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

by Joel Garreau

  Thence come our ideas of transcending origins and becoming something more than we are. Thence comes our demonstration that stealing fire from the gods is at the heart both of human nature and of The Heaven Scenario.

  To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.

  —Oscar Wilde

  “Why make people inquisitive, and then put some forbidden fruit where they can see it with a big neon finger flashing on and off saying ‘THIS IS IT!’?,” says the angel Aziraphale.

  “I don’t remember any neon,” replies the demon Crowley.

  “Metaphorically, I mean. I mean, why do that if you really don’t want them to eat it, eh? I mean, maybe you just want to see how it all turns out. Maybe it’s all part of a great big ineffable plan. All of it. You, me, him, everything. Some great big test to see if what you’ve built all works properly, eh? You start thinking: it can’t be a great cosmic game of chess, it has to be just very complicated Solitaire.”

  —Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett, Good Omens

  Scene: Alan Turing in the Bell Labs cafeteria, 1943

  His high pitched voice already stood out above the general murmur of well-behaved junior executives grooming themselves for promotion within the Bell corporation. Then he was suddenly heard to say: “No, I’m not interested in developing a powerful brain. All I’m after is just a mediocre brain, something like the President of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.”

  —Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing: The Enigma of Intelligence

  WASHINGTON IS A tribal town. One of its rituals involves code words. These evoke vast and nuanced concepts to those in the know, while sometimes appearing meaningless to outsiders. One of these words is serious, as in “He is a serious person,” or not, or “That is a serious idea,” or not. Serious does not necessarily have anything to do with whether the person or idea is correct, important or valuable, no matter what insiders would have you believe. Serious means that the notion or individual has been cleaned up, molded and adopted by sponsors already vetted as serious. It implies that the idea or person is deemed ready for admittance to the sacraments of authority—such as congressional hearings—which can lead to that Holy Grail, federal funding. It suggests a certain WASP respectability. It basically means housebroken.

  That is why it is interesting to watch The Heaven Scenario begin to be taken seriously in parts of Washington. Two very serious organizations are the National Science Foundation and the United States Department of Commerce. They became regarded as serious in part because of their sober reputation for not taking injudicious chances. They also have wildly separate constituencies. Thus it is pretty remarkable to see them team up to produce a Washington policy document saying, “It is time to rekindle the spirit of the Renaissance” to achieve “a golden age that will be a turning point for human productivity and quality of life.”

  The 415-page, three-pound pronouncement entitled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance comes complete with PowerPoint-ready bullet points laying out the radical evolution of humans for those with the attention span of a Cabinet secretary. Note how many exceed even some of Kurzweil’s more startling predictions. Note also, because it is a Washington policy document, how quickly it cuts to the chase, aiming at constituencies in defense, in industry and in management of the economy, while genuflecting in the direction of many potentially important adversaries.

  The bullet points in part say that in the next 10 to 20 years the advantages of radical evolution will include the following:

  • Direct connections between the human brain and machines “will transform work in factories, control automobiles, ensure military superiority, and enable new sports, art forms and modes of interaction between people.”

  • Wearable sensors will “enhance every person’s awareness of his or her health condition, environment, chemical pollutants, potential hazards, and information of interest about local businesses, natural resources, and the like.”

  • Teams will be able to “cooperate profitably across traditional barriers of culture, language, distance, and professional specialization.”

  • “The human body will be more durable, healthy, energetic, easier to repair, and resistant to many kinds of stress, biological threats, and aging processes.”

  • “Machines and structures of all kinds, from homes to aircraft, will be constructed of materials that have exactly the desired properties, including the ability to adapt to changing situations, high energy efficiency, and environmental friendliness.”

  • Technologies will “compensate for many physical and mental disabilities and will eradicate altogether some handicaps that have plagued the lives of millions of people.”

  • “National security will be greatly strengthened by lightweight, information-rich war fighting systems, capable uninhabited combat vehicles, adaptable smart materials, invulnerable data networks, superior intelligence-gathering systems, and effective measures against biological, chemical, radiological and nuclear attacks.”

  • “Anywhere in the world, an individual will have instantaneous access to needed information.”

  • “Engineers, artists, architects, and designers will experience tremendously expanded creative abilities,” in part through “improved understanding of the wellsprings of human creativity.”

  • “The vast promise of outer space will finally be realized by means of efficient launch vehicles, robotic construction of extraterrestrial bases, and profitable exploitation of the resources of the Moon, Mars, or near-Earth asteroids.”

  • “Average persons, as well as policymakers, will have a vastly improved awareness of the cognitive, social, and biological forces operating their lives, enabling far better adjustment, creativity, and daily decision making.”

  • “Factories of tomorrow will be organized” around “increased human-machine capabilities.”

  • “Agriculture and the food industry will greatly increase yields and reduce spoilage through networks of cheap, smart sensors that constantly monitor the condition and needs of plants, animals, and farm products.”

  • “Transportation will be safe, cheap, and fast.”

  • “Formal education will be transformed” by an understanding of “the physical world from the nanoscale through the cosmic scale.”

  It concludes: “The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment.” It may be “that humanity would become like a single, distributed and interconnected ‘brain.’”

  Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge of the National Science Foundation are the co-authors of this document. Roco is a compact man who speaks English with a thick accent that even some of his colleagues assume is Russian. This turns out to be a very big mistake. He was born in Bucharest, Romania, and is incensed and incredulous that anyone might be ignorant enough to make an error about this.

  Roco is senior adviser for nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation, chair of the National Science, Engineering and Technology Council’s subcommittee on nanoscale science, engineering and technology, chair of the President’s National Science and Technology Council’s Interagency Nanoscience, Engineering and Technology working group, and chair of the National Science and Technology Council’s subcommittee on nanoscale science, engineering and technology. He is credited with 13 inventions.

  Roco’s version of The Heaven Scenario is driven by much more than The Curve. He sees transcendence resulting from no less than the convergence of all human wisdom. “The hallmark of the Renaissance was its holistic quality,” he and Bainbridge write, “as all fields of art, engineering, science and culture shared the same exciting spirit and many of the same intellectual principles. A creative individual, schooled in multiple arts, might be a painter one day, an engineer the next, and a writer the day after that. However, as the centuries passed, the holism of the Renaissance gave way to specialization and intellectual fragmentation.” Today, that’s ov
er, he says. “It’s time to rekindle the spirit of the Renaissance.”

  The GRIN technologies—genetics, robotics, information technology and nanotechnology—drive a unified theory of everything, in this view. The information technology is the sire of them all. Here’s how they intertwine.

  One of the most challenging thinkers about the future of human genetics, the G in the GRIN technologies, is Gregory Stock. He is director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the School of Medicine of the University of California at Los Angeles.

  Stock’s version of The Heaven Scenario departs from Kurzweil’s. He doesn’t think humans will transcend because of computers. He thinks humans will transcend because of genetic engineering. Such biological remodeling is “a plausible way for people to overcome their bodily frailties, but a larger game is afoot,” he says. It is “biology’s bid to keep pace with the rapid evolution of computer technology.”

  “No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?” he approvingly quotes James Watson, co-winner of the Nobel prize for discovering the structure of DNA, as saying. The titles of several of Stock’s books display his position. One is called Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future. An earlier one is called Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism.

  “To not be human in the sense we use the term now” is the fate of our descendants, Stock says. We will soon see humans as physically and intellectually divergent as “poodles and Great Danes.” But the passing of people like us is hardly a tragedy, he believes. “Unlike the saber-toothed tiger and other large mammals that left no descendants when our ancestors drove them to extinction, Homo sapiens would spawn its own successors by fast-forwarding its evolution.”

  That’s not far off, says Stock. It’s a whole lot closer than the “distant space travel we see in science fiction movies.” He sees it as the inevitable outcome of the decoding of the human genome. “We have spent billions to unravel our biology, not out of idle curiosity, but in the hope of bettering our lives. We are not about to turn away from this.” Genetic transcendence “does not hinge on some cadre of demonic researchers hidden away in a lab in Argentina trying to pick up where Hitler left off. The coming possibilities will be the inadvertent spin-off of mainstream research that virtually everyone supports. Infertility, for example, is a source of deep pain for millions of couples. Researchers and clinicians working on in vitro fertilization (IVF) don’t think much about future human evolution but nonetheless are building a foundation of expertise” that will “one day be the basis for the manipulation of the human species,” he says matter-of-factly.

  There are two kinds of genetic engineering. The first is called somatic gene therapy. The phrase comes from the Greek word soma, meaning “body.” It’s intended to fix genes gone bad in one person. It treats wrenchingly awful diseases such as cystic fibrosis, immune deficiency disorders, sickle-cell anemia and hemophilia. Somatic gene therapy usually is not terribly controversial—except when it kills the person on which it is being tested, and especially when that person was not adequately informed of the risk, as happened in the 1999 death of Jesse Gelsinger. The reason somatic therapy is not hugely debated is that it only swaps out bad genes in specific areas—the lungs, the liver—of the person being treated. Changes are not passed on to succeeding generations. Thus it is usually viewed as not tremendously different from surgery. Even the Amish use it.

  Where the balloon goes up is over germ-line interventions. Germ comes from the Latin word for “root.” Germ-line engineering changes the genetic makeup of the embryo at the very start, altering the child’s every cell. Thereafter, it changes every grandchild and great-grandchild propagated, forever. This is where the controversy over “designer babies” begins. It is the vision in which people start by selecting the color of their kid’s eyes, and the next thing you know, you have “clusters of genetically enhanced superhumans who will dominate if not enslave us,” as Stock puts it. Yet he dismisses such horror stories. “No one understood the powerful effects of the automobile or television at its inception,” he notes. “Our blindness about the consequences of new reproductive technologies is nothing new, and we will not be able to erase the uncertainty by convening an august panel to think through the issues. No shortcut is possible. As always, we will have to earn our knowledge by using the technology and learning from the problems that arise.”

  If it’s safe, it ain’t sex. But risks in reproduction, we’re wary about. That’s why Stock is betting that we’ll like artificial chromosomes. Right now, we have 23 chromosome pairs, with the chromosomes numbered 1 through 46. Messing with them is tricky—you never know when you’re going to inadvertently step on unanticipated interactions. If, however, we add a new chromosome pair (numbers 47 and 48) to the embryo, the possibilities are endless. Think of it as scaffolding. It doesn’t change anything itself. It just holds plug-in points where you can stick gene modules and their controls. “The auxiliary chromosome would be a universal delivery vehicle for gene modules fashioned by medical geneticists throughout the world,” Stock says. He sees it as the safest way to substantially modify humans. It would minimize unintended consequences. On top of that, the insertion sites could have an off switch activated by an injection if we wanted to stop whatever we’d started. This would give future generations a chance to undo whatever we did, if they choose. It would also allow us to stick modifications into our kids that they could choose to turn on or off later in life, as they become adults. “When children who have received auxiliary chromosomes to improve some mental or physical characteristic grow up, they may want to give their own child the same advantage. They won’t, however, want to pass on the outdated auxiliary chromosomes they received a generation earlier, any more than a middle-aged father today would try to give his Internet-savvy college-bound daughter that state-of-the-art typewriter he used for his term papers,” Stock says. “Parents will want the most up-to-date genetic modifications available. Were these prospective parents’ own modifications scattered through their chromosomes, cleaning them out and upgrading them would be tricky, but with changes confined to an auxiliary chromosome, a parent could simply discard the entire thing and give his or her child a newer version.” He sees this as disarming the ethical argument, offered by the Council for Responsible Genetics, that germ-line engineering should be unconditionally banned because future generations screwed up by wrongful or unsuccessful germ-line modifications would have no control over the matter.

  What would the impact of all this be? Genetic research is one of the ways the NSF report sees us quickly getting to “vastly improved awareness of the cognition, social, and biological forces” operating our lives. James Watson, the provocative co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, talks about molecular biology curing stupidity. “If you are really stupid, I would call that a disease,” the Nobel laureate says. He also has few qualms about engineering beauty: “People say it would be terrible if we made all girls pretty. I think it would be great.”

  Stock—who with his deep-set, penetrating eyes, carefully barbered beard and youthfully bushy head of gunmetal-gray hair could moonlight as a local TV anchor—personally prefers the idea of becoming genetically altered flesh, rather than Kurzweil’s kind of beyond-human machine. But he also sees his own Heaven Scenario as “tame” and near-term compared to Kurzweil’s. Rudimentary artificial chromosomes already exist. Within a few years “we should have a fair idea of the size of the task facing future genetic engineers,” he says. By then, “traditional reproduction may begin to seem antiquated, if not downright irresponsible.” He sees his projections as not at all out of touch with reality, compared to Kurzweil’s, which he characterizes as “far-fetched,” “techno-exuberance” and a “huge leap of faith.”

  Perhaps that is another useful definition of human nature—the species that punctuates the most far-reaching discussions of its future with asides about how com
petitors stink.

  Nanotechnology, the N in the GRIN technologies, means manipulating the unimaginably small. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter. It is the length of five carbon atoms in a row or the distance your fingernail grows in one second. If a nanometer were the size of your nose, a red blood cell would be the size of the Empire State Building, a human hair would be more than two miles thick, your finger would span the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and a person would be taller than six planet Earths stacked one on top of the other. Just as there are two kinds of genetic engineering, there are two kinds of nanotechnology, one more far-reaching and controversial than the other. The first kind is the one already coming into existence. It reduces big things to sizes so astonishingly little that their behavior changes dramatically—transistors, for example, or the active ingredients in sunblock. By 2003, hundreds of tons of nanomaterials were being made in U.S. labs and factories. Such nanotechnology is expected to be a $1 trillion business by 2015—comparable to the gross national product of Canada.

  The other kind of nanotechnology is the one its proponents say promises godlike powers, immortality and unimaginable wealth. Its detractors say it will doom us and every living thing on the planet. This form of nanotechnology is intended to work the other way around from the first. It involves taking individual atoms and stacking them into any large thing we want, from diamonds to spacecraft.