fear? What happens if we create a monster? Will our silicon successes punish us? That is the horror and the dread. Call it “The Frankenstein Principle.” The history of that idea begins in the summer of 1816, when Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, while still a teenager, came to her spectacular leap of imagination. More about guilt, fear, horror and dread in the next chapter, on The Hell Scenario.

  To continue tracing the history of stealing fire from the gods, however, in 1859, Charles Robert Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It changed everything. By placing humans in a history of millions of years in which all living things are connected and nothing is constant, it transformed the way people thought about God and themselves. Human nature is not etched in stone. This insight became the dominant metaphor of our age. The still-controversial Origin of Species—described by the philosopher Daniel Dennett as the greatest idea ever to occur to a human mind—became the most lastingly influential book of the modern era, surpassing even Freud and Marx.

  A golden age of fiction about the future followed, much of it starting out quite utopian. With his series about extraordinary voyages, the Frenchman Jules Verne caught the enterprising spirit of the age, along with its uncritical fascination with inventions and scientific progress. A Journey to the Center of the Earth, in 1864, and From the Earth to the Moon, in 1865, rode the sense of optimism and godlike vistas humankind saw opening up for itself. The universe was our dominion, the environment ours to be mastered, from the planet’s core to its orbit. In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Verne introduced one of the world’s first superheroes, Captain Nemo, with his baroque, extravagant submarine, the Nautilus. That story so captured the sense of adventure and limitless possibilities of the age that Disney made it into a movie starring Kirk Douglas in 1954. The same year the United States Navy christened the first nuclear submarine the Nautilus. In 1958 that vessel performed the mind-boggling, top-secret, hitherto considered impossible feat of sailing to the North Pole. (The Soviets were not amused.) Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days was made into a film in 1956 starring the aggressively international cast of David Niven, Cantinflas, Charles Boyer and Jose Greco.

  A few decades after Verne, the Englishman Herbert George “H. G.” Wells, in his more than 100 books, produced even more shocking, overwhelming divinations. His 1895 The Time Machine anticipated Einstein’s theories in postulating time as the fourth dimension. Even eerier to a 21st-century reader is his 1896 The Island of Dr. Moreau, in which a mad scientist uses bioengineering to transform animals into human creatures. In movie versions, Dr. Moreau inspired such diverse actors as Charles Laughton, Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando. Wells’ The Invisible Man in 1897 was a Faustian story of a scientist who tampered with human nature in pursuit of transcendent, superhuman powers. The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, was so powerful a tale of Martians invading the earth that when Orson Welles’ news-bulletin-style Mercury Theater radio dramatization was broadcast on October 30, 1938, widespread panic ensued.

  H. G. Wells’ prescience was extraordinary. In The World Set Free he wrote, “Nothing could have been more obvious to the people of the early twentieth century than the rapidity with which war was becoming impossible. And as certainly they did not see it. They did not see it until the atomic bombs burst in their fumbling hands.” He wrote that in 1914. In 1920, he described human history as becoming “more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”

  By the middle of the 20th century, after the Industrial Revolution had delivered one miracle after another—electricity, the telephone, radio, the airplane—a remarkable change occurred in our culture and values. People no longer found startling the idea that man had acquired godlike powers to reshape himself and his environment. (The first Superman comic book appeared in 1938.) They did, however, begin to anticipate The Hell Scenario. They questioned whether technological change really equaled “progress.”

  Meanwhile, in the late 20th century, fiction continued to be the key forum pushing the boundaries of our imagination about what could happen to the future of human nature. Novels stretched our conceptions of human-created Heaven, kick-starting our thinking about what was possible, forcing us to change our perception of what was serious. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—vividly brought to the screen in 1968 by Stanley Kubrick—introduced us to HAL, the intelligent computer. The biochemist Isaac Asimov shaped an entire generation of roboticists with his stories, starting with I, Robot. What would machines that had ethics behave like? He imagined what he called the Three Laws of Robotics: “The First Law—A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. The Second Law—A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. The Third Law—A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” Later, in his Foundation series, Asimov explored the notion that the social sciences and history had fundamental laws as immutable and calculable as those of mathematics or physics and that these truths, properly understood, could help perfect society. These stories molded the scenario-planning industry.

  Popular culture continued the quest to imagine transcendence. Michael Crichton’s 1972 novel, Terminal Man, became the television series The Bionic Man. The hottest writer in Hollywood in the early 21st century, Philip K. Dick, had been dead for two decades. The scruffy, poverty-stricken, five-times-married, clinically paranoid Dick, a garage philosopher, autodidact and conjurer of false realities, never cared much about robots or space travel. He was, however, fascinated by hallucinatory worlds in which there is a blur between what is real and what is not. Needless to say, that has become a very hot subject as we try to process living in a time that includes telekinetic monkeys. Dick’s work h
as become the stuff of big budgets, exalted directors and illustrious actors, such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, starring Harrison Ford; Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, with Arnold Schwarzenegger; Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, starring Tom Cruise; and John Woo’s Paycheck, with Ben Affleck and Uma Thurman. Dick’s sensibility is all over The Matrix.

  The impact of such storytelling on global culture should not be underestimated. In my travels I found it hard to find a cutting-edge researcher today who, when asked about the inspiration for his creations, did not reply by simply pointing to a shelf in a place of honor. There invariably sat expensively collected fables of the future that shaped his youth. For Kurzweil, it was the Tom Swift Jr. series.

  “My personal philosophy,” Kurzweil says, “is there is no problem or challenge that comes along that there isn’t an idea to overcome that problem. I first encountered this idea in the Tom Swift series, which I have over there. Actually, those books on the left is the Tom Swift Sr. series. Those are original books, almost 100 years old.” The ones on the right were the books from the Tom Swift Jr. series of 1954 to 1971 that Kurzweil devoured when young, such as the 1956 Tom Swift in the Caves of Nuclear Fire.

  “I’ve been collecting them. I had the whole series, but I’ve been re-collecting them. If you remember how those books all progressed, Tom Swift Jr. would get into some jam, along with his friends and usually the whole human race. He would kind of go into his lair. That’s what kept you reading—how is he going to get out of this jam? But it was always an idea, some clever insight. Really, the moral of each of these books was the power of the idea. There is no problem that you can get into where some well-leveraged idea wouldn’t save the day.”