by Joel Garreau
It’s telling that Nietzsche, the philosopher who transformed Bostrom’s young life, was the one who created the idea of the Übermensch. Literally, it means “overman,” but is more commonly translated in comic-book fashion as “superman.” The overman, says Nietzsche, is the entity that will follow humans on the evolutionary ladder. “Man is a rope, tied between beast and Overman—a rope over an abyss,” Nietzsche writes. “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.” He might as well have called the Übermensch the posthuman. In him Nietzsche sees strength, courage, nobility, style and refinement. He is devoid of human timidity, continually aspiring to greatness and living life as a creative adventure. In Nietzsche’s view, we should aim at becoming such an admirable posthuman, even if we who are “all too human” find this ideal so idealistic as to be unfulfillable.
Remember the opening scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in which the protohumans are flinging bones about and one of the bones soars into the sky, only to morph into the spaceship of advanced humankind? Remember the swelling theme music behind it, the five clear and haunting horn notes followed by the kettledrums and the full triumphant rush of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra? That’s Richard Strauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra, embodying the ascension of man into spheres reserved for the gods—a deliberate choice. The movie ends with an astronaut catapulted into mysterious posthumanity.
The hard question, then, is this: What if Kass is right to worry, and yet, as seems likely, our evolution continues? Right now, the argument is usually cast rather fruitlessly between the proponents of the Hell and Heaven Scenarios. One side sees the dangers and wants everything stopped. The other side sees the promise and serves as cheerleaders. They talk past each other.
For The Prevail Scenario to prevail—for us to be the masters of change and not its pawns—we have to recognize the dangers at the same time as we accept that transformation is coming, and figure out how our solutions will accelerate at the same pace as our challenges. Figuring out how to expedite the response of our culture and values also helps us learn what these tests of our humanity are telling us about human nature.
For example:
• Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, kills a hundred thousand people and is accused of crimes against humanity. Does his behavior make him a monster to be removed from the protection of the law, to be forever cast outside the bounds of humanity? Or does he remain all too recognizably one of us?
• In 2004, a new technology for the first time allowed women great flexibility in timing motherhood. Women are able to freeze their eggs when they are young and fertile, enabling them to have full careers, perhaps culminating in becoming CEO of a big corporation, without fretting about the biological clock. They can then thaw these eggs and start having children in their 60s, 70s or 80s, if they wish. Is this human? I ask a neighbor celebrating her 62nd birthday. She doesn’t see “retirement age” as a time to start winding down. She sees it as the opening of brand-new chapters. You’ve got 40 exciting years to go, I tease her. Yes I know, she replies, looking me straight in the eye. You can do anything you want in all that time, she says. Anything at all. That’s why I threw out my husband.
• In the early 21st century we have been having an interesting societal conversation about human nature, signaled by the decision of the Vatican to weigh in on the debate. An issue once far on the fringes of public discussion has moved swiftly to center ring in North America and Western Europe. Suppose two people of the same sex want state recognition of their committed union—gay marriage. Is that just another wrinkle in evolution? Or is it an abomination? Is gay marriage an early warning of significant legal and political controversies to come over what constitutes genuinely human behavior? If bonds between people of the same gender are beyond the pale, how will we feel when people start having relationships with their digital companions?
• What happens when your kid comes home crying after failing once again to compete against bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, more talented, cuter, better-behaved kids whose rich parents have given them big tweaks? What will be your gut reaction to their ability to succeed in ways that your kid can’t? Do you say, “Don’t worry, dear, we love you just the way you are and, besides, just because other parents are willing to take risks with their kids’ bodies and minds doesn’t mean we have to”? Do you remortgage the house to try to catch up? Or do you try to get the tweaked kids exiled from your school?
• What happens when a girl shows up who is so intent on connecting to you that she wants to show you the contents of her mind on her cuttlefish wings? Do you banish her from the tribe?
This stuff is going to get pretty hairy, pretty quick.
If transcendence is inevitable, how will we manage it?
IF YOU BELIEVE that matter and energy are all that make up the universe, and you think the GRIN technologies will finally enable you to manipulate just about any matter you can imagine, then you have a stirring proposition on your hands. It’s sort of a reverse Pascal’s Wager.
Blaise Pascal was the brilliant French scientist, mathematician and physicist of the early 1600s who is credited with inventing everything from an amazingly advanced calculator to the roulette wheel and the wristwatch. He helped create the calculus of probabilities and was a pioneer of decision theory. He argued that God cannot be proven logically to be real, yet each of us must decide whether or not to believe. If you choose to believe in God and the deity turns out not to exist, he reasoned, you haven’t lost much. If you choose to conduct your life devoutly and God does turn out to exist, the rewards are infinite. Therefore, he concluded, it pays to play the odds.
A reverse Pascal’s Wager, then, would be one in which you decide that since it is possible that God does not exist, it might be reasonable, if you have the opportunity, to attempt to do the job yourself.
Some sputter. The very idea of aspiring to godlike powers to them is blasphemous. “Genetic engineering,” writes Michael J. Sandel, a professor of political philosophy at Harvard, is “the ultimate expression of our resolve to see ourselves astride the world, the masters of our nature. But the promise of mastery is flawed. It threatens to banish our appreciation of life as a gift, and to leave us with nothing to affirm or behold outside our own will.”
“When genetics moves out of the realm of disease and into the study of human traits, especially when an intent to alter traits is implied or openly stated, the discomfort level appropriately rises, and questions about ‘playing God’ are often raised,” writes Ted Peters, professor of systematic theology at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. “Perhaps if we could be confident that humans would play God as God does—with infinite love and compassion—the concern would be lessened.”
Yet suppose you accept as a compact definition of human nature, “the inclination to steal fire every chance we get.” The odds are good somebody’s going to reach for these awesome powers, somewhere in the world, soon. So the big question is where we’re going to get the wisdom to use such strength properly. That takes us to the question of whether we can manage our evolution successfully.
Co-evolution—problems prodding humans to solutions that offer new opportunities, which in turn create new challenges, in an endless spiral—has an extremely long and distinguished history. The Little League fastball is a prime example. Only humans are capable of it. Apes can heave things around, but they can’t pitch. They don’t have the brains.
The first hominids capable of walking erect—usefully freeing up their hands to seek food—couldn’t run fast enough to catch many animals. Therefore they were stuck with eating a lot of fruits and nuts unless they stumbled across an animal that had been crippled by a more formidable predator. This limited them to living in tropical areas where such a diet was feasible. One day, however, a desperately hungry protohuman astonished herself by pegging a rock one-handed at a rabbit or a bird and hitting it on the first try. This was an inflection point in history. Suddenly, she had an overwhel
ming advantage. She had become a predator capable of acting at a distance—the first significant one on the planet, notes William Calvin, the University of Washington theoretical neurobiologist and best-selling author on the evolution of the brain. She and her children suddenly had vastly more protein available to them than everybody else. A population explosion of their offspring ensued. That’s what always happens when you open up a new evolutionary niche.
Nailing a rabbit with a fastball is difficult. It is an extremely brain-intensive activity. Targeting the prey, figuring out where it will be in a few seconds, coiling up your body, explosively using every major muscle group in sequence to pitch and at the last thousandth of a second releasing your finger so precisely that the rock will go where the animal will be—and doing all this in a few heartbeats—takes a great deal of processing power. We have trouble creating a machine that can do it, as the history of the anti-missile missile program demonstrates.
The only way protohumans managed was by stumbling onto brain specialization. Evolution rewarded with better eating those whose left brain concentrated on developing throwing ability. Quickly—as these things go—the brain size of their talented offspring tripled in size. (The two halves of apes’ brains still don’t coordinate quickly. The best apes can do is a two-handed over-the-head throw if they wish to crack a skull with a boulder. This is the only reason they don’t have fat contracts with the Yankees.) Those who could specialize suddenly discovered they could come out of the trees and into the plains, living handsomely off the prey they found there, kicking off the process by which humans ended up occupying every portion of the globe. As it happens, the areas of the brain that offer immediate nutritional payoff by allowing this complex behavior are the ones now colonized by language. Bigger brains enabled hunting parties to create strategy. It also is the start of cultural evolution—handing down to the next generation, for example, ways of creating sharp spear points that work much better than baseball-sized rocks. Flaking hard rocks also throws sparks, which is a handy way of creating fire on demand. The rest is history.
Is it possible that we might continue to see that sort of co-evolution, in which the use of new tools enables more specialized and capable human understanding? Will we in turn fundamentally change some of our premises about technology as we continue to evolve? Are humans already changing as a result of the Information Age?
That’s exactly what we’ve been doing since the 1940s, says Don Kash.
Don E. Kash is long and lean, with the kind of hearty laugh that sounds like he just heard a joke he shouldn’t repeat. He has been studying innovation for more than 40 years. He’s developed corporate case studies from Silicon Valley to India. He teaches at the schools of public policy at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as well as at Tsinghua University in Beijing—“the MIT of China.”
“There’s always been innovation,” Kash says. “But we learned something in World War II that has become permanently embedded in our minds. And that is, you can build organization systems that can do almost anything you can think of, and they will do that without anyone understanding how it’s done. No one person knows precisely how the organization accomplished it.”
World War II was a hinge in co-evolution history, Kash points out. The war was won with devices that did not exist when the war started. Radar, code-breaking computers and the atomic bomb are conspicuous examples. Its lessons resound to this day.
Kash recalls his case study of Intel. Why is Intel so successful? Well, he recalls being told, it’s because we use minimum information. Huh? What do you mean minimum information? Well, we progress by solving problems one at a time. How do we solve problems? Well, we decide on a solution and we try it. And if it works, we go right on. If it doesn’t work, “we try sumptin’ else.” In this fashion, the new is routinely created not by individual geniuses, as mythology might have it, but by faceless teams of ordinary people. Science no longer paves the way for engineering; usually it’s the other way around. Intel figures out a way to make wires only a few molecules thick, and why that might work is at best of passing interest—as long as it does. Science can take years if not decades to catch up with an adequate explanation of the device’s quantum mechanics. It is the final triumph of Edison over Einstein.
This is a profound change in human circumstances, Kash notes. “You go to executive management classes and they tell you, ‘If you don’t innovate, you die. The path to success is to make what you’re doing obsolete.’ My children get up every morning thinking there will be new capabilities. Why do they think that? Because of some Platonic model? Hell, no,” he says, pausing dramatically for emphasis. “It’s because—That’s. What. They. Experience. Every. Day.”
The problem is that our ways of thinking about the world have not caught up with these new realities, Kash says. For example, “we have a conceptual model that takes physical finiteness”—shortages—“as its core starting point assumption. Throughout most of human history, this was the experience. Economics is all bound up in this. We now live in a world, however, where our experience is not shortage. Our experience is in fact trying to get people to consume things, because we have too many of them.” We still look at the world, however, using eons-old assumptions that haven’t held true in generations. We still worry about scant supply when “the great management issue in the world is not scarcity, it’s surplus. The main public policy issue across the board is what do you do with surplus capacity? Food is the classic example.” If people starve in Africa, it’s not because of any lack of food in the world. Absent some climatic meltdown, rich nations produce so much food that they can ship it halfway around the world and still charge so little as to force small local farmers out of business, driving them off their tiny plots and into the sprawling fetid cities. For decades, famines have invariably been caused not by any global lack of food but by the food not getting to the right people—frequently because corrupt regimes withhold it to control their own populations. This is not to say hunger is not an enormous challenge. Rather, the core problem is different from the one we have been trained to consider. The disruptive factor is the opposite of our myths.
In terms of physical, material objects now, anything imaginable is possible. “Our capabilities are now so great that nature is not something you study in order to understand how things work,” Kash notes. “Nature is something you study to figure out how to engineer and change it. Including human nature. Galileo got into deep shit because he said there wasn’t any difference between the human mind and the divine. There wasn’t anything that God could understand that we couldn’t understand. Well, I think that’s not true. But there isn’t anything that God can do that we can’t do. That’s a different story. It really is sort of dazzling.” Yet “what we have is still a set of ideas about how the world operates that we hang on to,” Kash says. “And we have a social system that behaves totally different than our ideas.
“If you are dealing with The Singularity, the definition is that none of the rules work anymore,” says Kash. “If none of the rules work anymore, then you either say, ‘Well, what the hell, just ride it out and see what happens,’ or you try to formulate some new rules. You start with a rule that says that in managing society, you have to do it by trial and error. We have a rhetoric now in which politicians and corporate leaders have to talk as if they were in a position to control and manage,” despite the abundant evidence that this is not remotely the case. The central rule of society today is run-and-gun adaptation.
The critical issue in co-evolution is time. Can we speed up the societal understanding response such that co-evolution has a chance? It’s child’s play to focus on the rate of increase in the problems. The big question is whether we are also seeing an accelerated increase in the rate of solutions. Are we seeing a rise in adaptability? In time-to-market work-arounds and muddle-throughs? In empathy? In beauty and love?
In a cynical era, it is easy to dismiss those questions out of hand with a snort and a “Hell, no.”
Culture and values always change more slowly than technology. But evidence exists that increasingly interconnected billions of individuals are coming up with answers that are “good enough” to deal with their new local realities.
Look at history. The printing press allowed the rise of such coordinated and cooperative action as democracy, science and global trade, notes Howard Rheingold, the fellow who wrote Smart Mobs. The ensuing spread of self-government, rationalism and complex webs of enterprise is an example of millions of individuals acting collectively to produce outcomes vastly beyond the power or even understanding of any individual or even any nation. None of these was feasible before there was a means for these individuals easily to link up, share information and act on it through the printed word. Democracy, science and vast markets each presented transformational approaches to problems that once seemed insolubly complex.
The question is whether other institutions of co-evolution are emerging in our generation. Consider, for example, the “gift economy.” The Net from first creation was not built by greed. Those who built it openly offered wisdom and information for free. Their legacy is all around us. Look at the results to any question you ask of your search engine. Most of the answers that pop up clearly were put there by people with no hope of immediate financial gain—pictures of the beach on the island of Bequia, hymns in German to antique Harley-Davidsons, the warning signs of frostbite, the botany of mistletoe, short stories by Anton Chekhov. It’s endless. Now we have begun to freely share the very guts of our own computers—both the content and the processing power—individual to individual, peer to peer. Music sharing—which already involves more people per year than vote in American presidential elections—is just the beginning. It points toward a gift economy that is altering the basics of the marketplace.