by Joel Garreau
An even more hopeful argument against the inevitability of The Hell Scenario, however, is “A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom and Gloom Futurists” by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid. Brown was director of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center back in the day when Xerox PARC was legendary in Silicon Valley. It was the birthplace of many of the things that allow a personal computer to feel friendly to ordinary human beings—from the computer mouse shaped to your hand to the icons you point at and click on your desktop screen. These breakthroughs eventually became the Apple Macintosh and then Microsoft Windows. Duiguid, Brown’s regular co-author, is from the University of California at Berkeley. They wrote a very wise book on the intersection of our broadest culture and values, and how it influences our technology, reciprocally, called The Social Life of Information.
In their response, which appeared within weeks of Joy’s article, Brown and Duiguid argue that Bill Joy’s problem is that he is so tightly focused on technology, he can’t see any other forces at work. He has tunnel vision, they argue. He can’t see any controls because he can’t see the broad workings of society and social systems. “Technological and social systems shape each other,” they say. “Technologies—such as gunpowder, the printing press, the railroad, the telegraph and the Internet—can shape society in profound ways. But on the other hand, social systems—in the form of governments, the courts, formal and informal organizations, social movements, professional networks, local communities, market institutions and so forth—shape, moderate and redirect the raw power of technologies.”
Genetic engineering of food presents the clearest example for them. It once seemed to be an unstoppable force. Now it is an object of consumer boycotts. When Joy wrote, both the promise and the threat of nanotechnology seemed immeasurable, for good reason: at the time the technology was almost wholly on the drawing board.
This is a good point. If someone in the 1970s had correctly forecast the ubiquitous presence in the 21st century of computer viruses viciously and constantly attacking the brains of our most sensitive systems, any sensible person would have concluded we were doomed. It might have seemed laughably Pollyannaish to believe that an immune system could co-evolve to match the problems.
Meanwhile, say Brown and Duiguid, “the thing that handicaps robots most is their lack of a social existence. . . . All forms of artificial life (whether bugs or bots) will remain primarily a metaphor for—rather than a threat to—society at least until they manage to enter a debate, sing in a choir, take a class, survive a committee meeting, join a union, pass a law, engineer a cartel or summon a constitutional convention. Those critical social mechanisms allow society to shape its future. It is through planned, collective action that society forestalls expected consequences (such as Y2K) and responds to unexpected events (such as epidemics).”
This is not to say that we will necessarily succeed at avoiding Joy’s Hell Scenario. It takes work for defense and offense to co-evolve. Culture and values can be glacial. “We must shore up the foundations of civilization well in advance, much as the medieval cathedrals had flying buttresses retrofitted,” says William H. Calvin, the University of Washington theoretical neurophysiologist and author of A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change.
“Getting started now is important because political consensus takes so long to achieve. The development of atomic bombs required only a few years, yet Europe’s impressive achievement of a common currency took fifty years. Action and effective societal reaction have very different time scales. While scientists can provide better headlights to spot the turnings and the washouts in advance, speeding up consensus-building requires a different set of skills. Only an effective combination of foresight and leadership stands a chance of building these flying buttresses that are needed to protect the cathedral of civilization from abrupt shocks. . . .
“The physician who waits until dead certain of a diagnosis before acting is likely to wind up with a dead patient. Sometimes things develop so rapidly that only early action—back when you’re still somewhat uncertain—stands a chance of being effective, as in catching cancer before it metastasizes.”
AFTER RETURNING FROM ASPEN, I reread Brown and Duguid’s piece. I thought of Bill Joy on his mountaintop, as alone as he could get. In the profiles I’d read of him from as long ago as the 1980s, there had been many references to his “characteristic boyish grin.” Granted, the topics we discussed had been grim. But over the course of a couple of days I would have thought I might have seen one or two characteristic boyish grins. I did not. Overall, his affect was markedly flat. Later that year, he got divorced, quit Sun, and put the book on hold.
Whenever Joy and I discussed the bullets humanity had dodged over the years, such as nuclear annihilation, he ascribed it to “luck.” Computer viruses haven’t destroyed the Information Age? Given Microsoft’s “bug-ridden” software permeating the globe, “that’s just serendipity.” SARS? “We were just lucky.” Whenever a social system works, for Joy that is just “luck.” “The common defense is not in anybody’s individual self-interest,” he claims.
He may be right. The Hell Scenario may be inevitable. But the great irony is that Joy—the pioneer of networks, the pioneer of open source—believes we are doomed precisely because he no longer gives much credence to the power of either.
Brown would hardly argue with Joy’s contention that “life involves risk. If it didn’t involve risk, it would be inanimate. What you can do is responsibly reduce the risk.” Nor would he argue with the proposition that Joy has done the world a great service with his warnings.
Brown’s gentle and almost avuncular reminder to Joy, however, is that for hundreds of thousands of years, we humans have succeeded in making our own luck.
And no man is an island.
* * *
The Hell Scenario
Bill Joy and other advocates of The Hell Scenario see a future in which the advance of The Curve is unstoppable, and unspeakable evil ensues. In their conviction that their prediction is inevitable, they are the mirror image of those who promulgate The Heaven Scenario. Nonetheless, since others do not agree with this inevitability, here it is being treated as a scenario.
Predetermined elements:
• There are Curves of exponential technological change.
Critical uncertainties:
• Are The Curves of exponential change smoothly accelerating? If so, how fast? Or are they displaying unexpected slowdowns, reversals or stops?
• Are Curves of change leading to progress, disaster or both?
Early warning signs that we are entering The Hell Scenario:
• Almost unimaginably bad things are happening, destroying large chunks of the human race or the biosphere, at an accelerating pace.
• Horrors that recently seemed like science fiction are routinely exceeded.
• Even in the face of such disasters, no agreement is being reached to slow down or stop the spread of these technologies. Humans seem helpless before the onslaught.
• Technologies continue to accelerate as individual nations, continents, tribes or movements jockey for position in a hostile world.
Embedded assumption:
• Technology drives history.
Early warnings that we might not be entering The Hell Scenario:
• The pace of growth of complexity slows or starts proving erratic.
• Almost unimaginably good things start happening. This would be an early warning that we are entering The Heaven Scenario.
• Culture and values gain control of technology such that events that once seemed inevitable are now consciously being avoided over significant periods of time, and by everyone on the planet. This would be an early warning that we are entering The Prevail Scenario.
* * *
CHAPTER SIX
Prevail
I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom
has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.
—William Faulkner, Nobel Prize acceptance speech, December 10, 1950
IN NEW MEXICO, El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro—the fabled Royal Road from Mexico City to Santa Fe—traces the course of the Rio Grande. Through the clear, dry air from El Paso del Norte toward the Sangre de Cristo—beyond the cotton, chilis and pecans of its fertile plain and below its gliding sandhill cranes—poke abrupt, strange mountain shapes. Spooky, spiky, funky and wild, they are hard not to imagine as Paleozoic reptiles awaiting the incantation that will bring them back to life. In this very ancient place, along this path of dreams, lies a small town called La Mesilla.
Today La Mesilla (the name means “the little tableland”) is fewer than 30 miles north of the border between Mexico and the United States. But the boundaries move a lot in these parts. In 1598—9 years before the Cavaliers landed in Virginia and 22 years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock—the conquistador Don Juan de Oñate here led some of the first permanent European settlers into what would become the United States. For more than two centuries, Spain brought to this region the cross and the sword. The Pueblo Indians responded with mixed emotions. The Apaches and later the Comanches responded with great violence. In 1821, when it achieved independence, this empire became Mexico. Two and a half decades later, Americans, pursuing their Manifest Destiny, declared war and in 1848 began the process of turning the northern half of Mexico into all or some of California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah. Because of a surveyor’s mistake, however, a band of territory including La Mesilla wound up still in dispute, claimed by both Old Mexico and the United States. The Yankees didn’t resolve that border issue in their favor until just before the Civil War. Then came the Rebels, who grabbed La Mesilla in 1861 and claimed a vast dominion as part of the Confederacy. It took a year for the Union to reclaim it. (New Mexico became the 47th state only in 1912.)
After the borders got straightened out, you’d think things would have settled down in La Mesilla—or just Mesilla, as it is more familiarly known. But no. The area west of the Pecos was now called the New Mexico Territory, and it was as wild and lawless as ever the West was. People from as far as Chihuahua and Tucson came to Mesilla to attend bullfights, cockfights and dances called bailes, and visit the town’s bars, pool halls and even a bowling alley. It was not uncommon for differences to be settled in the streets with gunfights. The children of Mesilla practiced the quick draw with their little wooden pistols, mimicking their teenage hero, William Henry McCarty, alias Kid Antrim, alias William H. Bonney, alias Billy the Kid, who was said to have killed more men than he had years of age. At the jail and courthouse on the southeast corner of the plaza, The Kid was tried and sentenced to hang in 1881 for the killing of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady. When The Kid escaped after being transported to the northern part of the Territory to hang, Sheriff Pat Garrett tracked him down and shot him dead at the age of 19, 20 or 21—estimates vary, as his birth date is a surmise.
In the ensuing century, since the railroad and the Interstate passed it by, Mesilla has seen little change, some chroniclers claim. But that’s not right. Granted, a lot of the residents are direct descendants of the rugged original settlers—Indian, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo. (Mesilla’s still the kind of place where people make distinctions between being “Spanish” and being “Mexican.” It’s an ancient issue of Hispanic authenticity that hinges on how many centuries ago your ancestors got here, as well as who is browner than whom.)
One of the foremost connoisseurs today of whether Mesilla is closer to the ancient world or the universe of curving change is Jaron Lanier. Lanier, who was born in 1960, has vivid memories of how much Mesilla resembled a frontier when he was growing up there.
Jaron Zepel Lanier today is one of the world’s more startling combinations of philosopher, creative artist and computer scientist. Learned journals have published his articles on the philosophy of consciousness and information—like how you might tell whether an intelligent entity is a zombie or whether there is actually somebody home inside. He says his book, Technology and the Future of the Human Soul, will be finished someday, despite epic procrastination. He is a professional “new classical” recording artist who writes chamber and orchestral compositions, including a triple concerto commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Composers Forum. In his Berkeley, California, home he maintains some 1,300 musical instruments, many of them exotic, all of them playable and all of which he can play. They include a glass harmonica invented by Benjamin Franklin, consisting of a series of rotating glass cylinders that produces haunting harmonies when played with a finger wetted in vinegar. Then there is the world’s biggest fully chromatic modern flute, 16 feet tall, and the full-size pipe organ. He believes his to be the largest and most varied collection actively played by one person in the world. Paintings and drawings by Lanier have been exhibited in museums and galleries in the United States and Europe.
He is best known, however, for inventing “virtual reality” as a shared experience, and naming it. In his early 20s Lanier founded VPL Research—yes, in a garage in California. It was the first company to provide research labs around the world with the then-almost-magical virtual-reality paraphernalia. When he was 24, his groundbreaking work made the cover of Scientific American. Few recent innovations have had such consequences. It is difficult to buy an automobile or fly in an airplane today that wasn’t designed in virtual reality. The petroleum to fuel them was probably found with Lanier’s inventions. City planning, building design, surgery and scientific visualization—especially of molecules important to the creation of new drugs and the understanding of proteins and genes—are being redefined by virtual-reality imaging. So is the training of police, firefighters, emergency response teams and the military.
In the early 21st century, Lanier was the chief scientist of Advanced Network and Services, the engineering office of Internet2—a coalition of 180 American research universities sharing an experimental next-generation network so powerful that when they fired it up, lights dimmed all over campus, or so the story goes. He led the National Tele-Immersion Initiative. It aimed to create alternative worlds in which people at distant sites work together in a shared, simulated environment that makes them feel as if they were in the same room.
“Our social contract with our own tools has brought us to a point where we have to decide fairly soon what it is we humans ought to become, because we are on the brink of having the power of creating any experience we desire,” writes Howard Rheingold, an analyst of technology’s impact on society. Virtual reality “represents a kind of new contract between humans and computers, an arrangement that could grant us great power, and perhaps change us irrevocably in the process.”
Lanier is sufficiently renowned that on the rare occasions when he visits his hometown, people in Mesilla recognize him on the street. That’s not so difficult, as he is quite a sight. Lanier has grown up to be a vast bear of a man. A panda bear, actually, is what comes to mind as he pads around in his sandals. His eyes are blue. His skin is so pale as to verge on the albino. His hair naturally falls into sandy brown dreadlocks. They hang below his waist. As he talks, they constantly fly about. No one ever mistakes Lanier for somebod
y else. Lanier today is far and away the most famous son of Mesilla, New Mexico.
Lanier still isn’t entirely sure why his father and mother, Ellery and Lillian, an intellectual and an artist, respectively, chose to move from New York City to Mesilla shortly after the birth of their only child. As recently as Lanier’s Vietnam-era childhood, few of Mesilla’s streets were paved. There was no television—no signal reached that far. Buildings made out of adobe—walls of dried mud as much as two and a half feet thick—were still common. “The houses were always in a state of being dissolved” during the rare but torrential desert rains, he recalls. “Every single thing was in a constant state of melting back into the elements. It was a constant struggle to rebuild. It was this odd world of constant decay. Strange world. A lot of death play.”
When Lanier was growing up, Doña Ana County, in which Mesilla is located, was the second poorest in the United States. “There were diseases that just shouldn’t still have existed in America. There were deformities,” he says. Cruelty and violence were a part of life. Lanier especially remembers one of his classmates drowning in the school swimming pool. Lanier’s recollection of the incident is that it was common knowledge that his classmates had murdered the child and “he deserved it because he was unpopular and I was next.”