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

by Joel Garreau

  George Orwell’s 1984—written in 1948—emerged from one of mankind’s most perilous decades. The promises of any coming utopia, such as those pledged by Hitler and Stalin, were smashed by a cataclysm of warfare and slaughter. Orwell vividly explained who these monstrous dictators were, and the nature of their hold on others. The book still resonates in our nightmares and language. It reflects the dawning of the Information Age understanding that those who controlled knowledge could be as gods. In 1984, Big Brother can create a world in which everything means the opposite of what it is called. The Ministry of Love delivers torture, the Ministry of Truth delivers lies, the Ministry of Peace engages in war, and the Ministry of Plenty creates starvation. It’s all about information. “To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them,” is at the core of totalitarianism, Orwell writes in 1984. Big Brother, the Thought Police and the Memory Hole remain part of our vocabulary. Orwellian has become the gold standard adjective to apply when measuring the gulf between political language and moral reality, as Glenn Frankel noted in The Washington Post on the occasion of Orwell’s 100th birthday.

  Greatly fueling the idea that human nature could be reduced to machinelike soullessness was the work of Burrhus Frederic “B. F.” Skinner, who by the middle of the 20th century had become the most famous psychologist since Sigmund Freud. His work on operant conditioning demonstrated that rewarding any desirable act could readily shape the behavior of pigeons and rats. Extrapolating from these to humans, Skinner saw no value in understanding the human psyche. He believed there was no such thing as the human mind. Human behavior was just the sum total of the effect of external forces. Shape the reward system and you’ve shaped human nature. In 1971 he wrote Beyond Freedom and Dignity, which advocated abandoning individual freedoms to further the goals of an ideal society. By then his ideas had so evoked Brave New World and 1984 as to lose traction. The regimes of Mao and Pol Pot cast doubt on the fruitfulness of this approach. So did the inclination of humans generally to behave in ornery and unpredictable ways. Even the lab animals had a nasty habit of not getting with the program. Skinner’s students once formulated the Harvard Law of Animal Behavior: “Under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damned well pleases.”

  One of the more hopeful aspects of The Hell Scenario is that it might be so persuasive, and so terrifying, as to become an inoculant. We still so fear the 20th century’s fictional dystopias that we invoke Brave New World and 1984 when we see developments we abhor. They vaccinated us against the futures they described. The atomic nightmare movies that populated the Cold War offered similar medicine. Take On the Beach, the Nevil Shute novel made into the 1959 film starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and, oddly enough, Fred Astaire. In it, the Northern Hemisphere has been wiped out in a nuclear exchange, and the cast awaits their extinction in Australia as the fallout creeps slowly, inexorably south. Then there is Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the greatest black comedy ever made. Slim Pickens, as bomber pilot Captain “King” Kong, riding the bucking bomb to oblivion, is a pop culture icon to this day.

  These and hundreds of similar works effectively established such a horror and taboo against the use of nuclear weapons that we live in one of the least likely futures anyone at midcentury could imagine: Humans have not used a nuclear weapon in anger for well over half a century. This, of course, could all change tomorrow. But as of this writing, the truly unimaginable has happened: Nuclear war—by at least nine orders of magnitude the most elaborately planned apocalypse in the history of man—has not yet come to pass. We may dream that The Hell Scenario provides as great a service to humankind.

  Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—which convincingly envisioned a vernal equinox so poisoned by pesticides that it would not even be heralded by the song of birds—is another example of an alarm that resulted in great social good. Informing all of Carson’s work was the idea that although human beings are part of nature, we are distinguished by our power to alter it irreversibly. “The ‘control of nature,’” she wrote, “is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.” Her 1962 work led to the rise of the environmental movement, which squarely challenges three centuries of thought about the idea of “progress.” Its bedrock observation is that scientific change is specifically not progress if it destroys the nature of which humans are a part. In the 1970s, the historic preservation movement built on this, with its core belief that change is specifically not progress if it destroys the community of which humans are a part. The measure of these movements is that two generations ago, not one person in a hundred had ever heard the word ecology. The public had never contemplated a photo from space of the whole Earth, swirling blue and green and white like a beacon of life in the utterly black void. It would have been fantasy to think that the nation’s rivers—then open sewers—would ever be so clean as to spark a real-estate boom along their banks.

  This is small comfort to those who tie global environmental degradation to technological “progress.” As if the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl nuclear disasters, ozone loss and acid rain were not enough, now looms the specter of abrupt climate change. It could cause the extinction of a quarter of the planet’s species, a report in the journal Nature suggests, not to mention mass migrations of humans as Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and Russia are returned to the Ice Age. Such scenarios are frequently linked to atmospheric change caused by burning carbon-based fuels. Hence the environmental movement’s profound distrust of technology and the corporations that produce it.

  For many, this specter is just a foretaste of The Hell Scenario.

  IN DANTE’S Inferno, the ninth and final circle of hell—the frozen lake Cocytus—is reserved for those who betray love and trust. Those who writhe in icy agony farthest from the warmth of redemption are those who have sold out the ones to whom they should ever be faithful: family, country, God.

  For Francis Fukuyama, one of America’s most thoughtful and challenging public intellectuals, the lowest ring of hell will be reserved for those who, through biotechnology, dream of leaving behind human nature. Unlike Bill Joy, he worries less about physical extinction. Fukuyama systematically attacks the ethics, morals and economics of those who would transform the human species. “Human nature exists, is a meaningful concept, and has provided a stable continuity to our experience as a species,” he writes. It is, “with religion, what defines our most basic values.” Messing with our minds, memories, psyches and souls, he fears, risks “leading to a brave new world.” In Huxley’s hell, he notes, we “no longer struggle, aspire, love, feel pain, make difficult moral choices, have families, or do any of the things that we traditionally associate with being human.” As a result, we “no longer have the characteristics that give us human dignity.” He quotes the bioethicist Leon Kass: “Unlike the man reduced by disease or slavery, the people dehumanized à la Brave New World are not miserable, don’t know that they are dehumanized, and, what is worse, would not care if they knew. They are, indeed, happy slaves with a slavish happiness.” Fukuyama thinks that this could easily be our future and he wants to stop it now.

  This is no small contention. Fukuyama first achieved renown for authoring The End of History and the Last Man. In that 1989 work he argued that the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism signaled the emerging triumph of democracy and capitalism around the globe. For this the Reaganauts lionized him. Now, however, he is a darling of the European left, especially those opposed to genetically modified crops, much less genetically modified critters, not to even countenance genetically modified human character. That’s because a decade after The End of History Fukuyama realized that of all
the myriad critiques of his work, the one he couldn’t refute was the argument that there could be no end to history—no final triumph of democracy and capitalism as we know it—if there were no end to science. In fact, since human nature shapes the kinds of political organizations that are possible, technology could destroy democracy. Kiss “all men are created equal” goodbye, for example. That idea drives Fukuyama wild. “What will happen to political rights once we are able to, in effect, breed some people with saddles on their backs, and others with boots and spurs?” he asks. The result was his 2002 book, Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. With it, Fukuyama became the first fully credentialed “serious” person to introduce the word posthuman into the debate in Washington, D.C. He announced to the pinstripes that this was important. We are headed toward a transformation beyond the human species in our lifetimes.

  When Fukuyama and I get together one mild and sunny November afternoon, I am reminded of the Washington of pulp fiction. Have you ever noticed that in every espionage thriller, whenever a clandestine meeting is required in the nation’s capital, there always seems to be a tiny, out-of-the-way, European-style hostelry into which the protagonists can conveniently dive? That’s because every espionage thriller writer in Washington seems to have spent time at the Tabard Inn on N Street. Nice place for lunch if you like overpriced organic grub and dark, mysterious, seedy ambiance. Not that Fukuyama and I have anything to be stealthy about. We were just looking for a place handy to Think Tank Row on Massachusetts Avenue, where can be found the formidable SAIS—the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University—at which Fukuyama now occupies an endowed chair.

  Picking at our crab cakes, we talk about human nature, what it would take to transcend it and why that would necessarily be such a terrible thing. By now my reporting has taken me to the studied conclusion that we are heading into a world in which we well might see three distinctly different kinds of humans, which I have come to call The Enhanced, The Naturals, and The Rest.

  • The Enhanced are people who embrace the opportunities of the GRIN technologies. They love the idea of thinking faster, living longer, remembering everything, connecting to anything, being muscular, staying muscular, never worrying about fat, conquering disease, being sexy forever. They will pay almost any price for that kind of transformation. The Enhanced are defined as those who, through modifications to their minds, memories, metabolisms and personalities, can perform feats so unattainable by original-equipment human beings as to draw attention to themselves.

  • The Naturals are those who have access to those opportunities but pass them by like fundamentalists eschewing modern pleasures or like vegetarians shunning meat. For esthetic, moral or political reasons, they recoil in horror from the consequences, especially the unintended ones. Naturals are original-equipment humans who have the opportunity to become Enhanced but have chosen to turn against it.

  • The Rest are those who, for economic or geographic reasons, do not have access to these technologies. They envy and despise those who do. The Rest are original-equipment humans with no choice to become Enhanced.

  In the early 21st century, there were no bright lines separating these three and it was an open question whether or how such stark separations might occur. The gaps, should they arise, are more a values proposition than a technological issue. If a person has a test-tube baby, is she an Enhanced? In the developed world, we don’t recognize her as such. She is perhaps just a 50-something attending elementary school meetings. Her blessings are remarkable, but hardly seen as threatening. If her family travels to Africa, however, the locals may properly regard her with wonder, if they even believe her claim not to be the child’s grandmother. But again, there is no bright line, either of technology or of acceptance.

  If a person has a Viagra prescription, is he an Enhanced? That’s more problematic. Viagra is a metabolic improvement that possibly allows a wealthy 50-year-old to compete for a young lovely against a 30-something or even a financially struggling 20-something. Does resentment ensue?

  What about Barry Bonds? He has been implicated in the steroid trade. If he is an Enhanced, should he go around with an asterisk on his forehead for the rest of his life marking him as a kind of human different from his godfather, Willie Mays, whose home-run feats he surpassed?

  These questions reflect primitive 20th-century technologies. What happens when The Curve allows a vast collection of formidable internal upgrades for those who can afford them? How will you someday tell, looking at an Enhanced, if she genuinely represents a transformation of the species—comparable to the difference between Neanderthals and today’s humans?

  I propose The Shakespeare Test.

  (This deliberately avoids the swamp concerning how you would establish if a machine intelligence is truly conscious. That debate leads to thousands of excruciating pages of monographs. Besides, as Vernor Vinge notes, “self-awareness may be overrated.”)

  In The Shakespeare Test, as I imagine it, you take the being who has been so seriously modified that you are concerned. Forget the old bases for discrimination of the past. She is way beyond simple differences of class or race. She has a significantly transformed mind, memory, metabolism and personality. You’re curious whether this has changed her immortal soul. So you stick her into your thought experiment’s hypothetical time machine and dial this creature back to 1603 or thereabouts. You then present her to Mr. Shakespeare, who knew something about human nature and humans’ reactions to outsiders, as he created both Othello and Caliban. You ask Mr. Shakespeare a simple question: “Do you recognize this creature as one of yours? Is she human?” If yes, then she passes the human nature test. If not, then no.

  The Shakespeare Test is based on the observation that historically, human nature changes much more slowly than do our circumstances. In the 21st century we perform the ancient Greek plays all the time and recognize the characters as being like us. This is not to say that human nature is utterly unchanged. Some habits of millennia ago, such as eye gouging, are now regarded as pathological and monstrous. Similarly, although Romeo and Juliet still resonates, the violent aspects of Verona would not play today if set in a wealthy zip code such as Beverly Hills. Rich people today rarely slaughter each other like that, and when they do, it becomes a national morality play, as in the O. J. Simpson trial. To make sense, Romeo and Juliet now must be set in a neighborhood marginal to the human experience in the developed world, such as the South Central L.A.-like gangsta hood of the 1996 Leonardo DiCaprio film, or the Spanish Harlem of West Side Story.

  Therefore, if you were to apply The Shakespeare Test to the cast of Apollo 13, they would pass effortlessly. Once Mr. Shakespeare got past the fact that the film involves a craft headed toward the moon—and it’s nonfiction—he would have no trouble recognizing the astronauts as adventurers trying to make it home, exactly like those of The Odyssey. Similarly, most of the characters on the bridge of the original Star Ship Enterprise—Bones, Sulu, Uhura, Captain Kirk—would easily pass The Shakespeare Test. The ones Mr. Shakespeare might have trouble with are Spock and, in the later series, Data, and those dudes with the horseshoe crabs on their foreheads, like Worf. In addition to their appearance, their emotional responses, or lack thereof, would definitely be suspect. It’s easy to imagine these characters sparking a lively conversation with Mr. Shakespeare as to who should count as a human and why. I would especially like to know what Mr. Shakespeare would make of Lt. Commander Data.

  Back at the Tabard Inn, Fukuyama wonders how Gestapo officers would fare when presented to Mr. Shakespeare—or sociopaths who lack the capacity for embarrassment. “Something that’s very typically human is the ability to perceive how other people perceive you,” he notes. “Autistic children do not have this. A source of their problem is that they shout out loud in class and they don’t understand that people don’t like them.”

  What Fukuyama’s really concerned about, though, are not people like this�
�well out on the fringes of the bell curve. “The thing I’m worried the most about is the attempt to modify on a large scale some basic characteristics of human behavior in ways that will make us scarcely recognizable,” he says. He loves the work of the anthropologist Donald E. Brown, author of Human Universals. In fieldwork with a hunting-gathering society, Brown couldn’t help but observe the huge differences between them and Westerners. Yet, he notes, both societies have in common emotional responses that tie them to all human beings through tens of thousands of years. “It’s instantly recognizable that this is another human being, despite that huge difference,” says Fukuyama.

  If there is prompt recognition even when a hunter-gatherer and an Internet maven meet, imagine a different, posthuman future, he asks. Suppose our grandchildren have been genetically manipulated to “improve” the species, and pharmaceuticals have taken all the rough edges off their personalities. “Is it possible to imagine that somehow we would be missing some of those typical human characteristics, good or bad?” That’s his big concern. He defines human nature as “the sum of the behavior and characteristics that are typical of the human species, arising from genetic rather than environmental factors.” He goes to great lengths to establish that he is by no means suggesting that gays—or, for that matter, dwarfs or any other minority—are not human, even though they are not the statistical norm. Fukuyama says that when you strip away all of a person’s accidents of birth—skin color, looks, social class, gender, culture and even talents—there is still some essential human quality underneath that is worthy of respect. That is the source of human dignity, he argues. That essence, whatever it is, he calls “Factor X.” He wrestles with what that might mean. He does not, for example, insist that “Factor X” means a soul. He knows there are a lot of people who believe that matter and energy are all that is real. Yet he points out that there is some essential quality there that we obviously recognize, because “the idea that one could exclude any group of people on the basis of race, gender, disability or virtually any other characteristic from the charmed circle of those deserving recognition for human dignity is the one thing that will bring total obloquy on the head of any politician who proposes it.” The resulting idea of a universal equality of human dignity “is held as a matter of religious dogma by the most materialist of natural scientists.”