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

by Joel Garreau

  The high point of the trip, of course, is Lanier showing off Mesilla. Its old Spanish plaza remains remarkably genuine. A wedding is going on at the iglesia, the church at the north end of the square. It would not be out of place a thousand miles south. Some businesses have begun to make a pass at gentrification. There’s a bed-and-breakfast and a bookstore. The ground floor of the old courthouse now features the Billy the Kid Gift Shop. But even amid the predictable supply of badges in the shape of a six-pointed star saying “Sheriff” at the top and “New Mexico” at the bottom, with a wide selection of boys’ and girls’ first names embossed in the middle, one can find certain blooms of authenticity. Lanier spies a collection of Indian flutes for sale. “Oh, I know the guy who makes those,” he says. “Those are cedar flutes. They’re really good.” He picks one up and suddenly the tourist trap is filled with amazing trills as he triple-tongues this flute and flutters his fingers over the holes. Everything stops. All turn to listen to the music Lanier is coaxing out of these humble instruments.

  Leaving the plaza, we pass the Palacio Bar. Lanier has vivid childhood memories of watching people carrying their shotguns into this bar. He remembers the sound of gunfire. He’s never been inside, he muses.

  “Great!” I say. “Let’s have a beer!”

  Lanier looks and thinks the way he does completely without benefit of drink or drugs. He is a lifelong teetotaler. His imagination is completely fueled by his own onboard supply of neurochemicals—one of his more remarkable achievements. So there we are, bellying up to the bar of the Palacio, and Lanier orders a Diet Coke. I look at him in horror and quickly order a Cuervo Gold and a draft, just to avoid trouble. The Palacio is still pretty unadulterated. But it’s not the way Lanier imagined it. It’s more of a family place now. Yet over the bar there’s a list of deadbeats who have welshed on their tab, labeled “Bad Eggs.” On top of the thermostat behind the bar there lies a sapper—one of those whippy metal things with weights at either end covered with leather that cops used to carry in their hip pockets, calling it “a persuader.” The bartender says he’s never had to use it. But it remains prominently displayed.

  Lanier may have no use for mind-bending substances, but he does take a fine and studied interest in his home state’s regional cuisine. This is how we end up peeling off the Interstate for breakfast at the town of Hatch. Hatch, which is even less prepossessing than Mesilla, prides itself on being the chili capital of New Mexico. No small boast. The universal solvents of every meal in the state are green chili salsa and red chili salsa. A local sternly lectures me for not recognizing the value of spreading chili jam on one’s breakfast toast, and stirring it into one’s yogurt.

  New Mexico’s chilis are intriguing. They’re not the Texas instant-hit, blow-the-back-of-your-head-off kind. New Mexico’s chilis have layers of flavor. They enter into a conversation with your food and your taste buds in a complex way.

  On our way out of town, after a vast platter of huevos and salsa at La Palma Cafe, we espy this little cinder-block hole-in-the-wall place called Flores Farms, on Hall Street, Hatch’s main drag. Out front hangs row after row of ristras. These are fat decorative braids of dried chilis, some as many as six feet long. We definitely need some of these, so we pull in, and behind the counter is Felipe Mendoza. Mendoza has the sort of terrific, sun-darkened, wizened Mexican-American visage over which the photographer Ansel Adams, who roamed these parts, would have swooned. We get into a very deep conversation about the various kinds of chilis he has, when to roast them, how to crush them, the correct proportion of cilantro to add and so forth. This fills the better part of an hour. Wandering around the tiny shop, examining its wares in the course of all this, we discover two big maps on the wall, one of the United States and one of the world. On close examination both turn out to be riddled with pinholes. When a customer comes in, Mendoza will give him a pushpin to stick in the maps to show how far away from Hatch, New Mexico, he’s from. At the end of the year the shopkeepers remove all the pushpins and the process starts all over again.

  This is only the fifth month of the year, but already the maps are full of pushpins. Not only from Miami to Seattle, but including Russia, India, Iraq and some little island off the coast of western Australia nearer to the Antarctic than anything else. That’s the one that really impresses Mendoza.

  Much later it occurs to me that Felipe Mendoza’s world is a metaphor for Prevail. It is this intensely local yet vastly global arrangement that’s very complex and very authentic whose pivot literally is flavor. Mendoza is no poster child for going back to some static nature, Lanier observes. Mendoza talks about all the varieties of chilis they are experimenting with to see how far they can push their business. His livelihood depends upon people coming to Hatch and saying Hatch is special. He is both a man of the world and is grounded in that place. He is clearly somebody who has the flavor of the valley. He is the essence of being connected while relishing differences.

  Lanier thinks it important that we carefully pick which ramp on which to focus as we ride The Curve of exponential change. It is impossible to tell humans to spurn further evolution.

  Lanier has sympathy for those who ask why we can’t just be satisfied with all we have. It’s hardly an irrational point of view, he says, but it is an impractical one. That’s not our nature. “You can’t have a clever species sitting around on the planet with nothing to do,” he says. “Trouble will ensue. Something bad will happen. So it’s essential to have long-term goals. These ramps are not just for fun. They’re actually for our survival because of our nature. We want to choose our ramp wisely, and I think the one I’ve outlined, I think it works.” He laughs. “I’m thinking of it as a technologist, like designing a ramp for mankind. This is a good ramp. It’s respectful of others. It doesn’t say, ‘I know the right way.’ It assumes differences. It’s psychologically extremely challenging. And it is based on a real measurable achievement—whether people have understood each other—instead of some fantasy.”

  Who knows whether Lanier’s version of Prevail will prevail. But Hatch provides evidence that his scenario could be credible. For by the side of the road, in a secluded part of New Mexico, there stands a small monument, decorated with ristras, pointing the way to an infinite game in which people are at the center, flavor is not blanched out and the goal is connections as complex as those musicians like to make. It might be a long shot. But if we can evolve in that direction, we might even manage to find an ambitious and persistent way to expand the ineffable and the marvelous and the resilient in the human spirit.

  * * *

  The Prevail Scenario

  There are two key elements to any version of The Prevail Scenario:

  • Humans have an uncanny history of muddling through—of forging unlikely paths to improbable futures in defiance of historical forces that seem certain and inevitable.

  • The wellspring of this muddling through, of this prevailing, is the ability of ordinary people facing overwhelming odds to rise to the occasion because it is the right thing—for example, the British “nation of shopkeepers” that defied the Third Reich.

  To these, Jaron Lanier shapes his version of The Prevail Scenario by adding:

  • Even if technology is advancing along an exponential curve, that doesn’t mean humans cannot creatively shape the impact on human nature and society in largely unpredictable ways. Technology does not have to determine history.

  • The key measure of Prevail’s success is an increasing intensity of links between humans, not transistors. If some sort of transcendence is achieved beyond today’s understanding of human nature, it will not be through some individual becoming a superman. In Lanier’s Prevail Scenario, transcendence is social, not solitary. The measure is the extent to which many transform together.

  Predetermined elements:

  • Few. The Prevail Scenario views uncertainty about the specifics of the future of human nature as one of its more plausible features.

  Critical uncertain
ties:

  • Are The Curves of exponential change smoothly accelerating, or are they susceptible to unexpected slowdowns, reversals or stops?

  • Will The Curves of technological change produce a smooth curve of change in human culture?

  Big differences between The Prevail Scenario and both the Heaven and Hell Scenarios:

  • In Prevail, humans are picking and choosing their futures in an effective manner. They are actually succeeding in practical ways to slow change that is seen as negative or accelerate change that is seen as positive. This is not to be confused with mere rhetoric that has little functional outcome. Nor is it to be confused with protests that result in little actual change, or change that merely alters the outcome by moving the relentless Curve from one part of the globe to another—from North America to Asia, for example.

  Early warning signs that we are entering The Prevail Scenario:

  • Resistance to The Curves of change is actually having an effect worldwide.

  • Certain technologies that affect human development and enhancement are globally seen as worth slowing down or stopping, in the way that the use of nuclear weapons was effectively prevented for the second half of the 20th century.

  • Technologies that were seen as inevitable turn out to take much longer to develop than anticipated. Predictions common in the early 21st century begin to sound as silly as those of the middle of the 20th century, such as the paperless office, hotels on Mars and self-cleaning houses.

  • Researchers voluntarily stop working on topics they view as too dangerous.

  • Researchers decline funding for certain topics that they view as too fraught with human peril, putting their ethics ahead of their promotions, tenure, graduate students and intellectual curiosity.

  • Researchers decline funding from organizations they view as too laden with problems, such as corporations and the military.

  • Moore’s Law, which projects the swift repeated doubling of computer power, is discovered no longer to be a reliable guide, because it has hit fundamental physical limits.

  • Computational power is no longer seen as achieving exponential growth because of the inability of software to keep up the pace of innovation.

  • There is little correlation between any exponential change in technology and the development of human society.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Transcend

  Transcend: To go beyond in some respect, quality or attribute; to rise above, surpass, excel, exceed.

  —Oxford English Dictionary

  Transcendence is the belief that you can win, break even, or get out of the game.

  —Clay Shirky

  GENETIC ENGINEERING IS WICKED, the crowd in the charm-free auditorium at Yale University is being told. They fidget as bioethicist George Annas scolds them. Look at all those rosy promises made when we were being sold nuclear power and manned space flight, he says. Tinkering with our gene pool—altering human nature as we have understood it for millennia—is unspeakable.

  Annas is as compact, pudgy and generally affable as a stuffed toy with a comb-over. But right now, he’s on a tear. Nobody should change humanity without consulting society, says the chair of the Department of Health Law, Bioethics and Human Rights at the Boston University School of Public Health. The burden of proof should be shifted to researchers. Make them prove harmless any species-altering or species-endangering experiments. The world is too dangerous already.

  That’s the old precautionary principle, responds Gregory Stock, who is sitting to his left. Stock, the anchorman-smooth author of Redesigning Humans who sees biotechnology leading to The Heaven Scenario, is the director of the Program on Medicine, Technology, and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine. Annas’ suggestion is just another way of saying that we should never do anything for the first time, Stock goes on. How could anyone have established there was no harm in creating the first laser? The precautionary principle is just a way to block research without admitting that that is the goal. Science works by making mistakes. We shouldn’t torture ourselves with hypotheticals. Minimize the actual problems that arise. Allow people individual choice; let them advise those who follow about the paths not to be taken.

  Our mistakes are called children, Annas seethes. We should try this on twenty generations of primates first.

  It is unlikely that parents who treasure their offspring would rush out to use any treatments, much less genetic ones, that they didn’t believe were fully validated and safe, says Stock. We’re going to go on this adventure. We should not just accept but embrace the new technologies, because they’re filled with promise. And because we can.

  It’s hard to be against the future, says Annas. It’s not transhumanism we should worry about; it’s dehumanization.

  Someone from the audience asks Annas how he is going to stop this technology. What makes you think government is up to the task?

  World government is a pipe dream, but a good pipe dream. We should think and talk about it, Annas replies.

  The debate rages for more than an hour. Stock closes his portion by predicting that future humans will look back at this glorious moment, when all ways to alter humanity were being developed, and marvel. It’s an enormous privilege to be alive at this time, he says, finishing his delivery of The Heaven Scenario.

  Annas ends his presentation of The Hell Scenario with a warning: We are not very good at preventing harm to the environment, the pain of poverty, the horror of genocide. He hopes we use the precautionary principle as our guide to prevent future calamities.

  The debate organizer, James “Jay” Hughes, a health policy professor at Trinity College, sympathizes with Stock. He says that arguing in favor of the transformation of human nature is “like arguing in favor of the plow. You know some people are going to argue against it, but you also know it’s going to exist.”

  “Detailed regulation is not possible and probably not desirable,” Australian high court justice Michael Kirby later tells the crowd. Kirby serves as a bioethics adviser to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. “This is not defeatism or resignation. It is realism.

  “All one has to do is read the science journals to know these issues are on the table today,” Kirby says. “One thing I can say with certainty from my experience is that the wheels of law, of the legislative process, grind very slowly within nations and slower still internationally. The progress of science, on the other hand, is ever accelerating. If anything, we’ve been surprised at how quickly technology has progressed. It’s worth taking on these issues intellectually now, rather than in crisis later.”

  IN AN ORNATE ROOM in a Romanesque building on the Yale campus in New Haven, there is a shrine to the relationship between knowledge and wisdom. Over the elaborately carved fireplace in one corner of Linsly-Chittenden Hall, formerly the university library, is a proverb: “Through wisdom is a house builded and by understanding it is established and by knowledge shall the chambers be filled with all precious and pleasant riches.” Along one wall is a stained glass mural created in 1890 by Louis Comfort Tiffany, stretching dramatically for 30 feet. The colors are striking—creamy pearl, opalescent pinks, brilliant peacock blues, deep golds and muted antique rose in marbleized tones. In the center of the stained glass, in long flowing gowns, three angels represent Light, Love and Life. A dozen more beautiful and remarkably modern-looking young women portray the muses of Religion, Music, and Art. Near the center, Science is attended by romantic figures representing the virtues that undergird it, Research and Intuition. Behind them are a bevy of other qualities on which Science depends: Devotion, Labor, Truth, Perception and Analysis.

  One fine June New England weekend, these goddesses of knowledge and wisdom preside over some intense conversation about the transcendence of human nature. The gathering, dubbed “The Adaptable Human Body: Transhumanism and Bioethics in the 21st Century,” is co-sponsored by the estimable Yale Interdisciplinary Bioethics Program Working Research Group
on Technology and Ethics and a young organization called the World Transhumanist Association.

  Transhumanism is a loosely defined movement that started in the 1970s but is gaining heightened attention as the genetic, robotic, information and nano technologies—the GRIN technologies—make the transhumanists’ interest in engineered evolution increasingly credible. Those like Annas who do not wish to see human nature altered are taking transhumanism seriously enough to attack it.

  Transhumanists are keen on the enhancement of human intellectual, physical and emotional capabilities, the elimination of disease and unnecessary suffering, and the dramatic extension of life span. What this network has in common is a belief in the engineered evolution of “posthumans,” defined as beings “whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to no longer be unambiguously human by our current standards.” “Transhuman” is their description of those who are in the process of becoming posthuman—the metamorphosis they believe, not without good reason, some of us are entering right now.