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

by Joel Garreau

  He’s certainly right that such a project may already be leading to a major reordering of our politics, scrambling any Industrial Age thinking about what constitutes left and right—who’s got and who wants. The strange-bedfellows list when it comes to engineered evolution is intriguing. Liberal and conservative are awkward labels in this realm. Among those deeply skeptical of human enhancement, one will find prominent “bioconservatives” such as Leon Kass, chair of the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics. But those finding some things about which to agree with him include Jeremy Rifkin’s Foundation for Economic Trends, the Green Party, many who loathe globalism (especially the unregulated marketplace, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank), people who don’t believe we are descended from monkeys, off-shoots of the Christian anti-abortion movement, feminists from the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (including the editor of Our Bodies, Ourselves, whom McKibben describes as more pro-choice than the pope is Catholic), and Prince Charles. McKibben points out that environmentalists usually see organized science as their ally in the fight against climate change or for habitat conservation. Yet Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace USA have lined up against human cloning. William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, signed the same petition in this regard as did Tom Hayden and Todd Gitlin, stalwarts of the sixties left.

  Gung-ho adherents of The Heaven Scenario offer a similarly fascinating spread. They include the staunchly libertarian individualists and market-driven entrepreneurs one finds so thick on the ground in Silicon Valley. But among these, you also universally get endorsement of open societies such as the Western social democracies and rejection of authoritarian or totalitarian systems, whether they be of the left or the right. When pressed, they of course will not abandon their position that government rarely does anything right. Yet they are grudgingly forced to acknowledge that the United States government created the Internet, and great gobs of technology funding is federal. In this political space, loathing of convicted monopolists such as Microsoft is common. In the Heaven enthusiasts’ Web sites, it’s easy to find denunciations of “racism, sexism, speciesism, belligerent nationalism and religious intolerance.” Greens are imaginatively represented—especially in the Viridian movement—as looking forward to ecological fixes through technology. Disabled people, who are among the most technology-dependent humans on earth, had as their poster boy Christopher Reeve, the former Superman actor, who was determined to use the GRIN technologies to walk again. You can find feminists who welcome a vision of a posthuman future that does not require men for anything, including procreation. You will even see arguments among Heaven scenarists for a universal guaranteed human income—after all, it’s the least all those robots who will produce our cornucopia can do for us, since we made them possible.

  That’s why the Heaven and Hell Scenarios, and those attracted to them, may be the new political divide, the defining political conflict of the 21st century. Optimists and pessimists cut across all lines. You can find them among cultural liberals and conservatives, economic liberals and conservatives, bioethical liberals and conservatives, and advocates of government big and small. Yes, among advocates of The Hell Scenario you will find social conservatives who have found great support in right-wing governments. But oddly, they are in the position of advocating massive government regulation to thwart individual choice, which was not a hallmark of conservative thought in the late 20th century. It may be more useful to refer to them less as conservatives and more as devotees of The Hell Scenario. By contrast, Nick Bostrom, co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association—a group that advocates The Heaven Scenario—can readily be described as a liberal. Not only is that his political history, but he embraces radical social change. Yet he is practically libertarian in his agenda, in that he proposes letting each individual decide for herself and her family which technologies they should embrace, how and when. So perhaps a more constructive label for him would be “Heaven Scenario devotee.”

  In imagining responses to The Hell Scenario, McKibben has two things he would like to see happen. The first is that we build up a network of taboos—as the Amish have done—that “keeps us more or less human.” In this he is preaching the gospel of “voluntary simplicity,” which is as sound an idea today as it was when advocated by Henry David Thoreau in Walden. As his friend Emerson noted, Thoreau “made himself rich by making his wants few.”

  Historically, however, voluntary simplicity has had as its most fervent adherents those who already have plenty. It would not be much of a surprise if many Naturals came from the ranks of the well-off and educated, similar to McKibben, who already makes his home close to nature in the mountains above Lake Champlain.

  McKibben’s second hope is more formidable. He would like it if “the rush of technological innovation that’s marked the last five hundred years can finally slow.” The practicalities of this, of course, have yet to be demonstrated. Rejecting the endless cycle of cheaper, faster, better, is probably an easier sell to McKibben’s fellow faculty members at Vermont’s Middlebury College than it is to those like my neighbor, whose maxim is “If Wal-Mart don’t got it, you don’t need it.” The question is whether those who don’t know where the next rent check is coming from—or worse yet, the billions who don’t know where their children’s next meal is coming from—will ever agree with McKibben that “the world has enough wealth and enough technological capability, and should not pursue more.” Under what circumstances will those with little not seek more? When will they cry, “Enough”?

  It will be particularly difficult to arrive at a consensus about what constitutes enough when we’re discussing experimental therapies with parents who have a kid who is sick or perhaps dying. For them, there is probably no such thing as enough.

  You might say that’s a part of human nature.

  A SMALL INDUSTRY has risen challenging aspects of both The Heaven and Hell Scenarios.

  The controversy over The Heaven Scenario includes those who are so horrified by the very idea of transcending human nature that they see it as a Hell Scenario. But it also encompasses those who argue about whether The Heaven Scenario is possible.

  Of those who argue that it can’t happen—the Heaven Can Wait contingent, we may call them—the most thoughtful arguments frequently amount to modern versions of what used to be known as “vitalism.” Vital is an interesting word. It comes from the Latin word meaning “to live,” yet in English it means “essential.” These critics profoundly question whether living things really are like machines. They suggest life has a vital spark that will be impossible for science to match.

  This has not stopped J. Craig Venter from trying. Venter is the maverick genetic researcher who created Celera Genomics to beat government researchers to the goal of mapping the entire human genome. Now, funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, he is creating new microscopic life forms with special abilities, such as consuming toxic waste. His larger goal is to create from bits and pieces of DNA a single-celled organism with the minimum number of genes to sustain life.

  Today’s vitalists, however, are saying that playing God in biology will not be as technically easy as Victor Frankenstein or Craig Venter would have us believe. They think we will discover, one failure at a time, that there is something ineffable about life, some necessary, vital ingredient—perhaps consciousness created by the effects of quantum physics—that humans will have the Devil’s own time matching.

  John Searle is such a critic. Searle is a professor of philosophy of mind at the University of California at Berkeley. He points out that Kurzweil’s Heaven Scenario assumes that when computers can perform sufficiently more operations per second than can our brains, they will inevitably seem conscious. That is, they will demonstrate true intelligence. Indeed, they will be “spiritual.” That’s what happened with the evolution of our brains, according to Kurzweil. Why shouldn’t it happen with the evolution of computers?

  Searle argues that we have no idea what consciousness
is, and never will, because the very idea is utterly subjective. Therefore, who is to say that computers will ever achieve it? Kurzweil agrees that consciousness is utterly subjective. The only way you can guess whether another human being is intelligent is by the way she behaves. But, he says, since behaving intelligently is a good enough way to cause people to think you are conscious, so too will it be a good enough way to cause people to think that machines are intelligent. If it quacks like a duck convincingly enough, sooner or later someone will wonder how it might look in orange sauce.

  Searle asks how anyone can be so sure consciousness can be reduced to zeroes and ones, that there is not some deep mystery behind it. Adds the scenario planner Kees van der Heijden, “They have to do a lot more than reverse-engineer the brain. They have to reverse-engineer the whole human body, with its complex sensing system, motor system and chemistry (emotions) in addition to its brain. All that is just as essential to human intelligence.”

  Kurzweil believes that “he can somehow do what philosophers have pondered for centuries: separate the body from the mind,” writes Ellen Ullman, author of Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents, and The Bug. He is “mistaking the machine and its principle of operations for the realities of humanity he intends to automate.” Ullman is that unlikely combination, a software industry pioneer with the eye and voice of a poet. “Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist. He has taken his knowledge . . . and superimposed it over everything he seeks to understand. . . . He has redefined the problem as something he knew how to engineer.” He “would analyze the scan to derive the ‘patterns’ that constitute consciousness, what he calls the architecture and ‘implicit algorithms’ of the interneuronal connections. This analysis would involve differentiating between brain activities seen as essential parts of the mind, and those that ‘do not directly contribute to its handling of information.’”

  Ullman is applying to the essence of human nature the argument Robert Frost made when he said, “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.” Ullman believes “we’re beings who are suffused with error, dripping with imperfection, drenched in inefficiency . . . Ray Kurzweil would improve us. I don’t know about you, but it always makes me nervous when someone wants to improve the human race.”

  Kurzweil’s basic reply is that pattern recognition is his expertise, that this is the direction toward which he can clearly see that we’re headed. Human intelligence and machine intelligence are becoming increasingly indistinguishable.

  This is an argument that can be resolved only with time—although not very much time, because of the march of The Curve. Events will make it obvious to us right quick whether Kurzweil is a seer or a fool. It will all depend on how we see our lives merge with our machines.

  Then there is Steven Pinker of Harvard. Pinker is the undisputed rock star of the human nature biz. Alarmingly, model-quality slim, with an immense mane of curly if graying hair from which a boyish lock falls over his forehead, he has blue eyes, high cheekbones, cheeks as dimpled as a fresh Titleist, a square jaw, androgynously full lips and a lead-singer voice. He has been known to show up at academic performances in a double-breasted black jacket, long collared blue-purple shirt, cranberry silk tie and tall, soft leather boots.

  Pinker has massively annoyed the left with his best-seller The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. In it, he argues that human nature is so complex and so based on genes (activated by upbringing) that it resists the most well-intentioned efforts to be molded by state-sponsored nurture, such as welfare. Nonetheless, a year after publication, Pinker was causing gas in the techno-libertarian right at what was billed as the first gathering of its kind: “The Future of Human Nature: A Symposium on the Promises and Challenges of the Revolutions in Genomics and Computer Science” at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future of Boston University. Pinker claimed at the symposium that “not only is genetic enhancement not inevitable, it is not particularly likely in our lifetimes.” His argument was that the genetic basis of human nature is not only so complex as to defy the best efforts of Mao or Pol Pot to shape it, but also very well might be so complex as to defy the best efforts of geneticists. Individual genes rarely produce beneficial effects, he says. There are no single genes for mathematical giftedness or athletic prowess. We shouldn’t hold our breath for the musical talent gene—or for cures for schizophrenia, antisocial personality, or bipolar illness. It’s more complicated that that, he says, with many genes interacting in feedback loops.

  Pinker also points out that specific predictions about technologies as complicated as genetic enhancement are unreliable because so many things have to go right—technologically, psychologically, sociologically. How many people guessed correctly that the videophones of the 1960s would sink like a stone while text messaging from mobile phones would become a teenage craze? Real people weigh both the benefits and the costs of any innovation, he points out. If we’re made nervous by genetically engineered soybeans, why do we think we will do it to our kids?

  Other people don’t think technology will evolve as quickly as Kurzweil does. There is a strikingly large number of bright people with impressive credentials who think that since it took us 200 years to get from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, it will take another 200 years or so to get to the Next Big Thing of human transcendence. Most of them aren’t arriving at that conclusion in a convincing way, unfortunately, as I discovered in my travels. They simply fail to factor in the accelerating returns embodied in The Curve.

  At that august conference at Boston University, where big names made deeply serious presentations in an impressive room decorated with classical columns and pediments, palm trees, and crystal and gold chandeliers, the organizers asked questions like “In 2200 will we recognize humans?” With a date that far out, the question became academic in the classic meaning of that phrase—of theoretical interest at best. Working the room, I asked why the participants thought we had that kind of time. This seemed a crucial question to me. Overwhelming change in 20 years yields a fundamentally different world than overwhelming change in 200 years. The more time culture has to adapt to and shape technology, the more likely it is that the transition will be softened. No one disagreed. But no matter how eagerly I sought out a thoughtful debunking of The Curve, that’s not what I got. None of the organizers gave me a straight answer as to why he or she thought transcendence might be very far in the misty future. That is not to say they are necessarily wrong. But I left with the impression that they hadn’t really grappled with the question.

  A more sophisticated analysis may be the one popular in tech circles. It holds that predictions of immortality always occur among men in their 50s. They always say it is 20 years out, just when they’re going to need it.

  Bill Joy, meanwhile, derides The Heaven Scenario as selfish. “A traditional utopia is a good society and a good life. A good life involved other people. This techno utopia is all about ‘I don’t get diseases; I don’t die; I get to have better eyesight and be smarter’ and all this. If you described this to Socrates or Plato they would laugh at you.”

  In turn, Joy’s peers acknowledge the seriousness of his Hell Scenario. What they take him to task about is his relentless pessimism regarding our ability to deflect it. More than 350 years ago, the poet John Milton wrote a pamphlet addressed to the Parliament of England with the title Areopagitica. He was arguing for the liberty of unlicensed printing, notes Freeman Dyson, the physicist and a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Dyson has written many popular works on science and society, including Infinite in All Directions. He replied to Joy’s provocative article in an essay titled “The Future Needs Us.”

  There is a connection between “the 17th-century fear of moral contagion by soul-corrupting books and the 21st-century fear of physical contagion by pathogenic microbes,” Dyson says. In John Milton’s 1644, England had just emerged from a long and bloody religious civil war, and Germany’s was still in
progress. In that century, “books not only corrupted souls but also mangled bodies,” Dyson notes.

  Milton talks about the difficulty of regulating “things, uncertainly and yet equally working to good and evil”: “Suppose we could expel sin by this means; look how much we thus expel of sin, so much we expel of virtue: for the matter of them both is the same; remove that, and ye remove them both alike.”

  In arguing to free that earlier technology, capable of great good but also great evil, Milton expressed majestic confidence in our ability to prevail: “Lords and Commons of England, consider what Nation it is whereof we are, and whereof ye are the governors: a Nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to.”

  In such fashion did Milton seek to reconcile the enduring problems of individual freedom and public safety that we grapple with today. Can the most totalitarian regimes we can imagine today or tomorrow totally shut down hackers of genetic, robotic, information and nano engineering? If not, might the societies that thrive be the ones that widely disperse knowledge? Rather than closeting knowledge in a bureaucratic intelligence agency, might a citizen militia of smart people, armed with enough knowledge, be able to respond within minutes with brave solutions to hitherto unimaginable threats? Evidence exists that this works. On 9/11, the fourth airplane never made it to its target, and it’s not the top-down military or the White House who can take credit for that. Empowered by their mobile phones, and without waiting for orders from any national leadership, the passengers aboard that aircraft within a matter of minutes diagnosed their society’s problem and, with determination and at a great price, rolled.