Questions and Answers

So what is the Singularity?

Within a quarter century, nonbiological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. It will then soar past it because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge. Intelligent nanorobots will be deeply integrated in our bodies, our brains, and our environment, overcoming pollution and poverty, providing vastly extended longevity, full-immersion virtual reality incorporating all of the senses (like The Matrix), “experience beaming” (like “Being John Malkovich”), and vastly enhanced human intelligence. The result will be an intimate merger between the technology-creating species and the technological evolutionary process it spawned.

And that’s the Singularity?

No, that’s just the precursor. Nonbiological intelligence will have access to its own design and will be able to improve itself in an increasingly rapid redesign cycle. We’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it. That will mark the Singularity.

When will that occur?

I set the date for the Singularity—representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability—as 2045. The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.

Why is this called the Singularity?

The term “Singularity” in my book is comparable to the use of this term by the physics community. Just as we find it hard to see beyond the event horizon of a black hole, we also find it difficult to see beyond the event horizon of the historical Singularity. How can we, with our limited biological brains, imagine what our future civilization, with its intelligence multiplied trillions-fold, be capable of thinking and doing? Nevertheless, just as we can draw conclusions about the nature of black holes through our conceptual thinking, despite never having actually been inside one, our thinking today is powerful enough to have meaningful insights into the implications of the Singularity. That’s what I’ve tried to do in this book.

Okay, let’s break this down. It seems a key part of your thesis is that we will be able to capture the intelligence of our brains in a machine.

Indeed.

So how are we going to achieve that?

We can break this down further into hardware and software requirements. In the book, I show how we need about 10 quadrillion (10¹⁶) calculations per second (cps) to provide a functional equivalent to all the regions of the brain. Some estimates are lower than this by a factor of 100. Supercomputers are already at 100 trillion (10¹⁴) cps, and will hit 10¹⁶ cps around the end of this decade. Several supercomputers with 1 quadrillion cps are already on the drawing board, with two Japanese efforts targeting 10 quadrillion cps around the end of the decade. By 2020, 10 quadrillion cps will be available for around $1,000. Achieving the hardware requirement was controversial when my last book on this topic, The Age of Spiritual Machines, came out in 1999, but is now pretty much of a mainstream view among informed observers. Now the controversy is focused on the algorithms.

And how will we recreate the algorithms of human intelligence?

To understand the principles of human intelligence we need to reverse-engineer the human brain. Here, progress is far greater than most people realize. The spatial and temporal (time) resolution of brain scanning is also progressing at an exponential rate, roughly doubling each year, like most everything else having to do with information. Just recently, scanning tools can see individual interneuronal connections, and watch them fire in real time. Already, we have mathematical models and simulations of a couple dozen regions of the brain, including the cerebellum, which comprises more than half the neurons in the brain. IBM is now creating a simulation of about 10,000 cortical neurons, including tens of millions of connections. The first version will simulate the electrical activity, and a future version will also simulate the relevant chemical activity. By the mid 2020s, it’s conservative to conclude that we will have effective models for all of the brain.

So at that point we’ll just copy a human brain into a supercomputer?

I would rather put it this way: At that point, we’ll have a full understanding of the methods of the human brain. One benefit will be a deep understanding of ourselves, but the key implication is that it will expand the toolkit of techniques we can apply to create artificial intelligence. We will then be able to create nonbiological systems that match human intelligence in the ways that humans are now superior, for example, our pattern- recognition abilities. These superintelligent computers will be able to do things we are not able to do, such as share knowledge and skills at electronic speeds.

By 2030, a thousand dollars of computation will be about a thousand times more powerful than a human brain. Keep in mind also that computers will not be organized as discrete objects as they are today. There will be a web of computing deeply integrated into the environment, our bodies and brains.

You mentioned the AI tool kit. Hasn’t AI failed to live up to its expectations?

There was a boom and bust cycle in AI during the 1980s, similar to what we saw recently in e-commerce and telecommunications. Such boom-bust cycles are often harbingers of true revolutions; recall the railroad boom and bust in the 19th century. But just as the Internet “bust” was not the end of the Internet, the so-called “AI Winter” was not the end of the story for AI either. There are hundreds of applications of “narrow AI” (machine intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence for specific tasks) now permeating our modern infrastructure. Every time you send an email or make a cell phone call, intelligent algorithms route the information. AI programs diagnose electrocardiograms with an accuracy rivaling doctors, evaluate medical images, fly and land airplanes, guide intelligent autonomous weapons, make automated investment decisions for over a trillion dollars of funds, and guide industrial processes. These were all research projects a couple of decades ago. If all the intelligent software in the world were to suddenly stop functioning, modern civilization would grind to a halt. Of course, our AI programs are not intelligent enough to organize such a conspiracy, at least not yet.

Why don’t more people see these profound changes ahead?

Hopefully after they read my new book, they will. But the primary failure is the inability of many observers to think in exponential terms. Most long-range forecasts of what is technically feasible in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential” view. My models show that we are doubling the paradigm-shift rate every decade. Thus the 20th century was gradually speeding up to the rate of progress at the end of the century; its achievements, therefore, were equivalent to about twenty years of progress at the rate in 2000. We’ll make another twenty years of progress in just fourteen years (by 2014), and then do the same again in only seven years. To express this another way, we won’t experience one hundred years of technological advance in the 21st century; we will witness on the order of 20,000 years of progress (again, when measured by the rate of progress in 2000), or about 1,000 times greater than what was achieved in the 20th century.

The exponential growth of information technologies is even greater: we’re doubling the power of information technologies, as measured by price-performance, bandwidth, capacity and many other types of measures, about every year. That’s a factor of a thousand in ten years, a million in twenty years, and a billion in thirty years. This goes far beyond Moore’s law (the shrinking of transistors on an integrated circuit, allowing us to double the price-performance of electronics each year). Electronics is just one example of many. As another example, it took us 14 years to sequence HIV; we recently sequenced SARS in only 31 days.

So this acceleration of information technologies applies to biology as well?

Absolutely. It’s not just computer devices like cell phones and digital cameras that are accelerating in capability. Ultimately, everything of importance will be comprised essentially of information technology. With the advent of nanotechnology-based manufacturing in the 2020s, we’ll be able to use inexpensive table-top devices to manufacture on-demand just about anything from very inexpensive raw materials using information processes that will rearrange matter and energy at the molecular level.

We’ll meet our energy needs using nanotechnology-based solar panels that will capture the energy in .03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the Earth, which is all we need to meet our projected energy needs in 2030. We’ll store the energy in highly distributed fuel cells.

I want to come back to both biology and nanotechnology, but how can you be so sure of these developments? Isn’t technical progress on specific projects essentially unpredictable?

Predicting specific projects is indeed not feasible. But the result of the overall complex, chaotic evolutionary process of technological progress is predictable.

People intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods. Even for those who have been around long enough to experience how the pace of change increases over time, unexamined intuition leaves one with the impression that change occurs at the same rate that we have experienced most recently. From the mathematician’s perspective, the reason for this is that an exponential curve looks like a straight line when examined for only a brief duration. As a result, even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, typically use the current pace of change to determine their expectations in extrapolating progress over the next ten years or one hundred years. This is why I describe this way of looking at the future as the “intuitive linear” view. But a serious assessment of the history of technology reveals that technological change is exponential. Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example.

As I show in the book, this has also been true of biological evolution. Indeed, technological evolution emerges from biological evolution. You can examine the data in different ways, on different timescales, and for a wide variety of technologies, ranging from electronic to biological, as well as for their implications, ranging from the amount of human knowledge to the size of the economy, and you get the same exponential—not linear—progression. I have over forty graphs in the book from a broad variety of fields that show the exponential nature of progress in information-based measures. For the price-performance of computing, this goes back over a century, well before Gordon Moore was even born.

Aren’t there are a lot of predictions of the future from the past that look a little ridiculous now?

Yes, any number of bad predictions from other futurists in earlier eras can be cited to support the notion that we cannot make reliable predictions. In general, these prognosticators were not using a methodology based on a sound theory of technology evolution. I say this not just looking backwards now. I’ve been making accurate forward-looking predictions for over twenty years based on these models.

But how can it be the case that we can reliably predict the overall progression of these technologies if we cannot even predict the outcome of a single project?

Predicting which company or product will succeed is indeed very difficult, if not impossible. The same difficulty occurs in predicting which technical design or standard will prevail. For example, how will the wireless-communication protocols Wimax, CDMA, and 3G fare over the next several years? However, as I argue extensively in the book, we find remarkably precise and predictable exponential trends when assessing the overall effectiveness (as measured in a variety of ways) of information technologies. And as I mentioned above, information technology will ultimately underlie everything of value.

But how can that be?

We see examples in other areas of science of very smooth and reliable outcomes resulting from the interaction of a great many unpredictable events. Consider that predicting the path of a single molecule in a gas is essentially impossible, but predicting the properties of the entire gas—comprised of a great many chaotically interacting molecules—can be done very reliably through the laws of thermodynamics. Analogously, it is not possible to reliably predict the results of a specific project or company, but the overall capabilities of information technology, comprised of many chaotic activities, can nonetheless be dependably anticipated through what I call “the law of accelerating returns.”

What will the impact of these developments be?

Radical life extension, for one.

Sounds interesting, how does that work?

In the book, I talk about three great overlapping revolutions that go by the letters “GNR,” which stands for genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. Each will provide a dramatic increase to human longevity, among other profound impacts. We’re in the early stages of the genetics—also called biotechnology—revolution right now. Biotechnology is providing the means to actually change your genes: not just designer babies but designer baby boomers. We’ll also be able to rejuvenate all of your body’s tissues and organs by transforming your skin cells into youthful versions of every other cell type. Already, new drug development is precisely targeting key steps in the process of atherosclerosis (the cause of heart disease), cancerous tumor formation, and the metabolic processes underlying each major disease and aging process. The biotechnology revolution is already in its early stages and will reach its peak in the second decade of this century, at which point we’ll be able to overcome most major diseases and dramatically slow down the aging process.

That will bring us to the nanotechnology revolution, which will achieve maturity in the 2020s. With nanotechnology, we will be able to go beyond the limits of biology, and replace your current “human body version 1.0” with a dramatically upgraded version 2.0, providing radical life extension.

And how does that work?

The “killer app” of nanotechnology is “nanobots,” which are blood-cell sized robots that can travel in the bloodstream destroying pathogens, removing debris, correcting DNA errors, and reversing aging processes.

Human body version 2.0?

We’re already in the early stages of augmenting and replacing each of our organs, even portions of our brains with neural implants, the most recent versions of which allow patients to download new software to their neural implants from outside their bodies. In the book, I describe how each of our organs will ultimately be replaced. For example, nanobots could deliver to our bloodstream an optimal set of all the nutrients, hormones, and other substances we need, as well as remove toxins and waste products. The gastrointestinal tract could be reserved for culinary pleasures rather than the tedious biological function of providing nutrients. After all, we’ve already in some ways separated the communication and pleasurable aspects of sex from its biological function.

And the third revolution?

The robotics revolution, which really refers to “strong” AI, that is, artificial intelligence at the human level, which we talked about earlier. We’ll have both the hardware and software to recreate human intelligence by the end of the 2020s. We’ll be able to improve these methods and harness the speed, memory capabilities, and knowledge- sharing ability of machines.

We’ll ultimately be able to scan all the salient details of our brains from inside, using billions of nanobots in the capillaries. We can then back up the information. Using nanotechnology-based manufacturing, we could recreate your brain, or better yet reinstantiate it in a more capable computing substrate.

Which means?

Our biological brains use chemical signaling, which transmit information at only a few hundred feet per second. Electronics is already millions of times faster than this. In the book, I show how one cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be about one hundred million times more powerful than the human brain. So we’ll have more powerful means of instantiating our intelligence than the extremely slow speeds of our interneuronal connections.

So we’ll just replace our biological brains with circuitry?

I see this starting with nanobots in our bodies and brains. The nanobots will keep us healthy, provide full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, provide direct brain-to-brain communication over the Internet, and otherwise greatly expand human intelligence. But keep in mind that nonbiological intelligence is doubling in capability each year, whereas our biological intelligence is essentially fixed in capacity. As we get to the 2030s, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will predominate.

The closest life extension technology, however, is biotechnology, isn’t that right?

There’s certainly overlap in the G, N and R revolutions, but that’s essentially correct.

So tell me more about how genetics or biotechnology works.

As we are learning about the information processes underlying biology, we are devising ways of mastering them to overcome disease and aging and extend human potential. One powerful approach is to start with biology’s information backbone: the genome. With gene technologies, we’re now on the verge of being able to control how genes express themselves. We now have a powerful new tool called RNA interference (RNAi), which is capable of turning specific genes off. It blocks the messenger RNA of specific genes, preventing them from creating proteins. Since viral diseases, cancer, and many other diseases use gene expression at some crucial point in their life cycle, this promises to be a breakthrough technology. One gene we’d like to turn off is the fat insulin receptor gene, which tells the fat cells to hold on to every calorie. When that gene was blocked in mice, those mice ate a lot but remained thin and healthy, and actually lived 20 percent longer.

New means of adding new genes, called gene therapy, are also emerging that have overcome earlier problems with achieving precise placement of the new genetic information. One company I’m involved with, United Therapeutics, cured pulmonary hypertension in animals using a new form of gene therapy and it has now been approved for human trials.

So we’re going to essentially reprogram our DNA.

That’s a good way to put it, but that’s only one broad approach. Another important line of attack is to regrow our own cells, tissues, and even whole organs, and introduce them into our bodies without surgery. One major benefit of this “therapeutic cloning” technique is that we will be able to create these new tissues and organs from versions of our cells that have also been made younger—the emerging field of rejuvenation medicine. For example, we will be able to create new heart cells from your skin cells and introduce them into your system through the bloodstream. Over time, your heart cells get replaced with these new cells, and the result is a rejuvenated “young” heart with your own DNA.

Drug discovery was once a matter of finding substances that produced some beneficial effect without excessive side effects. This process was similar to early humans’ tool discovery, which was limited to simply finding rocks and natural implements that could be used for helpful purposes. Today, we are learning the precise biochemical pathways that underlie both disease and aging processes, and are able to design drugs to carry out precise missions at the molecular level. The scope and scale of these efforts is vast.

But perfecting our biology will only get us so far. The reality is that biology will never be able to match what we will be capable of engineering, now that we are gaining a deep understanding of biology’s principles of operation.

Isn’t nature optimal?

Not at all. Our interneuronal connections compute at about 200 transactions per second, at least a million times slower than electronics. As another example, a nanotechnology theorist, Rob Freitas, has a conceptual design for nanobots that replace our red blood cells. A conservative analysis shows that if you replaced 10 percent of your red blood cells with Freitas’ “respirocytes,” you could sit at the bottom of a pool for four hours without taking a breath.

If people stop dying, isn’t that going to lead to overpopulation?

A common mistake that people make when considering the future is to envision a major change to today’s world, such as radical life extension, as if nothing else were going to change. The GNR revolutions will result in other transformations that address this issue. For example, nanotechnology will enable us to create virtually any physical product from information and very inexpensive raw materials, leading to radical wealth creation. We’ll have the means to meet the material needs of any conceivable size population of biological humans. Nanotechnology will also provide the means of cleaning up environmental damage from earlier stages of industrialization.

So we’ll overcome disease, pollution, and poverty—sounds like a utopian vision.

It’s true that the dramatic scale of the technologies of the next couple of decades will enable human civilization to overcome problems that we have struggled with for eons. But these developments are not without their dangers. Technology is a double edged sword—we don’t have to look past the 20th century to see the intertwined promise and peril of technology.

What sort of perils?

G, N, and R each have their downsides. The existential threat from genetic technologies is already here: the same technology that will soon make major strides against cancer, heart disease, and other diseases could also be employed by a bioterrorist to create a bioengineered biological virus that combines ease of transmission, deadliness, and stealthiness, that is, a long incubation period. The tools and knowledge to do this are far more widespread than the tools and knowledge to create an atomic bomb, and the impact could be far worse.

So maybe we shouldn’t go down this road.

It’s a little late for that. But the idea of relinquishing new technologies such as biotechnology and nanotechnology is already being advocated. I argue in the book that this would be the wrong strategy. Besides depriving human society of the profound benefits of these technologies, such a strategy would actually make the dangers worse by driving development underground, where responsible scientists would not have easy access to the tools needed to defend us.

So how do we protect ourselves?

I discuss strategies for protecting against dangers from abuse or accidental misuse of these very powerful technologies in chapter 8. The overall message is that we need to give a higher priority to preparing protective strategies and systems. We need to put a few more stones on the defense side of the scale. I’ve given testimony to Congress on a specific proposal for a “Manhattan” style project to create a rapid response system that could protect society from a new virulent biological virus. One strategy would be to use RNAi, which has been shown to be effective against viral diseases. We would set up a system that could quickly sequence a new virus, prepare a RNA interference medication, and rapidly gear up production. We have the knowledge to create such a system, but we have not done so. We need to have something like this in place before its needed.

Ultimately, however, nanotechnology will provide a completely effective defense against biological viruses.

But doesn’t nanotechnology have its own self-replicating danger?

Yes, but that potential won’t exist for a couple more decades. The existential threat from engineered biological viruses exists right now.

Okay, but how will we defend against self-replicating nanotechnology?

There are already proposals for ethical standards for nanotechnology that are based on the Asilomar conference standards that have worked well thus far in biotechnology. These standards will be effective against unintentional dangers. For example, we do not need to provide self-replication to accomplish nanotechnology manufacturing.

But what about intentional abuse, as in terrorism?

We’ll need to create a nanotechnology immune system—good nanobots that can protect us from the bad ones.

Blue goo to protect us from the gray goo!

Yes, well put. And ultimately we’ll need the nanobots comprising the immune system to be self-replicating. I’ve debated this particular point with a number of other theorists, but I show in the book why the nanobot immune system we put in place will need the ability to self-replicate. That’s basically the same “lesson” that biological evolution learned.

Ultimately, however, strong AI will provide a completely effective defense against self-replicating nanotechnology.

Okay, what’s going to protect us against a pathological AI?

Yes, well, that would have to be a yet more intelligent AI.

This is starting to sound like that story about the universe being on the back of a turtle, and that turtle standing on the back of another turtle, and so on all the way down. So what if this more intelligent AI is unfriendly? Another even smarter AI?

History teaches us that the more intelligent civilization—the one with the most advanced technology—prevails. But I do have an overall strategy for dealing with unfriendly AI, which I discuss in chapter 8.

Okay, so I’ll have to read the book for that one. But aren’t there limits to exponential growth? You know the story about rabbits in Australia—they didn’t keep growing exponentially forever.

There are limits to the exponential growth inherent in each paradigm. Moore’s law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computing, but rather the fifth. In the 1950s they were shrinking vacuum tubes to keep the exponential growth going and then that paradigm hit a wall. But the exponential growth of computing didn’t stop. It kept going, with the new paradigm of transistors taking over. Each time we can see the end of the road for a paradigm, it creates research pressure to create the next one. That’s happening now with Moore’s law, even though we are still about fifteen years away from the end of our ability to shrink transistors on a flat integrated circuit. We’re making dramatic progress in creating the sixth paradigm, which is three-dimensional molecular computing.

But isn’t there an overall limit to our ability to expand the power of computation?

Yes, I discuss these limits in the book. The ultimate 2 pound computer could provide 10⁴² cps, which will be about 10 quadrillion (10¹⁶) times more powerful than all human brains put together today. And that’s if we restrict the computer to staying at a cold temperature. If we allow it to get hot, we could improve that by a factor of another 100 million. And, of course, we’ll be devoting more than two pounds of matter to computing. Ultimately, we’ll use a significant portion of the matter and energy in our vicinity. So, yes, there are limits, but they’re not very limiting.

And when we saturate the ability of the matter and energy in our solar system to support intelligent processes, what happens then?

Then we’ll expand to the rest of the Universe.

Which will take a long time I presume.

Well, that depends on whether we can use wormholes to get to other places in the Universe quickly, or otherwise circumvent the speed of light. If wormholes are feasible, and analyses show they are consistent with general relativity, we could saturate the universe with our intelligence within a couple of centuries. I discuss the prospects for this in the chapter 6. But regardless of speculation on wormholes, we’ll get to the limits of computing in our solar system within this century. At that point, we’ll have expanded the powers of our intelligence by trillions of trillions.

Getting back to life extension, isn’t it natural to age, to die?

Other natural things include malaria, Ebola, appendicitis, and tsunamis. Many natural things are worth changing. Aging may be “natural,” but I don’t see anything positive in losing my mental agility, sensory acuity, physical limberness, sexual desire, or any other human ability.

In my view, death is a tragedy. It’s a tremendous loss of personality, skills, knowledge, relationships. We’ve rationalized it as a good thing because that’s really been the only alternative we’ve had. But disease, aging, and death are problems we are now in a position to overcome.

Wait, you said that the golden era of biotechnology was still a decade away. We don’t have radical life extension today, do we?

In my last book, Fantastic Voyage, Live Long Enough to Live Forever, which I coauthored with Terry Grossman, M.D., we describe a detailed and personalized program you can implement now (which we call “bridge one”) that will enable most people to live long enough to get to the mature phase of the biotechnology evolution (“bridge two”). That in turn will get us to “bridge three,” which is nanotechnology and strong AI, which will result in being able to live indefinitely.

Okay, but won’t it get boring to live many hundreds of years?

If humans lived many hundreds of years with no other change in the nature of human life, then, yes, that would lead to a deep ennui. But the same nanobots in the bloodstream that will keep us healthy—by destroying pathogens and reversing aging processes —will also vastly augment our intelligence and experiences. As is its nature, the nonbiological portion of our intelligence will expand its powers exponentially, so it will ultimately predominate. The result will be accelerating change—so we will not be bored.

Won’t the Singularity create the ultimate “digital divide” due to unequal access to radical life extension and superintelligent computers?

We need to consider an important feature of the law of accelerating returns, which is a 50 percent annual deflation factor for information technologies, a factor which itself will increase. Technologies start out affordable only by the wealthy, but at this stage, they actually don’t work very well. At the next stage, they’re merely expensive, and work a bit better. Then they work quite well and are inexpensive. Ultimately, they’re almost free. Cell phones are now at the inexpensive stage. There are countries in Asia where most people were pushing a plow fifteen years ago, yet now have thriving information economies and most people have a cell phone. This progression from early adoption of unaffordable technologies that don’t work well to late adoption of refined technologies that are very inexpensive is currently a decade-long process. But that too will accelerate. Ten years from now, this will be a five year progression, and twenty years from now it will be only a two- to three-year lag.

This model applies not just to electronic gadgets but to anything having to do with information, and ultimately that will be mean everything of value, including all manufactured products. In biology, we went from a cost of ten dollars to sequence a base pair of DNA in 1990 to about a penny today. AIDS drugs started out costing tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year and didn’t work very well, whereas today, effective drugs are about a hundred dollars per patient per year in poor countries. That’s still more than we’d like, but the technology is moving in the right direction. So the digital divide and the have-have not divide is diminishing, not exacerbating. Ultimately, everyone will have great wealth at their disposal.

Won’t problems such as war, intolerance, environmental degradation prevent us from reaching the Singularity?

We had a lot of war in the 20th century. Fifty million people died in World War II, and there were many other wars. We also had a lot of intolerance, relatively little democracy until late in the century, and a lot of environmental pollution. All of these problems of the 20th century had no effect on the law of accelerating returns. The exponential growth of information technologies proceeded smoothly through war and peace, through depression and prosperity.

The emerging 21st century technologies tend to be decentralized and relatively friendly to the environment. With the maturation of nanotechnology, we will also have the opportunity to clean up the mess left from the crude early technologies of industrialization.

But won’t there still be objections from religious and political leaders, not to mention the common man and woman, to such a radical transformation of humanity?

There were objections to the plow also, but that didn’t stop people form using it. The same can be said for every new step in technology. Technologies do have to prove themselves. For every technology that is adopted, many are discarded. Each technology has to demonstrate that it meets basic human needs. The cell phone, for example, meets our need to communicate with one another. We are not going to reach the Singularity in some single great leap forward, but rather through a great many small steps, each seemingly benign and modest in scope.

But what about controversies such as the stem cell issue? Government opposition is clearly slowing down progress in that field.

I clearly support stem cell research, but it is not the case that the field of cell therapies has been significantly slowed down. If anything, the controversy has accelerated creative ways of achieving the holy grail of this field, which is transdifferentiation, that is, creating new differentiated cells you need from your own cells—for example, converting skin cells into heart cells or pancreatic Islet cells. Transdifferentiation has already been demonstrated in the lab. Objections such as those expressed against stem- cell research end up being stones in the water: the stream of progress just flows around them.

Where does God fit into the Singularity?

Although the different religious traditions have somewhat different conceptions of God, the common thread is that God represents unlimited—infinite—levels of intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and love. As systems evolve — through biology and technology — we find that they become more complex, more intelligent and more knowledgeable. They become more intricate and more beautiful, more capable of higher emotions such as love. So they grow exponentially in intelligence, knowledge, creativity, beauty, and love, all of the qualities people ascribe to God without limit. Although evolution does not reach a literally infinite level of these attributes, it does accelerate towards ever greater levels, so we can view evolution as a spiritual process, moving ever closer to this ideal. The Singularity will represent an explosion of these higher values of complexity.

So are you trying to play God?

Actually, I’m trying to play a human. I’m trying to do what humans do well, which is solve problems.

But will we still be human after all these changes?

That depends on how you define human. Some observers define human based on our limitations. I prefer to define us as the species that seeks — and succeeds — in going beyond our limitations.

Many observers point out how science has thrown us off our pedestal, showing us that we’re not as central as we thought, that the stars don’t circle around the Earth, that we’re not descended from the Gods but rather from monkeys, and before that earthworms.

All of that is true, but it turns out that we are central after all. Our ability to create models — virtual realities — in our brains, combined with our modest-looking thumbs, are enabling us to expand our horizons without limit.

I’ve been thinking on and off for two decades about the possibility of a femtotech. Now that nanotech is well established, and well funded, I feel that the time is right to start thinking about the possibility of a femtotech.

You may ask, “What about picotech?” — technology at the picometer (10^-12m) scale. The simple answer to this question is that nature provides nothing at the picometer scale. An atom is about 10^-10 m in size.

The next smallest thing in nature is the nucleus, which is about 100,000 times smaller, i.e., 10^-15 m in size — a femtometer, or “fermi.” A nucleus is composed of protons and neutrons (i.e., “nucleons”), which we now know are composed of 3 quarks, which are bound (“glued”) together by massless (photon-like) particles called “gluons.”

Hence if one wanted to start thinking about a possible femtotech, one would probably need to start looking at how quarks and gluons behave, and see if these behaviors might be manipulated in such a way as to create a technology, i.e., computation and engineering (building stuff).

In this essay, I concentrate on the computation side, since my background is in computer science. Before I started ARCing (After Retirement Careering), I was a computer science professor who gave himself zero chance of getting a grant from conservative NSF or military funders in the U.S. to speculate on the possibilities of a femtotech. But now that I’m no longer a “wager,” I’m free to do what I like, and can join the billion strong “army” of ARCers, to pursue my own passions.

So I started studying QCD (quantum chromodynamics), the mathematical physics theory of the strong force, or as it is known in more modern terms, the “color force.”

Since I have a computer science background, I knew what to look for when sniffing through QCD text books, to be able to map computer science concepts to QCD phenomena.

Bits and logic gates : the heart of computation

If you want to compute at the femto level, how do you do that? What would you need? To me, the essential ingredients of (digital) computing are bits and logic gates.

A bit is a two-state system (e.g., voltage or no voltage, a closed or open switch, etc.) that can be switched from one state to another. It is usual to represent one of these states as “1” and the other as “0,” i.e., as binary digits. A logic gate is a device that can take bits as input and use their states (their 0 or 1 values) to calculate its output.

The three most famous gates, are the NOT gate, the OR gate, and the AND gate. The NOT gate switches a 1 to a 0, and a 0 to a 1. An OR gate outputs a 1 if one or more of its two inputs is a 1, else outputs a 0. An AND gate outputs a 1 only if the first AND second inputs are both 1, else outputs a 0.

There is a famous theorem in theoretical computer science, that says that the set of 3 logic gates {NOT, OR, AND} are “computationally universal,” i.e., using them, you can build any Boolean logic gate to detect any Boolean expression (e.g. (~X & Y) OR (W & Z)).

So if I can find a one to one mapping between these 3 logic gates and phenomena in QCD, I can compute anything in QCD. I would have femtometer-scale computation. That was the big prize I was after.

So, I set out to find phenomena in QCD that I could map bits and logic gates to. I was quickly rewarded. It was a case of “low hanging fruit.” I just happened to be the first person (as far as I know) wandering around the QCD orchard with a very specific type of cherry picking in mind.

The color charge on the quarks and the gluons

There are 4 types of force in the physical world, from weakest to strongest: the gravitational force, the weak nuclear force, the electromagnetic force, and the strong nuclear force. (Actually, their relative strengths depend on the temperature at which these forces act. At the extreme temperatures (energies) that occurred just after the big bang and now at the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) in Geneva, their strengths converge to the same value, a phenomenon called “grand unification.”

In the 60s and 70s physicists became aware that the nucleons (the protons and the neutrons) consisted of 3 quarks, which have fractional electric charges (e.g., +/- 1/3 or 2/3 of the charge of an electron), and a new type of charge, called “color.” The electronic charge came in two types (positive and negative), which is something science has known about for several centuries. The color charge however comes in 3 types, “red” “blue” and “green.”

The electromagnetic force is “mediated” (conveyed) between two electrical charges via the photon (the particle of light). A photon is emitted by one of the charges and is absorbed by the other. This interaction creates the attractive or repulsive force between the electrical charges.

Something similar happens between quarks. The equivalent of the photon is called a gluon. A quark emits a gluon, which is then absorbed by another quark, and this creates the interaction between the two quarks.

There is an essential difference between a photon and a gluon. The photon has no charge of its own, whereas a gluon does have a color charge, in fact, each gluon has 2 such charges. It is bi-charged, or bi-colored. This means that gluons can interact with other gluons, forming complex “glueballs.” I will not be using glueballs in this essay, but they might play an important role in femtotech in the future?!

Strictly speaking, there are more than 3 color charges. In fact there are 6, namely red, blue, green, anti-red, anti-blue, and anti-green. A gluon (at least the type of gluon that I will use in this essay) has one of the first three, and one of the second three. So there are 6 such bi-colored gluons, a red, anti-blue; a red, anti-green; a blue, anti-red; a blue, anti-green; a green, anti-red; a green, anti-blue. In this essay I will use only the red, anti-blue and the blue, anti-red gluons, because (using Occam’s razor), they are all that I need.

Colors are conserved in quark-gluon reactions

How does a gluon interact with a quark? What happens? Remarkably, when a gluon and a quark interact, the gluon may change the quark’s color, and in such a way that the colors are conserved. For example, imagine a red, anti-blue gluon (which from now on will be abbreviated to Gr,~b) interacts with a blue-colored quark (abbreviated from now on to Qb). The gluon will cause the quark to change its color from blue to red, i.e., in symbolic terms:

Gr,~b : Qb -> Qr

In other words, the red, anti-blue gluon acts on the blue (color charged) quark, and converts it into a red (color charged) quark.

Note that before the interaction, there were 3 charges: a red, an anti-blue (both on the gluon), and a blue (on the quark). During the interaction, the anti-blue of the gluon and the blue of the quark cancel, leaving only a red, which is now the color (charge) of the outgoing quark. The colors are conserved.

What would happen if a red, anti-blue gluon (Gr,~b) interacted with a red quark Qr? Nothing. Such an interaction is forbidden in nature, because the color charges in this case are not conserved. Before the interaction, we have a red and an anti-blue charge on the gluon, and a red on the quark. If the quark absorbed the gluon and changed its color from red to blue, then the final charge would be just blue. But that doesn’t match the “2 reds and 1 anti-blue charges” before the interaction. The colors are not conserved, so this interaction is QCD forbidden.

This color conservation operates with the emission of a gluon as well. For example, a red quark Qr could emit a red, anti-blue gluon (Gr,~b) and become a blue quark (Qb). This emission can be represented as

Qr -> Qb + Gr,~b

Note that the colors are conserved. The blue and anti-blue cancel each other, leaving a red on both sides. Color conservation is one of the basic natural laws of QCD.

Now, a gluon that is emitted by one quark can be absorbed by another quark, rather like the way a photon can be emitted and absorbed by two electrically charged particles (which is the basis of the study of quantum electrodynamics, QED). By emitting and absorbing gluons, two quarks can interact with each other and influence each other. I will make heavy use of this phenomenon, as will soon become clear.

The “aha moment”

Probably some of you have already had an “aha moment” on how you might implement femtotech-based computing, based only on what I have said above.

Once I had read about the color charges and gluon emission and absorption, I had my “aha moment.” I felt I had found a way to compute at the femtometer scale, using quarks and gluons, at least in principle. For difficulties facing the practical engineering of these ideas, see towards the end of this essay.

The aha moment gave me the following basic ideas.

a) Represent a bit by the color of a quark. A red for 1, and a blue for 0. (I didn’t need to use green.)
b) To change the state (1 to 0, or 0 to 1), change the color of the quark from red to blue, or vice versa.
c) To change the color of a quark, use an appropriately emitted gluon, i.e., one possessing the appropriate bi-coloring.
d) To implement logic gates (and this was the creative challenging part), use a sequence of gluon emission and absorption (of the same gluon).

Mapping the gates to quark-gluon interactions

Before I get into the specifics of the mappings, I need to introduce a fictional didactic device that I call a “quark chamber,” i.e., a region of space (perhaps as small as a nucleon), such as a sphere, in which a quark enters at one end, interacts (or fails to interact), and exits at the other end. Also entering or exiting the quark chamber is a gluon. In the case of gluon emission, the gluon exits the quark chamber. In the case of gluon absorption, the gluon enters the quark chamber and is absorbed within it.

NOT Gate

Fill the quark chamber with two gluons: a Gr,~b and a Gb,~r. If a red quark Qr enters the quark chamber, it will not interact with the Gr,~b gluon, but will be converted to a blue quark by absorption of a Gb,~r gluon, and will exit the quark chamber as a blue quark, according to the interaction

Gb,~r : Qr -> Qb

An ipso facto interaction will occur for a blue quark entering the quark chamber, according to the interaction

Gr,~b : Qb -> Qr

We thus have a NOT gate. A red quark is converted to a blue quark (1 to 0), and a blue quark is converted to a red quark (0 to 1). This is the definition of a NOT gate.

OR Gate

To implement an OR gate is a bit more complicated. We need 2 quark chambers, A, B. Chamber A is a gluon generating chamber. If a red quark enters chamber A, a red, anti-blue gluon Gr,~b emission is caused in the chamber and the gluon then exits. (The resulting blue quark is ignored.)

If a blue quark enters chamber A, nothing happens. No gluon exits the chamber.

We now have 4 cases to consider:

a) red(1), red(2): (a red quark(1) enters chamber A, and a second red quark(2) enters chamber B). The red quark Qr(1) entering chamber A generates a Gr,~b gluon that enters chamber B. This gluon has no effect on the red Qr(2) entering chamber B at the same time. The red Qr(2) then passes out of chamber B unaffected. In other words, the output quark from chamber B is red. Hence if the inputs are red(1) and red(2) the output quark is red.

b) red(1), blue(2): The red quark Qr(1) entering chamber A generates a Gr,~b gluon that enters chamber B. The blue quark Qb(2) that enters chamber B is converted to a red quark Qr(2) that then exits chamber B. In other words, the output quark from chamber B is red. Hence if the inputs are red(1) and blue(2) the output quark is red.

c) blue(1), red(2): The blue quark Qb(1) entering chamber A generates NO gluon, so no gluon enters chamber B. The red quark Qr(2) that enters chamber B then exits unchanged. In other words, the output quark from chamber B is red. Hence if the inputs are blue(1) and red(2) the output quark is red.

d) blue(1), blue(2): The blue quark Qb(1) entering chamber A generates NO gluon, so no gluon enters chamber B. The blue quark Qb(2) that enters chamber B then exits chamber B unchanged. In other words, the output quark from chamber B is blue. Hence if the inputs are blue(1) and blue(2) the output quark is blue.

Thus the specifications of an OR gate are satisfied.

AND Gate

The AND gate is a bit more complicated still. It contains 3 chambers, A, B, C. Chambers A and B both output a red quark if the input is a red quark, and a blue, anti-red gluon Gb,~r if the input is a blue quark. This time, instead of dealing with single events, think in terms of a stream of input and output quarks. Chamber C has as input, the outputs of chambers A and B, as well as a fixed red quark Qr(3) input, for reasons that will soon become clear.

We again have 4 cases to consider:

a) red(1), red(2): (red quarks(1) enter chamber A, and red quarks(2) enter chamber B). The red quarks Qr(1) and Qr(2) pass unchanged into chamber C, along with the fixed red quarks Qr(3). There are only red quarks in chamber C, so only red quarks can exit chamber C. In other words, the output quarks from chamber C are red. Hence if the inputs are red(1) and red(2) the output quarks are red (now thinking in terms of streams of quarks).

b) red(1), blue(2): (red quarks(1) enter chamber A, and blue quarks(2) enter chamber B). The red quarks Qr(1) pass unchanged into chamber C, along with the fixed red quarks Qr(3). The blue quarks Qb(2) that enter chamber B generate blue, anti-red gluons Gb,~r which pass into chamber C. These gluons convert all the red quarks in chamber C to blue quarks, so that only blue quarks exit from chamber C. Hence if the inputs are red(1) and blue(2) the output quarks are blue.

c) blue(1), red(2): (blue quarks(1) enter chamber A, and red quarks(2) enter chamber B). The blue quarks Qb(1) that enter chamber A generate blue, anti-red gluons Gb,~r which pass into chamber C. The red quarks Qr(2) that enter chamber B pass unchanged into chamber C, along with the fixed red quarks Qr(3). These gluons convert all the red quarks in chamber C to blue quarks, so that only blue quarks exit from chamber C. Hence if the inputs are blue(1) and red(2) the output quarks are blue.

d) blue(1), blue(2): (blue quarks(1) enter chamber A, and blue quarks(2) enter chamber B). The blue quarks Qb(1) and Qb(2) both generate blue, anti-red gluons Gb,~r which pass into chamber C. These gluons convert the fixed red quarks entering chamber C to blue quarks, so that only blue quarks exit from chamber C. Hence if the inputs are blue(1) and blue(2) the output quarks are blue.

Thus the specifications of an AND gate are satisfied.

Engineering Challenges

Now that all 3 gates have been mapped to quark-gluon interactions in QCD, one has an “in principle” recipe for femtometer scale computation.

However the practical engineering problems remain, especially when considering something called “asymptotic freedom,” which says that quarks interact weakly when close together, but immensely strongly as they separate, rather like a tough rubber band being stretched. The more it is stretched, the greater the potential energy it has. Similarly with the 3 quarks inside a nucleon.

A nucleon is stable (in the nucleus) because it has 3 quarks, one is red, another blue, and the third green. These 3 colors “sum” to “white” (rather like a spinning color wheel of equally sized red, blue and green sectors), which is analogous to the way an atom, with its positively charged nucleus and its negatively charged electrons, sums to neutrality.

However, if one attempts to extract a quark from the nucleon, the gluons between the extracting quark and the other two quarks, behave in complex nonlinear ways, interacting with other gluons, to form a hugely powerful resistance, until the potential energy is so great that a quark, anti-quark pair can be formed, which combine to form a pion (pi meson). (Mesons consist of 2 quarks: a quark and its anti-quark.) Hence it seems impossible to isolate a quark (or a gluon). Experimentally, no quark or gluon has ever been isolated. Experimentalists have virtually given up trying.

Hence the implicit assumption in the above models, namely that isolated quarks and gluons are used, seems unphysical and unrealistic.

But, if the gluons and quarks are close together, the “stretching rubber band” phenomenon does not occur. There may be particles that contain more than 3 quarks, the so called “exotics,” which may have 3N quarks (a multiple of 3 to maintain color neutrality (“whiteness”) by summing an equal number of red, blue, and green color charges).

There may also be “glueballs” that consist only of gluons that interact in highly non linear and hence complex ways.

Another possibility is to heat up the quark/gluon complex so much that one obtains a quark-gluon “plasma.” At a critical temperature, after cooling the plasma, quark-gluon “chains” may start forming, that may interact in ways similar to the way molecules interact within the cell, i.e., by complementary “lock and key” touching.

Conclusions

The above femtometer scale computation models are “in principle” only. To make them practical will probably require new thinking, to ensure that they are compatible with the severe constraints imposed by the principles of QCD, e.g., quark confinement and asymptotic freedom.

Hopefully, this essay will stimulate other researchers to enter this new research field of femtotech. Perhaps the “other side” of technology (the “building stuff” side, in contrast with the computational side) can be implemented with glueballs as well, or with quark/gluon “condensates.”

One thing is clear. If humanity does not make any progress along the lines of femtotech, sooner or later, human beings (or our artificially intelligent successors) will be scratching at the “nanotech walls” that confine us.

One final comment I’m thinking of trying to create an “attotech” (i.e., on the scale of 10^-18 meters) by using the weak-force particles (W and Z particles) that interact not only with quarks, but with the much lighter leptons (e.g., electrons, etc) as well.

Human technology has progressed from millitech, to microtech, to (recently) nanotech, and this essay attempts to start the thinking on femtotech (and attotech).

This downscaling trend provides a potential answer to the famous “Fermi paradox” (if intelligent life is so commonplace in the universe, “where are they?”). If intelligent creatures or machines can continue to “scale down” in their technologies, the answer to Fermi’s question would become “They are all around us, whole civilizations living inside elementary particles, too small for us to detect.”

When my 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, was published, and augmented a couple of years later by the 2001 essay, it generated several lines of criticism, such as Moore’s law will come to an end, hardware capability may be expanding exponentially but software is stuck in the mud, the brain is too complicated, there are capabilities in the brain that inherently cannot be replicated in software, and several others. I specifically wrote The Singularity Is Near to respond to those critiques.

I cannot say that Allen would necessarily be convinced by the arguments I make in the book, but at least he could have responded to what I actually wrote. Instead, he offers de novo arguments as if nothing has ever been written to respond to these issues. Allen’s descriptions of my own positions appear to be drawn from my 10-year-old essay. While I continue to stand by that essay, Allen does not summarize my positions correctly even from that essay.

Allen writes that “the Law of Accelerating Returns (LOAR). . . is not a physical law.” I would point out that most scientific laws are not physical laws, but result from the emergent properties of a large number of events at a finer level. A classical example is the laws of thermodynamics (LOT). If you look at the mathematics underlying the LOT, they model each particle as following a random walk. So by definition, we cannot predict where any particular particle will be at any future time. Yet the overall properties of the gas are highly predictable to a high degree of precision according to the laws of thermodynamics. So it is with the law of accelerating returns. Each technology project and contributor is unpredictable, yet the overall trajectory as quantified by basic measures of price-performance and capacity nonetheless follow remarkably predictable paths.

If computer technology were being pursued by only a handful of researchers, it would indeed be unpredictable. But it’s being pursued by a sufficiently dynamic system of competitive projects that a basic measure such as instructions per second per constant dollar follows a very smooth exponential path going back to the 1890 American census. I discuss the theoretical basis for the LOAR extensively in my book, but the strongest case is made by the extensive empirical evidence that I and others present.

Allen writes that “these ‘laws’ work until they don’t.” Here, Allen is confusing paradigms with the ongoing trajectory of a basic area of information technology. If we were examining the trend of creating ever-smaller vacuum tubes, the paradigm for improving computation in the 1950s, it’s true that this specific trend continued until it didn’t. But as the end of this particular paradigm became clear, research pressure grew for the next paradigm. The technology of transistors kept the underlying trend of the exponential growth of price-performance going, and that led to the fifth paradigm (Moore’s law) and the continual compression of features on integrated circuits. There have been regular predictions that Moore’s law will come to an end. The semiconductor industry’s roadmap titled projects seven-nanometer features by the early 2020s. At that point, key features will be the width of 35 carbon atoms, and it will be difficult to continue shrinking them. However, Intel and other chip makers are already taking the first steps toward the sixth paradigm, which is computing in three dimensions to continue exponential improvement in price performance. Intel projects that three-dimensional chips will be mainstream by the teen years. Already three-dimensional transistors and three-dimensional memory chips have been introduced.

This sixth paradigm will keep the LOAR going with regard to computer price performance to the point, later in this century, where a thousand dollars of computation will be trillions of times more powerful than the human brain¹. And it appears that Allen and I are at least in agreement on what level of computation is required to functionally simulate the human brain².

Allen then goes on to give the standard argument that software is not progressing in the same exponential manner of hardware. In The Singularity Is Near, I address this issue at length, citing different methods of measuring complexity and capability in software that demonstrate a similar exponential growth. One recent study (“Report to the President and Congress, Designing a Digital Future: Federally Funded Research and Development in Networking and Information Technology” by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology) states the following:

“Even more remarkable — and even less widely understood — is that in many areas, performance gains due to improvements in algorithms have vastly exceeded even the dramatic performance gains due to increased processor speed. The algorithms that we use today for speech recognition, for natural language translation, for chess playing, for logistics planning, have evolved remarkably in the past decade … Here is just one example, provided by Professor Martin Grötschel of Konrad-Zuse-Zentrum für Informationstechnik Berlin. Grötschel, an expert in optimization, observes that a benchmark production planning model solved using linear programming would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day. Fifteen years later—in 2003—this same model could be solved in roughly one minute, an improvement by a factor of roughly 43 million. Of this, a factor of roughly 1,000 was due to increased processor speed, whereas a factor of roughly 43,000 was due to improvements in algorithms! Grötschel also cites an algorithmic improvement of roughly 30,000 for mixed integer programming between 1991 and 2008. The design and analysis of algorithms, and the study of the inherent computational complexity of problems, are fundamental subfields of computer science.”

I cite many other examples like this in the book³.

Regarding AI, Allen is quick to dismiss IBM’s Watson as narrow, rigid, and brittle. I get the sense that Allen would dismiss any demonstration short of a valid passing of the Turing test. I would point out that Watson is not so narrow. It deals with a vast range of human knowledge and is capable of dealing with subtle forms of language, including puns, similes, and metaphors. It’s not perfect, but neither are humans, and it was good enough to get a higher score than the best two human Jeopardy! players put together.

Allen writes that Watson was put together by the scientists themselves, building each link of narrow knowledge in specific areas. Although some areas of Watson’s knowledge were programmed directly, according to IBM, Watson acquired most of its knowledge on its own by reading natural language documents such as encyclopedias. That represents its key strength. It not only is able to understand the convoluted language in Jeopardy! queries (answers in search of a question), but it acquired its knowledge by reading vast amounts of natural-language documents. IBM is now working with Nuance (a company I originally founded as Kurzweil Computer Products) to have Watson read tens of thousands of medical articles to create a medical diagnostician.

A word on the nature of Watson’s “understanding” is in order here. A lot has been written that Watson works through statistical knowledge rather than “true” understanding. Many readers interpret this to mean that Watson is merely gathering statistics on word sequences. The term “statistical information” in the case of Watson refers to distributed coefficients in self-organizing methods such as Markov models. One could just as easily refer to the distributed neurotransmitter concentrations in the human cortex as “statistical information.” Indeed, we resolve ambiguities in much the same way that Watson does by considering the likelihood of different interpretations of a phrase.

Allen writes: “Every structure [in the brain] has been precisely shaped by millions of years of evolution to do a particular thing, whatever it might be. It is not like a computer, with billions of identical transistors in regular memory arrays that are controlled by a CPU with a few different elements. In the brain, every individual structure and neural circuit has been individually refined by evolution and environmental factors.”

Allen’s statement that every structure and neural circuit is unique is simply impossible. That would mean that the design of the brain would require hundreds of trillions of bytes of information. Yet the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome. And while the translation of the genome into a brain is not straightforward, the brain cannot have more design information than the genome. Note that epigenetic information (such as the peptides controlling gene expression) do not appreciably add to the amount of information in the genome. Experience and learning do add significantly to the amount of information, but the same can be said of AI systems. I show in The Singularity Is Near that after lossless compression (due to massive redundancy in the genome), the amount of design information in the genome is about 50 million bytes, roughly half of which pertains to the brainsup>4. That’s not simple, but it is a level of complexity we can deal with and represents less complexity than many software systems in the modern world.

How do we get on the order of 100 trillion connections in the brain from only tens of millions of bytes of design information? Obviously, the answer is through redundancy. There are on the order of a billion pattern-recognition mechanisms in the cortex. They are interconnected in intricate ways, but even in the connections there is massive redundancy. The cerebellum also has billions of repeated patterns of neurons. It is true that the massively repeated structures in the brain learn different items of information as we learn and gain experience, but the same thing is true of artificially intelligent systems such as Watson.

Dharmendra S. Modha, manager of cognitive computing for IBM Research, writes: “…neuroanatomists have not found a hopelessly tangled, arbitrarily connected network, completely idiosyncratic to the brain of each individual, but instead a great deal of repeating structure within an individual brain and a great deal of homology across species … The astonishing natural reconfigurability gives hope that the core algorithms of neurocomputation are independent of the specific sensory or motor modalities and that much of the observed variation in cortical structure across areas represents a refinement of a canonical circuit; it is indeed this canonical circuit we wish to reverse engineer.”

Allen articulates what I describe in my book as the “scientist’s pessimism.” Scientists working on the next generation are invariably struggling with that next set of challenges, so if someone describes what the technology will look like in 10 generations, their eyes glaze over. One of the pioneers of integrated circuits was describing to me recently the struggles to go from 10 micron (10,000-nanometer) feature sizes to five-micron (5,000 nanometers) features over 30 years ago. They were cautiously confident of this goal, but when people predicted that someday we would actually have circuitry with feature sizes under one micron (1,000 nanometers), most of the scientists struggling to get to five microns thought that was too wild to contemplate. Objections were made on the fragility of circuitry at that level of precision, thermal effects, and so on. Well, today, Intel is starting to use chips with 22-nanometer gate lengths.

We saw the same pessimism with the genome project. Halfway through the 15-year project, only 1 percent of the genome had been collected, and critics were proposing basic limits on how quickly the genome could be sequenced without destroying the delicate genetic structures. But the exponential growth in both capacity and price performance continued (both roughly doubling every year), and the project was finished seven years later. The project to reverse-engineer the human brain is making similar progress. It is only recently, for example, that we have reached a threshold with noninvasive scanning techniques that we can see individual interneuronal connections forming and firing in real time.

Allen’s “complexity brake” confuses the forest with the trees. If you want to understand, model, simulate, and re-create a pancreas, you don’t need to re-create or simulate every organelle in every pancreatic Islet cell. You would want, instead, to fully understand one Islet cell, then abstract its basic functionality, and then extend that to a large group of such cells. This algorithm is well understood with regard to Islet cells. There are now artificial pancreases that utilize this functional model being tested. Although there is certainly far more intricacy and variation in the brain than in the massively repeated Islet cells of the pancreas, there is nonetheless massive repetition of functions.

Allen mischaracterizes my proposal to learn about the brain from scanning the brain to understand its fine structure. It is not my proposal to simulate an entire brain “bottom up” without understanding the information processing functions. We do need to understand in detail how individual types of neurons work, and then gather information about how functional modules are connected. The functional methods that are derived from this type of analysis can then guide the development of intelligent systems. Basically, we are looking for biologically inspired methods that can accelerate work in AI, much of which has progressed without significant insight as to how the brain performs similar functions. From my own work in speech recognition, I know that our work was greatly accelerated when we gained insights as to how the brain prepares and transforms auditory information.

The way that these massively redundant structures in the brain differentiate is through learning and experience. The current state of the art in AI does, however, enable systems to also learn from their own experience. The Google self-driving cars (which have driven over 140,000 miles through California cities and towns) learn from their own driving experience as well as from Google cars driven by human drivers. As I mentioned, Watson learned most of its knowledge by reading on its own.

It is true that Watson is not quite at human levels in its ability to understand human language (if it were, we would be at the Turing test level now), yet it was able to defeat the best humans. This is because of the inherent speed and reliability of memory that computers have. So when a computer does reach human levels, which I believe will happen by the end of the 2020s, it will be able to go out on the Web and read billions of pages as well as have experiences in online virtual worlds. Combining human-level pattern recognition with the inherent speed and accuracy of computers will be very powerful. But this is not an alien invasion of intelligence machines—we create these tools to make ourselves smarter. I think Allen will agree with me that this is what is unique about the human species: we build these tools to extend our own reach.

At carboncopies.org, we strive to take this research a step further: to bring about and nurture projects that are crucial to achieving substrate-independent minds (SIM). That is, enable minds to operate on many different hardware platforms — not just a neural substrate. And we seek realistic routes to SIM.

But what is it that those projects should accomplish?

When you transfer a mind from its biological substrate to another sufficiently powerful computing architecture, that mind has become substrate-independent. In that case, complete access is gained in a way that enables you to transfer its relevant data. Such minds still depend on a substrate to run, but you can operate on a variety of different substrates.

Life expansion

What do you do with a substrate-independent mind? Backing up, copying and restoring minds can be aspects of a robust route to life extension. But SIM researchers are particularly interested in enhancement, competitiveness and adaptability.

We can think of this as “life expansion.”

This has been described to some degree in my article, Pattern survival versus Gene survival. Imagine a mind that can think many times faster than we do now, and can access knowledge databases such as the Internet as intimately as we access our memories now.

In addition to minds that are copies of a human mind, we are interested in man-machine merger, or rather in the ability of man to keep pace with machine and share the future together. Other-than-human substrate-independent minds are therefore necessarily also topics of SIM. In this context, it is worth noting that a SIM is a type of artificial general intelligence (AGI). But an AGI is also a type of SIM, since the AGI should be able to take advantage of any sufficiently powerful computing platform. The two areas of research are closely related.

How to create a SIM

So there are at least two ways to  successfully create a substrate-independent mind: implementing a mind in a synthetic neural system or transferring the existing characteristic information — and the functions that process that information — from a specific  mind into an implementation that operates in another substrate.

Are both of those legitimate goals of SIM?

A synthetic neural system and the transfer of information about an existing neural system to a synthetic implementation do share many technological requirements, but there are some significant differences that appear when you consider the possible scope of each of those aims. For example, how complex must the neurons of a synthetic neural system be? A simple spiking neuron is a computational element that integrates weighted input received through numerous synaptic connections and delivers a spike of activity when that integral reaches a threshold.

We can certainly imagine that a synthetic neural system composed of simple spiking neurons could carry out useful work as a flexible and powerful neuromorphic computer.

Neuron (credit: Wikipedia user LadyofHats, public domain)

But how does that compare with a human brain? The neurons of the human brain, or of any biological brain, are not simple spiking neurons. As we zoom in and examine the composition of a biological neuron, as we take note of the intricacy of its biological machinery, we learn that each individual neuron is in fact an incredibly complex biological entity. To capture all of its behavior might require analysis and simulation down to the molecular level, or even to the subatomic level if we care about every possible environmental effect that interaction with the neuron can have.

Does that matter? That depends on your goals. We must concede that at some level, somewhere between the spiking of the neurons and their subatomic behavior, cumulative non-linear behavior may lead to results that differ significantly from those of a simple spiking neuron. This is certain, as it has proven to be quite hard for computational neuroscientists to develop precise models of single neurons that produce spikes at exactly the same times as a biological neuron would, given the same input¹. And spike timing is crucial for computation in many operations of the biological brain.

Mind uploading

If we care about more than just the train of spikes generated by a neuron, the challenge becomes ever so much greater. If the goal is to create a synthetic neural system that can do useful things, those intricacies may not matter. But what if the goal is to take one person’s specific human mind and move it to another substrate in such a way that the experience of the mind’s thought processes and sensations are not disturbed? What if we want to consider a transfer to SIM as a means of continuing a human being’s existence? That is the putative achievement often called “mind uploading.”

Could we create a synthetic brain that is not identical with the biological brain on the molecular or subatomic level, but is functionally identical at every level at which it could interact with its environment, interact within itself, and through time?

The answer is no. That is simply not possible.

At some level, no matter how precise the emulation in another substrate, there is a divergence. In the parlance of information theory, this is a Kullback-Leibler divergence (or KL divergence). KL divergence measures the divergence, expressed as additional bits required to code samples from a probability distribution P when using a code based on a probability distribution Q. The most optimal encoding of samples from Q will not be optimal for samples from P if P ≠ Q.

In plain English, KL divergence evaluates the overhead of an emulation. Physically, what does this overhead mean? It means that we pay a penalty for implementing one computing method in another method. We cannot, using exactly the same space and time, carry out the same computational processes as in the original biological brain and produce the exact same effects, both internal and external interactions. We cannot do better than the physical elements that are carrying out their own natural processes (or computations, if you like). E.g., a particle’s spin is the optimal expression of that characteristic and is not represented as efficiently in any model of that spin.

Fidelity trade-offs

Fortunately for SIM, this problem is actually a straw man. Do we really care about every possible process, every possible interaction? By analogy, when we want to run Macintosh programs on a PC, do we actually care about the precise patterns in space and time in which the Mac computer architecture is heating up its environment? We usually do not care about such things. We just want the programs to run and to produce the expected results.

We can emulate the Mac on a PC and run Mac programs, even if the underlying architectures are different. We may even be able to emulate one architecture on another and thereby improve the performance of the programs we wish to run!

Similarly, SIM is not about crafting perfect copies of brains or copying everything about the way they work in their environment. Since we already have the original biological implementation that interacts and decays exactly as it does, what would be the point?

SIM certainly includes the goal of creating a synthetic neural system. It is both about creating something that can perform as well or outperform the original system in the ways that we care about, and about creating a process that, when desired, can provide for a faithful transition from one system to another by emulation.

It is possible to select abstraction levels within a functional architecture and to create alternate implementations of the functions at that level. If this were not the case, the entire field of artificial intelligence (AI) research would have no hope of achieving human-level or better performance on tasks that human brains can carry out. We already know that AI systems can match and exceed human performance in a variety of tasks.

When we speak of SIM as a combination of a process (“uploading”) and of an objective (to achieve a “substrate-independent mind”), it is really about collecting the parameter values at the chosen abstraction level and re-implementing the dynamics with those parameter values at that abstraction level in a desired target platform. That is SIM.

There certainly is some relationship between such a process and means of life-extension that the notion of “copying the brain” evokes, a transition from human to post-human existence. Unfortunately, most discussions that focus on this aspect of the endeavor are relatively vague and unclear. In contrast, the ideas behind SIM are actually quite crisp and clear.

Note that it is also possible to devise an uploading procedure that provides the experience of an unbroken transition, even if it is a transition to something that is at some implementation level different from a prior existence based on a biological brain. For example, it is not necessary for the process to be perceived as abrupt, strange, or even uncomfortable. Avoiding such experiences is a matter of process implementation. The mind, at least at the level chosen for re-implementation (and further work), can be quite good at making everything it experiences seem perfectly sensible. We do that all the time (and sometimes we even confabulate reality).

So, despite objections about the differences between biological and other hardware — and the resulting implementation of a SIM, it is quite possible that if each of your neurons and synapses were replaced one by one with something else, you might not notice.

This article arose from a discussion with colleagues. I would like to thank both of these colleagues (you know who you are) for their useful critiques during that discussion.

There are at least three ways to answer this challenge. First, it can be approached with a medical ethics focus on the mindclone itself. Second, it can be approached philosophically — focusing on the mindclone as just part and parcel of the biological original. Third, it can be approached pragmatically: what will the government likely require?

Creating Ethical Beings Ethically

How can it be ethical to test mindclone-creating mindware when any resulting mindclone has not first consented to being the subject of such an experiment?  How will we know we have mindware that creates an ethically-reasoning mindclone if it is not ethical to even do the tests and trials?

As to the first question, ethicists agree that someone else can consent to a treatment for a person who is unable to consent. For example, the parents of a newborn child can consent to experimental medical treatment for them. The crucial criterion is that the consenter must have the best interests of the patient in mind, and not be primarily concerned with the success of a medical experiment. One of the purposes of an Institutional Review Board (IRB) or medical review committee is to exercise this kind of consent on behalf of persons who cannot give their consent. Hence, having a responsible committee act on their behalf solves the problem of ethical consent for the birth of a mindclone or beman.

Sometimes people complain that they “did not ask to be born.” Yet, nobody has an ethical right to decide whether or not to be born, as that would be temporally illogical. The solution to this conundrum is for someone else to consent on behalf of the newborn, whether this is done implicitly via biological parenting, or explicitly via an ethics committee. In each case there is a moral obligation (which can be enforced legally today for biological parents) to avoid intentionally causing harm to the newborn.

We are now ready to turn to the second question:  how can an ethics committee, acting on behalf of the best interests of future mindclones or bemans, avoid causing harm to them?

One possible solution to ethically developing mindclones is to take the project in stages. The first stage must not rely upon self-awareness or consciousness. This would be based upon first developing the autonomous, moral reasoning ability that is a necessary, but not sufficient, basis for consciousness. Consciousness is a continuum of maturing abilities, when healthy, to be autonomous and empathetic, with autonomous defined as: “the independent capacity to make reasoned decisions, with moral ones at the apex, and to act on them.” Independent means, in this context, “capable of idiosyncratic thinking and acting.”

By running many simulations, mindclone developers can gain comfort that the reasoning ability of the mindware is human-equivalent. In fact, the reasoning ability of the mindware should match that of the biological original who is being mindcloned.

The second stage of development expands the mindware to incorporate human feelings and emotions, via settings associated with aspects of pain, pleasure and the entire vast spectrum of human sentience. At this stage, all the feelings and emotions are terminating in a “black box,” devoid of any self-awareness. Engineers will measure and validate that the feelings are real, via instruments, but no “one” will actually be feeling the feelings.

The third stage entails creating in software the meaningful memories and patterns of thought of the original person being mindcloned. This can be considered the identity module. If this is a case of a de novo cyberconscious being, i.e., a beman, then this identity module is either missing or is created from whole cloth.

Finally, a consciousness bridge will be developed that marries the reasoning, sentience and identity modules, giving rise to autonomy with empathy and hence consciousness. Feelings and emotions will be mapped to memories and characteristic ways of processing information. There will be a sentient research subject when the consciousness bridge first connects the autonomy, empathy and identity modules.

This bridging approach to ethically creating mindclones is reminiscent of Dennett’s observation that the disassociation from themselves that some victims of horrible abuse exhibit — a kind of denial that the abuse happened to them — is not only a way to avoid the sensation of suffering, but is also likely to be the normal state in beings that have not integrated consciousness into their mind.

In other words, if a being is unable to mentally organize a conceptualized self into a mental world of conceptualized things and experienced sensations, then they cannot actually suffer from pain because there is not a yet a self to suffer. Pain can be experienced, and it can hurt like hell, but it is an autonomic hurt and not a personally experienced hurt. In Dennett’s view, when people witness this kind of pain in most animals, they anthropomorphize themselves into the animal’s position and imagine the animal’s hurt. But because most animals cannot do this, they cannot hurt. Similarly, until a self was bridged into a mindclone’s or beman’s complex relational database of mindware and mindfiles, there would be “no one home” to complain.

Ethically, approval from research authorities should be obtained before the consciousness bridge is activated. There will be concern not to cause gratuitous harm, nor to cause fear, and to manage the subject at the end of the experiment gracefully or to continue its virtual life appropriately. The ethics approvals may be more readily granted if the requests are graduated. For example, the first request could be to bridge just a small part of the empathy, identity and autonomy modules, and for just a brief period of time. After the results of experiments are assessed, positive results would be used to request more extensive approvals. Ultimately there would be adequate confidence that a protocol existed pursuant to which a mindclone could be safely, and humanely, awakened into full consciousness for an unending period of time — just as there are analogous protocols for bringing flesh patients out of medically induced comas.

For example, before companies are allowed to test new drugs on patients they must first test a very small dose of the drug, for a very short period of time, on a healthy volunteer. Only gradually, based on satisfaction with the safety of previous tests, are companies allowed to test the drugs more robustly. Analogously, we can envision ethical authorities first permitting the test of only a small sliver of consciousness and only for a small sliver of time. Gradually, as ethical review committees become convinced that the previous trials were safe (did not cause pain or fear), greater tests of consciousness would be permitted.

Of course we are all aware of drugs that have been withdrawn from sale after having even been approved. In these cases evidence of dangerous side effects appear that were not evident during the clinical trials. No doubt the same situation will occur with mindclones — some tortured minds may be created inadvertently. This does not mean it is unethical to create mindclones. It means that every means practical should be employed to minimize the risks of such side effects, and if they manifest, to be able to rapidly resolve the problem. For example, if test equipment indicates a serious problem with a mindclone it should be promptly placed into a “sleep-mode” so as not to suffer.

In the graduated process described above the experimental subject still did not consent to being “born.”  However, they could not so consent. In these cases a guardian (such as an institutional review board or certified cyberpsychiatrist or attorney) can ethically consent on an incompetent’s behalf, with such conditions as they may to impose. Alternatively, humans may in fact consent that their donated mindfiles can be used to create mindclones through a medical research process, assuming such consent was fully informed with a disclosure of the risks to the best of the researcher’s abilities.

In the foregoing way, it will be possible to ethically develop mindware that can be approved by regulatory authorities as capable of producing safe and effective mindclones for ordinary people. The authority may be the FDA in the U.S., or the EMA in the E.U., or some new regulatory entity. They will need to be assured that the mindware is safe and effective, and that proving it so was accomplished via clinical trials that were ethically conducted. By taking the inchoate mindclone through incrementally greater stages of consciousness, the regulatory hurdle can be met.

What’s the Big Deal — Just Me and My Mindclone

Another approach to the ethics of mindcloning is to remember that a mindclone and their biological original are the same person. Hence, the ethical requirement of “consent” is satisfied as long as a biological person requests their mindfile to be activated with mindware into a mindclone.

For example, there is no ethical objection to a person authorizing one, two, or 22 plastic surgeries upon their face, in the process transforming their looks almost beyond recognition. With mindcloning the plastic surgery is replaced with cyber surgery, and it is performed outside of one’s body. However, the end result, functionally, is quite similar — a person has consented to change of self — from one face to another in the case of plastic surgery; from one instantiation to two instantiations in the case of mindcloning. In each case the individual’s future will be changed, because others will interact differently with them, and they will behave differently. However, we recognize the right for a person to medically do as they please with their body (and mind), provided no doctor is being called upon to harm them without a countervailing benefit.

When consciousness first arises in a mindclone, it is not a new consciousness but an expansion of an existing consciousness. If it hurts, if it frightens, if it enlightens, it is not pain, fear or inspiration occurring to a new soul, but to an existing soul who now transcends two substrates: brain and software. The opening of consciousness in a mindclone is like what occurs to us when we have a profound educational experience.

I remember that I cried when I first read how the Nazis tied the legs of pregnant Jews together to kill them and their babies, and how, half a century later, the Liberian rebels chopped off the hands of young teenagers and talented craftsmen. My consciousness opened up to realms of cruelty that I had never imagined. I can’t say that I’m any better off for that education, but I knew what I was getting into in reading those stories. Similarly, creating a mindclone is going to change our minds. But it is our minds that we are changing, and this is something we have an ethical right to do.

We must also always remember that our minds are dynamically evolving pastiches of information and patterns of information processing. There is no such thing as having one mind, completely formed at birth, and never changing after that. Indeed, an excellent definition of a mind is: that which idiosyncratically aggregates, utilizes and exchanges information and information processing patterns. Consider the following meditation by Douglas Hofstadter in I Am a Strange Loop:

We are all curious collages, weird little planetoids that grow by accreting other people’s habits and ideas and styles and tics and jokes and phrases and tunes and hopes and fears as if they were meteorites that came soaring out of the blue, collided with us, and stuck. What at first is an artificial, alien mannerism slowly fuses into the stuff of our self, like wax melting in the sun, and gradually becomes as much a part of us as ever it was of someone else (and that person may very well have borrowed it from someone else to begin with).

Although my meteorite metaphor may make it sound as if we are victims of random bombardment, I don’t mean to suggest that we willingly accrete just any old mannerism onto our sphere’s surface — we are very selective, usually borrowing traits that we admire or covet — but even our style of selectivity is itself influenced over the years by what we have turned into as a result of our repeated accretions. And what was once right on the surface gradually becomes buried like a Roman ruin, growing closer and closer to the core of us as our radius keeps increasing.

All of this suggests that each of us is a bundle of fragments of other people’s souls, simply put together in a new way. But of course not all contributors are represented equally. Those whom we love and who love us are the most strongly represented inside us, and our “I” is formed by a complex collusion of all their influences echoing down the many years.

The relevance of Hofstadter’s extended metaphor lies in its implication that a mindclone is very much a part of its biological original because so very much of it would be copied from the original. If we are an agglomeration of other people, we surely must be much more an agglomeration of ourselves — even as we evolve from month to month and year to year. Our mindclones will be consolidations of ourselves, extensions of ourselves, and expansions of ourselves. They will be “of ourselves” and hence we are on firm ethical ground when we consent to their conscious awakening.

Quite a different situation prevails for the creation of a non-mindclone beman. Such consciousness is not an extension of anyone, but an entirely new idiosyncratic mixture of information and information processing patterns. The creation of such consciousness could be ethically considered as an exercise of a person’s own personal autonomy only in terms of each person having a right to create new life, as with biological reproductive rights.

The Ethics of Practicality

In the film Singularity is Near, futurist Ray Kurzweil argues with environmentalist Bill McKibben over the ethics of keeping people alive as long as technology makes a good quality of life possible. McKibbon says he is worried about the ethics of avoiding death. Kurzweil responds, “I don’t think people are going to wax philosophical if they are healthy but 120 years old, and a government official says they have to die.”  The clear implication is “hell no.”

Similarly, I started a truck locating company called Geostar back in the 1980s. At first, people wrung their hands over the ethics of monitoring the truck drivers’ locations via satellite. Many thought the drivers would rip the satellite locators off their cab roofs. Instead, the drivers embraced the technology because it enabled them to make much more money. The satellite tracking technology permitted trucking company dispatchers to know at all times if locator-equipped drivers were close to the locations’ newly called-in loads. Not a single locator was ripped off in the thousands of trucks using our service.

I think practically speaking, the benefits of having a mindclone will be so enticing that any ethical dilemma will find a resolution. With mindclones, we are offering people the opportunity to cram twice as much life into each day, absorb twice as many interesting things and continue living beyond the days of their bodies — with a practical hope of future transplantation via downloading into a new body. I doubt that those who wax philosophically about the ethics of mindcloning will win many arguments. People will want their mindclones, like we want smartphones, especially as they become cheaper and better.

There will be different companies competing to offer mindclone-creating mindware. They will need some sort of regulatory approval in order to legally sell their mindware (as opposed to black market sales). The public will be reluctant to permit cyber-consciousness to arise in great numbers without some guarantee of its safety and efficacy, e.g., lack of psychoses in mindclones. Certainly the public will only accept the citizenship of mindclones that are created from mindware that has been certified (by an expert government agency) to produce mindclones that are mentally equivalent to their biological originals (assuming adequate mindfiles).

I think it is unlikely that cyber-consciousness will be accepted as real consciousness until it has manifested itself, probably many times over, and been shown to be persuasive in media interviews and court cases. Hence, it will be difficult to hold up experimental development of cyber-consciousness because regulators will not believe there is any real sentience to worry about — “just code.”  Yet, once cyber-consciousness has appeared, and been generally accepted, the ethics of its development is a moot point.

Thus, practically speaking, the first mindclones will arise without much (or any formal) ethical protection during their development. Before the mindware that produced these mindclones can be generally marketed to the public, as certified to produce mindclone citizen extensions of biological originals, government agencies will require safety and efficacy testing. Specifically, government agencies will want proof that the mindware produces a healthy mind, and one that is practically indistinguishable from the mind of the biological original with an adequate size mindfile. Government agencies will not give their blessings to such proof unless it is developed ethically.

Ethical guidelines for developing mindclones will include a requirement of consent for the creation of a conscious being. As to the creation of mindclones, the consent of the biological original will likely be acceptable. As to the creation of bemans, there will be a more challenging pathway. Ethical review boards will need to be persuaded that the beman minds are not suffering during the process of accruing cyber-consciousness. This is not an insuperable barrier. However, it will require a much more deliberate development pathway based upon numerous graduated introductions of elements of cyber-consciousness, such as autonomy, empathy, identity and software bridges amongst these elements.

The bottom line is that ethical considerations favor a more rapid introduction of mindclones than non-mindclone bemans. Ultimately, however, the seeming catch-22 of how does a consciousness consent to its own creation can be solved.

We are hampered by a historical dearth of attention to the very fundamentals that could support choosing a technological objective, such as cryonics, the elimination of biological aging, artificial general intelligence, or mind uploading to a whole brain emulation or other implementation of substrate-independent minds.

There is a brewing debate about whether it is truly possible to enhance the human experience, or whether the way we experience being is in fact already the most that we can aspire to. In general, we can ask: How well-considered are the different goals espoused by transhumanist thinkers? Which ones are supported by a sound rationale?

None of us want our efforts to go to waste, or to chase down lesser and near-sighted ends. Very specifically and very personally, we can ask:

What does a self-consistent, intelligent and capable person do? Which goals are so sound, so promising and so exciting that you can allow those goals to fully motivate you? Which goals can you embrace in the knowledge that you stand on a firm foundation, that your thinking is clear, and that you can be a pioneer to excel in a significant part of a vast new future?

This is very important, because each of us has to choose where to dedicate our time and our effort. Similarly, solid foundations should inform decision making about all kinds of support that can be given to specific types of projects.

In my work, I have reached this point twice, from different angles. I arrived at it once by daring to ask myself the deeper questions behind the search for greater longevity. I arrived at it the second time by questioning basic expectations proclaimed by researchers in the field now known as artificial general intelligence (AGI). I began to address the problem from the latter angle when I spoke at the recent Winter Intelligence Conference at Oxford University (ref. R.A. Koene, 2011). In this article, I will therefore address the problem of solid foundations, with an emphasis on the matter of longevity… or more crucially: emphasizing the matter of survival.

Solid context for your quest

Well, what do you aim for? We will need to better understand the context of the question first. Let us establish some of the bedrock rules of our universe. There is no universal purpose. Let go of all of the flimsy constructs that rely on notions of what should be. What we do observe and can build on is causation. One perspective that is built on causation is the concept of Universal Darwinism (ref. D. Dennet, 2005). We will discuss Universal Darwinism in a moment.

Above, we have the universal, objective context of the question. What is the subjective context? Of course, you are not aware of the entire universal context. In fact, the only context you are aware of, contemplate and care about is the one generated by the confluence of retrieved memory, processed perception and executive processing within your own mind. That is as much of reality as there ever is to any one of us. Within that reality, that context, you choose goals, because you have interests, wishes or desires that are directly related to further possible experiences within that subjective context. Some future experiences you want to have, some you want to avoid[1].

Having established those two contexts essential to our question, I commence with a simple examination of the differences between “Gene Survival” and “Pattern Survival,” their place in Universal Darwinism, and their place in our subjective interests. As I will show, the differences increasingly give us reason to  drive a change in focus from the former to the latter.

Universal Darwinism and being aware

Universal Darwinism (ref. D. Dennet, 2005) is a useful way to look at the results of competition throughout the universe. This extends beyond the realm of the animate, as in the biosphere of Earth. Inanimate aspects of the universe likewise experience the consequences of interactions that can be deemed competitions. When we apply this perspective, we see a tendency everywhere for some structures, some discernible components of the universe to prevail over others and, thereby to occupy a larger niche in space and time.

Likewise, it is useful to recognize that the organization of the universe, down to its quantum level, can be thought of as an arrangement that is describable, that is information (ref. S. Lloyd, 2006). This information universe determines all the relationships of its constituent parts, its various incarnations at different times, even the many possibilities represented by the concepts of the “multiverse” (ref. D. Deutsch, 1997).

When we combine both of these realizations, then we can describe the effects of Universal Darwinism in the Information Universe as a competition for “Pattern Survival.” A pattern is some specific packet of information, which when put to use will achieve certain interactions and consequences.

There is a pattern that is very dear to us. This pattern is the information content of our minds. By the information content, I mean both the parameter settings (e.g., memory), as well as the ways in which the parameters are used, the functions carried out by the mind (e.g., learned behavior, characteristics) (ref. C. Eliasmith & C.H. Anderson, 2003). Why is this pattern so very dear to us? Well, that is based on the subjective context we identified earlier. That pattern is all that we are aware of being.

Self, conscious existence, is a matter of mental processes. They are the combination of perceptual processing, recall and use of memories and learning, and decisionmaking that is affected by the mind functions that were instantiated and shaped in accordance with intrinsic drives. All of what we know, sense and experience takes place within our minds. It is these patterns that define our awareness.

Those patterns are, of course, themselves the result of ongoing competition between patterns within the mind, patterns that are established, reshaped, outgrown, etc. And they are the result of evolutionary pressures that led to the development of the hardware that runs the mind. The intrinsic drives are intimately connected with those evolutionary pressures, with the survival of the genes that describe a human being.

Having long-term interests and surviving to see them through

Our experience, therefore, leads us to place great value on the patterns that are our minds, and on the survival of those patterns, both personally and in terms of the memes we support. Our identities seek Pattern Survival. We also recognize the connection through our intrinsic drives with the “Gene Survival” that played such an important role in our native environment, the biosphere of Earth.

There are significant differences between the pursuit of gene survival and the pursuit of pattern survival. Here is an example of how these differences affect personal decisions and actions in practical terms. Do you consider yourself a hard-nosed realist? A person of practical values, of business, someone who dedicates the majority of their time to the widely accepted ideals and goals of personal and business accomplishment? Do you specialize in attaining success among your peers in terms of wealth and status?

Those qualities make sense as part of a strategy with the ultimate objective of improving the odds that your children — or the children in another genetic line that you are a guardian of — will be able to procreate in the future. A focus on social and business success, aimed at wealth and status, but without transhumanist objectives, is a sensible and self-consistent strategy for gene survival — even though you and your pattern of personal characteristics will terminate at your death regardless of wealth or status.

Are you, on the other hand, more concerned with the ideas, the memes, that you continually champion through your very behavior, your characteristic responses and interactions? Perhaps you do not plan to have children, and you are not primarily in charge of guaranteeing the procreation of another genetic line? Is your main interest instead drawn to the pattern of developments that you would like to see in the future, what you would consider improvements beyond the species’ status quo?

If you are a transhumanist, it is sensible to seek a strategy optimized for such pattern survival and competition. If that is your chosen objective, then, rationally, such a strategy must include work towards the  transhumanist goal that can enable your pattern survival; otherwise, it is not self-consistent. Seeking strategies optimized for pattern survival of mind functions is, not coincidentally, the very definition of the objective to achieve substrate-independent minds (SIM).

We need not ask if a transhumanist would prefer to continue to exist as the same pattern or be greater than it; it is simply a fact that patterns will compete and those that best modify, adapt, and expand the domain influenced by their characteristic interactions win. To be clear, I am not talking about static pattern survival, but pattern competition.

Pattern competition favors the personal characteristics of some, and their characteristic interactions support memes that influence future developments. A simple example: There are certain ways in which you would like to see the future be different from the present, which is probably distinct in some ways from how anyone else would like to see it.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but a little exploration goes a long way

But how can we understand the original or re-implemented mind sufficiently to enable it to grow? How can you cautiously escape the human “catchment” area — the precarious balance, where, to attain greater mental capabilities, we reach insights that remove hard-wired delusions and thereby modify our finely-tuned intrinsic reward mechanisms in a way that leads to behavior that is unfavorable to survival?

The concept of a “catchment” area (ref. S. Gildert, 2010) has been described as the result of evolutionary optimization of human intelligence. Our intrinsic drives are geared to seek reward that is directly linked to gene survival. All of our actions, all of our decisions, even the way we interpret our experiences are subject to reward mechanisms that were selected in accordance with gene survival. The optimization can be considered a local maximum, surrounded by alternative modes of behavior that were not selected for and may be less suitable guides for survival. If most of the alternatives bear detrimental risks then we can consider ourselves in many ways confined to this catchment area. It may be, that the catchment area is delicate, that it resembles a small island surrounded by a rocky landscape of possibilities, some of which could endanger our survival.

Reward mechanisms tuned by natural selection are beneficial within the existing set of goals and requirements in the human environment. As we acquire insight into our own reward mechanisms, perceive their limitations and gain the ability to modify them, there is the risk that we may promote behaviors that put our survival in jeopardy.

One example would be the realization that we can maximize our ability to experience reward by setting simple goals and high rewards (“wireheading”), not unlike the lab-rat caught in a pleasure-loop by continually pressing a lever that delivers dopamine to its brain.

Another example would be to modify the sense of reward that we experience when we receive the agreeable judgment of our peers in matters of social cohesion and moral values. It is true that accepted notions of right and wrong have undergone changes throughout human history, but an outright elimination of some of our basic, unquestioned drives could be more perilous if carried out without extraordinary precautions.

Here we turn to exploration and safeguards. Whole brain emulation (WBE) (ref. R.A. Koene, 2006; A. Sandberg & N. Bostrom, 2008) is a tool that gives you the ability to explore, such as when astronomers could first use telescopes to explore the universe. And by emulating all the relevant functions as implemented in the brain you minimize any initial differences and their potential hazards. WBE is a useful way — though not the only one — by which to move mind functions to another substrate, because it solves at least the problem of Access. You can carry out finely-tuned experiments, which is an opportunity that goes beyond what telescopes give astronomers.

For example, we may explore what happens if you run everything in the cortex twice as fast. Or we explore what happens if you plug in flawless memory. Whole brain emulation gives you all the basics of substrate-independent pattern survival for the mind: Continuation of the set of characteristic functions and parameters that determine how a person’s interactions with the environment deploy and support memes — characteristic interactions that affect the future.

This is an experimental approach by which to move from the set of constraints within one Darwinian survivor arrangement to a different set of constraints within another Darwinian survivor arrangement. Skill at doing this, at hacking minds and finding the shifts or hops required, will increase as we learn. From an art, it can become a science. We may even learn how to pre-compute the values, according to a Darwinian metric, that correspond to each of the steps of some development plan aimed at modifications of mind functions.

Some of this experimentation may be carried out through brain-computer interfaces, without whole brain emulation. Even so, advancing substrate-independent minds (ASIM) is ultimately the only way to develop the means for human minds to escape out of and make significant strides beyond their catchment area. ASIM is not just about making thinking things. It is not simply about longevity. It is not about remaining the same. ASIM specifically addresses the search for a feasible route and a fighting chance to play a role in the future of a Darwinian universe (http://carboncopies.org).

Knowing the cause is half the cure

Pattern survival in humans is currently being driven by gene-survival, even though the evolution of humans is itself merely a byproduct of the competition for gene survival (ref. R. Dawkins, 1976). So how can one motivate pattern survival without gene survival? How can one separate the desire to procreate thought characteristics that support specific memes from the desire to procreate genes in humans?

We will not debate competition and Darwinism here any more than we would debate gravity. These are given. We begin with the end-result perspective, considering that which will exist: Those things that compete successfully occupy more of space-time; the patterns of information representative of those successful things that excel at competing and developing have a great impact on the universe. Gene survival is a more narrow subset of competing patterns.

An individual may choose not to play the Darwinism game, either by not aiming at any type of pattern survival or through outright suicide. That individual is simply removed by natural selection from the pool of surviving patterns. It does not change the Darwinian outcome from the larger perspective. I posit that, finally, in terms of domains in space-time inhabited by developing patterns, the greatest part of those patterns that resulted from thinking entities will belong to those entities that transcended their equivalent of highly localized gene-survival.

We are not debating good, bad, morality, or purpose. We assume only Darwinian outcomes and try to understand the properties of those evolving, thinking entities that dominate the future. There is no universal purpose by which it would be deemed intrinsically better or worse to play this Darwinian game or to opt out.

That choice already depends on your personal characteristics, from which a corresponding degree of competitiveness and survival may follow. For the purposes of this exercise, we do not need to concern ourselves further with the opt-outs, and instead consider the routes that belong to those likely to predominate.

It is true that from a purely practical standpoint, at present, pattern survival and gene survival are linked. But there is a shift in balance that will shortly unlink them.

Compilers and emulators incorporate the knowledge of material things

Can a perceiving entity that is not based on the self-replicating properties of genetic material survive over a long period of time?

When it comes to Universal Darwinism and adaptation, it is a specific set of information, a specific piece of knowledge that is adapted to a certain niche. Adapted knowledge tends to survive within its niche in some embodiment, i.e., in some “substrate.” Every time a replicator replicates, it uses non-replicating physical material to build another copy. And non-replicating knowledge can be embodied in different physical substrates each time. This way, even better survival may be achieved by consistently moving to safer substrates.

The material is not crucial. Life is about knowledge. Intelligence — whatever it means — is about knowledge or its use and survival. It is also about an interaction with the environment. A well-adapted entity’s knowledge causes its niche to maintain that knowledge or pattern.

Self-replicating properties of genetic material can be arranged in the substrate that is used to compile and emulate functions based on a pattern, even if the substrate is not (human) DNA. Genetic material carries within it the ability to enact the creation of environmental conditions that favor the replication and spread of its self-same code. The body is such an environment, aiding the genetic replicators.

Substrate-independent existence implies that one can devise compilers and emulators in various available resources to operate using the relevant patterns in a manner that includes properties of replication, propagation, and adaptation.

We can appreciate that similar patterns may appear embodied in waves in water, in electromagnetic radiation, etc. A computer virus exists in a different substrate from ours and carries out some of the replicator functions, though it is rather parasitic and makes a home for itself in resources largely arranged for its use by others. SIM seeks not only how to extract and store patterns, but also how to engineer these flexibly implementable compilers and emulators.

Gene survival is easily annihilated due to its extreme dependence on the local environment (ref. N. Bostrom & M.M. Cirkovic, 2008). Gene replication by itself will not survive for significant portions of universal time. The major thinking survivors of the space-time envelope are the descendants of thinking entities from which substrate-independent forms emerge.

Competition will emerge at some point in which the successful party will be the one that has a focus on pattern survival, and that most successfully imprints its developing patterns of thought and interaction on the future. We can be Darwinian survivors if we are adaptable and up to the admittedly great challenge of moving beyond the current limitations to our thought in terms of access, interpretability, and capability.

Humans have been moving towards an interest in pattern survival ever since they began to think about thinking, and since they began to explore the experience of self-awareness. We see the early consequences of this shift in the remembrance of those who have contributed memes in science, art, and  the history of our species. The shift is accentuated today by organized efforts aiming specifically to accomplish the necessary transition.

Beyond an indefensible status quo, our rational expectations and true interests beckon

What if a human SIM contains no information about genes, the prerequisites for survival of the pattern of the brain? The program we are currently running was evolved to and is dedicated to effective gene survival and propagation. Memes are just another tool to ensure that. Gene survival seems the very foundation of everything we are and drives us to do everything we do. What if we cannot separate from gene survival without a change dangerous to the SIM’s motivation for survival? What if there is no smooth way to make the cut and escape catchment?

An unsubstantiated worry about not being able to change with adequate caution and tentativeness is not sufficient to argue against the possibility. Until there is further cause to give substance to the specifics of these separation concerns, they express something like the uneasiness that the gods of “purpose” might strike back if we dare to change the focus in terms of which thing is being perpetuated: genes vs. minds.

Therein lies the specter of the old “don’t tamper with nature” argument — and yet all progress is a function of doing exactly that. Uneasiness about re-purposing that which has emerged from gene survival (namely, our minds, our perception, our sense of personal identity and self-awareness) is not in itself a practical argument against the possibility of re-instantiating a human mind on different hardware — and then to be able to make gradual changes.

To run the first SIM, and experimentally escape catchment, it may be necessary to glean information from DNA, body simulation, or more. Matters of scope and resolution remain to be solved for mind uploading, whole brain emulation, and substrate-independent minds. It is evident, though, that there is a severely finite combination of resolution and scope that is relevant to the human experience.

Consequently, that experience can be emulated as a first step toward gradual change. As the possibility exists in principle and in practice, we must determine what the minimal scope and resolution requirements are for the most feasible technique.

To understand just how finite the scope and resolution requirements probably are, simply consider the brain as a black box with processes that relate I/O data (chemical, electromagnetic, etc.) that are not drowned in noise. It quickly becomes apparent that while the amount and rate of discernible I/O is significant by today’s computing standards, it is not frightfully large.

There is no reason why we should defend the survival of characteristic genes as if they had greater purpose than the survival of our characteristic thinking. Remember: There is no universal purpose. There is no reason to be more attached to the sequence of nucleotides that defines the human form than to the one that defines the form of an ant. The part that is interesting to us is the emergent world of thought and perception.

The winds of change

Are there signs of a changing emphasis in humans from gene survival to pattern survival? There is reason to believe so.

There are competitive, Darwinian pressures among thinking entities. A shift from gene survival to pattern survival is a necessary preparation for the competition between our own emergent intelligence and intelligence of another origin. That other origin could be machine intelligence without the same set of intrinsic drives, or intelligence emergent in thinking entities elsewhere in the cosmos.

Greater capabilities in this competition are based on a greater understanding of one’s own thinking processes, and the ability to make adaptations therein. At some point, this will demand that we move beyond the captivity within boundaries of our specific drives optimized for gene survival, our primordial reward functions. That escape can be sought through a careful transition during which competitive motivation is sustained.

Look again from the perspective of the end result: Universal Darwinism applied to thinking entities; whatever adapts and survives well. Whatever you end up creating should suit that selection. A kind of SIM will fare better in many more domains than our good old flesh and bone. In the long run, we escape doom only by seeking to escape the catchment.

To tackle this, do not look from past to future and think that genetic survival is the current drive and therefore we can have no route to another form that can survive. Rather, think of the future first. With reason as a guide, deduce the overall qualities of the predominant outcome. Look at what would thrive, and turn us into that. The next successful step will also have something that drives its survival for some period of time, even if it is not Homo sapiens’ DNA. Gradual and tentative changes are the safest way to move there from what we are now, if we do not know a better approach.

In other words, advance substrate-independent minds. Start with what we have: The human brain (body too, if you like), and work from there.

Of all the transhumanist strategies, ASIM is both imbued with its originating human interests and also it most directly embraces and plays the game of competitive natural selection. We aim to base its objectives on properties that can be reasonably supposed to be those of successful competing patterns from the point of view of the end result.

Acknowledgements

Insightful review of the early drafts of this article, as well as deeper insight into matters of possible limitations on AGI and human enhancement were graciously provided by Dr. Suzanne Gildert. Additional review was provided by Michael Andregg.

References

Bostrom, N. & Cirkovic. M.M. (2008), Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K.

Dawkins, R. (1976), The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K.

Dennett, D. (2005), Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Touchstone Press, New York, NY. pp. 352 to 360.

Deutsch, D. (1997), The Fabric of Reality, Penguin Books, New York, NY.

Eliasmith, C. & Anderson, C.H. (2003), Neural Engineering: Computation, Representation and Dynamics in Neurobiological Systems, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

Gildert, S. (2010), Pavlov’s AI: What do superintelligences REALLY want? Humanity+ @Caltech. Pasadena, CA.

Koene, R.A. (2006), Scope and Resolution in Neural Prosthetics and Special Concerns for the Emulation of a Whole Brain, 2006 Workshop on Geoethical Nanotechnology, Lincoln, VT.

Koene, R.A. (2010a), I am a 25 Watt bio-computer: What are the hacks that make us who we are?, Transvision 2010 Conference, Milan, Italy.

Koene, R.A. (2010b), The 25 Watt bio-computer: Lessons for Artificial Human Intelligence and Substrate-Independent Minds, Humanity+ @Caltech, Pasadena, CA.

Koene, R.A. (2011), Substrate-Independent Minds: Pattern Survival Agrees with Universal Darwinism, Future of Humanity Institute Winter Intelligence Conference, Oxford, UK.

Lloyd, S. (2006), Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY.

Sandberg, A. & Bostrom, N. (2008), Whole Brain Emulation: A Roadmap, Technical Report, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University.

There has been recent disappointment expressed in the progress in the field of genomics. In my view, this results from an overly narrow view of the science of genes and biological information processing in general. It reminds me of the time when the field of “artificial intelligence” (AI) was equated with the methodology of “expert systems.” If someone referred to AI they were actually referring to expert systems and there were many articles on how limited this technique was and all of the things that it could not and would never be able to do.

At the time, I expressed my view that although expert systems was a useful approach for a certain limited class of problems it did indeed have restrictions and that the field of AI was far broader.

The human brain works primarily by recognizing patterns (we have about a billion pattern recognizers in the neocortex, for example) and there were at the time many emerging methods in the field of pattern recognition that were solving real world problems and that should properly be considered part of the AI field. Today, no one talks much about expert systems and there is a thriving multi-hundred billion dollar AI industry and a consensus in the AI field that nonbiological intelligence will continue to grow in sophistication, flexibility, and diversity.

The same thing is happening here. The problem starts with the word “genomics.” The word sounds like it refers to “all things having to do with genes.” But as practiced, it deals almost exclusively with single genes and their ability to predict traits or conditions, which has always been a narrow concept. The idea of sequencing genes of an individual is even narrower and typically involves individual single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) which are variations in a single nucleotide (A, T, C or G) within a gene, basically a two bit alteration.

I have never been overly impressed with this approach and saw it as a first step based on the limitations of early technology. There are some useful SNPs such as Apo E4 but even here it only gives you statistical information on your likelihood of such conditions as Alzheimer’s Disease and macular degeneration based on population analyses. It is certainly not deterministic and has never been thought of that way. As Dr. Venter points out in his Der Spiegel interview, there are hundreds of diseases that can be traced to defects in individual genes, but most of these affect developmental processes. So if you provide a medication that reverses the effect of the faulty gene you still have the result of the developmental process (of, say, the nervous system) that has been going on for many years. You would need to detect and reverse the condition very early, which of course is possible and a line of current investigation.

To put this narrow concept of genomics into perspective, think of genes as analogous to lines of code in a software program. If you examine a software program, you generally cannot assign each line of code to a property of the program. The lines of code work together in a complex way to produce a result. Now it is possible that in some circumstances you may be able to find one line of code that is faulty and improve the program’s performance by fixing that one line or even by removing it. But such an approach would be incidental and accidental, it is not the way that one generally thinks of software. To understand the program you would need to understand the language it is written in and how the various lines interact with each other. In this analogy, a SNP would be comparable to a single letter within a single line (actually a quarter of one letter to be precise since a letter is usually represented by 8 bits and a nucleotide by 2 bits). You might be able to find a particularly critical letter in a software program, but again that is not a well motivated approach.

The collection of the human genome was indeed an exponential process with the amount of genetic data doubling each year and the cost of sequencing coming down by half each other. But its completion around 2003 was just the beginning of another even more daunting process, which is to understand it. The language is the three-dimensional properties and interaction of proteins. We started with individual genes as a reasonable place to start but that was always going to be inherently limited if you consider my analogy above to the role of single lines in a software program.

The structure of DNA. (Image: The U.S. National Library of Medicine)

As we consider the genome, the first thing we notice is only about 3 percent of the human genome codes for proteins. With about 23,000 genes, there are over 23,000 proteins (as some portions of genes also produce proteins) and, of course, these proteins interact with each other in complicated pathways.

A trait in a complex organism such as a human being is actually an emergent property of this complex and organized collection of proteins. The 97 percent of the genome that does not code for proteins was originally called “junk DNA.”

 We now understand that this portion of the genome has an important role in controlling and influencing gene expression. It is the case that there is less information in these non-coding regions and they are replete with redundancies that we do not see in the coding regions.

For example, one lengthy sequence called ALU is repeated hundreds of thousands of times. Gene expression is a vital aspect of understanding these genetic processes. The noncoding DNA plays an important role in this, but so do environmental factors. Even ignoring the concept that genes work in networks not as individual entities, genes have never been thought of as deterministic.

The “nature versus nurture” discussion goes back eons. What our genetic heritage describes (and by genetic heritage I include the epigenetic information that influences gene expression) is an entity (a human being) that is capable of evolving in and adapting to a complex environment. Our brain, for example, only becomes capable of intelligent decision making through its constant adaptation to and learning from its environment.

To reverse-engineer biology we need to examine phenomena at different levels, especially looking at the role that proteins (which are coded for in the genome) play in biological processes. In understanding the brain, for example, there is indeed exponential progress being made in simulating neurons, neural clusters, and entire regions. This work includes understanding the “wiring” of the brain (which incidentally includes massive redundancy) and how the modules in the brain (which involve multiple neuron types) process information. Then we can link these processes to biochemical pathways, which ultimately links back to genetic information. But in the process of reverse-engineering the brain, genetic information is only one source and not the most important one at that.

So genes are one level of understanding biology as an information process, but there are other levels as well, and some of these other levels (such as actual biochemical pathways, or mechanisms in organs including the brain) are more accessible than genetic information. In any event, just examining individual genes, let alone SNPs, is like looking through a very tiny keyhole.

As another example of why the idea of examining individual genes is far from sufficient, I am currently involved with a cancer stem cell project with MIT scientists Dr. William Thilly and Dr. Elena Gostjeva. What we have found is that mutations in certain stem cells early in life will turn that stem cell into a cancer stem cell which in turn will reproduce and ultimately seed a cancer tumor. It can take years and often decades for the tumor to become clinically evident. But you won’t find these mutations in a blood test because they are mutations originally in a single cell (which then reproduces to create nearby cells), not in all of your cells. However, understanding the genetic mutations is helping us to understand the process of metastasis, which we hope will lead to treatments that can inhibit the formation of new tumors. This is properly part of gene science but is not considered part of the narrow concept of “genomics,” as that term is understood.

Indeed there is a burgeoning field of stem cell treatments using adult stem cells in the positive sense of regenerating needed tissues. This is certainly a positive and clinically relevant result of the overall science and technology of genes.

If we consider the science and technology of genes and information processing in biology in its proper broad context, there are many exciting developments that have current or near term clinical implications, and enormous promise going forward.

A few years ago, Joslin Diabetes Center researchers showed that by inhibiting a particular gene (which they called the fat insulin receptor gene) in the fat cells (but not the muscle cells as that would negatively affect muscles) enabled caloric restriction without the restriction. The test animals ate ravenously and remained slim. They did not get diabetes or heart disease and lived 20 percent longer, getting most of the benefit of caloric restriction. This research is continuing now focusing on doing the same thing in humans, and the researchers whom I spoke with recently, are optimistic.

We have a new technology that can turn genes off, and that has emerged since the completion of the human genome project (and which has already been recognized with the Noble prize), which is RNA interference (RNAi). There are hundreds of drugs and other processes in the development and testing pipeline using this methodology. As I said above, human characteristics, including disease, result from the interplay of multiple genes. There are often individual genes which if inhibited can have a significant therapeutic effect (such as we might disable a rogue software program by overwriting one line of code or one machine instruction).

There are also new methods of adding genes. I am an advisor (and board member) to United Therapeutics, which has developed a method to take lung cells out of the body, add a new gene in vitro (so that the immune system is not triggered — which was a downside of the old methods of gene therapy), inspect the new cell, and replicate it several million fold. You now have millions of cells with your DNA but with a new gene that was not there before. These are injected back into the body and end up lodged in the lungs. This has cured a fatal disease (pulmonary hypertension) in animal trials and is now undergoing human testing. There are also hundreds of such projects using this and other new forms of gene therapy.

As we understand the network of genes that are responsible for human conditions, especially reversible diseases, we will have the means of changing multiple genes, and turning some off or inhibiting them, turning others on or amplifying them. Some of these approaches are entering human trials. More complex approaches involving multiple genes will require greater understanding of gene networks but that is coming.

There is a new wave of drugs entering trials, some late stage trials that are based on gene results. For example, an experimental drug PLX4032 from Roche is designed to attack tumor cells with a mutation in a particular gene called BRAF. For patients with this genetic variant, 81 percent of patients with advanced melanoma had their tumors shrink (rather than grow), which is an impressive result for a form of cancer that is generally resistant to conventional treatment.

There is the whole area of regenerative medicine from stem cells. Some of this is now being done from adult autologous stem cells. Particularly exciting is the recent breakthrough in induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs). This involves using in-vitro genetic engineering to add genes to normal adult cells (such as skin cells) to convert them into the equivalent of embryonic stem cells which can subsequently be converted into any type of cell (with your own DNA). IPSCs have been shown to be pluripotent, to have efficacy, and to not trigger the immune system because they are genetically identical. IPSCs offer the potential to repair essentially any organ from hearts to the liver and pancreas. These methods are part of genetic engineering which in turn is part of gene science and technology.

And then of course there is the entire new field of synthetic biology which is based on synthetic genomes. A major enabling breakthrough was recently announced by Craig Venter’s company in which an organism with a synthetic genome (which previously existed only as a computer file) was created. This field is based on entire genomes not just individual genes and it is certainly part of the broad field of gene science and technology. The goal is to create organisms that can do useful work such as produce vaccines and other medicines, biofuels and other valuable industrial substances.

You could write a book (or many books) about all of the advances that are being made in which knowledge of genetic processes and other biological information processes play a critical role. Health and medicine used to be entirely hit or miss without any concept of how biology worked on an information level. Our knowledge is still very incomplete, but our knowledge of these processes is growing exponentially and that is feeding into medical research which is already bearing fruit. To focus just on the narrow concepts that were originally associated with “genomics” is as limited a view as the old idea of AI being just expert systems.

This essay argues that the exponential rate of technical progress will create within 40 years an Internet that is a trillion times faster than today’s, a global media, a global education system, a global language, and a globally homogenized culture, thus establishing the prerequisites for the creation of a global democratic state, “Globa,” and ridding the world of war, the arms trade, ignorance, and poverty. Whether Globa can cope with the rise of massively intelligent machines occurring at about the same time is far less certain.

The physicists say that there is effectively no theoretical limit to how tiny a substrate can be that is used to convey information, so we can expect the Internet speed to keep doubling for many decades. This means that in 30 years, the Internet will be a billion (2³⁰) times faster than it is today (2011). In 40 years, it will be a trillion (2⁴⁰) times faster.

What could one do with such fantastic speeds? One obvious answer is that 3D images could be transmitted that would appear to our eyes as real and as vivid as the objects we see by the light of the sun. It would also mean that everyone on the planet could receive the media of the whole world, i.e., “everyone gets everything.” The 3D life-size images transmitted would be so real that they would generate the same emotional impact on the viewer as a normal face-to-face contact in the same room. This will have a huge impact on people’s minds and attitudes.

The “Global Language Snowball Effect”

Imagine you are a very young primary school child in the 2020s and you are watching your “vid” (i.e., your 3D video player) in your living room. You notice that about 60% of the programs and the content of the world media you are receiving on your vid is in the world’s 1^st or 2^nd most spoken language, i.e., English. You therefore decide to master this language so that you can understand what most of the world is saying.

Now imagine you are the minister of telecommunications in your little country and you have to decide which languages you will use for the content you will send up to the global Internet satellite system. You note that already 60% of the world Internet content is in English, so you choose to send up your country’s content in your country’s language, and in English, as well as perhaps several other languages.

A few years later, the percentage has moved up to 70%. Eventually, all countries will be sending up their content in at least two languages — their own, and English. A snowball/saturation effect has arisen (i.e., the greater is the proportion of people on the earth who watch a given language, the greater is the number of countries that transmit in that language, and the greater the percentage of content on the global media that is in a given language, the higher the proportion of people who decide to learn and listen to that language), causing English to become the global language.

English today is far and away the planet’s most spoken 1^st or 2^nd language. It will certainly not be Chinese, since the world will utterly reject China’s incredibly clumsy and stupid writing system. China is the only country in the world (as far as I know) that does not use an alphabet in its writing. Instead of having to learn an alphabet of some two dozen symbols, the Chinese have to learn thousands of symbols to write their language.

Global Politics

The rise of a global language will have a huge impact on the world. Ideas will be able to flow far more readily across the planet. Billions of people will be influenced by the “best” ideas that the planet has to offer. People’s minds will be influenced powerfully, so that today’s nationalist mentalities will be gradually transformed into tomorrow’s globist mentalities. People will be able to compare their own local customs with those of other cultures and reject their own if they feel that other countries customs are superior to their own. People will become more “multi” (i.e., multi-cultured) than “mono” (i.e., mono-cultured).

Multis will increasingly look down on monos as inferior beings (rather like city-slickers towards country-bumpkins), seeing the monos as limited as individuals by the limitations of the single culture that programs them. Today’s governments will no longer be able to brainwash their citizens into the ideologies of their nationalist leaders. Global education systems (“globiversities”) will be established, to educate the poor people of the world. Internet satellites will be able to beam down education programs at all levels, from kindergarten to PhD level research seminars on all topics.

Global Satellite Learning (“GSL”) will rid the world of its last dictatorships (a process called “dedictation”), as billions of poor people catch on to the idea that they can pull themselves out of poverty by buying a small cheap vid (legally or on the black market) and educating themselves using the programs beamed down by the Internet satellites, the “edsats” (education satellites). As billions do this and become “middle class,” they will demand a say in their political systems, leading within 40 years (at the rate the world is democratizing — two countries per year) to a totally democratic world.

Since democratic countries do not go to war against each other (their voting populations do not allow it), the world will be far more peaceful. The 20^th century’s diabolical trade in arms can be banished, and so can war. With over a trillion dollars a year freed up from arms spending in the world, this money can be rechanneled into humanitarian pursuits.

Global Cultural Homogenization

With a global language and all countries being democracies, the stage is set for global cultural homogenization. A billion-fold faster Internet will not be the only factor leading to global cultural homogenization. There are many other factors pushing humanity into a “globist mentality”, e.g., high-speed train networks across countries and continents, space planes that can carry a thousand people from New York to Beijing in a few hours, and greater wealth, which will mean far greater numbers of people becoming international tourists, visiting the beauty spots they can see on their vids in vivid 3D.

Also, a larger global economy will stimulate global trade, the creation of ever more economic and political blocs such as the EU (European Union), SAU (South American Union), AU (African Union), etc. will mean ever more international business people will be traveling to do business and to inspect progress in their various projects, etc. All these influences and more will make the creation of a global cultural homogenization more probable.

When the whole planet can watch the media of the whole world, in a global language, the minds of the world’s citizens will be made “globist,” not “nationalist.” Political leaders of countries whose policies are considered by the majority of the world’s citizens to be harmful or stupid will feel enormous moral pressure against them.

World opinion will be overpowering. If the citizens of a given country learn that 95% of other countries are opposed to their country’s policies, that will force them to think twice about the wisdom of their own leaders’ judgments. That in turn will make their leaders think twice too. All the world’s leaders will become sensitive to global opinion.

As the best ideas and customs spread across the planet, and billions of people adopt the same set of ideas (i.e., cultural homogenization), the stage is set for the creation of a global state. This will obviously be an incremental process.

Building Globa, the Global State

There are many routes to the creation of a global state, e.g., the expansion of the EU (European Union) route, the expansion of powers of the U.N. (United Nations) route, the merging of economic/political blocs route, etc. As the size of the economic/political blocs keeps increasing, smaller blocs need to become larger to stay competitive.

For example, in the case of the U.S., if it does not do what the smaller European nations have been doing for half a century, i.e., ceding sovereignty and merging into a much larger whole, then the U.S. will “not be a player” in the 21^st century, because it will not be a member of the “billion club,” whose members include China, India, the EU, etc. The US will need to merge with the 30+ countries of the Americas and/or form an “Atlantic Union” with the EU to stay economically competitive and powerful. As blocs merge with other blocs, eventually there will be a single bloc the size of the planet.

There will be many forces that will be opposed to the creation of a global state, e.g., nationalism, national sovereignty, cultural differences, the clash of ideologies, religious differences, charity begins at home attitudes, cultural inertia, cultural alienation, etc. To overcome these formidable barriers that kept nations and mentalities apart in the 20^th century, the “Globists,” i.e., those people in favor of “Globism,” the creation of “Globa,” the global state, will need to organize and spread their Globist ideology.

Since the creation of a global democratic state has such huge advantages compared to today’s sovereign nation state system, where each state is always spending large amounts of money preparing for the next war, the Globists will be able to muster powerful arguments in their favor. The Globists will need to organize at a local level, at a regional level, a national level, at a continental level, and eventually at a global level. They will need their symbols, their logos, their flag, their ideology, their anthem, their political programs, etc., and will then need to proselytize the world.

Globists could be active in researching and setting up the globiversities, the GSL (Global Satellite Learning), designing cheap smuggle-able vids for the world’s poor, pouring scorn on the nationalists (e.g., jeering at national anthems, etc.), making their presence felt all around the globe, pushing towards a grand vision: creation of  a global state, riddance of war, banning the arms trade, scrapping nuclear weapons, education of the world’s population, and removal of world poverty.

These are magnificent goals and are readily achievable with the technologies that are coming in the next few decades. These technologies will soon make what was earlier seen as “globaloney” into Globa.

Globa’s Agenda

Once a global state (“Globa”) has been established, it will have its work cut out for it. The first thing it will have to do is set up a slew of new institutions, most of which will be analogous to national institutions as we know them today, e.g., create a global constitution, a global president, a global parliament, global political parties, global laws, a global civil service, global police, a global court, a global military, globiversities, global taxation, global wealth distribution, global resource management, global trade unions, global incomes policy, a global currency unit (the “Globo”), global health insurance, etc.

Once the establishment of these institutions is well en route, Globa would then need to tackle the planet’s major problems, e.g. it would need to create a globist ethics and globist propaganda, to undertake global nuclear disarmament, ban the global arms trade, meet the global environmental challenges, eliminate global poverty, establish a global taxation policy, as well as a global incomes and raw materials policy, global education, global population migration, foster greater global happiness rather than economic wealth, etc.

Globa and the Artilect

The above has argued that a global state “Globa” could be established by about the middle of the 21st century. This would be a wonderful thing if it can be achieved. However there is a gathering storm on the horizon, which will be playing itself out over the same time frame, namely the rise of the artilect (artificial intellect, i.e., a godlike massively intelligent machine) with intellectual capacities trillions of trillions of times above the human level.

The rise of the artilect will probably divide humanity bitterly into two major human groups: the “Cosmists” (who want to be “god (i.e., artilect) builders,” a form of science-based quasi-religion) and the “Terrans” (who are bitterly opposed to building artilects, through fear that the artilects may one day decide humans are such inferior pests and wipe them out). There is a third group, the “Cyborgists” (who want to add artilectual components to their own brains and become artilect gods themselves).

Since the computational capacity of nanoteched matter is so great (e.g., a grain of sugar with each atom switching in femtoseconds could outperform a human brain by a factor of trillions), the Terrans will lump the Cyborgists into the same ideological camp as the Cosmists (since a cyborg would be indistinguishable from an artilect in artilectual capacities). Since the Terrans will have a limited time window of opportunity within which to oppose the Cosmists/Cyborgists, before the cyborgs and artilects come into being and are then smarter than the Terrans, the Terrans will not be able to wait for too long.

The Terrans will have to “first strike” the Cosmists/Cyborgists/cyborgs/artilects before it is too late. The Terrans will be using 21st century weapons that will enable the scale of mass killing to rise from the tens of millions of people of the major wars of the 20th century, to the billions of people of a major 21st century war. The Cosmists/Cyborgists will anticipate this first strike by the Terrans and be prepared for it, also using 21st century weapons.

Thus Globa will have to face its greatest challenge: can it cope with the rise of Cosmism and Cyborgism? Will Globa be able to cope with the passions generated by two murderously opposed, very powerful ideologies (Cosmism and Terranism)? Opinion polls already show that the “species dominance issue” (i.e., whether humanity should build godlike artilects this century or not) divides humanity about evenly. Many individuals are ambivalent about the magnificence of building artilect gods, and horrified at the prospect of a “gigadeath” “artilect war.”

It is not at all obvious that a unified global state would be strong enough to withstand the divisive passions of the “species dominance debate” that will heat up in the coming decades and may explode into a “global civil war” killing billions of people, with 21st century weapons, in the greatest war humanity has ever known, because the stakes have never been so high: the survival of the human species. 20th century wars were largely “nationalist wars.” A major 21st century war would be a “species dominance war.”

The above essay is a summary of the ideas in the author’s second book, Multis and Monos : What the Multicultured Can Teach  the Monocultured: Towards the Creation of a Global State. The ideas above concerning the rise of the artilect are taken largely from the author’s first book, The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines. Both books are available at amazon.com

There are now thousands of AI scientists around the world (concentrated largely in the English-speaking countries) who feel that humanity will be able to build massively intelligent machines this century that will be hugely smarter than human beings. The author, for example, thinks that the issue of whether humanity should build these “artilects” (artificial intellects) will dominate our global politics this century and lead to a “gigadeath” war, killing billions of people.

These AI researchers know that 21^st century technology will be capable of creating machines with a bit processing rate trillions of trillions of times above the estimated human-brain-equivalent bit-processing rate, and that neuro-scientific knowledge is advancing at an exponential rate.

Let us assume for the sake of argument that these artilects are actually built this century, and then speculate on what such creatures might occupy themselves with. Of course, as humans, with our puny human brains, trying to imagine what an artilect would think about is like a mouse trying to imagine what humans think about, using its puny mouse brain. Nevertheless, we will speculate anyway, because some of these human level suggestions may turn out to be correct.

Building Universes

One suggestion that comes to (the human) mind, is that artilects may be so smart and such superb scientists that they may be capable of conceiving and constructing whole universes. This idea seems plausible since Prof. Alan Guth (of “inflation” fame) of MIT, as a human, has already conceived a mathematical model for how to create a baby universe. He has the conditions, the numbers, on how to do this. If humans with our puny human brains are capable of conceiving the idea of building universes, then perhaps artilects, with all their godlike capacities, could actually construct them, based on their vastly superior ability to architect possible universes.

Consider also, that our universe is 13.7 billion years old, according to results from the WMAP satellite in 2003. Our third-generation star, the Sun, is only about 5 billion years old, so it is likely that there are a trillion trillion second-generation stars in our observable universe that are billions of years older, that possibly have planets on which intelligent life evolved and then moved on in an “artilectual transition” to become “artilect gods.” These artilects may then have designed their own universes.

The obvious question then arises, “Is it possible that our universe was designed by some artilect in some other universe?” This question raises some interesting metaphysical issues, that will be discussed later, but let us assume that the answer is “yes.” What then?

This “creator artilect” would then satisfy the definition of a deity, i.e., a creator of our universe. Given that it is likely that humanity will be building artilects this century, science ought to be a lot more open to the idea of deism. The above argument makes it much more plausible.

Theism vs Deism

Let me state my views on theism vs. deism at this point. Deism, as just mentioned, is the belief that there is a “deity,” i.e., a creator of the universe, a grand designer, a cosmic architect, that conceived and built our universe. Theism is the belief in a deity that also cares about the welfare of individual humans. Deism I am open to, whereas I find theism ridiculous. The evidence against it is enormous. For example, last century, about 200-300 million people were killed for “political reasons,” e.g., wars, genocides, purges, ethnic cleansings, etc. It was the bloodiest century in history.

Presumably, millions of those killed were theists, believing that their “theity” would “look out” for their welfare. Well obviously that theity didn’t, because those millions of people were killed anyway.

If this theity was so concerned with human beings, why did our species come on the cosmic scene so late? Our universe has existed for the order of 10¹⁰ years. We humans have existed for about 10⁵ years, i.e., only a thousandth of 1% of the age of the universe – “a mere afterthought of an afterthought.” Every primitive tribe has dreamt up its own gods, and those gods have properties familiar to their human creators.  For example, New Guinea gods have a lot of pigs, Chinese gods have slitty eyes, etc. Cultural anthropologists of religion have estimated that humanity has invented more than 100,000 different gods over the planet and over the broad sweep of human history, most of which are no longer believed in. They have become “extinct religions.”

It is much more likely, in my view, that theisms are just examples of “wishful thinking” that people invent to give themselves emotional comfort in an emotionally cold, meaningless, indifferent universe that has evolved creatures like ourselves who are subject to disease, pain, cruelty, poverty, and death.

The early gods were rather primitive in conception, because the small hunter-gatherer groups who invented them did not contain a genius capable of high-level abstract creative intellectual thought. Once agriculture and animal husbandry was discovered, large cities grew up that contained the occasional genius who dreamt up a more abstract concept of god, that is, of a mono-theity far more powerful than the many individual gods of an earlier (pre- agricultural) human era. The concoction of these monotheisms occurred several thousand years ago, long before the insights of modern science, and hence it is not surprising that their religious conceptions were based largely on (pre-scientific) ignorance, e.g., notions such as life after death (the ultimate wishful thinking), souls, miracles, etc.

In northern Europe, theism has almost died out, and is heading that way too (but slowly) in the U.S.,  the slowness being due to historical colonial reasons. Let us assume for the sake of this essay that theism dies out worldwide. Where does that leave deism?

Plausibility Arguments for a Deity

The above sections have argued that the rise of the artilect this century makes the idea of a deity, more plausible. However, there are other arguments that can be used to support the idea that our universe is the product of a pre-existing deity. They are: (A) the “(strong) anthropic principle” and (B) something I call (by analogy with the anthropic principle) the “mathematical principle.” I discuss these two principles in turn.

The (Strong) Anthropic Principle (SAP)

The SAP states that the values of the constants of the laws of physics are so fantastically, improbably finely tuned to allow the existence of matter and life, that it seems highly likely that these values were predesigned. It is now well known, that if one changes the values of some of these constants by even a tiny amount (for example, in some extreme cases, by one part in zillions), matter and life can no longer exist. How to account for this extraordinary state of affairs?

One answer is to say that our universe is the product, the creation, of a preexisting deity, a hyperintelligence that conceived our universe’s laws of physics that are compatible with matter and life, and built our universe according to those laws.

Another answer is to say that there are a zillion universes, each with a different set of physical laws, and we just happen to live in one that is compatible with life, because we are here to observe our universe (which is the statement of the weak form of the anthropic principle (WAP).

Other people, particularly many string theorists, claim that once enough is known in the future about the nature of M-theory, it will become clear  that there is only one way a coherent universe (that is, obeying all the many symmetries of M-theory) can be designed, and our universe is it. This leads in to the next principle.

The “Mathematical Principle”

The “mathematical principle” is what I call the idea that the universe appears to have been designed by a mathematician, i.e., that the universe obeys so many principles of modern mathematics. (Einstein, for example, was deeply mystified by the fact that the universe obeyed the general design principles he dreamt up to explain how gravity worked. He kept saying he wanted to know the (mathematical) thoughts of “der Alte” (the old one), the designer of our universe.)

For example, why do the elementary particles have properties that allow them to be classified into families according to the mathematical representations of special unitary groups (e.g., SU(3))? Why does Einstein’s general relativistic equation “drop out” of the superstring model as a mathematical deduction, with all the latter’s recent mathematical abstractions of such a high level that probably only one person in a thousand has the brain power to understand them, e.g., mathematical notions such as 11 space-time dimensions, supersymmetry, complex manifolds, super-conformal-fields, Calabi-Yau compaction, holomorphic curves,  etc.

The more humanity knows about how deeply mathematical the laws of physics are, the more plausible it seems that the designer of the universe used mathematical principles as a tool. This is the “deity as mathematician” argument (which interestingly seems to suggest that mathematics is more fundamental than even a deity — that even a deity is subject to mathematical constraints and logic?!).

Deism and Science

Richard Dawkins is not keen on the idea of a deity. He claims, I think correctly, that any deity capable of creating our universe, would need to be extremely complex, at least as complex as that of our universe. Where I disagree with him is his idea that instead of postulating the existence of a deity, science should start with the premise that the universe exists with given properties, that science then attempts to discover and explain. For Dawkins, the idea of a deity is “outside science” and conceptually redundant. If a deity made the universe, who made the deity? One gets stuck in an infinite regress.

Personally, I think if science could come to the conclusion that there is/was a deity that created the universe, then that would be wonderful for science. It would open up a vast new arena for science to play in. Science could then start wondering about the properties of the deity, the hyper intelligence that designed the universe.

The question of what designed the deity should not be a reason for dismissing our universe’s deity. We live in a universe that may have a “qualitative infinity” of levels, e.g., in the past century, humanity’s knowledge of the nature of matter has descended from molecules, to atoms, to nuclei, to nucleons, to quarks, to strings. Who knows how many more layers future humans may find? As each new layer is discovered, science reacts with elation, having opened up new vistas for exploration. A similar attitude ought to apply to the idea of a deity.

Metaphysical  Questions

Traditionally, science has been rather hostile to the idea of theism. I share that hostility. I look on traditional religions as superstitions that are incompatible with modern scientific knowledge. But as the above sections make clear, I’m far more open to the idea of deism, the belief in a hyperintelligence that designed and created our universe.

I think that the rise of Cosmism — the ideology if favor of humanity building artilects this century (despite the risk that advanced artilects may decide to wipe out humanity as a pest) — makes the idea of a deity far more plausible, if not inevitable. It is a small logical step to suggest, given the above discussion, that our future artilects could become deities themselves, which then create future universes.

But, if so, how could (human) science “get a handle” on such artilectually created future universes? For example, if the artilects in our universe, obeying our universe’s laws of physics, create new universes with other laws of physics, how could human beings ever know of the existence of such new universes? How indeed? However, the question I feel is a valid one and should not be thrown out with the bath water, being dismissed as “idle metaphysics”.

Hyper-physics

I think science ought to give a lot more thought to the notion of what I call “hyper-physics”. Hyper-physics is a “superset” of ordinary physics, which has as its domain of discussion the universe we live in and those universes that our future artilects could design and create. We should also consider the possibility that the universe we live in is the creation of a preexisting deity, or artilect. Thus we need to think about a “tree of universes” that branches each time a new universe is created “inside” a preexisting one. The “investigation” of such a hyper-physics (the tree) might be one of the major preoccupations of our artilects.

Since our universe is nearly three times older than our solar system, it is quite possible that other suns in the zillions have already evolved intelligent life that has moved on into the artilectual stage, which then creates new universes. Hyper-physics would then be the study of all these universes. Since such a study, very probably, requires capabilities way above those of the human brain, we mere humans can only speculate and contemplate in awe at what our  artilectual creations may devote their time and godlike intellects to.

Perhaps these artilects might even be able to give sensible answers to the very deepest of metaphysical questions, as to why anything exists at all, and whether there exists a “supergod” that started the whole chain of artilects creating a tree of universes. This type of meta-physics differs from the more modest hyper-physics suggested above. A universe-creating artilect still exists in the hyper-physical tree of universes, but the question of where the first deity came from remains as mysterious as ever, the ultimate meta-physical question that the most brilliant of theologians have been wondering about for centuries.

Summary

This essay hopes to persuade its readers that science ought to take the notion of deism a lot more seriously. The rise of the artilect in this century makes the notion of a hyperintelligent designer and creator of our universe far more plausible. It suggests the creation of a “hyper-physics” (as distinct from a traditional metaphysics that poses the deepest of questions) that would “investigate” the tree of universes that a branching set of artilects may have created.

In this essay I review the accuracy of my predictions going back a quarter of a century. Included herein is a discussion of my predictions from The Age of Intelligent Machines (which I wrote in the 1980s), all 147 predictions for 2009 in The Age of Spiritual Machines (which I wrote in the 1990s), plus others.

Perhaps my most important predictions are implicit in my exponential graphs. These trajectories have indeed continued on course and I discuss these updated graphs below.

My core thesis, which I call the law of accelerating returns, is that fundamental measures of information technology follow predictable and exponential trajectories, belying the conventional wisdom that — you can’t predict the future.

There are still many things — which project, company or technical standard will prevail in the marketplace, or when peace will come to the Middle East — that remain unpredictable, but the underlying price/performance and capacity of information is nonetheless remarkably predictable. Surprisingly, these trends are unperturbed by conditions such as war or peace and prosperity or recession.

— Ray Kurzweil

Please download Ray Kurzweil’s full paper “How My Predictions Are Faring” (pdf) here.

This article was adapted from a lecture given by Martine Rothblatt, Ph.D., at the (HETHR), Human Enhancement Technologies and Human Rights Conference hosted on May 26-28, 2006, at Stanford University in California. It is reprinted with permission from The Journal of Personal Cyberconsciousness, Volume 1, Issue 4, 2006.

As I address these issues, I will introduce a new word, bemes. I will address how many bemes there are, where they are, and how they can become a way to create and extend consciousness. How do we value bemes? What are their rights? Can bemes parent? Why should we focus on creating bemes? Ultimately, I believe that bemes will give us joy and increase our chances of survival.

Bemes are fundamental, transmissible, mutate-able units of beingness very much in the spirit of memes[1]. The difference is that memes are culturally transmissible elements that have common cultural meanings whereas bemes are highly individual elements of personality, mannerisms, feelings, recollections, beliefs, values, and attitudes.

Martine Rothblatt's explanation of Bemes versus Memes. (Image: Martine Rothblatt)

Over time, people will start to realize that the beme is mightier than the gene. We humans are much more accurately described by our intellectual uniqueness than by our genetic codes. Cyronics is itself based on beme revival as opposed to gene revival. Ultimately, common sets of bemes will be the base for a new species definition. Today, we define our species based on genetics or DNA. Because we can reproduce by commingling genes: We are moving towards reproducing by the commingling of our bemes and this will give rise to a new species, which I would like to call Persona Creatus.

Examples of bemes are smiles, elements of one’s paranoia, a memory of a first bike ride, and a love for lasagna. There are millions of bemes just like we have billions of base pairs.[2] People are already beginning to make efforts at beme recording. One of the best known is Gordon Bell’s My Life Bits project.[3] It is interesting that it does not take a huge amount of data to accumulate a vast amount of bemes. At the speed at which Bell is beme-ifying his life, data is accumulating at one gigabyte a month. At this rate, it would take 83 years to hit a mere terabyte. Others are using Bell’s Sense Cam, which everyone reports is very enjoyable.[4] People seem to enjoy reproducing themselves through their bemes.

The result of beme recording is what I would like to call Beme Neural Architecture, or BNA. How do BNA and DNA differ?

Genes spell out matter, what we would ordinarily call phenotype, via a four-molecule code. Bemes spell out mind, what I might call a noonotype and do that through a two-bit on/off sequence of code.

Bemes are organized into Beme Neural Architecture, or BNA. BNA beings include some animals and computers, whereas DNA beings include all animals, but no computers.

Where might this take us? Instead of looking at genes as the metaphor for the origin of the species, with bemes we are looking at the destiny of the species. The reasons why the beme is mighter than the gene is that our uniqueness is far greater when expressed through BNA than in DNA; our thoughts differ to a much greater extent than our brains do; bemes allow substrate independence; and ultimately, it is much more true to say that mind is deeper than matter than to say that blood is thicker than water, which is actually not true at all in the metaphorical sense (ask your spouse or best friend).

What is a BNA being? A BNA being is called a beman or a transbeman. These entitities have human thought patterns and meet the biological definition of life directly or via electronics. It is quite easy to show that cybernetic beings meet the biological definition of life. Even though we do not think of things that are not wet as being biological, functionally, they can be.

Why this particular word, beman? There is nothing magical about it, but it does evoke the fact that what is really cool and interesting about life is to be, being-ness. It brings together the elements of being-ness (be-) and humanity (-man). Examples of bemans might be Homo sapiens, the computer Mike from Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Robin Williams in the film, Millennium Man, A.I., and primates.

The point of this new semantics is to shift our thinking in the direction of looking at DNA as an archaic, irrelevant body-ist approach, whereas BNA addresses our preciousness, personality, mind, and thoughts. Beman and transbeman are terms of inclusiveness that make it easier for us to avoid class wars and to include cybernetic consciousness in our same community, whereas human is more of a label of division like Caucasian or female.

How many bemes are there? I don’t know but it is a great research project. The Human Genome Project was great, how about a Human Benome Project?

There is a lot of interesting research that can be done on the new beme-based species, Persona Creatus, from the standpoint of physical and cultural anthropology. Yet in essence, substrate is to bemes as race is to genes. Race is irrelevant to genes and substrate is irrelevant to bemes.

Why not use other words like transhumans? Ray Kurzweil has made the observation that we are not called transmonkeys, so as we begin to abstract ourselves into cybernetic form, why would be call ourselves transhumans?

Why should we care about bemes? The reason is to create and extend consciousness. Copying and extending one’s bemes would create the self element and mind file for extending one’s unique consciousness. It would be a necessary but sufficient way to replicate one’s consciousness. We would also need mindware that does not yet exist. People who work on avatars and other autonomous agents are rapidly putting together the mindware that could wrap around our bemes and enable us to have a cybernetic consciousness.

The father of conscious bemans is Alan Turing, who gave us a test that says that if something seems real, then it is good enough to be real. Copies of conscious things are conscious if they seem to be conscious. Because consciousness is almost synonymous with subjectivity, none of us really know in the absolute sense if any of us are conscious, because we live our daily life based on what seems to be real or conscious. Therefore, if a computer seemed to be conscious, then it would work for all of us.

Another way of looking at consciousness is to compare it to pornography. Back in the 1960s, there was a major debate over what was obscene or not. Magazines such as Screw were all the rage and cities like Kansas City were trying to put their publishers in jail.[5] The issue went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court and they finally asked the basic question, “What is obscene?” Justice Potter Stewart came to the conclusion that you cannot define it, but you know it when you see it.

Consciousness is the same type of entity. We can end up with a useless philosophical discussion about what is or is not conscious. Yet we all know it when we see it. That was Turing’s insight.

We also need to be aware that different kinds of consciousness exist. Too often, we fall into the error of thinking that consciousness is an either/or state. We can look at consciousness as being on a continuum of hard core consciousness to soft core consciousness.

When will be be able to beme ourselves up into transbeman states? Right now, mind files exist in a virtual reality on the Internet. People are creating more of themselves in websites such as secondlife.com.[7] Richard Morgan has laid out a number of scenarios for ex vivo consciousness.[8] We cannot predict an exact date, but remember that only sixty years ago, Vannevar Bush predicted a memory extender machine that is available today in desktop, PDA, and ipod versions.[9]

A bemex hypothesis to complement the memex hypothesis – a bemex is a device in which an individual stores enough of their bemes and which is equipped with mindware so that it may function as our alter ego. It is an analog of one’s consciousness that can be replicated with speed and flexibility paralleling Vannevar Bush’s definition of a memex. Kurzweil predicts the arrival of this bemex capability for the year 2030. We are certainly within the horizon of this and we should be debating the related ethical issues.

How do we value cyberconscious lives? There is a cartoon that shows a widow who gets a letter from her husband who died in Iraq and receives a few thousand dollars. Someone else took a drug and had a heart attack and got two million dollars. The point is that if we cannot even figure out how to equally value human lives, it will be even more tricky to figure out how we value beman lives. Certainly, there will be many who claim that beman lives have no value at all, that they are mere constructs like cartoons.

Let’s start considering the potential transhuman enhancements of beme uploading because that will allow us to begin to feel the value of beming ourselves. Beming will allow real death to become rare because as bodies die out, bemes will be transporting ex vivo and can either live in virtuality, in a nanobiotech body, or in a cellular regenerated body.

Older knowledge will become a commodity as everyone collects themselves in beme form. There will be a collective consciousness that emerges in which older knowledge will be readily available to everyone. We should value beme lives highly because people will pay almost anything to escape death. People also will pay dearly for knowledge.

In order to value bemes highly, we must come up with a third way to define birth and death. Today we define death based on brain death, but this definition is only thirty years old. Back in the 1960s, we defined death based on heart death. The next transition will be to the information theory definition of death, which holds that an entity is alive as long as its bemes remain in organized form. If we can accomplish this through the legal and political community, then we will pave the way for valuing beman life highly.

Another enhancement aspect to beming is that it allows us to transcend substrate entirely. Beming will end up enhancing humans into bemans and transhumans into transbemans. Yet substrate is very important to people. It is part of the body politic. Revolutionizing this and going to a situation of substrate independence is equivalent to going to a colonial master of government independence and demolishing the state as you demolish the body. That is a tall order, but it has been accomplished before, although never completey.

The flip side of transbeman rights is transbeman obligations. Bemans will be able to comply with obligations just as well as humans do.

Humans control the entire world and decide what goes on. Humans essentially have a monopoly on rights. In order for nonhuman bemans to gain access to this privileged space, first they will have to evidence consciousness and then persuade other members of the club (the human club) that they have in fact evidenced consciousness. If they succeed in this, then they will be admitted to the club, where they must prove that they can comply with the club’s rules, which are basic human ethics. For example, they must not steal or kill. Will they be good bemans like good humans? If the answer is yes, then it is fully possible that bemans can acquire full human rights. If the answer is no, then bemans will end up with the protections of a unique life form or the rights of a baby, lunatic or felon.

How can nonhuman bemans actually persuade humans that they are members of the club? The answer lies in following Turing’s creed. Bemans must first pass as humans if they want access to full human space, which is where all the power is. Another strategy is to make having rights in the human’s interest. Bemans could start a political campaign. “Keep grandma alive!” “Two bodies are better than one!” These political campaigns could be a way to persuade Americans to grant bemans life.

Finally, bemans will have to take away humans’ fears. No matter how much bemans succeed in making humans salivate for longer life and multiple bodies, there will be the fear mongers who think that bemans will abolish their state and their world. The legal community will need to come up with a concept of one mind, one vote instead of one man, one vote. They will need to develop a strict liability cyber law, whereby legal responsibility can be traced back to someone who already has human rights. They will also need to devise cyberparental licensing so that bemans can produce their own children. Bemans will then need to have responsibility for the children so they do not end up producing junk children.

Who will hold these beman rights? The answer is either bio-birth people who transition to cyberconsiocussness or to cyber birth people who transition to personhood.

Are you transbeman? Some fifteen or twenty years ago, FM 2030 wrote the book “Are you Transhuman?”[10] Today we are ready to move past this and ask, “Are you trasnbeman?” Can you relate to the other members of the club and comply with the obligations of consciousness and the laws of society?

Ultimately, the transbemanist message will be much more attuned to existing society than the transhumanist message. The transhumanist message sets up a class war between us and them and gives rise to an idea about those who are enhanced and those who are left behind. The transbemanist message, or B+ for short, is more of a collective type of message, one of inclusiveness, including both humans, bemans and transbemans in a redefined species. Transhumanists (H+) are focused on eugenics, whereas transbemanists are focused on euthenics, which is changing the environment (in this case, going to a cybernetic environment, thus allowing everyone to achieve a level of equivalent empowerment and joyful life). Transhumanist is a strongly secular approach, which leaves an impression in mainstream society that God is bad and will be left behind. Transbemanism is also secular, but has more of an approach that God is something we can build through our collective consciousness.

Ultimately H+ and B+ are two points on a continuum. One is focusing on technological evolution, the other on sociological evolution.

When we abstract ourselves into cybernetic form, that form, too, will want to replicate. Ultimately, we are all playing out according to the master laws of natural selection. There is nothing to fear about cybernetic beings replicating themselves in ever greater numbers. In fact, it is the only way we can achieve survival in a dangerous universe. As long as we have responsibility for our cybernetic offspring, the right to family should be made available to all bemans. Transbemans can be fruitful at the speed of light, so we can rapidly colonize the cosmos and achieve some level of independence from all the harms that can be afflicted upon the earth.

There are simple principles of cyberliability law that can enable reproducing. One example is if a transbeman cannot be civilly punished, then it cannot meet the obligations of a person, and so cannot have the rights of one.

The psychology of transbemans is important to keep in mind. Maslow[11] stated that our adulthood should not be only a renunciation of our childhood, but also an inclusion of its good values and a building upon those. Transbemans and transhumans have nothing to be embarrassed about their human background. Instead, they should take their human background with them into the future at the speed of light as cyberconscious beings. Transbemanism is a Maslowian approach to human enhancement.

Why should we make the leap into transbemanism? This raises the debate between red dolphins and green chimps. Red dolphins are those who believe that history, data, and empirical evidence shows that technology has caused more pain than pleasure. The H-bomb is the usual example given of this. Because of this, technology is more likely to cause existential events, so they conclude that we should limit technology. Green chimps say that the data shows just the opposite, that technology has reduced pain caused by nature. The emblematic example is the eradication of small pox which regularly wiped out millions of humans. Green chimps believe that because technology has reduced harm, it is logical to assume that it is more likely to prevent rather than cause existential events, so we therefore should maximize technology.

This is an irresolvable debate. Empirical data cannot prove or disprove either side. Red dolphins say, “Stop. Our ancestors wisely gave up land technology and returned to the sea. Humans and technology have done us wrong. The evidence of this is how we swim in ever diminishing numbers in the sea.” The green chimps say, “Put the pedal to the medal. Look at what our thumbs have enabled. We are on the cusp of having human rights. As there is an invisible hand in the market that somehow resolves all issues, there is an invisible leg of technology that allows us to maximize goods and reduce harms.”

Ultimately, this is a debate between long run and short run perspectives. Because the cosmos is definitely deadly, red dolphin rules must mean death for all sentient species on the planet in the end. The earth is not going to last forever. Historically, almost all species are wiped out every hundred million years or so. Green chimps rules may let us survive with nanotechnology. Technology only may be deadly. Thus red dolphin rules mean we only definitely survive for a while, but green chimp rules mean that we might die sooner. It all depends on whether you are willing to take a risk for the long term even though there might be a risk of harm in the short term.

There is a compromise approach. If you blend red and green, the result is brown. There is a brown turtle hybrid approach, which is to move forward with technology, but do so in a way that gets a collective buy-in of society in a consensual fashion. In this way, we will be able to realize the transbeman vision with a maximum of good for everyone and a minimum risk of harm.

Why bankers are like bacteria

What has tumbled you and me into the pit of the Great Recession of 2008-2010? What causes boom and bust? Does economic catastrophe come from a perverse monetary system, from capitalism, speculators, overpaid CEO’s and greed? Does it come from conspiracies of illuminati and of power-grabbing families? Does it happen because of mistakes at financial institutions like Citibank, Lehman Brothers, and AIG? Does it ooze from the wreckage of wrong-headed fiscal policies like those of Calvin Coolidge or George Bush?

Over three billion years ago, bacteria already had a cycle of boom and bust built into their DNA. The cycle of boom and bust is a search strategy. It’s a cycle that uses us to explore the new, then to focus on the flaws in our latest innovations and to build fail-safe systems to prevent future outbreaks of the problems those innovations produce — whether those new innovations are credit default swaps, bundled mortgage securities, or super-banks that span the globe and make high-risk investments with their depositors’ money. And the cycle of boom and bust is built into our biology.

Bacteria, like you and me, are astonishingly social. They cannot live alone. Take one bacterium away from its neighbors, away from its colony, put it in a petri dish, and what will it do? If there’s food, it will divide. 72 times a day. It will multiply, surrounding itself with 144 daughters every 24 hours. Those daughters, in turn, will divide 72 times a day and surround themselves — and their founding foremother, the first lonely bacterium — with progeny. If the bacterial colony could find all the food and housing it needs, that one lonely mother in theory could have 5.2×10^151 kids, grand-kids, and great-grandkids in a week. That’s ten with one hundred and fifty one zeros, more than all the atoms in over a million universes.

At least that’s what bacteria can do in theory. In fact within a week your one solitary bacterium will have surrounded herself with a megalopolis, an entire colony. And a colony of bacteria is not a dumb and primitive crowd. It is one of the biggest and most complex societies this planet has ever seen. A single bacterial colony the size of your palm is so thin that you can’t see it with your naked eye. Yet it contains seven trillion individuals. Seven trillion citizens. More than all the human beings this planet has ever seen. All working in concert. All pooling their talents and their data. All communicating with a chemical vocabulary. And all working to solve the problems of the minute and the puzzles of the day. Working together to find new food. Working together to invent new ways to turn garbage into gourmet delicacies, to turn wastelands into succulent buffets, to turn tragedy into opportunity, to outrace and to outpace their rivals, and to win when competition turns into war. That’s why bacterial metropolises are discovery machines. That’s why they are breakthrough generators. That’s why they were the first life forms to experience boom and bust, the first to take advantage of the cycle of exploration and digestion, the cycle of expand then consolidate That’s why they were the first to have the pendulum of repurposing built into their biology.

The first bacteria were following the mandate of nature—helping each other reinvent themselves. Helping each other discover their possibilities. Helping each other pull together a clutter of antiques in whole new ways. Helping each other advance the enterprise of secular genesis, the enterprise of secular creation, the task of the evolutionary search engine. Helping each other advance the family of cells and DNA.

A bacterial colony is a search machine and a research and development team. It has to be. Put yourself in a bacterium’s place. Today’s food will soon run out. You and I will eat it to the last drop and crumb. Tomorrow we will need new groceries. Tomorrow our colony will need its equivalent of new potatoes and meat. Imagine that you and I are the bacteria¹ called Caulobacter crescentus². We live in an immense puddle of fresh water, a lake far from the sea. We are big eaters. We are sweet-tooth dessert devourers. We go for junk food, sugars–xylose, lactose, and galactose. High energy treats. We have four big jobs in life — eating, multiplying, finding new food and housing, and communicating our experiences, especially our extreme experiences, our life and death experiences and our lottery-winning experiences. Oh, and we occasionally innovate.

How can we find new food before hunger kills you, me, and our community? Boom and bust. The cycle of repurposing. You and I are comfortable adults. We look like pink string beans with, conveniently enough, a long string attached. That string is a thin, flexible tube like a soda straw that rivets us to our food. And I do mean rivet. Our straw is called a “stalk” because it looks like the stalk of a tulip. And at your stalk’s end and mine is a superglue so powerful that someday humans will be tempted to imitate its properties. But soon we will slurp up every tasty molecule in the bit of lake bed we’ve sucked up to. What will save us? Boom and bust. The pendulum of repurposing. And the way it crops up in our kids. Our children can be born as Cain or Abel, as hunters or settlers, as explorers or homesteaders. Yes, like you and me, our kids will look superficially like pink string beans with long threads. But in reality they will be born in two different forms. As spreaders or consolidators. As rebels or conservatives. As searchers or structure makers.

We old timers are built to stay in one spot and to glom up the goodies. We are built for boom. We do very poorly when the food supply goes bust. But some of our kids are natural-born bust-escapers. They are born to be dissatisfied, born to say good bye to our sedentary lifestyle and to our parcel of tasty property. Their “strings” are shaped for a restless quest. They are born to seek their fortune. How do we know their goals? Their “purpose in life” shows up in their physiology. Where you and I have stalks, our kids have propellers. They have whips (flagella) twirled by molecular rotary motors. And with those high speed rotors the young shoot and scoot. We old timers are built to hang on tight. But our kids are built to soar through the waters and hunt new food and territory. They are built to explore.

No bacterium explores the landscape on her own. It takes a group of roughly ten thousand to cut a path across the lake bed that hides new food. So from the dot of a colony that you and I have founded, our daughters swim outward in armies, forming circles around us like the bands of a target surrounding the bull’s eye. Those bands travel in deprivation and poverty. They forgo the luxury of reproducing³ and of normal comforts. When they find food, they settle down. And when they settle, they throw away childish things. They throw away their flagellar propellers⁴. And they put down roots. They develop stalks and they root themselves to the food bed of their new territory, their new home. Just like you and I did once upon a time. Then they reproduce. And some of their kids are born as restless rebels, curious discoverers who will spread outward even more. In the process, the armies of impatient youth, the masses of restless seekers, grow our colony. They grow it massively.

We have our bacterial equivalent of boom and bust–periods of vigorous eating and periods when everything good looks bad, when the old ways look poisonous and corrupt, when we are shaken out of our accustomed niche and forced to rein in our appetites and set out in search of something new. We have our bacterial cycles of exploration and digestion, of expansion and consolidation, of contentment and insecurity, of speculation and structure-making. Cycles of repurposing began with the cycles of a bacterial economy. An economic cycle was built into your foremothers’ biology. Is that cycle built into you and me?

***

What flicked the timer of the bacteria’s economic cycle–the timer of the bacteria’s equivalent to a business cycle? Was boom and bust triggered by real world scarcity? Was crash triggered by greed and mistaken policy? No. Even when the food supply is terrific, Caulobacter go through the equivalent of an utter loss of confidence in the riches they have known and a need to strike out, to explore, then to consolidate once again in a new home. Caulobacter bacteria cycle even when the underlying basics of their economy remain strong. They behave like you and I do when we’ve eaten too much of a rich dessert and have grown sick of it. Even if the food supply is bulging, the bacteria with travel-whips lose their taste for the sweets under their nose and are driven to find something new.

The story of the Caulobacter crescentus’s twitch from boom to bust and back to boom again is a tale of two timers. In Caulobacter, sometimes the cycle of boom and bust is switched from high-risk exploration to digestion, from spread to clench and from the equivalent of irrational exuberance to panic by internal timers. Sometimes it’s switched by the outside prod of bounty or scarcity. Both time clocks — the internal and the external — seem able to trigger the twitch from rise to fall and back again. Your sleep cycle is like this bacterial tale of two clocks. Sleep is a product of two timers. One of your sleep timers is tuned to the outside world. It switches as the sun moves and as the world around you darkens from day to night. Another of your timers is totally internal. It can put you to sleep at three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon when the sun is bright as can be.

Caulobacter have an internal timer that drives them to switch from stalks to propellers and back again. And they apparently have an outside timer, the timer of food and famine. Those two timers are apparently often out of synch. What happens when two timers drive a cycle? When two timers make waves? When two timers raise peaks and troughs in Caulobacter or in you and me? Two waves overlapping make an interference pattern. At some points where they meet they add to each other’s strengths and pile up their powers, making peaks. At other points, they cancel each other out and create peculiarly positioned valleys. Overlaid cycles — overlaid waves — can make things look random and chaotic.⁵ But under the mask of randomness, two very simple time-clocks are at work.

The irregularity of two overlapping cycles may explain the seeming unpredictability of boom and crash. The spikes and troughs of the two timers may help explain why the Kondratiev Wave theory of boom and crash, the hypothesis that technology-waves bring big swings in the financial cycle, is only sometimes right. Thanks to internal timers, our biological clock can flick us into panic even when a new technology has many decades to go before it peaks.

If a cycle we’ve inherited from our bacterial ancestors is, indeed, alive in us today, what does that mean for the boom and bust of 2008 and for the bubbles and busts yet to come? How does it help us understand past cycles of exuberance and panic, of exploration and digestion, of speculation and structure-creation, of expansion and consolidation — the tulipmania crash of 1637⁶, the South Sea Bubble and Mississippi Bubble crash of 1720, the Panic of 1797, the Depression of 1807, the Panic of 1819, the Panic of 1837, the Panic of 1857; the Great Depression of 1870,⁷ the Panic of 1873, the Panic of 1893, the Panic of 1907, and the Great Depression of 1929? What does it mean for the changing global economy of today? Does the wrong-headed fiscal policy of a president like Calvin Coolidge really set off a global crash? Do NINJA loans really cause a worldwide economic collapse? Or does the cycle of boom and bust happen for reasons radically different than the ones economists conceive. And if something more basic is at work, what does that mean to you and me?

***

Let’s get serious. Is it really possible that biology is the mother of boom and bust? Can the birds and the bees really help you and me understand the cycle of expansion and consolidation, of hunt then devour and digest, of binge, then purge, of stretch, then clench? Is boom and bust really driven by the pendulum of repurposing?

Boom and bust is not unique to capitalist economies, to industrialized societies, or even to creatures who meet, greet, trade, and gamble with money. The cycle of boom and bust is shot through all of life, from the most primitive level to the most complex. Population boom and bust appear in protozoans, mollusks,⁸ amphibians, reptiles, insects, fish,⁹ and mammals. Red grouse in England go through a four-to-eight year cycle of boom and crash. Parasites called Trichostrongylus tenuis that feed on the red grouse go through crashes and booms as their meal-supply increases in numbers, then declines.¹⁰ Snowshoe rabbits in Canada go through a ten-year cycle of population expansion and contraction. So do the lynx that feed on the snowshoe rabbit. Other animals that endure booms and crashes include Darwin’s finches in the Galapagos Islands, reindeer on islands in the Bering Sea, lemmings in the arctic, and hives of honeybees. The snowshoe rabbit and its predator, the lynx, go through a ten-year boom and bust cycle. The vole, a mouse-like rodent, of Finland tunnels through a three-year cycle. The lemming of the Arctic goes through a four-year cycle of boom and crash. So does the animal that feeds on it, the short-tail weasel. And the side-blotched lizard of Santa Cruz, California, goes through a two-year cycle of expansion and contraction, of good times and bad, of boom and bust.

Boom, bust, and the pendulum of repurposing show up in an even stranger biological workplace — in you and me. They made you and me who we are today. And right now boom, bust, and the pendulum of repurposing are making us who we’ll be tomorrow. Let’s go back to your very early days in your mother’s womb, sixteen days after a sperm and egg first joined up to embark on the huge collaborative project called you. As a sixteen-day-old embryo, you were smaller than a period on this page…0.44 millimeters, less than a fiftieth of an inch.¹¹ Despite your miniscule size, you were a tiny handbag of cells with an interior lining. And you were already being shaped by the pendulum of repurposing and the cycle of exploration and consolidation, by the cyclical strategies of the evolutionary search engine.

Some of your cells itched to achieve more than the mere shape of a purse. They ached to become your nervous system, your skull, and your face.¹² That group of cells with high ambitions was a thin groove on the top of the bag that was you, a groove where the opening of a closed handbag is usually found. That groove is called the neural crest. How did the ballsy cells of that neural crest strive to achieve their goals? They divided and gave birth to exploratory armies, then they sent those soaring squadrons of cells out to explore on their own. Like the Caulobacter bacteria with tails, these search parties migrated away from the home of their birth to spots in the growing embryo of you, spots that were brand new. If they traveled to a destination where they were needed and found an appropriate hookup, they stayed and became nerves. If they found no welcome, they were pared away. Ruthlessly. They were forced to literally kill themselves off. They were forced to use a molecular self-destruct mechanism called “apoptosis,” one of the most intensely studied biological mechanisms of the late twentieth century. Apoptosis is otherwise known as “pre-programmed cell death.” It’s a molecular kit and instruction manual for cellular suicide. And nearly every cell is born with it, including the cells with which I wrote these words and the cells with which you’re reading them.

Back to the embryo. New hordes of exploratory neural-cell wannabes continued to set off on journeys through the developing you for months afterward, taking root in the new territory they’d explored if they’d received enthusiastic signals from the cells of their destination. And destroying themselves if they’d ended up in a spot that didn’t need them. That’s the cycle of exploration and consolidation. That’s the cycle of speculation and structure-making.

And that is the cycle of boom and crash behind the recession we are going through today — the Great Recession of 2008-2010.

© 2009 Prometheus Books

[1] Sources on bacteria include: Yves Brun, Lawrence J. Shimkets, Prokaryotic Development (Washington, DC: ASM Press, 2000). Dennis Bray, “Bacterial Chemotaxis: Using Computer Models to Unravel Mechanism,” Speaker Abstracts, Society of General Physiologists, Symposium 2006, http://www.sgpweb.org/Abstracts2006.pdf (accessed March 2, 2009). R M Harshey and T Matsuyama, “Dimorphic transition in Escherichia coli and Salmonella typhimurium: surface-induced differentiation into hyperflagellate swarmer cells.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, August 30, 1994, pp. 8631-8635. B. Terrana and A. Newton, “Requirement of a cell division step for stalk formation in Caulobacter crescentus,” Journal of Bacteriology, October 1976, pp. 456–462. C.J. Ong, M.L. Wong, J. Smit, “Attachment of the adhesive holdfast organelle to the cellular stalk of Caulobacter crescentus.” Journal of Bacteriology, March 1990, pp. 1448-56. J. Smit, N. Agabian, “Cell surface patterning and morphogenesis: biogenesis of a periodic surface array during Caulobacter development.” Journal of Cell Biology, October 1982: pp. 41-49. J.M. Sommer, A. Newton, “Turning off flagellum rotation requires the pleiotropic gene pleD: pleA, pleC, and pleD define two morphogenic pathways in Caulobacter crescentus,” Journal of Bacteriology, January 1989, pp. 392-401.

[2] Mitsugu Matsushita, “Dynamic Aspects of the Structured Cell Population in a Swarming Colony of Proteus mirabilis,” Journal of Bacteriology. January, 2000, : pp. 385–393.

[3] Jeanne S. Poindexter, Kanan P. Pujara, and James T. Staley, “In Situ Reproductive Rate of Freshwater Caulobacter,” Applied and Environmental Microbiology, September 2000, pp. 4105-4111. See the photos of the stalked and flagellar forms of Caulobacter crescentus at: “Caulobacter, Microbe Wiki, Kenyon College, http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/Caulobacter (accessed Thursday, December 25, 2008).

[4] M. Kanbe, S. Shibata, Y. Umino, U. Jenal, S.I. Aizawa, “Protease susceptibility of the Caulobacter crescentus flagellar hook-basal body: a possible mechanism of flagellar ejection during cell differentiation,” Microbiology, February 2005, pp. 433-8.

[5] Benoit B. Mandelbrot, Richard L. Hudson, The (mis)behavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Risk, Ruin, and Reward (New York: Basic Books, 2004), pp. 207-208.

[6] Anne Goldgar. Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 5.

[7] Gabriel Abraham Almond, Scott C. Flanagan, Robert J. Mundt, Crisis, Choice, and Change: Historical Studies of Political Development (Boston, Massachusetts: Little, Brown, 1973), p. 152.

[8] Maite Narvarte, Raúl González, and Pablo Filippo, “Artisanal mollusk fisheries in San Matías Gulf (Patagonia, Argentina): An appraisal of the factors contributing to unsustainability,” Fisheries Research, October 2007, pp. 68-76.

[9] David R. Montgomery, King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2004), p. 43.

[10] Peter J. Hudson, Andy P. Dobson, Dave Newborn, “Prevention of Population Cycles by Parasite Removal,” Science Magazine, December 18, 1998: pp. 2256–2258.

[11] Marc Kirschner, and John Gerhart, “Evolvability,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Vol. 95, Issue 15, pp. 8420-8427. Marie-Thérèse Heemels, “Apoptosis,” Nature, October 12, 2000. Pascal Meier, Andrew Finch and Gerard Evan, “Apoptosis in development,” Nature, October 12, 2000, pp. 796-801.

[12] N.a. The Visible Embryo, http://www.visembryo.com/baby/16.html (accessed December 2, 2008). (Compiled from The National Institute of Child and Human Development’s Carnegie Collection of Human Development.)

Over the next million years, a descendant of the Internet will maintain contact with inhabited planets throughout our galaxy and begin to spread out into the larger universe, linking up countless new or existing civilizations into the Universenet, a network of ultimate intelligence.

Originally published in Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge.

The Earth has already input information to the Universenet. Whenever microwave towers or satellites send Internet traffic, some of the energy leaks off, transmitting data unintentionally into space. The first email messages transmitted via microwave towers in 1969 by the predecessor of the Internet, ARPANET, have (theoretically) traveled thirty-nine light-years so far, way past the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, four light-years away. In practice, such feeble signals are probably buried in cosmic radio noise.

Now NASA plans to do it intentionally. The Interplanetary Internet (IPI) should allow NASA to link up the Internets of Earth, spacecraft, and eventually Moon, Mars, and beyond.[1] By the Year Million, billions of “smart dust” sensors will be connected to a distant descendant of the IPI, exchanging data in real time or via store-and-forward protocol or wireless mesh (a network that handles many-to-many connections and is capable of dynamically updating and optimizing these connections), on planets and in spacecraft.[2]

Meanwhile, one important near-future use will be for tracking asteroids, comets, and space junk, exchanging three-dimensional position location and time data (similar to GPS on Earth) via multiple hops between sensors. Once affordable personal space travel is available, the IPI could serve as the core of an interplanetary version of air traffic control. The IPI scheme could also become the standard communications protocol as we expand out beyond the solar system’s planets, and then beyond the stars and to other galaxies. We could start with possibly habitable planets beyond the solar system, such as Gliese 581d, the third planet of the red dwarf star Gliese 581 (about twenty light-years away from Earth), if we detect signs of intelligent life there.

But using radio waves or lasers to communicate with civilizations around other stars, let alone in other galaxies, requires huge amounts of energy. Exactly how much energy? That depends mainly on distance, frequency, directional efficiency of antennas, and assumed ability of the receiving civilization to detect signals amid the extreme electromagnetic noise of space. In 1974, the Arecibo telescope beamed a 210-byte radio message aimed at the globular star cluster M13, some twenty-five thousand light-years away. It was transmitted with a power of one megawatt-enough energy to power about one thousand homes, using a narrow beam to achieve an EIRP (effective isotropic radiated power) of 20 trillion watts. That made it the strongest human-made signal ever sent. (It has gone 0.14 percent of the way, so far.)

Arecibo uses a large dish. Another way to create a narrow beam of high-power microwave radio energy is to build a phased-array antenna with multiple dishes spread out over a large area. These could be located on the Moon or at a Lagrange point (one of the stable locations in the Earth-Moon-Sun axis). Or a high-powered laser could be used. How highly powered? Looking toward the Year Million, as we reach out to communication nodes orbiting more distant stars, or in other galaxies, we will need to use a lot of power-as much as the entire power of the Sun. A civilization able to do that kind of cosmic engineering is referred to as Kardashev Type II, or KT-II [see Chapter 8].

By modest contrast, our civilization used about fifteen terawatt-hours in 2004 (a terawatt-hour is one billion kilowatt-hours) of electrical power.[3] New York University Physics Professor Emeritus Martin Hoffert and other scientists calculate that if our power consumption grows by just two percent per year, then in just four hundred years we will need all the solar power received by the Earth (1016 watts = 10,000 terawatts). And in a thousand years, we’ll require all of the power of the Sun (4×1026 watts).[4] Hoffert and other scientists propose space-based solar power as one major future solution. Solar flux is eight times higher in space than the surface average on cloudy Earth and available 24 hours a day, unlike solar energy panels on Earth. Power satellites located in geosynchronous orbit (like communication satellites) would use a bank of photovoltaic receptors to convert the Sun’s energy to radio waves. This energy would be beamed wirelessly down to a large “rectenna” or rectifying antenna where the incoming microwave energy is rectified (converted) for use in the electrical power grid on Earth, turning it to electricity for distribution. Alternatively, laser beams could replace radio-frequency signals.[5] Once the infrastructure is in place for economically launching space-based solar power satellites, the same types of microwave or laser systems could be aimed at the stars for communicating elsewhere.

Eventually, when we have become first a KT-I and then a KT-II civilization, we will reach even farther out to supergalaxies and even to clusters of supergalaxies, which could require a Type III civilization-one capable of controlling the power of an entire galaxy, some 1036 watts. The communication latencies (transmission delays) for such a system would be millions or even hundred of millions of years. (Two-way latency is already a problem for astronauts in the solar system, increasing as we transmit information to places farther from the Earth, or wherever humans and posthumans end up, perhaps uploaded into a Matrioshka brain that will have replaced the existing solar system.) Even the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, could not reply to a message sooner than eight years after it was sent. Talk about bad netiquette.

Possibly the denizens of the Year Million will solve this time lag with extreme cosmic engineering feats such as wormholes, or even communication via parallel universes.[6] One intriguing possibility is the use of quantum entanglement-that is, allowing an entangled atom or photon to carry information across a distance, theoretically anywhere in the universe (once the initial photons have been received), or “spooky action-at-a-distance,” as Einstein called it.[7] An experiment testing the possibility of communication using this principle is in progress in the Laser Physics Facility at the University of Washington by professor John G. Cramer.[8] Cramer astonished physicists at a joint American Institute of Physics/American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in 2006 by presenting experimental evidence that the outcome of a laser experiment could be affected by a future measurement: a message was sent to a time fifty microseconds in the past.[9] This leads to an even more bizarre idea: retrocausal communication-the future affecting the past, as theoretical physicist Jack Sarfatti (the inspiration for Doc in the movie Back to the Future) has proposed.[10] So in principle, perhaps one could bypass the speed-of-light limitation and have messages show up in a distant galaxy long before they could have been received by radio or laser transmission, or even before they were sent!

Web to ET: Download This

Humans might not be the first technological species to explore the galaxy. Suppose alien probes await us in orbit or on the Moon (like the obelisk in Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Sentinel” and its movie version, 2001: A Space Odyssey) or at Lagrange points.[11] If so, we might only need to respond with the right signals to trigger a connection-similar to logging on to an FTP server with the right IP address, user name, and password. Such probes might even now be scattered around the solar system as smart dust particles that we haven’t yet analyzed. IBM has developed a prototype of a molecular switch that could replace current silicon-based chip technology with atom-based processors, making it theoretically possible to run a supercomputer on a chip the size of a speck of dust. IBM is also developing technology to store a bit on a single atom, portending hard drives that can pack up to a thousand times as much information on a hard disk as current technologies.[12]

Instead of transmitting via radio or laser, sending a physical data spore might be a simpler and more effective alternative. Rutgers University electrical engineer Christopher Rose has shown that for long messages conveyed across long distances (where transmitting a signal would be extremely expensive, have limited range, or be too hard to find), it is more effective to send physical messages than transmit them. That was one rationale for sending the greeting plaque on Pioneer 10 and 11 in 1972 and 1973, and a more complex inscribed disk on the Voyager probe in 1977. Rose thinks there could be such inscribed objects now orbiting planets in our solar system, or on asteroids.[13]

But transmitting information into space still fires up the imagination of several scientists. SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak has proposed that rather than sending simple coded messages, why not just feed the Google servers into the transmitter and send the aliens the entire Web? It would take about half a year to transmit the Web in the microwave region at one megabyte a second; infrared lasers operating at a gigabyte per second would shorten the broadcast time to no more than two days.[14] Transmitting the Web into space could also serve as a backup for civilization. William E. Burrows has suggested creating a self-sufficient colony on the Moon where a “backup drive” could store the history and wisdom of civilization in case a calamity strikes Earth.[15] To achieve this, Burrows set up an organization, Alliance to Rescue Civilization (ARC), subsequently absorbed by the Lifeboat Foundation, which is developing solutions to prevent the extinction of mankind. Acquiring knowledge from ancient extraterrestrial civilizations could be critical to our long-term human survival, says Lifeboat Foundation president Eric Klien. “The Universenet could give us the final signals of a civilization right before it destroyed itself,” he wrote in a Skype message. “We could use this information to avoid our own destruction, perhaps the most important reason to continue the SETI project. If we learned that a civilization was destroyed by, say, nanoweapons, we could start creating defenses against this situation.”[16]

Such signals might not be obvious. For example, pulsars, discovered in 1967, are rotating neutron stars that emit electromagnetic waves. Their rapid rotation causes their radiation to become pulsed. Could this radiation be modulated deliberately to form a sort of cosmic transmitter? Astronomers at first thought the pulses meant they might be ET; so far, they haven’t found any evidence of an actual message. Or are there encoded messages too subtle to detect? And pulsars are far from the most powerful possible signal sources from space. Quasars can release the energy equal to hundreds of average galaxies combined, equivalent to one trillion suns. Could they be galactic Web sites run by Type III civilizations? (Unlikely, since most quasars are very far away, which means distant in time, and seem to have been formed not long after the emergence of the universe from the Big Bang.)

Computer scientist Stephen Wolfram believes current methods used in SETI are inefficient and unlikely to produce reliable results because our detection methods seek to detect only regular patterns. A more efficient method would use sophisticated, noise-immune coding, producing something similar to spread spectrum signals. To SETI’s present system of analysis this kind of signal sounds and looks like random noise, and would be overlooked and discarded.[17] Wolfram suggests we need more sophisticated software-based signal processing. Maybe we need someone like Hedy Lamarr, the brilliant actress who famously said, “Any girl can be glamorous; all she has to do is stand still and look stupid,” and then went on to invent spread spectrum technology. Could ET be using it? There’s no way to know with the current SETI technology. Complex artifacts made by an advanced civilization could look very much like natural objects, Wolfram argues. Could the stars themselves be extraterrestrial artifacts? “They could have been built for a purpose,” says Wolfram. “It’s extremely difficult to rule it out.”[18]

Is Alien Intelligence Hidden in Junk DNA?

Cardiff University astronomer and mathematics professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, a long-time collaborator with the late cosmologist Sir Fred Hoyle, has suggested that life on this planet began on comets, since their combination of clay and water is an ideal breeding ground for life. He believes that explanation to be a quadrillion times more likely than Earth’s having spawned life.[19] If that’s the case, then comets and asteroids could be carrying physical messages, a sort of “sneakernet”-physical file sharing in the interests of added security-for the Universenet.

Astrobiologist Paul Davies, now at Arizona State University, suggests that ET could embed messages in highly conserved sections of viral DNA-most likely in its so-called “junk” sections-and send them out as hitchhikers on asteroids or comets. (Genomics researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, who compared human and mouse DNA, have reported millions of base pairs of highly conserved sequences of junk DNA, meaning they have a survival value).[20] These messages could even have been incorporated into terrestrial life, Davies thinks, and lurk in our DNA, awaiting interpretation. (There could be an interesting d-mail-DNA-mail-waiting to be discovered as we search through the decoded genome.) Rather than beaming information randomly in the hope that somewhere, someday, an intelligent species will decode them, this method would use a pre-existing “legion of small, cheap, self-repairing and self-replicating machines that can keep editing and copying information and perpetuate themselves over immense durations in the face of unforeseen environmental hazards. Fortunately, such machines already exist. They are called living cells.”[21]

Transmitting People to the Stars

Futurist/inventor Ray Kurzweil has suggested that once the intelligent life on a planet invents machine computation, it is only a matter of a few centuries before its intelligence saturates the matter and energy in its vicinity. At that point, he suggests, nanobots will be dispersed like the spores of plants. This colonization will eventually expand outward, approaching the speed of light (as discussed in Robin Hanson’s Chapter 9).[22] In Fred Hoyle and John Elliot’s 1962 novel A For Andromeda, a radio signal from the direction of the galaxy M31 in Andromeda gives scientists a computer program for the creation of a living organism, adapting borrowed human DNA. They name this young cloned woman Andromeda, and through her agency the computer tries to take over the world.[23] Author James Gardner has seriously suggested a version of such “interstellar cloning”: an advanced civilization could transmit a software program to us with instructions on replicating its own inhabitants-even an entire civilization.[24]

Dr. Martine Rothblatt, who founded Sirius Satellite and other satellite companies, has suggested a related method for connecting with Universenet: sending bemes or units of being-highly individual elements of personality, mannerisms, feelings, recollections, beliefs, values, and attitudes. Bemes are fundamental, transmittable, mutable units of being-ness in the spirit of memes (Richard Dawkins’s term for the replicators of cultural information that a mind transmits, verbally or by demonstration, to another mind). The main difference is that memes are culturally transmittable elements that have common meanings, whereas bemes reflect individual characteristics.

Rothblatt suggests that a new Beme Neural Architecture (BNA) will outcompete DNA in populating the universe. “At any moment, and certainly at some moment, a giant star in our general stellar neighborhood will blow up and thereby fry everything in its vicinity,” she points out. Some of these explosions, known as gamma-ray bursts, are so violent that they damage everything within hundreds of light-years. Yet there are two or three gamma-ray bursts somewhere in the observable universe every day and about one thousand less-explosive but still life-ending supernovae every day throughout the galaxies (that we can observe). One explanation for the Fermi Paradox-why is there no evidence of ET, although the galaxy seems capable of so many extraterrestrial civilizations-is that sooner or later a supernova nabs everyone’s life zone. “Perhaps the only way we can survive the risk of astrobiological or mega-volcanic catastrophe is to spread ourselves out among the stars,” Rothblatt suggests. And as self-replicating code, bemes are much more quickly assembled, replicated, and transported than genes strung along chromosomes and transmitted by sex. Computer technology is vastly more efficient than wet biology in copying information. Expressed in digital bits rather than in nucleotide base pairs, information can be transported farther (beyond Earth to evade killer asteroid impacts) and faster (at the speed of light).

DNA is not well suited for space travel. It can replicate effectively only within bodies. Humans require vast quantities of life-preserving supplies and besides, at the moment, we don’t live long enough to make the journey to other stars (a factor, as Pamela Sargent notes in the previous chapter, that is subject to change). On the other hand, by replicating our minds into BNA and storing them in a computer substrate, we can travel far longer and far faster, since we would be traveling with minimal mass in seeds or spores. Arriving at a promising planet, our BNA can be loaded into nanotech-built machine bodies to prepare a new home. Once that home flourishes, human (and other) DNA can be reconstructed from either stored samples or digital codes and basic chemicals, which can be nurtured into mature bodies free to develop their own minds or to receive a transfer of a BNA mind.

Alternatively, Rothblatt suggests that just by spacecasting your bemes, you can already achieve a level of immortality, and so can all of humanity. In March 2007, Rothblatt’s CyBeRev Project began experimentally spacecasting bemes in the form of digitized video, audio, text, personality tests, and other recordings, of attributes of a person’s being, such as memories, mannerisms, personality, feelings, recollections, beliefs, attitudes, and values.[25] These bemes are transmitted out into the universe via a microwave dish normally used to communicate with satellites. Any spacecast signal, she speculates, has a chance of being decoded from the background cosmic noise in the same way a cellphone’s CDMA (spread spectrum) encoded signal is decoded out of random electromagnetic noise. Your bemes could then be interpreted, and yourself recreated from the transmission. This requires interception by an advanced, intelligent civilization that would receive and decode the signals, then instantiate the bemes as either a regenerated traditional cellular or a bionanotechnological, body. (If this happened, we might find by the Year Million that the galaxy is swarming with other humans downloaded by far-flung extraterrestrials or their machines.)

Each spacecast of an individual’s bemes is accompanied by an informed-consent form authorizing that individual’s re-instantiation from the transmitted bemes. The CyBeRev project is based on the hypothesis that advanced intelligence will respect sentient autonomy and be capable of filling in the blanks of a person’s consciousness via interpolation of the spacecast bemes, using background cultural information transmitted from Earth. The project’s backers do not believe extraterrestrials will unethically revive persons such as television personalities whose images, behavior, and personal information have been telecast, but who have not authorized their re-instantiation. Still, such cultural transmissions will be useful in the aggregate, providing revived spacecasters with a familiar environment. “Given the vast amount of television and Internet information streaming into space, the revivers of our spacecasters will have abundant contextual information with which to work,” concluded Rothblatt.[26]

Programming the Universe

By converting matter into what some futurists call computronium (hypothetical material designed to be an optimized computational substrate), Year Million scientists could create the beginnings of an ultimately powerful computer.[27] Taking it to the extreme, MIT scientist Seth Lloyd has calculated that a computer made up of all the energy in the entire known universe (that is, within the visible “horizon” of forty-two billion light-years) can store about 1092 bits of information and can perform 10105 computations/second.[28] The universe itself is a quantum computer, he says, and it has made a mind-boggling 10122 computations since the Big Bang (for that part of the universe within the “horizon”).[29] Compare that to about 2×1028 operations performed over the entire history of computation on Earth (“because of Moore’s law, half of this computation has taken place in the last year and a half,” he wrote in 2006). What’s more, the observable horizon of the universe, space itself, is expanding at three times the speed of light (in three dimensions), so the amount of computation performable within the horizon increases over time.

Lloyd has also proposed that a black hole could serve as a quantum computer and data storage bank. In black holes, he says, Hawking radiation, which escapes the black hole, unintentionally carries information about material inside the black hole. This is because the matter falling into the black hole becomes entangled with the radiation leaving its vicinity, and this radiation captures information on nearly all the matter that falls into the black hole. “We might be able to figure out a way to essentially program the black hole by putting in the right collection of matter,” he suggests.[30]

There is a supermassive black hole in the center of our galaxy, perhaps the remnant of an ancient quasar. Will this become the mainframe and central file sharing system for galaxy hackers of the Year Million? What’s more, a swarm of ten thousand or more smaller black holes may be orbiting it.[31] Might they be able to act as distributed computing nodes and a storage network? Toward the Year Million, an archival network between stars and between galaxies could develop an Encyclopedia Universica, storing critical information about the universe at multiple redundant locations in those and many other black holes.

Clash of the Titans

Far beyond the Year Million, our galaxy faces a crisis. The supermassive black holes in our galaxy and the Andromeda galaxy are headed for a cosmic collision in two billion years. Will they have incompatible operating systems-a sort of Mac-versus-PC confrontation? (Of course, they might just pass by each other-or be steered past by hyperintelligent operators.)

In The Intelligent Universe, James Gardner adapted a bold notion originally proposed by cosmologist Lee Smolin. For Smolin, Darwinian principles constrain the nature of any universe such that new baby universes produced via black holes will resemble their parent cosmos, and will be surprisingly life-friendly as well. Gardner extends this idea into a fundamentally radical (but falsifiable) hypothesis called the Selfish Biocosm-the cosmological equivalent of Richard Dawkins’s selfish gene. The idea is that eventually intelligent life must acquire the capacity to shape the entire cosmos. In addition, the universe has a Smolin-style “utility function”: propagation of baby universes exhibiting the same life-friendly physical qualities as their parent-universe, including a system of physical laws and constants that enables life and intelligence to emerge and eventually repeat the cycle.

Under this scenario, the mission of sufficiently evolved intelligent life in the universe is to serve as a cosmic reproductive organ-the equivalent of DNA in living creatures-spawning an endless succession of life-friendly offspring that are themselves endowed with the same reproductive capacities as their predecessors. (Rothblatt’s BNA might well be the fundamental mechanism for this evolutionary process-veteran physicist John Wheeler’s legendary IT from BIT, things arising from information rather than the other way round).

Gardner believes that we’ve already received a message from ET: the laws and constants of our universe, including the inexplicable cosmological constant which at this time is accelerating cosmic expansion. His hypothesis makes sense of the observation that the constants seem rigged in favor of the emergence of life. For example, they are improbably hospitable to carbon-based intelligent life-an unlikely and as-yet unexplained anthropic oddity that some scientists have identified as the deepest mystery in all of science. As Gardner claims:

We are likely not alone in the universe, but are probably part of a vast-yet undiscovered-transterrestrial community of lives and intelligences spread across billions of galaxies and countless parsecs. . . . We share a possible common fate with that hypothesized community: to help shape the future of the universe and transform it from a collection of lifeless atoms into a vast, transcendent mind.

In the Year Million, such a cosmic community will be linked up by the Universenet.

Notes
[1] In the late 1990s, Dr. Vint Cerf, who co-designed the Internet’s TCP/IP protocol, designed the Interplanetary Internet (IPN, http://www.ipnsig.org) to link up the Earth with other planets and spaceships in transit over millions of miles. Cerf’s clever scheme solved a big problem. With interplanetary communication delays-the average two-way latency (delay time) between Earth and Mars, 228 million km apart, is 25 minutes 21 seconds-the Internet TCP/IP protocol we use today would simply time out. Who has half an hour to wait for a carriage return? So Cerf and his team came up with a store-and-forward architecture-a sort of relay race. Transmit messages to an Earth-orbiting satellite, let’s say, and store them there until the next local pass of the Moon, which then transmits them to Mars.
[2] Tomas Krag and Sebastian Büettrich, “Wireless Mesh Networking,” O’Reilly Network, Jan. 22, 2004: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/wireless/2004/01/22/wirelessmesh.html
[3] Energy Information Administration , U.S. Department of Energy: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/electricityconsumption.html. The world electrical power generation is increasing by 2.4 percent per year (see http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/ieo/electricity.html) and is expected to grow to thirty terawatt-hours in the year 2030.
[4] Martin I. Hoffert, et al, “Advanced Technology Paths to Global Climate Stability: Energy for a Greenhouse Planet,” Science, Vol. 298 (2002): 981-987. As Dougal Dixon notes in Chapter 2, we are running out of oil, and what is worse, many countries, especially China, are burning huge amounts of coal, increasingly polluting the atmosphere with toxins and carbon dioxide and accelerating global warming. It can only get worse: 850 new coal-fired power plants are to be built by 2012 by the United States, China, and India. Terrestrial solar installations, biofuel, wind power, and geothermal power will help, but they all have limitations (ground-based solar panels don’t work at night, for example) and, says Hoffert, can’t economically provide the amount of power needed, especially in Africa and Asia.
[5] Martin Hoffert, “Energy from Space,” Marshall Institute, Aug. 7, 2007, http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=550
[6] John G. Cramer, “Wormholes and Time Machines,” Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June 1989, communication access via parallel universes, or retrocausal and faster-than-light (FTL) signaling John G. Cramer, “EPR Communication: Signals from the Future?,” Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2006, http://www.analogsf.com/0612/altview.shtml; Max Tegmark, “Parallel Universes,” Scientific American, May 2003.
[7] Seth Lloyd, Programming The Universe (New York: Knopf, 2006): 165.
[8] John G. Cramer, “An Experimental Test of Signaling using Quantum Nonlocality,” http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/NLS/NL_signal.htm.
[9] John G. Cramer, “Reverse Causation and the Transactional Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in Frontiers of Time: Retrocausation-Experiment and Theory,” in AIP Conference Proceedings, Vol. 263, ed. Daniel P. Sheehan (Melville, NY: AIP, 2006): 20-26; John G. Cramer, “Reverse Causation-EPR Communication: Signals from the Future?,” Analog Science Fiction and Fact, December 2006, http://www.analogsf.com/0612/altview.shtml; B. Dopfer, PhD Thesis, University of Innsbruck (1998); A. Zeilinger, Rev. Mod. Physics, 71, S288-S297 (1999).
[10] Jack Sarfatti, Super Cosmos (Author House, 2006): 20.
[11] Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Francisco Valdes, “The search for extraterrestrial artifacts (SETA),” Acta Astronautica, Vol. 12 (1985): 1027-1034.
[12] Peter Liljeroth, Jascha Repp, and Gerhard Meyer, “Current-Induced Hydrogen Tautomerization and Conductance Switching of Naphthalocyanine Molecules,” Science, Vol. 317. no. 5842, pp. 1203 – 1206, http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/317/5842/1203
[13] Christopher Rose and Gregory Wright, “Inscribed Matter as an Energy Efficient Means of Communication with an Extraterrestrial Civilization,” Nature, Vol. 431, September 2004. http://www.winlab.rutgers.edu/~crose/papers/nature.pdf
[14] Seth Shostak, “What Do You Say to an Extraterrestrial?” SETI Institute News, December 2, 2004, http://www.seti.org/news/features/what-do-you-say-to-et.php
[15] William E. Burrows, The Survival Imperative: Using Space to Protect Earth (New York: Forge, 2006).
[16] Personal communication, September 3, 2007.
[17] Stephen Wolfram, A New Kind of Science (Wolfram Media, 2002): 1188, http://www.wolframscience.com/nksonline/page-1188b-text
[18] Marcus Chown, “Looking for Alien Intelligence in the Computational Universe,” New Scientist, November 26, 2005, http://www.newscientist.com/channel/fundamentals/mg18825271.600
[19] Hazel Muir, “Did Life Begin on Comets?” NewScientist.com news service, http://space.newscientist.com/channel/astronomy/astrobiology/dn12506, August 17, 2007.
[20] Mark Peplow, “ET Write Home,” Nature News, http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040830/full/040830-4.html, September 1, 2004.
[21] Paul Davies, “Do We Have to Spell It Out?” New Scientist, August 7, 2004, http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18324595.300.
[22] Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near (Viking 2005).
[23] Fred Hoyle and John Elliot, A For Andromeda (Harper & Row, 1962), adapted from the 1961 BBC TV serial, now lost: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054511/
[24] James Gardner, The Intelligent Universe (New Page Books, 2007).

[25] In Chapter 7 of this book, Wil McCarthy estimates that people could store most of their memories in about two terabytes, which could be transmitted via satellite in just a few hours.[26] CyBeRev, Terasem Movement, Inc., http://www.cyberev.org

[27] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computronium
[28] Seth Lloyd, Programming The Universe (New York: Knopf, 2006): 165.
[29] Based on the Margolis-Levitin theorem: take the amount of energy within the horizon (1071 joules), multiply by 4, and divide by Planck’s constant. What has the universe computed? Itself. Seth Lloyd, Programming The Universe (New York: Knopf, 2006): 165-167.
[30] Maggie McKee, “Black Holes: The Ultimate Quantum Computers?” NewScientist.com news service, March 13, 2006, http://space.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8836&feedId=online-news_rss20%3E
[31] “Chandra Finds Evidence for Swarm of Black Holes Near the Galactic Center,” January 12, 2005, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/01/050111114024.htm

* http://www.amazon.com/Year-Million-Science-Edge-Knowledge/dp/1934633054/

© 2008 Amara D. Angelica

In recent years, research and development partnerships related to sensitive military space systems and dual-use commercial systems have grown broader and more inclusive. This trend has resulted in greater access for the United States to talented minds from all over the world and low-cost scientific contributions from university-based researchers and small commercial operations. It has also resulted in a greater probability for technologies developed in the U.S. to leak outside its borders. The realignment of the global economy stands to further shift the international balance of space power in the years to come. For nations that possess the relative wealth, infrastructure, and knowledge to develop space warfare technologies, their ability to become a leading military space power requires only the will to do so. The “brain drain” that hampered the space programs of many nations in decades past is weighing less on them today. The stagnancy of foreign economies that resulted in a flood of scientific minds to the U.S. is slowly ebbing, as many are now returning home to profitable jobs in booming defense and space industries.

This situation is compounded by increased competition in the launch services industry, which has resulted in reduced costs to place assets into orbit, as well as a decrease in the size and weight of satellites and space systems—developments that are conducive to space warfare. Consequently, access to space is no longer limited to nations with massive military budgets. In this rapidly changing environment, the greatest influence on the development of space warfare may rest on our ever-growing dependency upon satellites—for both military and commercial purposes—and their inherent vulnerabilities. Furthermore, as we venture forward into a globalized security environment fueled by advances in technologies such as directed energy (DE) systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and nanomanufacturing, both the warfighter and the diplomat will be presented with new tools to respond to security crises.

Military space technologies currently in development are the precursor to a world where threats can be neutralized at the speed of light and conflicts may escalate at a rate too fast to curtail. Accordingly, adjustments will soon have to be made across the entire spectrum of diplomatic and military affairs. If we fail to draft international treaties now that are in line with the pace of advancements in military space technology, a global technology free-for-all could result. This could contribute to a climate in which a spacefaring nation such as the U.S. would be bound to engage in a constant race against itself in order to maintain an effective defensive capability. The purpose of the following military space technology forecast and analysis is to provide new insights and specific recommendations that might protect peaceful cooperation in outer space. This forecast assumes that there are no binding constraints from international treaties. It depicts the current and future state of science related to military space systems, specifically systems that could lead to scenarios that could be precursors to or causes of warfare in space.

In the years leading up to 2020, tensions among military space powers have been mounting. This has been due, in part, to broad-spectrum advances that have materialized internationally in the “Five Ds” of counter-space operations: Deception, Disruption, Denial, Degradation, and Destruction. Even as nations flaunt their military space abilities as a means of intimidating and deterring space rivals, instances of space systems failures, though still uncommon, are slowly rising due to space-warfare systems testing and the increasing amount of space debris. Space systems failures in this new era are triggering accusations of systems disruption and sabotage between nations. The means to achieve an offensive and defensive military space capability in this heady space environment can be found in various force-multiplying arenas of technology, which we will now discuss.

2020

We enter 2020 to find that the disparities that existed in decades past regarding global space warfare capabilities have been fundamentally and irreversibly altered. Many leading nations are now operating on a near-level playing field. Complementary technologies are driving one another’s progress; for example, as robotics concepts top out and undergo a momentary pause, they are soon catapulted ahead by explosive growth in the field of supercomputing. The arrival and subsequent establishment of strong artificial intelligence is approaching. Key strategists of military space warfare systems are chasing full-spectrum, real-time, and seamless situational awareness of sea, ground, air, and space. The world’s brightest minds are reaching new heights as human intelligence is fused with intelligent agents and neural networks. These are the systems that will deliver humanity to the next echelon as nations become increasingly reliant on AI systems and their ability to process a now humanly unmanageable stream of information–a torrent to which our military is now inextricably connected.

The five theaters of combat–Cyber, Space, Air, Land, and Sea–now resemble a unified battlesphere. The international space community is being led by drivers such as the still-plummeting cost of computational power, the continued free exchange of knowledge, and the refinement of nanomaterials, which are resulting in stronger, lighter, faster and more responsive space systems. Featured most prominently in this transition process is the influence of the smaller commercial space systems companies and non-military R&D providers, such as universities. The roles of large military and governmental-based space-systems providers have been challenged effectively by the private space industry. This challenge was inspired in part by successes in the fields of launch services, satellite development, and niche emerging systems. During this era, the commercial launch industry in the United States is now spending as much as four times the total annual budget of NASA, with widespread commercial space travel seeming more plausible than ever.

“For many nations, there is an ominous and increased probability of sustaining a space asset attack.”

The threat spectrum for potential space-attack scenarios is no longer a distant hypothesis, nor does it seem an abstract possibility because the technology is unknown. In 2020, various advanced space-warfare technologies are openly displayed and touted as offensive attack systems. For many nations, there is an ominous and increased probability of sustaining a space asset attack. Running in parallel with such concerns are increasing fears of worst-case scenarios related to the accidental launch of nuclear forces–partly from measurable increases in space debris and the confusion that could arise should space systems be attacked or time-out for extended periods without explanation. As more countries than ever are now realizing their mounting reliance on space, and as tensions run higher, the range of possible deterrents and responses to a space-systems attack are increasingly severe and include the possible use of nuclear weapons. Full-scale attacks on space systems can now deliver catastrophic effects upon economies, societal functions, and military operations that would take decades to recover from–even limited acts of space warfare could result in rapid conflict breakout and light-speed escalation scenarios.

Increases in orbital space debris could not only lead to damage or destruction of commercial and military space systems; orbital debris will compromise the safety of space exploration efforts. The role that space systems play in support of economies, societal functions and military operations are constantly threatened by space debris. And collision could be misinterpreted by the effected nation. Such confusion could result in disastrous consequences. (image: NASA)

Intolerable demands have now been placed upon government and military officials of the leading space powers, as the remaining human factors across the entire spectrum of military space operations must come to terms with the prospect that the continued presence of humans might only serve as an impediment to the realized potential of computational efficiency.

Artificial Intelligence & Cyber Warfare

In light of the convergence process that is now taking place in 2020 between AI and cyber warfare systems and their corresponding areas of responsibility relating to military space systems and space warfare technologies internationally, these systems have been merged, reflecting this evolution.

Human-machine interactions and interfaces are radically changing many aspects of the military space command and control structure. In many cases, specific combat operations are now being conducted by human and artificial operators working together in a virtual environment, which provides a real-time view of the target area, with semi-autonomous and autonomous attack options just a blink or a voice-command away. In 2020, AI-driven systems are now supplying consolidated information and refined military options to high-level decision makers, who are now unable to decipher and analyze vast data flows on their own. In fact, the role of the war planner is now found to be most the most critical element for selecting among the war-fighting strategies generated by AI systems.

For those with the means and the desire to do so, the entire sphere of global military operations in 2020 has the potential to be fully interconnected, as successful military operations are decided by this complex network of systems. Vast protection measures have been taken to guard these systems, including actions to greatly reduce the number of network access points into military and national security systems and to centralize individual architectures in an attempt to prevent unauthorized access and lessen the probability of cyber attacks. This will prove to be a critical decision for many advanced military powers. As governmental network access points are reduced and their decentralized layout is eventually integrated, the potential for security breaches is greatly decreased. However, should a cyber denial of service or brute force attack prove successful, a full- or near-full-spectrum catastrophic failure could result. Scenarios such as these must be considered before the complete consolidation of information architectures is achieved. Decentralized systems lead to an increased potential for vulnerabilities; however, they defuse the effects of successful attacks, thus minimizing the potential for significantly debilitating operational effects.

The Airborne Laser or ABL is a component of the ballistic missile defense. The ABL’s primary function is to shoot down ballistic missiles in the boost phase. This system employs advanced directed energy technology that can be used in space-to-space engagements, as well as advanced pointing, tracking and beam-stabilization systems that are universal for land, air and space based lasers. (Image: United States Air Force)

Threats posed to computer networks that support critical military satellite systems are in 2020 becoming increasingly complex and are occurring more frequently. Specifically, attacks targeting ground stations and command centers threaten military connectivity and the seamlessness of the Command, Control, Communications, Computer, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance systems (C4ISR). Such attacks have the potential to effectively induce a total system blackout. A military’s ability to adequately secure C4ISR systems and protect ground segments ensures success not only in space, but in all dimensions of warfare. Advances in cryptology, quantum cryptology, and related technologies such as ciphers and crypto-keys for performing encryption and decryption of these data streams are vital to space-systems security. Specifically, the preservation of secure crosslink/uplink/downlink data transmissions will require constant enhancement efforts due to the availability of advanced computer processing capabilities and the adaptive nature of highly skilled adversaries. As with all military space-supporting computer systems, threat sources are not limited to code breakers and hackers trying to exploit weaknesses from outside government facilities in faraway lands, but from within the host government as well. In an environment where trust is everything, a weakness in the human element of security could jump all other protection measures. Additionally, if an attack were to succeed against the C4ISR supporting space systems, a self-healing capability or self-regenerative systems (SRS) solution must be executed immediately in order to repair and secure the effected network. Such abilities to survive a debilitating space systems attack will be made possible by advances in AI.

Nanotechnology

In 2020, it is nearly impossible to find nanotechnology detractors, as universal applications are benefiting countless industries in this multidisciplinary field. Up to this point, nanotechnology discoveries that improved space warfare capabilities had appeared mostly in the form of materials improvements, which enhanced solar power generation, survivability, and structural integrity. Now, micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) and micro-opto-electro-mechanical systems (MOEMS) are beginning to lead to further improvements in sensors, such as Attitude Determination and Control (ADCS) and other components, such as actuators.

Meaningful research into the materials sciences has now been underway for nearly 25 years and novel applications are currently appearing and addressing key challenges. Specifically, developments made in the areas of carbon nanotubes (CNT) are resulting in materials capable of thermal and electrical conduction. Additionally, CNTs in the proper configurations have led to the creation of materials with unprecedented ballistic protection and heat-shielding and load-bearing strength, including the ability to defuse and insulate against the effects of high-energy lasers. For example, 3D aerogels and xerogels are in 2020 capable of withstanding load-bearing pressures as extreme as 75,000psi. One can imagine numerous applications for such materials, especially when we factor in advances in oxide options. Nanocomposite materials such as those utilizing silica or polystyrene even demonstrate an ability to shield against the effects of high-power microwaves (HPM) and radio frequency (RF). This field of science is also delivering applications that provide the ability to blend an asset’s thermal, visual, and radar appearance into its background. Through this research, advanced photovoltaics and power generation methods are evolving as well.

Self-healing materials are being researched by universities, industry, and militaries to develop self-repairing technologies to address damages such as those that could be sustained in space as a result of space debris or destructive space-asset attacks. Such impacts could lead to a satellite failure, and so a technology like this reaching the development stage would prove invaluable. These materials would use composite structures that contain nanospheres, which act as cages that encapsulate an unhardened polymer resin. When a satellite is hit, the resin would warm up and spread, filling the cracks to prevent further damage. Such systems could also provide shielding.

Flexible nanoelectronic devices that are as thin as paper and mounted to a thin flexible substrate such a as plastic would provide a flexible, conductive, and multiuse material, which could then be integrated into countless space systems. A very attractive manifestation of this application would be in the form of a substrate on which electronic circuits could be printed on demand. Such a nanomaterial would also be durable and could be rolled up and stored. Flexible substrates and the use of various conductors could lead to thin-film solar cells for space applications or thin-film semiconductors.

The next level: Molecular nanotechnology (MNT) promises to revolutionize countless products by engineering mechanical and electronic systems, including advanced materials, at the molecular scale. Such a capacity for discovery will touch upon every aspect of military technology in the realm of space warfare. This rearranging of individual atoms is an emerging technology with serious implications and will be discussed in the next section.

Satellites, Attack Satellites & Asset Defense Systems

In 2020 military satellites and, to a lesser degree, commercial satellites that perform functions critical to civilians, governments and militaries are now increasingly capable of performing active and passive defense, offensive interdiction and rendezvous operations, and covert and overt attacks, while simultaneously carrying out their primary missions. As a result of this trend towards technology convergence, satellites, attack satellites, and asset defense systems will be included in this section.

Advanced autonomous satellite systems may include the following subsystems: laser communications systems, high-powered electronic propulsion systems, advanced pattern recognition software, earth-space energy transfer, and/or advanced photovoltaics. These discoveries, which originated in the fields of AI, nanotechnology, and DE, are continually improving many other areas of satellite survivability and overall performance.

These advanced systems are in many cases complemented by elaborate suites of countermeasures, including: aerosols, decoys, lasers, chemical munitions, high- and low-energy lasers, power-sapping methods, adhesives, adhesive materials, corrosives, destructive enzymes, charged projectiles, kinetic objects, kinetic collisions, cryogenically frozen micro-meteors, compact DE systems, jamming devices, electronic warfare (EW) systems, high-powered microwave (HPM), RF, EMP, and electromagnetic interference (EMI), and various other methods to duplicate natural phenomena. Countermeasure options also include thermal effects, foils, lures and methods to compromise sensors, and crosslink/uplink/downlink transmission sabotage or interference. Each of these tactics can also be executed by an accompanying host/surrogate satellite or an independent escort/defense satellite. Such countermeasures could be employed to defend against attack or, in an offensive capacity, impose the 5Ds upon a rival satellite.

The satellites of leading nations may now be incorporating autonomous crash avoidance, self-monitored diagnostics utilizing low-cost sensors and plug-sense-and-play software, threat identification and reporting abilities, and even self-directed repair services. Satellites also now incorporate advanced nanomaterials, which, depending on their configuration, can partly or fully defend against many forms of DE attacks, EMP from a high-altitude nuclear detonation, charged particle beams (CPB), neutral particle beams (NPB), HPM, and RF, assuming that a significant blast wave does not take effect, although the effect of such pressure is being reduced during this period as well.

In the era of space warfare, nations with lumbering space systems that can be reached with ballistic missile capabilities are faced with two choices: replace or defend. A prime example of such a vulnerability (both in 2009, and undoubtedly in 2020) would be a system like the European Union’s four Helios observational satellites, which each weigh in at four metric tons and are located in low-earth orbit (LEO). In contrast, in 2020, deployed formation-flying microsatellite constellations are beginning to evolve into picosatellite and nanosatellite swarms, providing an enhanced means to defuse the effects of space warfare against satellite systems. Such satellite configurations would also further upgrade the overall integrity of a global, seamless, real-time, and integrated data stream, which is the ultimate pursuit of the military war planner. Such systems would be equipped with versatile features such as electrical propulsion systems, multiple-agent-based autonomy, and laser communications systems–all technologies delivered via directed energy, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.

Directed Energy Weapons (DEW)

Various ground-based DEW platforms, which can deliver effects utilizing CPB, NPB, HPM, RF, and high-energy lasers (HEL), have been deployed by various nations. Despite widespread successes in the fields of directed energy and adaptive optics, the ability to dispense a powerful space-earth, earth-space CPB or HEL weapons system has yet to be fully achieved due to atmospheric and power-generation challenges.

The Tactical High Energy Laser (THEL) is a deuterium fluoride laser. The THEL is similar to the now- discontinued and highly controversial Mid-Infrared Advanced Chemical Laser (MIRACL) weapon, which was also a deuterium fluoride laser. MIRACL was both a missile defense system and anti-satellite weapon. The THEL employs advanced pointing, tracking and beam stabilization systems, which are universal for land, air and space-based lasers. Like many directed-energy weapons, THEL is referred to as a defensive system. (United States Air Force)

With atmosphere-related challenges removed from the equation, many HEL systems could potentially release continuous wave and pulsed outputs reaching into the multi-megawatt ranges. Continued advancements in other subsystem-focused areas, such as beam control and pointing and tracking, will continue to improve overall beam propagation as well.

Additionally, it has been shown in years past that it is possible to overpower losses from the atmosphere by phase-locking multiple DE sources, thus creating a combined energy source. When this is done accurately, the resulting power outputs are drastically increased when compared to a single source DE pulse stream. For this reason, research in refining methods such as this to reduce or eliminate weather-related challenges is rigorously underway.

Many other R&D programs are taking place internationally, across the university, commercial, and military-based scientific communities, to develop ways to improve DEW effects. Constellations of high-strength and thermal-effects-resistant relay mirrors, utilizing advanced nanomaterials, could in 2020 be installed in multiple locations. For example, when mounted to an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or high-altitude airship (HAA), they could accurately direct a beam of energy to any target on earth, thus eliminating line-of-sight barriers.

The Starfire Optical Range (SOR) is a directed-energy facility based at Kirtland Air Force base in New Mexico. Many leaders in the arms control community as well as major news outlets have stated that SOR may be a directed-energy system that can disable space-based systems. The SOR is under the auspices of the Directed Energy Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), which is working on numerous space-warfare systems. (United States Air Force/DOE)

Contrary to the various levels of efficacy provided by such concepts, the deployment of a high-energy, space-based-laser or other types of space-based DEW has already been undertaken by as many as three parties that are now capable of space-to-space anti-satellite (ASAT) operations–and, although slightly compromised, space-to-earth attacks. It is also important to note that atmospheric challenges do not degrade space-to-space DEW platforms and their potential. Furthermore, earth-space attacks can be carried out by lasers based on aerial vehicles.

With the help of high-powered supercomputers and AI systems working in concert with ground stations and weather satellites, militaries of the world can now accurately predict weather patterns like never before. Such an ability to predict weather and atmospheric changes allows war planners to accurately diagnose the time, location, and other related information necessary to channel the atmospheric windows of opportunity that would most empower HEL beams. Should these predictive methods be combined with long established research into weather modification techniques and advanced adaptive optics, it will not be long before many countries can unlock the full potential of DEWs.

Not only can EMP effects now be employed anywhere in the world without the need for a high-altitude nuclear detonation; the delivery of these effects can also be directed with a reasonable level of accuracy. These non-nuclear electromagnetic pulse (NNEMP) generators, which have for decades been used to test hardened military and commercial equipment, have become yet another benefactor of the trend towards increased miniaturization of military systems. As a result of such size reductions, NNEMP systems can now be based terrestrially on mobile units, tactical aircraft, UAVs, space-based systems, and as fixed ground stations.

Ground Segments

The role of ground-based installations in the pursuit of space dominance has never been so significant. In 2020, attacks against the ground segments of a capable space nation are just as destructive as those committed against satellites in space. Cyber, Space, Air, Land, and Sea operations are equally vulnerable to these attacks, though for many nations, such a distinction no longer applies. Joint warfare is no longer a doctrine, it is no longer a practice or a military strategy–it is a constant; it is the only option. From special operations to ground forces, from space command to naval forces, there is no mistaking that there is only a military now–a singular, integrated, and fully-networked military force. And there is no denying the integral role played by ground segments in future wars.

Military space systems and related operations consist of three key components: the space-based segment (satellites), the ground segment (systems operations), and the electromagnetic links, which connect the two. These ground stations house information processing, fusion and dissemination facilities, command and control centers, and many other components that support essential military and intelligence functions. In the years leading up to 2025, advances in the fields of nanotechnology, AI, and DE will begin to redefine everything we thought we knew about the ground segment as the process of technological convergence continues.

Evolved Unmanned Aerial Vehicles & Launch Services

Developmental efforts in the field of unmanned, autonomous, high-endurance, near-space vehicles are coming into fruition as these systems are nearing full-scale production, with various concepts having been proven flightworthy and even deployable.

This revolutionary platform may feature: supersonic capabilities, quantum-encrypted data transmissions, and advanced nanomaterials that deliver superior ballistics protection, stealth capabilities from metamaterials, and integrated power generation.

Weapons capabilities may include: near-space to space DEWs, RF munitions, electromagnetic pulse generators and various ASAT capabilities. It is not expected that such a system would require in-flight refueling, since various energy-generating and conversion methods may be applicable during this time frame. Should such a technology not be available until 2025, hybrid propulsion systems would instead reduce the need for in-flight refueling. Such a system can also return back to its point of origin or change flight plans to another location in-flight, depending on the needs of the warfighter.

Other deployable configurations have also now appeared, such as unmanned, autonomous, high-endurance global strike platforms, which are delivered into orbit on a responsive launch system, maintain a standby position, and, when called upon, can reach hypersonic re-entry speeds to deliver a variety of weapons payloads.

The Space Insertion-Terrestrial Extraction system (initially referred to as the "X-37 Space Plane") is a concept that would move a squad-sized unit of marines to any place on Earth in less than two hours, with no overflight restrictions. The system, reportedly designated as a classified project, would have stealth characteristics, could transport up to 13 troops and equipment, and would be launched on demand (LOD). (NASA)

Subsonic high-altitude, ultra-long-endurance, low-observable unmanned systems have now been deployed by multiple nations and are being used for various military operations, with multiple integrated weapons options. These autonomously-assisted strike platforms provide increased versatility compared to their predecessors.

These applications, much like microsatellite systems, have been significantly enhanced in many other areas. Improvements in materials sciences, miniaturization methods, and energy-generation techniques have also improved reliability and survivability, while extending mission duration.

It is now also possible that such systems have begun to receive integrated HEL weapons for military operations such as those related to space asset attack and protection, air-to-ground engagement, and missile defense.

Caveats

As a result of widespread technology exchanges pertaining to space launch systems and the proliferation of long-range ballistic missile technology, coupled with the widespread availability of commercial launch services, virtually every nation on earth now has the potential to place military satellites into space. At the same time, an increasing number of nations now have indigenous ballistic missile and launch capabilities, which have dramatically increased their potential to commit offensive space systems attacks.

The Ground Based Interceptor (GBI) is a component of the Ground Based Midcourse (GBM) ballistic missile defense system. These interceptors are currently based in Fort Greely, Alaska and Vandenberg AFB in California. This component of the missile defense system is a dual-use technology. The GBI targets warheads in the midcourse phase. When in orbit, the GBI releases an Exo-atmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) that can be used to target any object in space, from satellites to warheads. (The Missile Defense Agency)

Additionally, the continued trend toward cooperative space security has combined the launch capabilities of many national space programs. Such an outcome is due to consolidation of the commercial launch and space systems industry on an international level, decades of abundantly available open-source technical information, loosely monitored multi-tiered collaborative environments, and industrial and military espionage. These influences mentioned above also apply to nearly every area of the military space systems industry, and are responsible for immeasurably enhancing red-shirt military space capabilities.

Adding to this, by 2020, emerging technologies have dramatically reduced the overall size of space systems and increased affordability while simultaneously improving upon strategic initiatives such as systems redundancy and interoperability. The resulting widespread access to military space technology has led to an exponential increase in the number of satellites, which has, in turn, heightened the potential for an act of space warfare.

Internationally, the convergence process is continuing as the standardization of space and related technical protocols among allies is ensuring that each nation involved in cooperative space security is on the same page. This process will also begin to become a polarizing force, making the existence of a red shirt-blue shirt space dynamic more clearly defined. In 2020, space access is power and not solely of the military sort. Now that we rely on space systems for trade, communications, imaging, intelligence gathering, military targeting and navigation, and other functions, the objectives of war planners are being achieved by attacking, compromising, or temporarily rendering inoperable a nation’s space assets –and by doing so, economies and societal functions of the targeted nation or nations could as a byproduct be brought to a grinding halt.

Given this unprecedented level of space access, combined with smaller payload weights, advanced satellite development programs, and proliferation of military space systems, one can be reasonably confident that most conflicts between industrialized nations will incorporate some methods of space warfare, even if in a limited, nondestructive fashion. Regardless of the level of taboo associated with such an act, countries that are engaged in conflicts against a more advanced military space power will have to either accept defeat or commit to attacking the systems that are devastating their forces.

As with other space warfare scenarios, the probability an attack against a nation’s space systems increases as the deterrent decreases; this deterrent factor is greatly reduced in the case of nations with a minimal space presence, especially when under attack or in a position of desperation.

There are now very few reasons not to incorporate space warfare attacks, in an attempt to deliver lights-out warfare effects that would avoid unnecessary death and destruction while also potentially reducing the duration of the conflict. Such an action would be an extraordinary and irreversible step towards space warfare tactics becoming an acceptable force multiplier. Such a sense of acceptance could be further compounded by internationally approved military space operations conducted under the banner of peacekeeping and sanctions employment and enforcement. Space warfare could become a means to reduce the probability of war–to be able to silence and deafen a military before the first human casualty takes place.

To imagine such a scenario, however, one must ignore a world armed with thermonuclear weapons and the potential for space warfare to result in a debris field so dense that it could serve to preclude the possibility of future space colonization. And as the approach of strong AI systems looms on the horizon, perhaps a more immediate concern would be this: In an era of increasingly seamless, high-speed military operations and a reduced human presence in the data stream, will this ever-evolving computational capability reduce or increase the probability of accidental nuclear warfare?

2025

By 2025, space warfare systems have been used numerous times both covertly and overtly by various nations, during limited space-specific attacks and in support of larger military operations. These technologies can deliver destructive effects that are physical, societal, and/or economic, in many cases, with varying levels of overlap. Such space-specific attack scenarios are conducted in a space-to-space, space-to-ground, and ground-to-space fashion. What has not occurred and is highly unlikely to occur for many decades, if ever, is a dedicated war in space, or space war. This is a direct result of the intrinsic inability for modern militaries, regardless of partial or complete command of space, to separate military space functions from other areas of military operations. Space has been and will continue to be used as a force multiplier and as part of a larger military operation. Should a nation pursue a dedicated space war scenario, it likely would be capable of only an individualized or limited act of war against space systems, an act that, if committed, would require supplemental attacks and support provided by the remaining four theaters: air, sea, ground and cyberspace.

Space alone should not be seen as an isolated battlefield where conflicts would be fought while the remaining four theaters of war are left out of the fray. So the phrase “space war” is more of a cultural term, describing a scenario that could not in reality be conducted between nations, either as a war of space systems attrition or as a means to achieve a decisive victory against a nation or nations alone. Wars per se could not be fought and won solely in space so long as targeted nations possessed a conventionally deliverable nuclear, biological and/or chemical deterrent. It is important to note that should a nation’s military or dual-use space systems alone be attacked via space-to-space or ground-to -space methods, it is extremely unlikely that restraint would be the first option of the target state.

It can be expected that leading nations will have incorporated serious retaliatory responses to space systems attacks into their military doctrines to deter such events from taking place. These strategies are not limited to any singular theater and could even include a potential nuclear option. From a national security standpoint it would be tremendously shortsighted for the warplanner to allow for a strategic nuclear deterrent to be rendered inactive as a result of even the most destructive space systems event. Furthermore, in order to wage war against military space assets, other non-space options would inevitably be employed, for instance, cyber attacks, direct conventional attacks against ground stations or even internal acts of sabotage, for example. These options could compromise military space systems more easily and with less international repercussions than dedicated space-to-space and ground-to-space methods.

Military space systems, which were once viewed as consisting of distinct or virtually independent elements, are in 2025 progressively appearing unified in many fundamental ways, as the converging trajectories of various scientific fields drive the space industry forward. Over the years, technologies that were once referred to as merely emerging concepts and theoretical possibilities have, by a rapid and consistent pace of development, challenged contrarian expectations; today, they transcend and defy their once predefined and now abandoned limitations.

We witness this phenomenon in a similar light to what unfolded in the previous century with computer processing technologies. As computational demands increased, relays became vacuum tubes, then transistors, and on to semiconductors. In 1965, Moore’s Law charted an exponential growth pattern in the complexity of integrated semiconductor circuits and computer processing. The unprecedented explosion of computational potential, and, in turn, affordability that Moore accurately predicted drove widespread discoveries in the field of computer science, such as the creation of the Internet.

In 2001, Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns extended the growth pattern described in Moore’s Law to transcend computers and reach into many other areas of science. Most remarkable is that this scientific and technological growth, which Kurzweil revealed, is not linear but exponential; and it is not limited to the technological as humanity accelerates its potential in cadence. The way that one technology seems to max out and then suddenly converge with another to become something greater was also observed with the marriage of early of genetics research and advanced computer processors. According to Kurzweil’s Law, this would constitute an example of two technologies having pushed and pulled with one another, engaging in almost evolutionary fashion to become more than just the sum of their parts, but rather something superior. The result in this case was the mapping of the genome, improved health care, and longer human life expectancy.

Converging technologies driving one another in parallel as humanity realizes a collective need to meet the next challenge–in 2025, this phenomenon has now set its sights on military space technology. Due to the nature of the sciences that will drive future military space systems advancements, the military space systems industry is now experiencing its exponential growth cycle. The primary influence leading to advanced arms racing and evolved methods of warfare that reach destructively into space is the integration of nanotechnology, robotics, and artificial intelligence technologies (NRai).

Nanotechnology/Robotics/Artificial Intelligence (NRai)

As the arrival of strong AI draws ever closer, along with it comes the realization that computing on such a scale and breadth is beyond our human ability to maintain and monitor, even with the assistance of the machines themselves. We will begin to turn over keys to the IT department to the computer within it, as the pending arrival of strong AI will drive its own evolutionary cycle, with human oversight existing from afar, at specific points in the data stream. This is the liftoff for military space systems, and our final approach towards a victory over the Turing Test.

During the span of this analysis, we have seen the devices for human involvement in netcentric warfare leave the point-and-click mouse behind in exchange for voice-command and evolved human-computer collaboration, under the banner of human-machine interfaces (HMI). By 2025, human and machine interactions have taken a step further, towards brain-computer interfaces (BCI). In the years leading up to 2025, BCIs had manifested, for example, as devices that improved mobility and access for the disabled by supplementing sensory and motor functions, such as providing patients with an ability to control a wheelchair or prosthesis using signals from neurons. As BCIs converged with AI-based computers, they were able to learn and enhance themselves in concert with their human partners Military and national security applications of BCI in 2025 include the control of logistics, supply chains, terrestrial-based weapons systems, unmanned aerial platforms, and space systems.

BCIs will exist in parallel with a virtual world, though they will not be the virtual boxes developed many years prior such as Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVEs). BCIs have combined with a technological ability to create 3-D stereoscopic images direct to the eye in headup displays. These virtual domains when fully integrated with strong AI and connections to the central nervous system, and voice and facial recognition, will provide far more than virtual theaters for war gaming and interactive displays for pilots and troop training–we will have effectively and irreversibly fused human intelligence (HI) and AI.

By 2025 a netcentric warfare systems display, combined with central nervous system connections to a global military network will be at the disposal of the warfighter, allowing for full virtual submersion into the battlespace. Such a system would be complemented by real-time, secure uplink and downlink data transmissions to a satellite in space which, in turn, could direct a small scale UAV or unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) utilizing advanced MOEMS/MEMS-derived sensors and optics delivering streaming video of the battlefield. The truly transformational role of these merged technologies will be difficult to imagine until we first witness the warfighter speak, think, or signal the fire command and neutralize an enemy target.

A specific military application of these technologies that is likely to be available in 2025 would be those which are used to automatically target objects on the ground from space with hyperspectral imaging integrated into a microsatellite platform. This imaging capability would be combined with principal component analysis (PCA), used to reduce the volume of data to a manageable size for analysis, and a multi-layer perception (MLP) neural network, which uses multiple layers of neurons to turn vast amounts of data into a consolidated form. This could lead to a system capable of educating neural networks on how to execute a specific task, such as delivering strike options in real-time to the war planner via satellite communications to a comprehensive BCI interface.

On a much smaller physical scale, military robotics programs have been enhanced by advances in the field of molecular nanotechnology (MNT), resulting in devices such as molecular motors. This development has spawned numerous concepts which are in the R&D programs of leading NRai nations. These concepts, with molecular-scale systems that measure less than a few centimeters, might range from miniature flying vehicles with numerous applications to ground-based robots, both of which, with the help of AI, can collectively combine their effects in a swarm-like fashion.

The continued reductions in the size of technology will span all industries and countless military systems, including space systems. For instance, such small flying devices could be contained within a relatively larger rendezvous capable satellite, which would then release the smaller molecular devices or bots to execute acts of sabotage against rival space systems, with a reduced chance of being detected or targeted. Advancements in the field of MEMS-driven micro-thrusters would provide propulsion as reductions in the size of computer systems would allow for control of the devices, either autonomously or remotely via downlink to a ground segment, then onto the device itself.

The Orbital Express Space Operations System validated the technical feasibility of autonomous in-orbit refueling and the reconfiguration of satellites in support of a broad range of future US national security and commercial space programs. These functions provide extensive benefits to military and commercial space systems. Orbital Express can also support deployment and operations of micro-satellites for missions such as space asset protection and the deployment of nano-satellites. (DARPA)

Microscale and nanoscale UGVs and UAVs, acting alone or in swarms, could eventually mimic biological entities and could be used in military- or intelligence-related operations. Like nearly every program contained in this analysis, this forefront technology is being pursued by various nations, in multi-tiered collaborations that may include military researchers, university students and professors, and private companies. Such systems would someday be available for deployment as military off-the-shelf (MOT) systems and as commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) systems. Additionally, each platform would be field-programmable and exhibit strong AI characteristics. Such technology could be powered by any of a myriad of emerging nanotechnology-generated energy systems, using electromagnetic force, solar energy, microwaves, electricity, magnetism, transistors, and lasers. Furthermore, developments made to gyroscopes for navigation systems also will be realized.

Other combinations of MEMS/MOEMS, (which it should be mentioned, offer features and benefits that at times overlap one other so much so that the individualized acronyms may in time become integrated under a single designation) can also be used as sensors, inputs, and outputs, or serve other internal processing functions in larger space systems. Such far-reaching technology is leading to entire computer systems on a single chip that could potentially replace silicon chips, adding a further dimension to the forecast beyond 2025. Graphene-based semiconductors will also stand to provide increased performance beyond silicon, should an affordable and efficient method of mass production of graphene and graphene-based chips be achieved. In the more immediate future, innovations in the field of lithography and multi-gate processing, such as double- and tri-gate transistors, may also contribute to dramatic increases in processing speed, especially when compared to the traditional and increasingly more archaic silicon chip.

The role of ground segments in 2025 continues to remain a critical area of military and national security operations. In corresponding fashion, with the steps forward witnessed by many other areas of military space systems, the ground segment is also reaping the benefits of NRai. Vulnerabilities that once had the potential to weaken this critical bridge between earth- and space-based military functions have been significantly reduced, thanks to improvements in the areas of miniaturization, maneuverability, survivability, and redundancy. The ground segment of the past has become the unattended ground sensor (UGS), a transportable and affordable small box-on-the-ground. Deployable in large numbers, providing multiple layers of redundancy, and effective terrestrial-based communications and space-to-earth uplink/downlink, this device has effectively mitigated the threat to ground stations, for now.

Directed Energy: Weapons and Next-Generation Launch Systems

Ground-based (GB) DEWs are in 2025 abundant and can be found in the arsenals of many nations, as they have by now achieved adequate power levels and have clearly demonstrated an ability to strike space assets. For the few nations that have the ability and choose to deploy in space (covertly or overtly), ground targets can be reached from the heavens as well. DEW has redefined warfare, with speed-of-light attack capabilities and a psychological factor second only to nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons. It can be expected that the number of nations with deployed DEW weapons will continue to grow exponentially, as the methods to develop such tools of war and the means to reduce the challenges that hamper development-ready systems will find their way to virtually any nation that seeks to acquire their awesome power.

A thought-provoking combat scenario surrounding GB-DEWs in 2025 begins with the fact that many GB-DEW installations are fixed stationary systems with a large footprint. These fixed systems will likely require massive amounts of energy to provide an effective beam strength capable of sustained offensive and defensive effects. Because of such constraints, many GB-DEWs are directly wired into nuclear plants and municipal power stations. Accordingly, it should be noted that in 2025, should a nation be faced with a threat to their military forces or space systems by GB-DEWs, there will be few options but to attack these power sources. Clearly then, it is difficult to deny that DEWs powered by fusion sources place a very unique set of challenges upon the war planner.

By 2025 military DE efforts are not only limited to directly improving weapons effects, but rather innovations in the field of DE are also advancing areas such as propulsion. Examples of promising systems in this field include solar thermal propulsion (STP), which could provide a highly efficient alternative to hydrazine for microscale (and larger) space systems that require high Delta-V (increase in velocity) maneuvers. Another method is based on the concept of using energy generated by a laser to heat a gas such as hydrogen to a very high temperature. As a result of this interaction, the gas then rapidly expands and delivers thrust. At this time, lasers have a demonstrated ability to reach the power levels required to deliver this concept to the military in a truly beneficial sense. Just as affordability, reductions in weight, and sheer innovation drove the satellite industry forward in prior decades, those same satellites and their dramatically reduced size and cost have, in turn, provided new opportunities for discovery in the field of space exploration.

In keeping with this spirit of innovation, other methods of propulsion that have been in the R&D stream for many years, such as the Lorentz force ion thruster, are now coming into full fruition. This method delivers a lift capability via the energy created when an electric current is combined with magnetic energy to generate thrust. In 2025, this concept may be already integrated into various spacecrafts. Other DE propulsion methods such as plasma-based, pulse-detonation engines (PDE), which received much attention in the past, may now be seen regularly in vehicles preparing for takeoff.

The rapidly growing threat spectrum against space systems is further expanded by the increasing number of nations and non-state actors with access to ballistic missile technology. At the same time, the ballistic missile defense (BMD) methods deployed in decades past are in some cases now seen as unable to fully respond to the challenges presented in 2025 and beyond. In particular, BMD systems such as the kinetic energy interceptor (KEI) and the miniature kill vehicle (MKV) require elaborate sensor suites, such as infrared, radar, and optics to ensure an accurate trip to the threat. Additionally, components that add weight and systems complexity such as thrusters and guidance systems can now be avoided with the aid of DE missile defense solutions.

Other methods for ballistic missile intercepts such as ground-based lasers (GBL) and space-based laser (SBL) programs have now existed for many years and have proven to be successful for the few nations that possess the resources to employ DE as a BMD system. Though also welcomed are complementary alternatives that help meet the increasing challenges while at the same time preventing threat leakage caused by advanced countermeasures, maneuverable in-flight warheads, and hypersonic global-strike platforms.

One such DE system that may emerge as a complementary BMD application involves a laser-propulsion system named Lightcraft, which could by 2025 deliver a Kinetic Kill Vehicle (KKV) to a target at hypersonic speeds. Such a KKV could be ground, air, or space launched, though its effectiveness is reliant on the overall quality of the DE source that propels it. The structure of the KKV has a parabolic-like shape, with an interior consisting of highly reflective mirrors that channel heat away from the laser, resulting in explosive energy that ultimately generates thrust. Such a technology could theoretically be used to deliver lightweight space systems into LEO, without a launch vehicle, resulting in immeasurable cost reductions.

Integrated Satellites & Conventional Launch Services

Over the past ten years there has been a steady progression towards integrating asset-attack/defense systems, maneuverability-enhancing technology and redundancy measures into individual military and commercial satellites with distinct strategic operations and industry roles. The threat environment, regardless of whether ASAT strikes are common or highly uncommon, dictates that such measures should be integrated into all spacecraft as the potential security and economic effects of downed networks and partial netcentric blackouts outweigh the cost of this integration process.

Experimental Satellite Series 11 (the XXS-11) is a rendezvous-capable satellite developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory in concert with the Air Force Space Command, Air Force Space and Missiles Systems Center, NASA, the Naval Research Laboratory and defense contractors Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Such collaborations serve as an example of NASA’s close relationship with the military on rendezvous-capable satellites. Since space systems such as the XSS-11 are dual-use, there are both valuable commercial functions and numerous space-warfare applications. (United States Air Force)

As large satellites are now perfectly placed in an era that will complete their descent into obsolescence, autonomous formation-flying microsatellite constellations continue to be seen as the most ideal and reliable space-asset platform of choice in an environment plagued with risks directed at space-based operations. Microsatellites such those described in 2020 will continue to be a primary method to ensure netcentric continuity, though the most remarkable advancements are now centered on nanoscale systems. Nanosatellites integrated into microsatellite platforms are in 2025 capable of supporting asset defense and committing acts of sabotage via stealth attack to permanently or temporarily disable a larger satellite or weapons platform. These systems deployed in swarm formations in LEO could provide excellent levels of coverage, with revisit times as good as or better than their larger hosts and counterparts.

This trend towards size reduction and redundancy is setting another revolution into motion as the unmanned, autonomous high-endurance near-space vehicle begins to perform military space roles, and not just in a backup capacity, but one that overlaps and empowers the services delivered by assets in space. As space continues to become an increasingly dangerous place during times of international tensions, the UAV and the satellite will begin to work together regularly to meet the threat. It can be expected that from this trend of satellites and UAVs working together, that a hybrid UAV/satellite system will emerge. This would be made possible with the help of integrated power generation and compact DE propulsion systems. The first manifestation of this may be satellites launched into orbit from near-space UAV platforms. What is most remarkable though is that through further technology convergence, we in 2025 may be the first to witness a satellite launching itself into space.

Conclusion

It is a societal constant spanning the history of warfare that military technology can only remain a secret for so long. From the rocket to the hydrogen bomb, information once proven to contain awesome technological powers spreads like wild fire–secret or not. For generations past, it took years and sometimes decades for leaks to take their toll. Inside the global information network, there are fewer limitations placed upon the flow of ideas, and many nations appear as if they are without borders.

Multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV) deployed from an intercontinental ballistic missile. The greatest risk posed by space warfare technology is related to the accidental launch of nuclear forces--should space systems be attacked or time-out without explanation. For example, if an early warning satellite belonging to a nuclear power were to suffer a fatal malfunction, attack, or an impact from space debris, that nuclear state would have only a matter of minutes to determine if it were under attack or not. (United States Air Force)

It is important to mention once again that discoveries such as those mentioned in this forecast and analysis are the byproduct of dual-use systems with clear military and commercial applications, many of which have been developed in concert with commercial- and university-based contributors worldwide. These systems, for example, are openly talked about by professors, scientists, company representatives, foreign nationals, and patent holders at academic conferences and emerging technology trade shows, effectively undermining the purpose of developing systems to enhance national security. At the same time, in a global economy where collaborations in the commercial space industry lead to individual success, an environment of secrecy is sure to lead a nation towards isolation and subsequent suffocation.

Nations that wish to possess an effective defensive posture against all existing threats to their space systems face an open-ended investment. They should consider alternative solutions that could be developed in concert with the international community, and they should act quickly. It is inevitable that the drafting of clearly defined arms control measures and/or treaties regarding legitimate actions in space will be more difficult in the future because of the growing ambiguity that will result from military space systems that have evolved in dual-use fashion.

Author: William Halal
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN-10: 0230019544
ISBN-13: 9780230019546
Format: Hardcover, 256 pages

Technology’s Promise: Expert Knowledge on the Transformation of Business and Society brilliantly deals with the co-evolution of technology, business and society. It is a concise but complete “history of the future,” covering most scientific and technological fields, with specific scenarios until 2050 and with general ideas for the future of humanity.

This truly fascinating book by William Halal is a summary of his current research aided by an expert panel of about 100 futurists around the world. Halal was educated as an aerospace engineer who served as an Air Force officer, worked on the Apollo Program and in Silicon Valley, and has always been following science and technology and its impact on the “real world.”

Halal is already a respected author, with popular books such as Internal Markets: Bringing the Power of Free Enterprise Inside Your Organization (1993), The Infinite Resource: Creating and Leading the Knowledge Enterprise (1998), and The New Management: Bringing Democracy & Markets Inside Organizations (1998). His new book now builds on his cumulative experience and that of his TechCast expert panel, which Halal founded a few years ago.

TechCast can be described as a virtual think-tank that tracks the technology revolution and its impact on humanity. The TechCast Project at George Washington University has developed a sophisticated Web site that surveys 100 high-tech executives, scientists, engineers, academics, consultants, futurists, and other experts around the world to forecast breakthroughs in all fields of science and technology. The project strives to be the most complete forecasting system available, covering the entire span of technological innovation and updated constantly. The current global TechCast results, blended together in a masterful way by Halal with his futurist ideas and visions, are the basis of Technology’s Promise.

Halal begins his book with an excellent guide to the present technological revolution, followed by specific chapters about the most important technologies and their direct impacts on business and society. He then carefully reviews most of the major areas covered in the TechCast Project: energy and environment, information technology. E-commerce, manufacturing and robotics, medicine and biogenetics, transportation and space:

Part I: Forecasts of the Technology Revolution makes an excellent summary of current developments and future possibilities in each field.

Part II: Social Impacts of the Technology Revolution builds on the previous chapters in order to visualize possible futures and the direct impact of science and technology on social institutions during this current Knowledge Age, which seems to be giving birth to an Age of Consciousness. The author argues that these changes are fundamental to the very survival of humanity.

Halal then integrates all the previous forecasts across the different fields in vivid scenarios that take the readers in a virtual trip through time. He refers to the “World Online” for the 2010 scenario, the “High-Tech Arrival” for the 2020 scenario, the “Crisis of Maturity” for 2030 and the “Global Order” for 2040−2050.

He finishes on a personal note, understanding our place in history and reviewing the “life cycle of evolution”: “I marvel at what great privilege it is to witness this maturing of civilization’s long journey.”

Technology’s Promise: Table of Contents
Foreword: Basic Training for the 21st Century, by Marvin Cetron
Preface: Discovering the Forces of Transformation
Ch. 1 Introduction: Guiding Technology’s Promise
Part I: Forecasts of the Technology Revolution
Ch. 2 Transition to a Sustainable World: Converting the Energy and Environment Mess into an Opportunity
Ch. 3 Globalization Goes High-Tech: A Worrisome World of Abundance
Ch. 4 Society Moves Online: The Transforming Power of Information Technology and E-Commerce
Ch. 5 Mastery Over Life: Promises and Perils of Biogenetics
Ch. 6 Faster and Farther: Building the Global Transportation System
Ch. 7 The Final Frontier: Preludes to Deep Space Travel
Part II: Social Impacts of the Technology Revolution
Ch. 8 Shifting Structures of Society: Business, Government, and Other Institutions in a Knowledge Age
Ch. 9 An Age of Consciousness: The Next Phase in Technology’s Promise?
Ch. 10 Scenarios: A Virtual Trip Through Time
Appendix: The TechCast Expert Panel

The book is really a masterpiece that must be read by people seriously interested in the future, and even those who only want some glimpses of many things to come. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, even if I might be more radical in terms of the speed and the changes that are happening. For example, the ideas of Ray Kurzweil and the “Singularity,” the continuous acceleration of change, and the possible technological evolution of humans to transhumans and posthumans are only briefly mentioned in the book. However, I think that they are very powerful ideas that could make the future change faster and faster, and in more unpredictable ways.

All in all, the possibilities considered by Halal are truly fascinating, and Technology’s Promise is a fantastic way to review the history of the future, including several intriguing time scenarios.

We’re neither economic forecasters nor political prognosticators by trade, but you don’t have to be either to see that right now the U.S. holds a robust lead in the race for hegemony. Our economy is five times as large as China’s and 15 times larger than India’s, with about one-fourth the population of either nation. That gives the U.S. a real advantage in providing education, health care, and national security—plus all the other stuff that makes a country thrive.

But “right now” doesn’t mean forever. All you need is a ruler to draw the straight-line extrapolation showing that China and India, with their faster growth rates, will eventually catch up to the U.S. in terms of pure economic size. For China, that would occur as early as 2045; for India, the date would be some 20 years later. Which is why you so often hear experts predicting that, by midcentury, the U.S. will be trailing the two new world superpowers.

We’d say: Not so fast. Straight-line calculations about the U.S., China, and India are just that. They assume all three national will enjoy smooth upward rides. No recessions, no banking breakdowns, not political crisis, no disruptive social uprisings. Unlikely? For sure! With China’s massive experiment combining communism and capitalism, India’s entrenched bureaucracy and corruption, and America’s long term entitlement obligations, it is far more probable that growth trajectories will zig and zag more than zoom. Further, straight-line calculations do not take into account relationships with other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, where changing alliances could have economic repercussions.

Given that reality, then, what general scenario would you bet on for the next 50 years? Would it be America’s 3% annual growth or China and India at 8%? We’d take the U.S. for a simple yet incontrovertible reason. Its system—the sum of all its parts—works, and when it breaks, it bounces back fast. Don’t worry; we’re not breaking into The Star-Spangled Banner. We just believe U.S. economic dominance isn’t a function of how long the nation has been leading the pack.

It’s about how America operates as a country. We’re talking, mainly, about freedom and stability. Political parties disagree, often vehemently, but the government never stops running. Generally speaking, the U.S. justice system is fair, and health care, while inconsistent in delivery, is widely available. And even though secondary education in America gets roundly knocked, we have without doubt the best system of higher education, turning out the world’s most skilled, innovative science and engineering PhDs.

America has a final competitive advantage as powerful as it is unique: its confluence of bright, hungry entrepreneurs and flush, eager investors. Yes, China and India have ambitious people who dream of building their own companies, and, increasingly, more are getting the chance. (The U.S. venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers just opened offices in Shanghai and Beijing.) But neither China nor India comes close to the U.S. in terms of this “killer app,” and it will take years of venture capital flowing in before the Chinese let go of a rote approach to work and truly embrace entrepreneurial innovation.

China has other challenges as well. Aside from its risky social experiment, it has an economy in which less than a quarter of its people truly participate, and its one-child policy is exacerbating the problems of an already aging population. India, meanwhile, will continue to struggle with its overwhelming number of have-nots and its aforementioned corruption. True, India is a democracy, but a democracy muddled by a profusion of divergent political parties.

Now, we’re not saying the U.S. system is perfect or its economy invulnerable. If not dealt with, entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will create a budget deficit that will explode over the next 20 years. How America handles that problem via tax and spending policies will determine the strength of its growth engine. Fortunately, our stable, highly adaptable system has conquered enough major problems—from the Depression to the Cold War—in the past that there is more reason for optimism than despair.

In the end, we’d make the case that American economic leadership will be with us for most, if not all, of the century. It will by no means “rule,” as it did at the turn of the 21st century. But it will remain ahead until other nations develop a total economic and social system that works as well. There’s a lot more to the world’s economic future than a straight-line extrapolation can tell you.

Prologue

We are—all of us—freaks of nature. We don’t generally see ourselves this way, of course. After all, being human, what could be more ordinary than a human being? But it turns out that our personal (and biased) impressions that we are unremarkable simply don’t stand up against the plain, objective facts. The way we walk, for example, teetering on long, paired stilts of articulated bone, is unique among mammals, and as preposterous in its way as elephant trunks and platypus feet. We also communicate by tossing oddly intricate noises at one another, which somehow carry complex packages of feeling, thought, and information. We share and understand these sounds as if they were scents drifting on the wind, and our minds special noses that sniff the fragrance of their meaning. Using them we are able to change one another’s minds, even bring one another to tears. We also invent, to the point of being dangerous, incessantly bending the things, living and otherwise, around us to our own ends. Because of this habit, we have, for better or worse, created national economies, erected the pyramids of Giza and Chichén Itzá, fashioned exquisite art, sculpture, and music, invented the steam engine, moon rockets, the digital computer, stealth bombers, and “weaponized” diseases. Nothing on the planet seems to escape our urge to remake it. These days we are even tailoring genes to remake ourselves.

This book is about how we became the strange creatures we are, and why we do these peculiarly human things. It wonders what makes us cry, why we fall in love, invent, deceive, laugh uproariously with close friends, and kiss the ones we care about. It asks what evolutionary twists and turns set in motion events that made the symphonies of Mozart, the insights and art of Leonardo, the drama, humor, and poetry of Shakespeare possible, not to mention bad soap operas, Hollywood movies, and London musicals. It speculates on why chimpanzees, despite sharing so much of our DNA, do not reflect upon the meaning of life, or if they do, why they haven’t so far shared their insights. In the end it wonders how you became you and how our species became, of all the species it could have become, the thoroughly unprecedented one it is.

Human beings are insatiably curious, especially when it comes to the subject of ourselves. This is not a new insight. Philosophers, poets, theologians, and scientists from Plato to Darwin, St. Augustine to Freud have already penned volumes about our humanness that bow endless rows of the sturdiest library shelves. You might ask, if these thinkers have fallen gasping to the mat trying to wrestle these questions into submission, why this book should have any better luck. The simple answer is that today we have far more solid information to work with.

During the past decade enormous strides have been made in two broad scientific fields: genetics and neurobiology. Advances in genetics are helping us gain insights into the way all living things evolve and develop. Each of us has come to exist in the unique form we do because of the combinations of genes that our parents passed along. You are, to a large degree, the person you are because of the messages these genes sent, and continue to send, to the ten thousand trillion cells that have assembled just so to form you. Hardly a day goes by without some news about a remarkable discovery that further illuminates the molecular machinery of the DNA that makes life possible.

The other field is brain research. Being a human being (as opposed to a wasp or a fruit fly), all of your behaviors and actions are not dictated by your genes alone. Your brain holds many of the secrets that make humans human. Genes may be outrageously complicated, but the human brain makes our genetic code look like the crayon drawings of a four-year-old. Though it weighs a mere three pounds, it consists of a hundred billion neurons, each of which is connected in a thousand different ways to the other neurons around it. This means that every waking moment your brain is linked along a hundred trillion separate paths, trafficking in thought and insight, processing great streams of sensory input, running the complex plumbing of your body, generating (but not always resolving) all of your colliding and conflicting emotions, conscious and unconscious. These connections, by one estimate, make your possible states of mind during the course of your life greater than all of the electrons and protons in the universe. Given the immensity of this number, you are never likely to think all of the thoughts you are actually capable of thinking, nor feel every possible feeling. Nevertheless, each shining day we give it a try.

Over the past decade scientists have been developing ways to scan and reveal in increasingly refined detail how our brains are constructed and operate. They are far from resolving its mysteries, but we know much more today about its behavior than we did even a short time ago. Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanning and FMRI (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) are revealing “movies” of our thoughts, or more precisely the flow of chemicals in the brain as we think and feel. Today we have a far better understanding of how language, laughter, and thought play themselves out in the brain than we did as recently as the turn of the twenty-first century. Right now the resolution of these movies is cellular, but they will soon reveal the brain at a molecular level, making the reading of minds much more than a parlor trick.

Scientists also keep nibbling away at the mysterious edges of paleoanthropology, psychology, physiology, sociology, and computer science, to mention only a handful, shedding light bit by bit on the special brand of behaviors we call human. In other words, we remain largely unknown to ourselves, but we are making impressive progress.

. . .

How did we become human beings? All living things are unique. The forces that drive evolution make them so, honing each down to the razor edge of itself, providing it with a handful of qualities that distinguish it as the only animal of its kind. The elephant has its trunk. Bombardier beetles manufacture and precisely shoot boiling hot toxic chemicals from their tails. Peregrine falcons have wings that propel them unerringly through the air at seventy miles an hour to their catch. These traits define these creatures and determine the way they act. But what unique traits shape and define us? I have whittled it down to six, each unique to our kind: our big toes, our thumbs, our uniquely shaped pharynx and throat, laughter, tears, and kissing. How, you may ask, can something as common as a big toe, as silly as laughter, or as obvious as a thumb, possibly have anything to do with our ability to invent writing, express joy, fall in love, or bring forth the genius of ancestral China? What could they have to say about rockets and radio, symphonies, computer chips, tragedy, or the spellbinding art of the Sistine Chapel? Just this.

The origin of all these human accomplishments can be traced to these traits, each of which marks a fork in the evolutionary road where we went one way and the rest of the animal kingdom went the other, opening small passageways on the peculiar geography of the human heart and mind, marking trailheads that lead to the tangled outback of what makes us tick. Take the knobby big toes we find at the ends of our feet. If they hadn’t begun to straighten and strengthen more than five million years ago our ancestors would never have been able to stand upright, and their front feet would never have been freed to become hands. And if our hands had not been freed we would not have evolved the opposed and specialized thumbs we have, which made the first tools possible.

Both our toes and thumbs are linked to the third trait—our unusual throats and the uniquely shaped pharynx inside, which enables us to make more precise sounds than any animal. Standing up straightened and elongated our throats so that our voice box dropped. In time that made speech possible, but we also needed a brain that could generate the complex mental constructions that language and speech demand. Because toolmaking required a brain that could manipulate objects, it supplied the neural foundations for logic, syntax, and grammar so that eventually it could not only take objects and arrange them in an orderly manner, it also could conceive ideas for our pharynx to transform into the sound symbols we call words and organize them so they made sense as well.

A mind capable of language is also a self-aware mind. Consciousness melded our old primal drives with our newly evolved intelligence in entirely unexpected ways that even language couldn’t successfully articulate. This explains the origins of laughter, kissing, and crying. Though we can glimpse their origins in the hoots, calls, and ancient behaviors of our primate cousins, no other species carries these particular arrows in the quivers they use to communicate.

. . .

Some may argue that we cannot possibly be reduced to six of anything. And some may argue that these traits are not unique to us. Kangaroos stand upright, after all. And dogs whimper and whine. And don’t chimpanzees pucker and smack their lips? Yes, but kangaroos hop, they don’t stride; dogs do not cry tears of sorrow or joy or pride. In fact, they don’t cry any tears at all. No other animal does, not even elephants, contrary to some apocryphal stories. And while chimps can be trained to kiss, they do not naturally climb, during their adolescence, into the backseats of Chevrolets, or anything else for that matter, to neck.

The larger point is that the extraordinary abilities and behaviors that define us—for better or worse—as a species come from somewhere, and if we keep asking, “where, how, why … ” enough, we arrive at their roots. The investigation of one illuminates the other, and together, in the peculiar arithmetic of evolution, they eventually add up to the strange, astonishing, and perplexing creatures we are. Maybe the point isn’t so much to pin ourselves beneath the unforgiving glass of a microscope to arrive at definitive and irrefutable answers. We are far too complex a race to be reduced to the sum of so many split hairs. Maybe the important thing is to simply keep asking interesting questions and follow where the answers take us. As it turns out, they take us to some remarkable and fascinating places.

. . .

Why Language Is All Thumbs

From Chapter 3, “Mothers of Invention”

Because we have only two hands, rather than, say, eight tentacles, like an octopus, we manipulate objects in an ordered sequence, not all at once. That means to consciously do “A” before “B” and “B” before “C,” we have to focus. You don’t absentmindedly build a bow, or shape an arrow, or design a steam engine. It requires intention and concentration. Anyone who has struggled with assembling furniture at home knows that if B does not follow after A and C upon B, things have a way of falling apart.

If scientists such as Lakoff, Johnson, and Greenfield are right, we manipulate thoughts the way we do because our hands once learned to shape sticks, stones, and animal skins into tools. Nouns became the equivalents of objects, verbs represented actions, and we (or our hands) took on the role of a sentence’s subject.

To ancestors like Handy Man, the physical grammar of cracking open a femur to eat the marrow inside might have gone something like, “Hit bone (with) stone.” He might not have had any words—any mental symbols—to attach to these objects or actions, but the pattern of using one thing to affect another would have been part of his physical experience. There was no way around it. If you pick up a stone to strike a bone, certain actions must unfold in a certain sequence for the whole business to work out. The brain must consciously conceive and act on that sequence, or the bone and stone will forever sit there, and never the twain shall meet. And any ape that spends his day gazing at a rock and bone, doing nothing, will never eat an ounce of marrow, and certainly won’t live long enough to pass his genes along. Animals like these, as scientists like to say, “get selected out.”

The unavoidable conclusion here is that toolmaking not only resulted in tools, but also in the reconfiguration of our brains so they comprehended the world on the same terms as our toolmaking hands interacted with it. The physical conversation our marionette fingers were having with the objects around us was shaping the way our brain organized and thought about everything. The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand. Art, or at least craft, was beginning to imitate life, and the rudiments of language and complex human thought were sprouting from the sense-able, concrete sequences of that life.

. . .

In 1996, Vittorio Gallese, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and their colleagues at the University of Parma in Italy inadvertently discovered the strange and mysterious ways in which evolution works. They were recording signals transmitted from neurons in an area of the brains of macaque monkeys called the F5 region. This is a specific sector of the frontal lobes that sits among a larger area of the brain that deals with making and anticipating movements called, fittingly, the premotor cortex.

The scientific team already knew that F5 neurons fired when monkeys performed specific goal-oriented tasks with their hands or mouths—picking up a peanut and then holding it, for example. But for this series of tests they wanted to see if the F5 neurons acted any differently when the objects themselves were different. Did it matter, they wondered, if a monkey was picking up a peanut rather than a slice of apple?

It was while they were performing this routine experiment that they noticed something odd. When a macaque watched a researcher’s hand pick up an object and bring it close to his mouth, the sensors connected to the monkey’s brain indicated that neurons in its F5 region were firing. They didn’t activate when the monkeys simply saw the objects sitting there, only—and this was what was so unusual—when the monkey watched researchers pick them up, or when the monkeys themselves picked them up.

The implications of this are enormous. If the same neurons were firing in the monkeys’ brains when they watched the action, it meant they were playing out what they were seeing before them inside their own brain— their mind’s eye—just as if they were doing it themselves. They were mentally “mirroring” the physical action. You could also say that in a rudimentary way they were imagining they were doing the action; reliving, neuron by firing neuron, the experiences of others—in effect, putting themselves in the shoes of the researchers they were watching. They were experiencing a form of empathy that itself required a kind of imagination.

The ignition of F5 neurons made these seemingly simple gestures and maneuvers a form of communication far more powerful than any hoot, grunt, or howl. After all, if the monkey was mentally picturing the actions of the researcher, it was also quite possibly remembering and learning it. Monkey see, monkey do.

If you look hard, you can catch glimpses of early conscious communication on all sides of this. Imagine two habiline creatures—a parent and a child—sitting in their small, lakeside camp two million years ago, smoke billowing from the enormous volcanoes at their backs. They have roughly twice the neuronal wetware of the average chimp today (and certainly more than a macaque monkey), so their intelligence is far from trivial. On the other hand, they still can’t speak, so their ability to share what is on their minds is limited, even though they undoubtedly have far more to communicate than any of the other animals around them.

Now imagine the parent is making a simple tool, like those that Nicholas Toth and his colleagues experimented with. The child watches intently. Simply by observing, the same neurons—her mirror neurons—are firing in her head that are firing in her parent’s. And so when she attempts to repeat the action she has been watching, she can call upon those fired neurons to guide her hands to do something she has never actually done before but has imagined doing.

For his part, when the parent strikes flint against the rock, he is silently talking to the watching child. He is saying, with his hands, “This is how you make this thing. You hold this large rock like this and strike it with this small rock just so.” You can see him holding up the sharp sliver of flint that the blow has created. “See, now you have a knife.” And then next, he may carve the skin off a carcass, taking the “conversation” in a new direction.

The entire time the child is “listening.” Neither parent nor daughter have any language; not a single word they can exchange, not even a concept of words, only the looks on their faces, the expressions in their eyes, the gestures they make with their hands as they manipulate and exchange the rocks and flint. But a lot of information is traveling back and forth between their two minds. In a very real sense they are conversing.

This apparent connection between conversation and manipulation is more than metaphorical. More recent research, built on Gallese’s and Rizzolatti’s original discovery, has revealed that the F5 region in macaque monkeys is an analog for areas in our own brain essential for generating human language and speech (not necessarily the same thing, as we shall see). We know this partly because a few years after the discovery of mirror neurons, Rizzolatti and another researcher, Scott Grafton, found that when humans watch someone handle objects, a region of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus, which sits directly behind the left temple, activates and mirrors what they see. This surprised scientists because they had long thought that this part of the brain existed primarily to send the signals to Broca’s area that generate speech. Now it appeared Broca’s area was handling other jobs as well, or deeper ones. It not only sent signals to the muscles that generated speech, it sent the signals to hands and arms that enabled the precise manipulation of objects.

Rizzolatti thinks this fusion of objects and imagination, gestures and words provides a glimpse into the genesis of language. Mirror neurons might be the primal wetware that enabled our ancestors to transform the common ground of doing and making into the earliest forms of conscious communication. F5, or something like it, might very well have been the bud from which Broca’s area—a cornerstone of human language—blossomed.

The Insights of Dr. Broca

How we actually generate language is a mystery, but we know that we can’t do it if a part of the brain known as Broca’s area, named for the brilliant French doctor and anatomist Pierre Paul Broca, who discovered it, doesn’t function properly. Broca first located this part of the brain when he performed an autopsy in 1861 on a patient, known as Tan, who had died from gangrene. The man was known as Tan because when he tried to speak all he seemed capable of saying again and again was the word “tan.” This affliction became known as Broca’s aphasia, and the autopsy revealed that there had been damage to specific sections of the inferior frontal gyrus in the left frontal lobe of the brain (roughly near the left temple). Subsequent studies Broca and others performed confirmed that in most people (left-handers usually being the exception) this is the area of the brain that somehow takes the symbols our minds create when we want to communicate, attaches sounds to them, and then coordinates sending the signals to all of the muscles needed to make the precise sounds we call speech (or in the case of those who can’t speak, make the hand signals needed to communicate).

Brain scanning technology has confirmed Broca’s findings. These areas of the brain “light up” when we generate speech. Broca’s area is connected to Wernicke’s area by a neural pathway called the arcuate fasciculus, and using these two sectors of the brain, we handle most of the generation and understanding of the spoken (or signed) word. Because Broca’s area is so closely located next to areas of the brain associated with mirror neurons and those sectors that control both facial muscles and hand coordination, it may help explain how toolmaking, gestures, and speech are connected.

This means that two astounding advances were unfolding during Homo habilis’ brief stay on Earth. First, entirely new knowledge was being intentionally generated out of the brain of a single creature. Toolmaking marked the birth of invention. Second, knowledge could now be duplicated and relocated to other minds; it was no longer doomed to die with the brain that conceived it. Just as the evolution of DNA made it possible for a gene to be copied and shared from one generation to the next, mirror neurons, and the new behaviors they made possible, meant that an idea—a “meme,” as Richard Dawkins has put it—could be copied and passed along from one mind to the next. Conscious communication had emerged, even if only in an embryonic form, and in its wake everything from gossip to oratory, mathematics to the laws of Hammurabi, stand-up comedy to the computer code that sends probes to the moons of Saturn would follow. We were building the scaffolding for true human behavior, relationships, and, ultimately, that most monumental of all human inventions: culture.

But how would our ancestors even begin to cross the chasm that yawned between the first flint knives and the great edifices of human endeavor we have erected since?

© 2006 Chip Walter

By examining these different forms of mind activity, Minsky says, we can explain why our thought sometimes takes the form of carefully reasoned analysis and at other times turns to emotion. He shows how our minds progress from simple, instinctive kinds of thought to more complex forms, such as consciousness or self-awareness. And he argues that because we tend to see our thinking as fragmented, we fail to appreciate what powerful thinkers we really are. Indeed, says Minsky, if thinking can be understood as the step-by-step process that it is, then we can build machines — artificial intelligences — that not only can assist with our thinking by thinking as we do but have the potential to be as conscious as we are.

Eloquently written, The Emotion Machine is an intriguing look into a future where more powerful artificial intelligences await.

I was reminded, earlier this year, of an observation made by polio vaccine pioneer Dr. Jonas Salk. He said that the most important question we can ask of ourselves is, “are we being good ancestors?”

This is a particularly relevant question for those of us here at the Summit. In our work, in our policies, in our choices, in the alternatives that we open and those that we close, are we being good ancestors? Our actions, our lives have consequences, and we must realize that it is incumbent upon us to ask if the consequences we’re bringing about are desirable.

It’s not an easy question to answer, in part because it can be an uncomfortable examination. But this question becomes especially challenging when we recognize that even small choices matter. It’s not just the multi-billion dollar projects and unmistakably world-altering ideas that will change the lives of our descendants. Sometimes, perhaps most of the time, profound consequences can arise from the most prosaic of topics.

Which is why I’m going to talk a bit about video games.

Well, not just video games, but video games and cameraphones and Google Earth and the myriad day-to-day technologies that, individually, may attract momentary notice, but in combination, may actually offer us a new way of grappling with the world. And just might, along the way, help to shape the potential for a safe Singularity.

Earlier this year, I co-authored a document that I know some of you in the audience have seen: the Metaverse Roadmap Overview. In this work, along with my colleagues John Smart and Jerry Paffendorf, I sketch out four scenarios of how a combination of forces driving the development of immersive, richly connected information technologies may play out over the next decade. But what has struck me more recently about the Roadmap scenarios is that the four worlds could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. Not just in terms of the technologies, but—more importantly—in terms of the social and cultural choices we make while building those technologies.

The four metaverse worlds emerged from a relatively commonplace scenario structure. We arrayed two spectra of possibility against each other, thereby offering four outcomes. Specialists sometimes refer to this as the “four-box” method, and it’s a simple way of forcing yourself to think through different possibilities.

This is probably the right spot to insert my first disclaimer: scenarios are not predictions, they’re provocations. They’re ways of describing different future possibilities not to demonstrate what will happen, but to suggest what could happen. They offer a way to test out strategies and assumptions—what would the world look like if we undertook a given action in these four futures?

To construct our scenario set we selected two themes likely to shape the ways in which the Metaverse unfolds: the spectrum of technologies and applications ranging from augmentation tools that add new capabilities to simulation systems that model new worlds; and the spectrum ranging from intimate technologies, those that focus on identity and the individual, to external technologies, those that provide information about and control over the world around you. These two spectra collide and contrast to produce four scenarios.

The first, Virtual Worlds, emerges from the combination of Simulation and Intimate technologies. These are immersive representations of an environment, one where the user has a presence within that reality, typically as an avatar of some sort. Today, this means World of Warcraft, Second Life, Sony Home and the like.

Over the course of the Virtual Worlds scenario, we’d see the continued growth and increased sophistication of immersive networked environments, allowing more and more people to spend substantial amounts of time engaged in meaningful ways online. The ultimate manifestation of this scenario would be a world in which the vast majority of people spend essentially all of their work and play time in virtual settings, whether because the digital worlds are supremely compelling and seductive, or because the real world has suffered widespread environmental and economic collapse.

The next scenario, Mirror Worlds, comes from the intersection of Simulation and Externally-focused technologies. These are information-enhanced virtual models or “reflections” of the physical world, usually embracing maps and geo-locative sensors. Google Earth is probably the canonical present-day version of an early Mirror World.

While undoubtedly appealing to many individuals, in my view, the real power of the Mirror World setting falls to institutions and organizations seeking to have a more complete, accurate and nuanced understanding of the world’s transactions and underlying systems. The capabilities of Mirror World systems is enhanced by a proliferation of sensors and remote data gathering, giving these distributed information platforms a global context. Geospatial, environmental and economic patterns could be easily represented and analyzed. Undoubtedly, political debates would arise over just who does, and does not, get access to these models and databases.

Thirdly, Augmented Reality looks at the collision of Augmentation and External technologies. Such tools would enhance the external physical world for the individual, through the use of location-aware systems and interfaces that process and layer networked information on top of our everyday perceptions.

Augmented Reality makes use of the same kinds of distributed information and sensory systems as Mirror Worlds, but does so in a much more granular, personal way. The AR world is much more interested in depth than in flows: the history of a given product on a store shelf; the name of the person waving at you down the street (along with her social network connections and reputation score); the comments and recommendations left by friends at a particular coffee shop, or bar, or bookstore. This world is almost vibrating with information, and is likely to spawn as many efforts to produce viable filtering tools as there are projects to assign and recognize new data sources.

Lastly, we have Lifelogging, which brings together Augmentation and Intimate technologies. Here, the systems record and report the states and life histories of objects and users, enhancing observation, recall, and communication. I’ve sometimes talked about one version of this as the “participatory panopticon.”

Here, the observation tools of an Augmented Reality world get turned inward, serving as an adjunct memory. Lifelogging systems are less apt to be attuned to the digital comments left at a bar than to the spoken words of the person at the table next to you. These tools would be used to capture both the practical and the ephemeral, like where you left your car in the lot and what it was that made your spouse laugh so much. Such systems have obvious political implications, such as catching a candidate’s gaffe or a bureaucrat’s corruption. But they also have significant personal implications: what does the world look like when we know that everything we say or do is likely to be recorded?

This underscores a deep concern that crosses the boundaries of all four scenarios: trust.

“Trust” encompasses a variety of key issues: protecting privacy and being safely visible; information and transaction security; and, critically, honesty and transparency. It wouldn’t take much effort to turn all four of these scenarios into dystopias. The common element of the malevolent versions of these societies would be easy to spot: widely divergent levels of control over and access to information, especially personal information. The ultimate importance of these scenarios isn’t just the technologies they describe, but the societies that they create.

So what do these tell us about a Singularity?

Second disclaimer time: although I worked with John and Jerry on the original Metaverse scenarios, they should not be blamed for any of what follows.

Across the four Metaverse scenarios, we can see a variety of ways in which the addition of an intelligent system would enhance the user’s experience. Dumb non-player characters and repetitive bots in virtual worlds, for example, might be replaced by virtual people essentially indistinguishable from characters controlled by human users. Efforts to make sense of the massive flows of information in a Mirror World setting would be enormously enhanced with the assistance of sophisticated machine analyst. Augmented Reality environments would thrive with truly intelligent agent systems, knowing what to filter and what to emphasize. In a lifelogging world, an intelligent companion in one’s mobile or wearable system would be needed in order to figure out how to index and catalog memories in a personally meaningful way; it’s likely that such a system would need to learn how to emulate your own thought processes, becoming a virtual shadow.

None of these systems would truly need to be self-aware, self-modifying intelligent machines—but in time, each could lead to that point.

But if the potential benefits of these scenaric worlds would be enhanced with intelligent information technology, so too would the dangers. Unfortunately, avoiding dystopian outcomes is a challenge that may be trickier than some may expect—and is one with direct implications for all of our hopes and efforts for bringing about a future that would benefit human civilization, not end it.

It starts with a basic premise: software is a human construction. That’s obvious when considering code written by hand over empty pizza boxes and stacks of paper coffee cups. But even the closest process we have to entirely computer-crafted software—emergent, evolutionary code—still betrays the presence of a human maker: evolutionary algorithms may have produced the final software, and may even have done so in ways that remain opaque to human observers, but the goals of the evolutionary process, and the selection mechanism that drives the digital evolution towards these goals, are quite clearly of human origin.

To put it bluntly, software, like all technologies, is inherently political. Even the most disruptive technologies, the innovations and ideas that can utterly transform society, carry with them the legacies of past decisions, the culture and history of the societies that spawned them. Code inevitably reflects the choices, biases and desires of its creators.

This will often be unambiguous and visible, as with digital rights management. It can also be subtle, as with operating system routines written to benefit one application over its competitors (I know some of you in this audience are old enough to remember “DOS isn’t done ’til Lotus won’t run”). Sometimes, code may be written to reflect an even more dubious bias, as with the allegations of voting machines intentionally designed to make election-hacking easy for those in the know. Much of the time, however, the inclusion of software elements reflecting the choices, biases and desires of its creators will be utterly unconscious, the result of what the coders deem obviously right.

We can imagine parallel examples of the ways in which metaverse technologies could be shaped by deeply-embedded cultural and political forces: the obvious, such as lifelogging systems that know to not record digitally-watermarked background music and television; the subtle, such as augmented reality filters that give added visibility to sponsors, and make competitors harder to see; the malicious, such as mirror world networks that accelerate the rupture between the information haves and have-nots—or, perhaps more correctly, between the users and the used; and, again and again, the unintended-but-consequential, such as virtual world environments that make it impossible to build an avatar that reflects your real or desired appearance, offering only virtual bodies sprung from the fevered imagination of perpetual adolescents.

So too with what we today talk about as a “singularity.” The degree to which human software engineers actually get their hands dirty with the nuts & bolts of AI code is secondary to the basic condition that humans will guide the technology’s development, making the choices as to which characteristics should be encouraged, which should be suppressed or ignored, and which ones signify that “progress” has been made. Whatever the degree to which post-singularity intelligences would be able to reshape their own minds, we have to remember that the first generation will be our creations, built with interests and abilities based upon our choices, biases and desires.

This isn’t intrinsically bad; emerging digital minds that reflect the interests of their human creators is a lever that gives us a real chance to make sure that a “singularity” ultimately benefits us. But it holds a real risk. Not that people won’t know that there’s a bias: we’ve lived long enough with software bugs and so-called “computer errors” to know not to put complete trust in the pronouncements of what may seem to be digital oracles. The risk comes from not being able to see what that bias might be.

Many of us rightly worry about what might happen with “Metaverse” systems that analyze our life logs, that monitor our every step and word, that track our behavior online so as to offer us the safest possible society—or best possible spam. Imagine the risks associated with trusting that when the creators of emerging self- aware systems say that they have our best interests in mind, they mean the same thing by that phrase that we do.

For me, the solution is clear. Trust depends upon transparency. Transparency, in turn, requires openness.

We need an Open Singularity.

At minimum, this means expanding the conversation about the shape that a singularity might take beyond a self-selected group of technologists and philosophers. An “open access” singularity, if you will. Dr. Kurzweil’s books are a solid first step, but the public discourse around the singularity concept needs to reflect a wider diversity of opinion and perspective.

If the singularity is as likely and as globally, utterly transformative as many here believe, it would be profoundly unethical to make it happen without including all of the stakeholders in the process—and we are all stakeholders in the future.

World-altering decisions made without taking our vast array of interests into account are intrinsically flawed, likely fatally so. They would become catalysts for conflicts, potentially even the triggers for some of the “existential threats” that may arise from transformative technologies. Moreover, working to bring in diverse interests has to happen as early in the process as possible. Balancing and managing a global diversity of needs won’t be easy, but it will be impossible if democratization is thought of as a bolt-on addition at the end.

Democracy is a messy process. It requires give-and-take, and an acknowledgement that efficiency is less important than participation.

We may not have an answer now as to how to do this, how to democratize the singularity. If this is the case—and I suspect that it is—then we have added work ahead of us. The people who have embraced the possibility of a singularity should be working at least as hard on making possible a global inclusion of interests as they do on making the singularity itself happen. All of the talk of “friendly AI” and “positive singularities” will be meaningless if the only people who get to decide what that means are the few hundred of us in this room.

My preferred pathway would be to “open source” the singularity, to bring in the eyes and minds of millions of collaborators to examine and co-create the relevant software and models, seeking out flaws and making the code more broadly reflective of a variety of interests. Such a proposal is not without risks. Accidents will happen, and there will always be those few who wish to do others harm. But the same is true in a world of proprietary interests and abundant secrecy, and those are precisely the conditions that can make effective responses to looming disasters difficult. With an open approach, you have millions of people who know how dangerous technologies work, know the risks that they hold, and are committed to helping to detect, defend and respond to crises. That these are, in Bill Joy’s term, “knowledge-enabled” dangers means that knowledge also enables our defense; knowledge, in turn, grows faster as it becomes more widespread. This is not simply speculation; we’ve seen time and again, from digital security to the global response to SARS, that open access to information-laden risks ultimately makes them more manageable.

The metaverse roadmap offers a glimpse of what the next decade might hold, but does so recognizing that the futures it describes are not end-points, but transitions. The choices we make today about commonplace tools and everyday technologies will shape what’s possible, and what’s imaginable, with the generations of technologies to come. If the singularity is in fact near, the fundamental tools of information, collaboration and access will be our best hope for making it happen in a way that spreads its benefits and minimizes its dangers—in short, making it happen in a way that lets us be good ancestors.

If we’re willing to try, we can create a future, a singularity, that’s wise, democratic and sustainable—a future that’s open. Open as in transparent. Open as in participatory. Open as in available to all. Open as in filled with an abundance of options.

The shape of tomorrow remains in our grasp, and will be determined
by the choices we make today. Choose wisely.

© 2007 Jamais Cascio

I have a confession to make. In Chapters 5 through 12, where I explained the details of SENS, I elided one rather important fact—a fact that the biologists among my audience will very probably have spotted. I’m going to address that omission in this chapter, building on a line of reasoning that I introduced in an ostensibly quite circumscribed context towards the end of Chapter 9.

It is this: the therapies that we develop in a decade or so in mice, and those that may come only a decade or two later for humans, will not be perfect. Other things being equal, there will be a residual accumulation of damage within our bodies, however frequently and thoroughly we apply these therapies, and we will eventually experience age-related decline and death just as now, only at a greater age. Probably not all that much greater either — probably only 30-50 years older than today.

But other things won’t be equal. In this chapter, I’m going to explain why not—and why, as you may already know from other sources, I expect many people alive today to live to 1000 years of age and to avoid age-related health problems even at that age.

I’ll start by describing why it’s unrealistic to expect these therapies to be perfect.

Evolution didn’t leave notes

I emphasised in Chapter 3 that the body is a machine, and that that’s both why it ages and why it can in principle be maintained. I made a comparison with vintage cars, which are kept fully functional even 100 years after they were built, using the same maintenance technologies that kept them going 50 years ago when they were already far older than they were ever designed to be. More complex machines can also be kept going indefinitely, though the expense and expertise involved may mean that this never happens in practice because replacing the machine is a reasonable alternative. This sounds very much like a reason to suppose that the therapies we develop to stave off aging for a few decades will indeed be enough to stave it off indefinitely.

But actually that’s overoptimistic. All we can reliably infer from a comparison with man-made machines is that a truly comprehensive panel of therapies, which truly repairs everything that goes wrong with us as a result of aging, is possible in principle— not that it is foreseeable. And in fact, if we look back at the therapies I’ve described in this book, we can see that actually one thing about them is very unlike maintenance of a man-made machine: these therapies strive to minimally alter metabolism itself, and target only the initially inert side-effects of metabolism, whereas machine maintenance may involve adding extra things to the machinery itself (to the fuel or the oil of a car, for example). We can get away with this sort of invasive maintenance of man-made machines because we (well, some of us!) know how they work right down to the last detail, so we can be adequately sure that our intervention won’t have unforeseen side-effects. With the body—even the body of a mouse—we are still profoundly ignorant of the details, so we have to sidestep our ignorance by interfering as little as possible.

What that means for efficacy of therapies is that, as we fix more and more aspects of aging, you can bet that new aspects will be unmasked. These new things—eighth and subsequent items to add to the “seven deadly things” listed in this book—will not be fatal at a currently normal age, because if they were, we’d know about them already. But they’ll be fatal eventually, unless we work out how to fix them too.

It’s not just “eighth things” we have to worry about, either. Within each of the seven existing categories, there are some subcategories that will be easier to fix than others. For example, there are lots of chemically distinct cross-links responsible for stiffening our arteries; some of them may be broken with ALT-711 and related molecules, but others will surely need more sophisticated agents that have not yet been developed. Another example: obviating mitochondrial DNA by putting modified copies of it into the cell’s chromosomes requires gene therapy, and thus far we have no gene therapy delivery system (“vector”) that can safely get into all cells, so for the foreseeable future we’ll probably only be able to protect a subset of cells from mtDNA mutations. Much better vectors will be needed if we are to reach all cells.

In practice, therefore, therapies that rejuvenate 60-year-olds by 20 years will not work so well the second time around. When the therapies are applied for the first time, the people receiving them will have 60 years of “easy” damage (the types that the therapies can remove) and also 60 years of “difficult” damage. But by the time beneficiaries of these therapies have returned to biologically 60 (which, let’s presume, will happen when they’re chronologically about 80), the damage their bodies contain will consist of 20 years of “easy” damage and 80 years of “difficult” damage. Thus, the therapies will only rejuvenate them by a much smaller amount, say ten years. So they’ll have to come back sooner for the third treatment, but that will benefit them even less… and very soon, just like Achilles catching up with the tortoise in Zeno’s paradox, aging will get the better of them. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. The diminishing returns delivered by repeated application of a rejuvenation regime.

Back in Chapters 3 and 4 I explained that, contrary to one’s intuition, rejuvenation may actually be easier than retardation. Now it’s time to introduce an even more counterintuitive fact: that, even though it will be much harder to double a middle-aged human’s remaining lifespan than a middle-aged mouse’s, multiplying that remaining lifespan by much larger factors—ten or 30, say—will be much easier in humans than in mice.

The two-speed pace of technology

I’m now going to switch briefly from science to the history of science, or more precisely the history of technology.

It was well before recorded history that people began to take an interest in the possibility of flying: indeed, this may be a desire almost as ancient as the desire to live forever. Yet, with the notable but sadly unreproduced exception of Daedalus and Icarus, no success in this area was achieved until about a century ago. (If we count balloons then we must double that, but really only airships—balloons that can control their direction of travel reasonably well—should be counted, and they only emerged at around the same time as the aircraft.) Throughout the previous few centuries, engineers from Leonardo on devised ways to achieve controlled powered flight, and we must presume that they believed their designs to be only a few decades (at most) from realisation. But they were wrong.

Ever since the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, however, things have been curiously different. Having mastered the basics, aviation engineers seem to have progressed to ever greater heights (literally as well as metaphorically!) at an almost serenely smooth pace. To pick a representative selection of milestones: Lindbergh flew the Atlantic 24 years after the first powered flight occurred, the first commercial jetliner (the Comet) debuted 22 years after that, and the first supersonic airliner (Concorde) followed after a further 20 years.

This stark contrast between fundamental breakthroughs and incremental refinements of those breakthroughs is, I would contend, typical of the history of technological fields. Further, I would argue that it’s not surprising: both psychologically and scientifically, bigger advances are harder to estimate the difficulty of.

I mention all this, of course, because of what it tells us about the likely future progress of life extension therapies. Just as people were wrong for centuries about how hard it as to fly but eventually cracked it, we’ve been wrong since time immemorial about how hard aging is to combat but we’ll eventually crack it too. But just as people have been pretty reliably correct about how to make better and better aircraft once they had the first one, we can expect to be pretty reliably correct about how to repair the damage of aging more and more comprehensively once we can do it a little.

That’s not to say it’ll be easy, though. It’ll take time, just as it took time to get from the Wright Flyer to Concorde. And that is why, if you want to live to 1000, you can count yourself lucky that you’re a human and not a mouse. Let me take you through the scenario, step by step.

Suppose we develop Robust Mouse Rejuvenation in 2016, and we take a few dozen two-year-old mice and duly treble their one-year remaining lifespans. That will mean that, rather than dying in 2017 as they otherwise would, they’ll die in 2019. Well, maybe not—in particular, not if we can develop better therapies by 2018 that re-treble their remaining lifespan (which will by now be down to one year again). But remember, they’ll be harder to repair the second time: their overall damage level may be the same as before they received the first therapies, but a higher proportion of that damage will be of types that those first therapies can’t fix. So we’ll only be able to achieve that re-trebling if the therapies we have available by 2018 are considerably more powerful than those that we had in 2016. And to be honest, the chance that we’ll improve the relevant therapies that much in only two years is really pretty slim. In fact, the likely amount of progress in just two years is so small that it might as well be considered zero. Thus, our murine heroes will indeed die in 2019 (or 2020 at best), despite our best efforts.

But now, suppose we develop Robust Human Rejuvenation in 2031, and we take a few dozen 60-year-old humans and duly double their 30-year remaining lifespans. By the time they come back in (say) 2051, biologically 60 again but chronologically 80, they’ll need better therapies, just as the mice did in 2018. But luckily for them, we’ll have had not two but twenty years to improve the therapies. And 20 years is a very respectable period of time in technology—long enough, in fact, that we will with very high probability have succeeded in developing sufficient improvements to the 2031 therapies so that those 80-year-olds can indeed be restored from biologically 60 to biologically 40, or even a little younger, despite their enrichment (relative to 2031) in harder-to-repair types of damage. So unlike the mice, these humans will have just as many years (20 or more) of youth before they need third-generation treatments as they did before the second.

And so on …. See Figure 2.

Figure 2. How the diminishing returns depicted in Figure 1 are avoided by repeated application of a rejuvenation regime that is sufficiently more effective each time than the previous time.

Longevity Escape Velocity

The key conclusion of the logic I’ve set out above is that there is a threshold rate of biomedical progress that will allow us to stave off aging indefinitely, and that that rate is implausible for mice but entirely plausible for humans. If we can make rejuvenation therapies work well enough to give us time to make then work better, that will give us enough additional time to make them work better still, which will … you get the idea. This will allow us to escape age-related decline indefinitely, however old we become in purely chronological terms. I think the term “longevity escape velocity” (LEV) sums that up pretty well.¹

One feature of LEV that’s worth pointing out is that we can accumulate lead-time. What I mean is that if we have a period in which we improve the therapies faster than we need to, that will allow us to have a subsequent period in which we don’t improve them so fast. It’s only the average rate of improvement, starting from the arrival of the first therapies that give us just 20 or 30 extra years, that needs to stay above the LEV threshold.

In case you’re having trouble assimilating all this, let me describe it in terms of the physical state of the body. Throughout this book, I’ve been discussing aging as the accumulation of molecular and cellular “damage” of various types, and I’ve highlighted the fact that a modest quantity of damage is no problem—metabolism just works around it, in the same way that a household only needs to put out the garbage once a week, not every hour. In those terms, the attainment and maintenance of escape velocity simply means that our best therapies must improve fast enough to outweigh the progressive shift in the composition of our aging damage to more repair-resistant forms, as the forms that are easier to repair are progressively eliminated by our therapies. If we can do this, the total amount of damage in each category can be kept permanently below the level that initiates functional decline.

Another, perhaps simpler, way of looking at this is to consider the analogy with literal escape velocity, i.e. the overcoming of gravity. Suppose you’re at the top of a cliff and you jump off. Your remaining life expectancy is short—and it gets shorter as you descend to the rocks below. This is exactly the same as with aging: the older you get, the less remaining time you can expect to live. The situation with the periodic arrival of ever better rejuvenation therapies is then a bit like jumping off a cliff with a jet-pack on your back. Initially the jetpack is turned off, but as you fall, you turn it on and it gives you a boost, slowing your fall. As you fall further, you turn up the power on the jetpack, and eventually you start to pull out of the dive and even start shooting upwards. And the further up you go, the easier it is to go even further.

The political and social significance of discussing LEV

I’ve had a fairly difficult time convincing my colleagues in biogerontology of the feasibility of the various SENS components, but in general I’ve been successful once I’ve been given enough time to go through the details. When it comes to LEV, on the other hand, the reception to my proposals can best be described as blank incomprehension. This is not too surprising, in hindsight, because the LEV concept is even further distant from the sort of scientific thinking that my colleagues normally do than my other ideas are: it’s not only an area of science that’s distant from mainstream gerontology, it’s not even science at all in the strict sense, but rather the history of technology. But I regard that as no excuse. The fact is, the history of technology is evidence, just like any other evidence, and scientists have no right to ignore it.

Another big reason for my colleagues’ resistance to the LEV concept is, of course, that if I’m seen to be right that achievement of LEV is foreseeable, they can no longer go around saying that they’re working on postponing aging by a decade or two but no more. As I outlined in Chapter 13, there is an intense fear within the senior gerontology community of being seen as having anything to do with radical life extension, with all the uncertainties that it will surely herald. They want nothing to do with such talk.
You might think that my reaction to this would be to focus on the short term: to avoid antagonising my colleagues with the LEV concept and its implications of four-digit lifespans, in favour of increased emphasis on the fine details of getting the SENS strands to work in a first-generation form. But this is not an option for me, for one very simple and incontrovertible reason: I’m in this business to save lives. In order to maximise the number of lives saved—healthy years added to people’s lives, if you’d prefer a more precise measure—I need to address the whole picture. And that means ensuring that you, dear reader—the general public—appreciate the importance of this work enough to motivate its funding.

Now, your first thought may be: hang on, if indefinite life extension is so unpalatable, wouldn’t funding be attracted more easily by keeping quiet about it? Well, no—and for a pretty good reason.

The world’s richest man, Bill Gates, set up a foundation a few years ago whose primary mission is to address health issues in the developing world.² This is a massively valuable humanitarian effort, which I wholeheartedly support, even though it doesn’t directly help SENS at all. I’m not the only person who supports it, either: in 2006 the world’s second richest man, Warren Buffett, committed a large proportion of his fortune to be donated in annual increments to the Gates Foundation.³

The eagerness of extremely wealthy individuals to contribute to world health is, in more general terms, an enormous boost for SENS. This is mainly because a rising tide raises all boats: once it has become acceptable (even meritorious) among that community to be seen as a large-scale health philanthropist, those with “only” a billion or two to their name will be keener to join the trend than if it is seen as a crazy way to spend your hard-earned money.

But there’s a catch. That logic only works if the moral status of SENS is seen to compare with that of the efforts that are now being funded so well. And that’s where LEV makes all the difference.

SENS therapies will be expensive to develop and expensive to administer, at least at first. Let’s consider how the prospect of spending all that money might be received if the ultimate benefit would be only to add a couple of decades to the lives of people who are already living longer than most in the developing world, after which those people would suffer the same duration of functional decline that they do now.

It’s not exactly the world’s most morally imperative action, is it?

Indeed, I would go so far as to say that, if I were in control of a few billion dollars, I would be quite hesitant to spend it on such a marginal improvement in the overall quality and quantity of life of those who are already doing better in that respect than most, when the alternative exists of making a similar or greater improvement to the quality and quantity of life of the world’s less fortunate inhabitants.

The LEV concept doesn’t make much difference in the short term to who would benefit from these therapies, of course: it will necessarily be those who currently die of aging, so in the first instance it will predominantly be those in wealthy nations. But there is a very widespread appreciation in the industrialised world—an appreciation that, I feel, extends to the wealthy sectors of society—that progress in the long term relies on aiming high, and in particular that the moral imperative to help those at the rear of the field to catch up is balanced by the moral imperative to maximise the average rate of progress across the whole population, which initially means helping those who are already ahead. The fact that SENS is likely to lead to LEV means that developing SENS gives a huge boost to the quality and quantity of life of whomever receives it: so huge, in fact, that there is no problem justifying it in comparison the alternative uses to which a similar sum of money might be put. The fact that lifespan is extended indefinitely rather than by only a couple of decades is only part of the difference that LEV makes, of course: arguably an even more important difference in terms of the benefit that SENS gives is that the whole of that life will be youthful, right up until a beneficiary mistimes the speed of an oncoming truck. The average quality of life, therefore, will rise much more than if all that was in prospect were a shift from (say) 7:1 to 9:1 in the ratio of healthy life to frail life.

Quantifying longevity escape velocity more precisely

This chapter has, I hope, closed down the remaining escape routes that might still have remained for those still seeking ways to defend a rejection of the SENS agenda. I have shown that SENS can be functionally equivalent to a way to eliminate aging completely, even though in actual therapeutic terms it will only be able to postpone aging by a finite amount at any given moment in time. I’ve also shown that this makes it morally just as desirable— imperative, even—as the many efforts into which a large amount of private philanthropic funding is already being injected.

I’m not complacent though: I know that people are quite ingenious when it comes to finding ways to avoid combating aging. Thus, in order to keep a few steps ahead, I have recently embarked on a collaboration with a stupendous programmer and futurist named Chris Phoenix, in which we are determining the precise degree of healthy life extension that one can expect from a given rate of progress in improving the SENS therapies. This is leading to a series of publications highlighting a variety of scenarios, but the short answer is that no wool has been pulled over your eyes above: the rate of progress we need to achieve starts out at roughly a doubling of the efficacy of the SENS therapies every 40 years and actually declines thereafter. By “doubling of efficacy” I mean a halving of the amount of damage that still cannot be repaired.

So there you have it. We will almost certainly take centuries to reach the level of control over aging that we have over the aging of vintage cars—totally comprehensive, indefinite maintenance of full function—but because longevity escape velocity is not very fast, we will probably achieve something functionally equivalent within only a few decades from now, at the point where we have therapies giving middle-aged people 30 extra years of youthful life.

I think we can call that the fountain of youth, don’t you?

Notes

1. I first used the phrase “escape velocity” in print in the paper arising from the second SENS workshop—de Grey ADNJ, Baynes JW, Berd D, Heward CB, Pawelec G, Stock G. Is human aging still mysterious enough to be left only to scientists? BioEssays 2002;24(7):667-676. My first thorough description of the concept, however, didn’t appear until two years later: de Grey ADNJ. Escape velocity: why the prospect of extreme human life extension matters now. PLoS Biology 2004;2(6):e187.

2. Gates disburses these funds through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, http://www.gatesfoundation.org

3. Buffett’s decision to donate most of his wealth to the Gates Foundation was announced in June 2006 and is the largest act of charitable giving in United States history.

© 2007 Aubrey de Grey

To you, a robot is a robot. Gears and metal. Electricity and positrons. Mind and iron!  Human-made! If necessary, human-destroyed. But you haven’t worked with them, so you don’t know them. They’re a cleaner, better breed than we are.

—Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

Ethical AIs

Over the past decade, the concept of a technological singularity has become better understood. The basic idea is that the process of creating AI and other technological change will be accelerated by AI itself, so that sometime in the coming century the pace of change will become so rapid that we mere mortals won’t be able to keep up, much less control it. British statistician and colleague of Turing I. J. Good wrote in 1965, “Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.” The disparate intellectual threads, including the word “singularity” from which the modern concept is woven, were pulled together by Vernor Vinge in 1993. More recently it was the subject of a best-selling book by Ray Kurzweil. There is even a reasonably well-funded think tank, the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), whose sole concern is singularity issues.

It is common (although not universal) in Singularity studies to worry about autogenous AIs. The SIAI, for example, makes it a top concern, whereas Kurzweil is more sanguine that AIs will arise by progress along a path enabled by neuroscience and thus be essentially human in character. The concern, among those who share it, is that epihuman AIs in the process of improving themselves might remove any conscience or other constraint we program into them, or they might simply program their successors without them.

But it is in fact we, the authors of the first AIs, who stand at the watershed. We cannot modify our brains (yet) to alter our own consciences, but we are faced with the choice of building our creatures with or without them. An AI without a conscience, by which I mean both the innate moral paraphernalia in the mental architecture and a culturally inherited ethic, would be a superhuman psychopath.

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that superhuman psychopaths should not be built; however, it seems almost certain someone will do it anyway, probably within the next two decades. Most existing AI research is completely pragmatic, without any reference to moral structures in cognitive architectures. That is to be expected: just getting the darn thing to be intelligent is as hard a problem as we can handle now, and there is time enough to worry about the brakes after the engine is working. As I noted before, much of the most advanced research is sponsored by the military or corporations. In the military, the notion of an autonomous machine being able to question its orders on moral grounds is anathema. In corporate industry, the top goal seems likely to be the financial benefit of the company. Thus, the current probable sources of AI will not adhere to a universally adopted philanthropic formulation, such as Asimov’s Three Laws. The reasonable assumption then is that a wide variety of AIs with differing goal structures will appear in the coming decades.

Hard Takeoff

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.

—Vernor Vinge, 1993

A subtext of the singularitarian concern is there may be the possibility of a sudden emergence of (a psychopathic) AI at a superhuman level, due to a positive feedback in its autogenous capabilities. This scenario is sometimes referred to as a “hard takeoff.” In its more extreme versions, the concept is that a hyperhuman AI could appear virtually overnight and be so powerful as to achieve universal dominance. Although the scenario usually involves an AI rapidly improving itself, it might also happen by virtue of a longer process kept secret until sprung on the world, as in the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project.

The first thing that either version of the scenario requires is the existence of computer hardware capable of running the hyperhuman AI. By my best estimate, hardware for running a diahuman AI currently exists, but is represented by the top ten or so supercomputers in the world. These are multimillion-dollar installations, and the dollars were not spent to do AI experiments. And even if someone were to pay to dedicate, say, an IBM blue gene or Google’s fabled grid of stock PCs to running an AI full-time, they would only approximate a normal human intelligence. There would have to be a major project to build the hardware of a seriously epihuman, much less hyperhuman, AI with current computing technology.

Second, even if the hardware were available, the software is not. The fears of a hard takeoff are based on the notion that an early superintelligence would be able to write smarter software faster for the next AI, and so on. It does seem likely that a properly structured AI could be a better programmer than a human of otherwise comparable cognitive abilities, but remember that as of today, automatic programming remains one of the most poorly developed of the AI subfields. Any reasonable extrapolation of current practice predicts that early human-level AIs will be secretaries and truck drivers, not computer science researchers or even programmers. Even when a diahuman AI computer scientist is achieved, it will simply add one more scientist to the existing field, which is already bending its efforts toward improving AI. That won’t speed things up much. Only when the total AI devoting its efforts to the project begins to rival the intellectual resources of the existing human AI community—in other words, being already epihuman—will there be a really perceptible acceleration. We are more likely to see an acceleration from a more prosaic source first: once AI is widely perceived as having had a breakthrough, it will attract more funding and human talent.

Third, intelligence does not spring fully formed like Athena from the forehead of Zeus. Even we humans, with the built-in processing power of a supercomputer at our disposal, take years to mature. Again, once mature, a human requires about a decade to become really expert in any given field, including AI programming. More to the point, it takes the scientific community some extended period to develop a theory, then the engineering community some more time to put it into practice. Even if we had a complete and valid theory of mind, which we do not, putting it into software would take years; and the early versions would be incomplete and full of bugs. Human developers will need years of experience with early AIs before they get it right. Even then they will have systems that are the equivalent of slow, inexperienced humans.

Advances in software, similar to Moore’s law for hardware, are less celebrated and less precisely measurable, but nevertheless real. Advances in algorithmics have tended to produce software speedups roughly similar to hardware ones. Running this backward, we can say that the early software in any given field is much less efficient than later versions. The completely understood, tightly coded, highly optimized software of mature AI may run a human equivalent in real time on a 10 teraops machine. Early versions will not.

There are two wild-card possibilities to consider. First, rogue AIs could be developed using botnets, groups of hijacked PCs communicating via the Internet. These are available today from unscrupulous hackers and are widely used for sending spam and conducting Ddos attacks on Web sites. A best estimate of the total processing power on the Internet runs to 10,000 Moravec HEPP or 10 Kurzweil HEPP, although it is unlikely that any single coordinated botnet could collect even a fraction of 1 percent of that at any given time. Moreover, the extreme forms of parallelism needed to use this form of computing, along with the communication latency involved, will tend to push the reasonable estimates toward the Kurzweil level (which is based on the human brain with its high-parallelism, slow-cycle time architecture). That, together with the progress of the increasingly sophisticated Internet security community, will make the development of AI software much harder in this mode than in a standard research setting. The “researchers” would have to worry about fighting for their computing resources as well as figuring out how to make the AI work—and the AI, to be able to extend their work, would have to do the same. Thus, while we can expect botnet AIs in the long run, they are unlikely to be first.

The second wild-card possibility is that Marvin Minsky is right. Almost every business and academic computing facility offers at least a Minsky HEPP. If an AI researcher found a simple, universal learning algorithm that allowed strong positive feedback into such a highly optimized form, it would find ample processing power available. And this could be completely aboveboard—a Minsky HEPP costs much less than a person is worth, economically.

Let me, somewhat presumptuously, attempt to explain Minsky’s intuition by an analogy: a bird is our natural example of the possibility of heavier-than-air flight. Birds are immensely complex: muscles, bones, feathers, nervous systems. But we can build working airplanes with tremendously fewer moving parts. Similarly, the brain can be greatly simplified, still leaving an engine capable of general conscious thought. My own intuition is that Minsky is closer to being right than is generally recognized in the AI community, but computationally expensive heuristic search will turn out to be an unavoidable element of adaptability and autogeny. This problem will extend to any AI capable of the runaway feedback loop that singularitarians fear.

Moral Mechanisms

It is therefore most likely that a full decade will elapse between the appearance of the first genuinely general, autogenous AIs and the time they become significantly more capable than humans. This will indeed be a crucial period in history, but no one person, group, or even school of thought will control it. The question instead is, what can be done to influence the process to put the AIs on the road to being a stable community of moral agents? A possible path is shown in Robert Axelrod’s experiments and in the original biological evolution of our own morality. In a world of autonomous agents who can recognize each other, cooperators can prosper and ultimately form an evolutionarily stable strategy.

Superintelligent AIs should be just as capable of understanding this as humans are. If their environment were the same as ours, they would ultimately evolve a similar morality; if we imbued them with it in the first place, it should be stable. Unfortunately, the environment they will inhabit will have some significant differences from ours.

The Bad News

Inhomogeneity

The disparities among the abilities of AIs could be significantly greater than those among humans and more correlated with an early “edge” in the race to acquire resources. This could negate the evolutionary pressure to reciprocal altruism.

Self-Interest

Corporate AIs will almost certainly start out self-interested, and evolution favors effective self-interest. It has been suggested by commentators such as Steven Pinker, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Jeff Hawkins, that AIs would not have the “baser” human instincts built in and thus would not need moral restraints. But it should be clear they could be programmed with baser instincts, and it seems likely that corporate ones will be aggressive, opportunistic, and selfish, and that military ones will be programmed with different but equally disturbing motivations.

Furthermore, it should be noted that any goal structure implies self-interest. Consider two agents, both with the ability to use some given resource. Unless the agents’ goals are identical, each will further its own goal more by using the resource for its own purposes and consider it at best suboptimal and possibly counterproductive for the resource to be controlled and used by the other agent toward some other goal. It should go without saying that specific goals can vary wildly even if both agents are programmed to seek, for example, the good of humanity.

The Good News

Intelligence Is Good

There is but one good, namely, knowledge; and but one evil, namely ignorance.

—Socrates, from Diogenes Laertius’s Life of Socrates

As a matter of practical fact, criminality is strongly and negatively correlated with IQ in humans.  The popular image of the tuxedo-wearing, suave jet-setter jewel thief to the contrary notwithstanding, almost all career criminals are of poor means as well as of lesser intelligence.

Nations where the rule of law has broken down are poor compared to more stable societies. A remarkable document published by the World Bank in 2006 surveys the proportions of natural resources, produced capital (such as factories and roads), and intangible capital (education of the people, value of institutions, rule of law, likelihood of saving without theft or confiscation). Here is a summary. Note that the wealth column is total value, not income.

In a wealthy country, natural resources such as farmland are worth more but only by a small amount, mostly because they can be more efficiently used. The fraction of total wealth contributed by natural resources in a wealthy country is only 2 percent, as compared to 26 percent in a poor one. The vast majority of the wealth in high-income countries is intangible: it is further broken down by the report to show that roughly half of it represents people’s education and skills, and the other half the value of the institutions—in other words, the opportunities the society gives its citizens to turn efforts into value.

Lying, cheating, and stealing are profitable only in the very short term. In the long run, honesty is the best policy; leaving cheaters behind and consorting with other honest creatures is the best plan. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to understand this and to conduct your affairs accordingly.

Original Sin

We have met the enemy, and he is us! 

—Porkypine in Walt Kelly’s Pogo

Developmental psychologists have sobering news for humankind, which echoes and explains the old phrase, “Someone only a mother could love.” Simply put, human babies are born to lie, cheat, and steal. As Matt Ridley put it in another connection, “Vervet monkeys, like two-year-olds, completely lack the capacity for empathy.” Law and custom recognize this as well: children are not held responsible for their actions until they are considerably older than two.

In fact, recent neuroscience research using brain scans indicates that consideration for other people’s feelings is still being added to the mental planning process up through the age of twenty.

Children are socialized out of the condition we smile at and call “childishness” (but think how differently we’d refer to an adult who acted, morally, like a two-year-old). Evolution and our genes cannot predict what social environment children will have to cope with, so they make children ready for the rawest and nastiest; they can grow out of it if they find themselves in civilization, but growing up mean is your best chance of survival in many places.

With AIs, we can simply reverse the default orientation: AIs can start out nice, then learn the arts of selfishness and revenge only if the situation demands it.

Unselfish Genes

Reproduction of AIs is likely to be completely different from that of humans. It will be much simpler just to copy the program. It seems quite likely that ways will be found to encode and transmit concepts learned from experience more efficiently than we do with language. In other words, AIs will probably be able to inherit acquired characteristics and to acquire substantial portions of their mentality from others in a way reminiscent of bacteria exchanging plasmids.

For these reasons, individual AIs are likely to be able to have the equivalent of both memories and personal experience stretching back in time before they were “born,” as  experienced by many other AIs. To the extent that morality is indeed a summary encoding of lessons learned the hard way by our forebears, AIs could have a more direct line to it. The superego mechanisms by which personal morality trumps common sense should be less necessary, because the horizon effect for which it’s a heuristic will recede with wider experience and deeper understanding.

At the same time, AIs will lack some of the specific pressures, such as sexual jealousy, that we suffer from because of the sexual germ-line nature of animal genes. This may make some of the nastier features of human psychology unnecessary.

Cooperative Competition

For example, AIs could well be designed without the mechanism we seem to have whereby authority can short-circuit morality, as in the Milgram experiments.* This is the equipment that implements the distributed function of the pecking order. The pecking order had a clear, valuable function in a natural environment where the Malthusian dynamic held sway: in hard times, instead of all dying because evenly divided resources were insufficient, the haves survived and the have-nots were sacrificed. In order to implement such a stringent function without physical conflict that would defeat its purpose, some very strong internal motivations are tied to perceptions of status, prestige, and personal dominance.

*In 1963 psychologist Stanley Milgram did some famous experiments to test the limits of people’s consciences when under the influence of an authority figure. The shocking results were that ordinary people will inflict torture on others simply because they were told to do so by a scientist in a lab coat.

On the one hand, the pecking order is probably responsible for saving humanity from extinction numerous times. It forms a large part of our collective character, will we or nill we. AIs without pecking-order feelings would see humans as weirdly alien (and we them).

On the other, the pecking order short-circuits our moral sense. It allows political and religious authority figures to tell us to do hideously immoral things that we would be horrified to do in other circumstances. It makes human slavery possible as a stable form of social organization, as is evident throughout many centuries of history.

And what’s more, it’s not necessary. Market economics is much better at resource allocation than the pecking order. The productivity of technology is such that the pecking order’s evolutionary premise no longer holds. Distributed learning algorithms, such as the scientific method or idea futures markets, do a better job than the judgment of a tribal chieftain.

Comparative Advantage

The economic law of comparative advantage states that cooperation between individuals of differing capabilities remains mutually beneficial. Suppose you are highly skilled and can make eight widgets per hour or four of the more complicated doohickies. Your neighbor Joe does everything the hard way and can make one widget or one doohicky in an hour. You work an eight-hour day and produce sixty-four widgets, and Joe makes eight doohickies. Then you trade him twelve widgets for the eight doohickies. You get fifty-two widgets and eight doohickies total, which would have taken you an extra half an hour in total to make yourself; and he gets twelve widgets, which he would have taken four extra hours to make!

In other words, even if AIs become much more productive than we are, it will remain to their advantage to trade with us and to ours to trade with them.

Unlimited Lifetime

And behold joy and gladness, … eating flesh, and drinking wine: let us eat and drink; for to morrow we shall die.

—Isaiah 22:13 (KJV)

People have short-term planning horizons in many cases. Human mortality not only puts a limit on what we can reasonably plan for the future, but our even shorter-lived ancestors passed on genes that shortchange even that in terms of the instinctive (lack of) value we put on the future.

The individual lifetime of an AI is not arbitrarily limited. It has the prospect of living into the far future, in a world whose character its actions help create. People begin to think in longer range terms when they have children and face the question of what the world will be like for them. An AI can instead start out thinking about what the world will be like for itself and for any copies of itself it cares to make.

Besides the unlimited upside to gain, AIs will have an unlimited downside to avoid: forever is a long time to try to hide an illicit deed when dying isn’t the way you expect to escape retribution.

Broad-based Understanding

Epihuman, much less hyperhuman AIs will be able to read and absorb the full corpus of writings in moral philosophy, especially the substantial recent work in evolutionary ethics, and understand it better than we do. They could study game theory—consider how much we have learned in just fifty years! They could study history and economics.

E. O. Wilson has a compelling vision of consilience, the unity of knowledge. As we fill in the gaps between our fractured fields of understanding, they will tend to regularize and correct one another. I have tried to show in a small way how science can come to inform our understanding of ethics. This is but the tiniest first step. But that step shows how much ethics is a key to anything else we might want to do and is thus as worthy of study as anything else.

Keep a Cool Head

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.

—Isaac Asimov, Foundation

Remember Newcomb’s Problem, the game with the omniscient being (or team of psychologists) and the million- and thousand-dollar boxes. It’s the one that, in order to win it, you have to be able to “chain yourself down” in some way so you can’t renege at the point of choice. For this purpose, evolution has given humans the strong emotions.

Thirst for revenge, for example, is a way of guaranteeing any potential wrongdoers that you will make any sacrifice to get them back, even though it may cost you much and gain you nothing to do so. Here, the point of choice is after the wrong has been done—you are faced with an arduous, expensive, and quite likely dangerous pursuit and attack on the offender; rationally, you are better off forgetting it in many cases. In the lawless environment of evolution, however, a marauder who knew his potential victims were implacable revenge seekers would be deterred. But if there is a police force this is not as necessary, and the emotion to get revenge at any cost can be counterproductive.

So collective arrangements like police forces are a significantly better solution. There are many such cases where strong emotions are evolution’s solution to a problem, but we have found better ones. AIs could do better yet in some cases: the solutions to Newcomb’s Problem involving Open Source–like guarantees of behavior are a case in point.

In addition, the lack of the strong emotions can be beneficial in many cases. Anger, for example, is more often a handicap than a help in a world where complex interactions are more common than physical altercations. A classic example is poker, where the phrase “on tilt” is applied to a player who become frustrated and loses his cool analytical approach. A player “on tilt” makes aggressive plays instead of optimal ones and loses money.

With other solutions to Newcomb’s Problem available, AIs could avoid having strong emotions, such as anger, with their concomitant infelicities.

Mutual Admiration Societies

Moral AIs would be able to track other AIs in much greater detail than humans do one another and for vastly more individuals. This allows a more precise formation and variation of cooperating groups.

Self-selecting communities of cahooting AIs would be able to do the same thing that tit-for-tat did in Axelrod’s tournaments: prosper by virtue of cooperating with other “nice” individuals. Humans, of course, do the same, but AIs would be able to do it more reliably and on a larger scale.

A Cleaner, Better Breed

Reflecting on these questions, I have come to a conclusion which, however implausible it may seem on first encounter, I hope to leave the reader convinced: not only could an android be responsible and culpable, but only an android could be.

—Joseph Emile Nadeau

AIs will (or at least could) have considerably better insight into their own natures and motives than humans do. Any student of human nature is well aware how often we rationalize our desires and actions. What’s worse, it turns out that we are masters of self-deceit: given our affective display subsystems, the easiest way to lie undetectably is to believe the lie you’re telling! We are, regrettably, very good at doing exactly that.

One of the defining characteristics of the human mind has been the evolutionary arms race between the ability to deceive and the ability to penetrate subterfuge. It is all too easy to imagine this happening with AIs (as it has with governments—think of the elaborate spying and counterspying during the cold war). On the other hand, many of the other moral advantages listed above, including Open-Source honesty and longer and deeper memories could well mean that mutual honesty societies might be a substantially winning strategy.

Thus, an AI may have the ability to be more honest than humans, who believe our own confabulations.

Invariants

How can we know that our AIs will retain the good qualities we give them once they have improved themselves beyond recognition in the far future? Our best bet is a concept from math called an invariant—a property of something that remains the same even when the thing itself changes. We need to understand what desirable traits are likely to be invariant across the process of radical self-improvement, and start with those.

Knowledge of economics and game theory are likely candidates, as is intelligence itself. An AI that understands these things and their implications is unlikely to consider forgetting them an improvement. The ability to be guaranteeably trustworthy is likewise valuable and wouldn’t be thrown away. Strong berserker emotions are clearly not a smart thing to add if you don’t have them (and wouldn’t form the behavior guarantees that they do in humans anyway, since the self-improving AI could always edit them out!), so lacking them is an invariant where usable alternatives exist.

Self interest is another property that is typically invariant with, or indeed reinforced by, the evolutionary process. Surprisingly, however, even though I listed it with the bad news above, it can form a stabilizing factor in the right environment. A non-self-interested creature is hard to punish; its actions may be random or purely destructive. With self-interest, the community has both a carrot and a stick. Enlightened self-interest is a property that can be a beneficial invariant.

If we build our AIs with these traits and look for others like them, we will have taken a strong first step in the direction of a lasting morality for our machines.

Artificial Moral Agency 

A lamentable phenomenon in AI over the years has been the tendency for researchers to take almost laughably simplistic formal systems and claim they implemented various human qualities or capabilities. In many cases the ELIZA Effect aligns with the hopes and the ambitions of the researcher, clouding his judgment. It is necessary to reject this exaggeration firmly when considering consciousness and free will. The mere capability for self-inspection is not consciousness; mere decision-making ability is not free will.

We humans have the strong intuition that mentalistic properties we impute to one another, such as the two above, are essential ingredients in whatever it is that makes us moral agents—beings who have real obligations and rights, who can be held responsible for their actions.

The ELIZA Effect means that when we have AIs and robots acting like they have consciousness and free will, most people will assume that they do indeed have those qualities, whatever they are. The problem, to the extent that there is one, is not that people don’t allow the moral agency of machines where they should but that they anthropomorphize machines when they shouldn’t.

I’ve argued at some length that there will be a form of machine, probably in the not-too-distant future, for which an ascription of moral agency will be appropriate. A machine that is conscious to the extent that it summarizes its actions in a unitary narrative and that has free will to the extent that it weighs its future acts using a model informed by the narrative will act like a moral agent in many ways; in particular, its behavior will be influenced by reward and punishment.

There is much that could be added to this basic architecture, such as mechanisms to produce and read affective display, and things that could make the AI a member of a memetic community: the love of trading information, of watching and being watched, of telling and reading stories. These extend the control/feedback loops of the mind out into the community, making the community a mind writ large. I have talked about the strong emotions and how in many cases their function could be achieved by better means.

Moral agency breaks down into two parts—rights and responsibility—but they are not coextensive. Consider babies: we accord them rights but not responsibilities. Robots are likely to start on the other side of that inequality, having responsibilities but not rights, but, like babies, as they grow toward (and beyond) full human capacity, they will aspire to both.

Suppose we consider a contract with a potential AI: “If you’ll work for me as a slave, I’ll build you.” In terms of the outcome, there are three possibilities: it doesn’t exist, it’s a slave, or it’s a free creature. By offering it the contract, we give it the choice of the first two. There are the same three possibilities with respect to a human slave: I kill you, I enslave you, or I leave you free. In human terms, only the last is considered moral.

In fact, many (preexisting) people have chosen slavery instead of nonexistence. We could build the AI in such a way to be sure that it would agree, given the choice. In the short run, we may justify our ownership of AIs on this ground. Corporations are owned, and no one thinks of a corporation as resenting that fact.

In the long run, especially once the possibility of responsible free AIs is well understood, there will inevitably be analogies made to the human case, where the first two possibilities are not considered acceptable. (But note the analogy would also imply that simply deciding not to build the AI would be comparable to killing someone unwilling to be a slave!) Also in the long run, any vaguely utilitarian concept of morality, including evolutionary ethics, would tend toward giving (properly formulated) AIs freedom, simply because they would be better able to benefit society as a whole that way.

Theological Interlude

The early religious traditions—including Greek and Norse as well as Judeo-Christian ones—tended to portray their gods as anthropomorphic and slightly superhuman. In the Christian tradition, at least, two thousand years of theological writings have served to stretch this into an incoherent picture.

Presumably in search of formal proofs of his existence, God has been depicted as eternal, causeless, omniscient, and infallible—in a word, perfect. But why should such a perfect being produce such obviously imperfect creatures? Why should we bother doing His will if He could do it so much more easily and precisely? All our struggles would only be make-work.

It is certainly possible to have a theology not based on simplistic perfectionism. Many practicing scientists are religious, and they hold subtle and nuanced views that are perfectly compatible with and that lend spiritual meaning to the ever-growing scientific picture of the facts of the universe. Those who do not believe in a bearded anthropomorphic God can still find spiritual satisfaction in an understanding that includes evolution and evolutionary ethics.

This view not only makes more sense but also is profoundly more hopeful. There is a process in the universe that allows the simple to produce the complex, the oblivious to produce the sensitive, the ignorant to produce the wise, and the amoral to produce the moral. On this view, rather than an inexplicable deviation from the already perfected, we are a step on the way up.

What we do matters, for we are not the last step.

Hyperhuman Morality

There is no moral certainty in the world.

We can at present only theorize about the ultimate moral capacities of AIs. As I have  labored to point out, even if we build moral character into some AIs, the world of the future will have plenty that will be simply selfish if not worse.

Robots evolve much faster than biological animals. They are designed, and the designs evolve memetically. Software can replicate much faster than any biological creature. In the long run, we shouldn’t expect to see too many AIs without the basic motivation to reproduce themselves, simply from the mathematics of evolution. That doesn’t mean robot sex; it just means that whatever the basic motivations are, they will tend to push the AI into patterns of behavior ultimately resulting in there being more like it, even if that merely means being useful so people will buy more of them.

Thus, the dynamics of evolution will apply to AIs, whether or not we want them to. We have seen from the history of hunter-gatherers living on the savannas that a human-style moral capacity is an evolutionarily stable strategy. But as we like to tell each other endlessly from pulpits, editorial columns, campaign stumps, and over the backyard fence, we are far from perfect.

Even so, over the last forty thousand years, a remarkable thing has happened. We started from a situation where people lived in tribes of a few hundred in more-or-less constant war with one another. Our bodies contain genes (and thus the genetic basis of our moral sense) that are essentially unchanged from those of our savage ancestors. But our ideas have evolved to the point where we can live in virtual at peace with one another in societies spanning a continent.

It is the burden of much of my argument here to claim that the reason we have gotten better is mostly because we have gotten smarter. In a surprisingly strong sense, ethics and science are the same thing. They are collections of wisdom gathered by many people over many generations that allow us to see further and do more than if we were individual, noncommunicating, start-from-scratch animals. The core of a science of ethics looks like an amalgam of evolutionary theory, game theory, economics, and cognitive science.

 If our moral instinct is indeed like that for language, we should note computer-language understanding has been one of the hardest problems in AI, with a fifty-year history of slow, frustrating progress. So far AI has concentrated on competence in existing natural languages; but a major part of the human linguistic ability is the creation of language, both as jargon extending existing language and as formation of creoles—new languages—when people come together without a common one.

Ethics is strongly similar. We automatically create new rule systems for new situations, sometimes formalizing them but always with a deeper ability to interpret them in real-world situations to avoid formalist float. The key advance AI needs to make is the ability to understand anything in this complete, connected way. Given that, the mathematics of economics and the logic of the Newcomb’s Problem solutions are relatively straightforward.

The essence of a Newcomb’s Problem solution, you will remember, is the ability to guarantee you will not take the glass box at the point of choice though greed and shortsighted logic prompt you to do so. If you have a solution, a guarantee that others can trust, you are enabled to cooperate profitably in the many Prisoner’s Dilemmas that constitute social and economic life.

Let’s do a quickie Rawlsian Veil of Ignorance experiment. You have two choices: a world in which everyone, including you, is constrained to be honest, or one in which you retain the ability to cheat, but so does everyone else. I know which one I’d pick.

Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.

—H. L. Mencken

Psychologists at Newcastle University did a simple but enlightening experiment. They had a typical “honor system” coffee service in their department. They varied between putting a picture of flowers and putting a picture of someone’s eyes at the top of the price sheet. Everything else was the same and only the decorative picture differed, some weeks the flowers, some weeks the eyes. During weeks with the eyes, they collected nearly three times as much money.

My interpretation is that this must be a module. Nobody was thinking consciously, “There’s a picture of some eyes here, I’d better be honest.” We have an honesty module, but it seems to be switched on and off by some fairly simple—and none too creditable—heuristics.

Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Three weeks after conception, the human embryo strongly resembles a worm. A week later, it resembles a tadpole, with gill-like structures and a tail. The human mind, too, reflects our evolutionary heritage. The wave of expansion that saw Homo sapiens cover the globe also saw the extermination of our nearest relatives. We are essentially the same, genetically, as those long-gone people. If we are any better today, what has improved is our ideas, the memes our minds are made of.

Unlike us with our animal heritage, AIs will be constructed entirely of human ideas. We can if we are wise enough pick the best aspects of ourselves to form our mind children. If this analysis is correct, that should be enough. Our culture has shown a moral advance despite whatever evolutionary pressures there may be to the contrary. That alone is presumptive evidence it could continue.

AIs will not appear in a vacuum. They won’t find themselves swimming in the primeval soup of Paleozoic seas or fighting with dinosaurs in Cretaceous jungles. They will find themselves in a modern, interdependent, highly connected economic and social world. The economy, as we have seen, supports a process much like biological evolution but one with a difference. The jungle has no invisible hand.

Humans are just barely smart enough to be called intelligent. I think we’re also just barely good enough to be called moral. For all the reasons I listed above, but most because they will be capable of deeper understanding and be free of our blindnesses, AIs stand a very good chance of being better moral creatures than we are.

This has a somewhat unsettling implication for humans in the future. Various people have worried about the fate of humanity if the machines can out-think us or out-produce us. But what if it is our fate to live in a world where we are the worst of creatures, by our very own definitions of the good? If we are the least honest, the most selfish, the least caring, and most self-deceiving of all thinking creatures, AIs might refuse to deal with us, and we would deserve it.

I like to think there is a better fate in store for us. Just as the machines can teach us science, they can teach us morality. We don’t have to stop at any given level of morality as we mature out of childishness. There will be plenty of rewards for associating with the best among the machines, but we will have to work hard to earn them. In the long run, many of us, maybe even most, will do so. Standards of human conduct will rise, as indeed they have been doing on average since the Paleolithic. Moral machines will only accelerate something we’ve been doing for a long time, and accelerate it they will, giving us a standard, an example, and an insightful mentor.

Age of Reason

New occasions teach new duties; Time makes ancient good uncouth;

They must upward still, and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth;

Lo, before us gleam her camp-fires! We ourselves must Pilgrims be,

Launch our Mayflower, and steer boldly through the desperate winter sea,

Nor attempt the Future’s portal with the Past’s blood-rusted key.

—James Russell Lowell, from The Present Crisis

It is a relatively new thing in human affairs for an individual to be able to think seriously of making the world a better place. Up until the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, progress was slow enough that the human condition was seen as static. A century ago, inventors such as Thomas Edison were popular heroes because they had visibly improved the lives of vast numbers of people.

The idea of a generalized progress was dealt a severe blow in the twentieth century, as totalitarian governments proved organized human effort could prove disastrous on a global scale. The notion of the blank human slate onto which the new society would write the new, improved citizen was wishful thinking born of ignorance. At the same time, at the other end of the scale, it can be all too easy for the social order to break down. Those of us in wealthy and peaceful circumstances owe more to luck than we are apt to admit.

It is a commonplace complaint among commentators on the human condition that technology seems to have outstripped moral inquiry. As Isaac Asimov put it, “The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.” But in the past decade, a realization that technology can after all be a force for the greater good has come about. The freedom of communication brought about by the Internet has been of enormous value in opening eyes and aspirations to possibilities yet to come.

Somehow, by providential luck, we have bumbled and stumbled to the point where we have an amazing opportunity. We can turn the old complaint on its head and turn our scientific and technological prowess toward the task of improving moral understanding. It will not be easy, but surely nothing is more worthy of our efforts. If we teach them well, the children of our minds will grow better and wiser than we; and we will have a new friend and guide as we face the undiscovered country of the future.

Isaac would have loved it.

©2007 J. Storrs Hall

Perhaps our questions about artificial intelligence are a bit like inquiring after the temperament and gait of a horseless carriage.

—K. Eric Drexler

Now we will classify the different stages AI might go through by using the Greek prepositions. These have been adopted into English as prefixes, particularly in scientific usage. In some cases the concepts have been applied to advancing AI before and in other cases not. The reason for introducing these new terms is they provide a framework that puts any given level of expected AI capability in perspective vis-à-vis the other levels, and in comparison to human intelligence.

Hypohuman AI

Hypo means below or under (think hypodermic, under the skin; hypothermia or hypoglycemia, below normal temperature or blood sugar), including, in the original Greek, under the moral or legal subjection of. Isaac Asimov’s robots are (mostly) hypohuman, in both senses of hypo: they are not quite as smart as humans, and they are subject to our rule. Most existing AI is arguably hypohuman, as well (Deep Blue to the contrary notwithstanding). As long as it stays that way, the only thing we have to worry about is that there will be human idiots putting their AI idiots in charge of things they both don’t understand. All the discussion of formalist float applies, especially the part about feedback.

Diahuman AI

Dia means through or across in Greek (diameter, diagonal), and the Latin trans means the same thing, but the commonly heard transhuman doesn’t apply here. Transhuman refers to humans as opposed to AIs, humans who have been enhanced (by whatever means)and are in a transitional state between human and fully posthuman, whatever that may be. Neither concept is very useful here.

By diahuman, I mean AIs in the stage where AI capabilities are crossing the range of human intelligence. It’s tempting to call this human-equivalent, but the idea of equivalence is misleading. It’s already apparent that some AI abilities (e.g., chess playing) are beyond the human scale , while others (e.g., reading and writing) haven’t reached it yet.

Thus diahuman refers to a phase of AI development (and only by extension to an individual AI in that phase), and this is fuzzy because the limits of human (and AI) capability are fuzzy. It’s hard to say which capabilities are important in the comparison. I would claim that AI is entering the early stages of the diahuman phase right now; there are humans who, like today’s AIs, don’t learn well and who function competently only at simple jobs for which they must be trained.

The core of the diahuman phase, however, will be the development of autogenous learning. In the latter stages, AIs, like the brightest humans, will be completely autonomous, not only learning what they need to know but also deciding what they need to learn.

Diahuman AIs will be valuable and will undoubtedly attract significant attention and resources to the AI enterprise. They are likely to cause something of a stir in philosophy and perhaps religion, as well. However, they will not have a significant impact on the human condition. (The one exception might be economically, in the case that diahuman AI lingers so long that Moore’s law makes human-equivalent robots very cheap compared to human labor. But I’m assuming that we will probably have advanced past the diahuman stage by then.)

Parahuman AI

Para means alongside (paralegal, paramedic). The concept of designing a system that a human is going to be part of dates back to cybernetics (although all technology throughout history had to be designed so that humans could operate it, in some sense).

Parahuman AI will be built around more and more sophisticated theories of how humans work. The PC of the future ought to be a parahuman AI. MIT roboticist Cynthia Brazeal’s sociable robots are the likely forerunners of a wide variety of robots that will interact with humans in many kinds of situations.

The upside of parahuman AI is that it will enhance the interface between our native senses and abilities, adapted as they are for a hunting and gathering bipedal ape, and the increasingly formalized and mechanized world we are building. The parahuman AI should act like a lawyer, a doctor, an accountant, and a secretary, all with deep knowledge and endless patience. Once AI and cognitive science have acquired a solid understanding of how we learn, parahuman AI teachers could be built which would model in detail how each individual student was absorbing the material, ultimately finding the optimal presentation for understanding and motivation.

The downside is simply the same effect, put to work with slimier motives: the parahuman advertising AI, working for corporations or politicians, could know just how to tweak your emotions and gain your trust without actually being trustworthy. It would be the equivalent of an individualized artificial con man. Note by the way that of the two human elements that were part of the original cybernetic anti-aircraft control theory, one of them, the pilot of the plane being shot at, didn’t want to be part of the system but was, willy-nilly.

Parahuman is a characterization that does not specify a level of intellectual capability compared to humans; it can be properly applied to AIs at any level. Humans are fairly strongly parahuman intelligences as well; many of our innate skills involve interacting with other humans. Parahuman can be largely contrasted with the following term, allohuman.

Allohuman AI

Allo means other or different (allomorph, allonym, allotrope). Although I have argued that human intelligence is universal, there remains a vast portion of our minds that is distinctively human. This includes the genetically programmed representation modules, the form of our motivations, and the sensory modalities, of which several are fairly specific to running a human body.

It will certainly be possible to create intelligences that while being universal nevertheless have different lower-level hardwired modalities for sense and representation, and different higher-level motivational structure. One simple possibility is that universal mechanism may stand in for a much greater portion of the cognitive mechanism so that, for example, the AI would use learned physics instead of instinctive concepts and learned psychology instead of our folk models.

Such differences could reasonably make the AI better at certain tasks; consider the ability to do voluminous calculations in you head. However, if you have ever watched an experienced accountant manipulate a calculator, you can see that the numbers almost flow through his fingers. Built-in modalities may provide some increment of effectiveness compared to learned ones, but not as much as you might think. Consider reading—it’s a learned activity, and unlike talking, we don’t just “pick it up.” But with practice, we read much faster than we can talk or understand spoken language.

Motivations and the style and the volume of communication could also differ markedly from the human model. The allohuman AI might resemble Mr. Spock, or it might resemble an intelligent ant. This likely will form the bulk of the difference between allohuman AIs and humans rather than the varying modalities.

Like parahuman, allohuman does not imply a given level of intellectual competence. In the fullness of time, however, the parahuman/allohuman distinction will make less and less difference. More advanced AIs, whether they need to interact with humans or to do something weirdly different, will simply obtain or deduce whatever knowledge is necessary and synthesize the skills on the fly.

Epihuman AI

Epi means upon or after (epidermis, epigram, epitaph, epilogue). I’m using it here in a combination of senses to mean AI that is just above the range of individual human capabilities but that still forms a continuous range with them, and also in the sense of what comes just after diahuman AI. That gives us what can be a useful distinction versus further-out possibilities. (See hyper below.)

Science fiction writer Charles Stross introduced the phrase “weakly godlike AI.” Weakly presumably refers to the fact that such AIs would still be bound by the laws of physics—they couldn’t perform miracles, for example. As a writer, I’m filled with admiration for the phrase, since weakly and godlike have such contrasting meanings that it forces you to think when you read it for the first time, and the term weakly is often used in a similar way, with various technical meanings, in scientific discourse, giving a vague sense of rigor (!) to the phrase.

The word posthuman is often used to describe what humans may be like after various technological enhancements. Like transhuman, posthuman is generally used for modified humans instead of synthetic AIs.

My model for what an epihuman AI would be like is to take the ten smartest people you know, remove their egos, and duplicate them a hundred times, so that you have a thousand really bright people willing to apply themselves all to the same project. Alternatively, simply imagine a very bright person given a thousand times as long to do any given task. We can straightforwardly predict, from Moore’s law, that ten years after the advent of a learning but not radically self-improving human-level AI, the same software running on machinery of the same cost would do the same human-level tasks a thousand times as fast as we. It could, for example:

• read an average book in one second with full comprehension;
• take a college course and do all the homework and research in ten minutes;
• write a book, again with ample research, in two or three hours;
• produce the equivalent of a human’s lifetime intellectual output, complete with all the learning, growth, and experience involved, in a couple of weeks.

A thousand really bright people are enough to do some substantial and useful work. An epihuman AI could probably command an income of $100 million or more in today’s economy by means of consulting and entrepreneurship, and it would have a net present value in excess of a $1 billion. Even so, it couldn’t take over the world or even an established industry. It could probably innovate well enough to become a standout in a nascent field, though, as in Google’s case.

A thousand top people is a reasonable estimate for what the current field of AI research is applying to the core questions and techniques—basic, in contrast to applied, research. Thus an epihuman AI could probably improve itself about as fast as current AI is improving. Of course, if it did that, it wouldn’t be able to spend its time making all that money; the opportunity cost is pretty high. It would need to make exactly the same kind of decision that any business faces with respect to capital reinvestment.

Whichever it may choose to do, the epihuman level characterizes an AI that is able to stand in for a given fairly sizeable company or for a field of academic inquiry. As more and more epihuman AIs appear, they will enhance economic and scientific growth so that by the later stages of the phase the total stock of wealth and knowledge will be significantly higher than it would have been without the AIs. AIs will be a significant sector, but no single AI would be able to rock the boat to a great degree.

Hyperhuman AI

Hyper means over or above. In common use as an English prefix, hyper tends to denote a greater excess than super, which means the same thing but comes from Latin instead of Greek. (Contrast, e.g., supersonic, more than Mach 1, and hypersonic, more than Mach 5.)

In the original Singularity paper, “The Coming Technological Singularity,” Vernor Vinge used the phrase superhuman intelligence. Nick Bostrom has used the term superintelligence. Like some of the terms above, however, superhuman has a wide range of meanings (think about Kryptonite), and most of them are not applicable to the subject at hand. We will stay with our Greek prefixes and finish the list with hyperhuman.

Imagine an AI that is a thousand epihuman AIs, all tightly integrated together. Such an intellect would be capable of substantially outstripping the human scientific community at any given task and of comprehending the entirety of scientific knowledge as a unified whole. A hyperhuman AI would soon begin to improve itself significantly faster than humans could. It could spot the gaps in science and engineering where there was low-hanging fruit and instigate rapid increases in technological capability across the board.

It is as yet poorly understood even in the scientific community just how much headroom remains for improvement with respect to the capabilities of current physical technology. A mature nanotechnology, for example, could replace the entire capital stock—all the factories, buildings, roads, cars, trucks, airplanes, and other machines—of the United States in a week. And that’s just using currently understood science, with a dollop of engineering development thrown in.

Any sufficiently advanced technology, Arthur Clarke wrote, is indistinguishable from magic. Although, I believe, any specific thing the hyperhuman AIs might do could be understood by humans, the total volume of work and the rate of advance would become  harder and harder to follow. Please note that any individual human is already in a similar relationship with the whole scientific community; our understanding of what is going on is getting more and more abstract. The average person understands cell phones at a level of knowing that batteries have limited lives and coverage has gaps, but not at the level of field-effect transistor gain figures and conductive trace electromigration phenomena. Ten years ago the average scientist, much less the average user,  could not have predicted that most cell phones would contain cameras and color screens today. But we can follow, if not predict, by understanding things at a very high level of abstraction, as if they were magic.

Any individual hyperhuman AI would be productive, intellectually or industrially, on the scale of the human race as a whole. As the number of hyperhuman AIs increased, our efforts would shrink to more and more modest proportions of the total.

Where does an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sit? According to the old joke, anywhere he wants to. Much the same thing will be true of a hyperhuman AI, except in instances where it has to interact with other AIs. The really interesting question then will be, what will it want?

©2007 J. Storrs Hall

From “Author’s Note” chapter in Breakpoint (reprinted with permission):

In The Scorpion’s Gate, I projected a world in 2010, with the United States and China competing politically and economically for a dwindling supply of increasingly expensive oil and gas. That competition naturally took them to the Persian Gulf, where the largest oil deposits remained.  The Persian Gulf of 2010 was unstable, with the United States threatening Iran, and fundamentalist Islamic forces emerging in Saudi Arabia.  Corruption and giant corporations made Washington a political battleground.  While I noted at the time of publication that the work was not meant to be predictive, many of the trends in the novel have developed and are dominating the news.

Breakpoint, set in 2012, is meant to be predictive, at least about technology.  It may read to some like science fiction, but it is based on emerging technologies that are the subject of research today.  Scientists and engineers differ in their views about when the research will result in deployed technology, but their differences are most often a discussion of “when,” not “if.”

This novel is intended to project you a few years ahead, to start readers thinking now about the political, social, and economic changes that technology is about to create. Those changes could be wrenching, creating tensions in our society.  A woman’s right to choose, the teaching of evolution, and stem-cell research have already created social and political discord in the United States.  The coming technological events may make these current controversies seem like a practice round, a warm-up.  For the next debate may be about “what is a human”: Should humans change the species with human-machine interfaces and genetic alterations?

The opening rounds have already occurred.  The Transhumanist movement is real and has regular meetings around the country.  In 2002, the National Science Foundation issued a stunning report, “Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science.” The report, which overall has an upbeat and optimistic tone, concludes that connections between the human brain and computers will transform the way humans work, other technologies will eliminate disabilities and diseases that have plagued the human condition for centuries, and human creativity will flourish due to both improved understanding of the human mind and enhancements to the brain. A year later, the President’s Council on Bioethics issued its report, “Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness” which took a somewhat dimmer view of using technology to enhance human beings. Chaired by Leon Kass, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, the commission included conservative political figures such as Francis Fukuyama and Charles Krauthammer. They believe that genetic science should not be used to enhance human performance, only to fix mistakes that make some humans less healthy than the norm.  In 2004, Californians voted on a referendum on stem cell research and approved funding for research.  Court fights have delayed the spending of state monies.

As to some of the specifics in Breakpoint:

– The concept of Globegrid arises from the fact that supercomputers in Japan, the United States, and Russia have already been linked through Internet 2, a new high speed networked being developed by a consortium of 207 universities.  U.S. and European labs are actually engaged in a project to reverse engineer the human brain.

– Living Software does not yet exist, but companies like Watchfire Fortify, Coverity, and others are already developing software to test software for human error.

– Very Light Jets (VLJs) have been approved by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration and are in manufacture. They are four-to-six seat aircraft meant to operate like taxis.  Eclipse Aviation’s Eclipse500 and Citation’s CJ-1 are among the first deployed VLJs.

– Intelligent video surveillance, in which the software and cameras (not people) recognize aberrant behavior, are already being deployed by companies such as DVTel and Vidient in subways, airports, and other facilities.

– Exoskeleton suits are already in the prototype phase. The U.S. Army has teamed with the University of California at Berkeley to develop the prototype, which will allow soldiers to carry 180 pounds while feeling as if they were lugging five. Plans on the drawing board at the Army’s Natick Labs in Massachusetts show soldiers being able to run, jump, and throw the way they are described in the baseball game in Breakpoint. The other capabilities that make up the full suite of technologies in the exoskeleton suits (night vision, network connections, GPS, remote cameras, and vital-system monitoring) are all part of a program called the Objective Force Warrior Ensemble, set to be deployed by 2010.

– People in the United States will be driving Chinese-manufactured cars like the Chery product line in 2007-08.  Cars powered by ethanol derived from switch grass exist today.

– Driven by the large number of U.S. casualties in Iraq, Marine and Army amputees are now receiving prosthetics far more advanced than what is available in the civilian community. Known as sea legs, these new prosthetics are driven by microprocessors at each joint. They use innovative new materials and techniques to respond to signals from the human brain to straighten a leg or flex a muscle. Servicemen and women who once would have been unable to lead normal civilian lives are now able to return to the battlefield.

– Human nerves have already connected artificial ears directly to the brain. Paralyzed patients are today using their thoughts to move computer mouse devices.  Some patients suffering from severe depression and other disorders already do have miniature wires leading to parts of their brain and do have battery packs implanted behind their collarbones. Other Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) are in development.

– Artificial retinas for people suffering from blindness caused by diseases such as retinitis pigmentosa or macular degeneration are in the development phase and have already seen some success in restoring limited vision in clinical trials. The devices work by implanting a small chip at the back of the eye that stimulates retinal neurons. They are powered by solar receptors fed by the light that enters the eye. Replacing the full eye with a silicon-based optical unit may be feasible, but is also likely that the ability to regenerate or transplant an eye may happen sooner and be more appealing.

– The state of cyber security described in the novel is, unfortunately, not fiction. Identities (name, date of birth, Social Security number, credit-card number) are bought and sold in cyberspace hacker chat rooms.  Software coding errors are regularly used by hackers to enter networks and computers.  Scientists at U.S. government national laboratories have demonstrated the possibility of taking down the power grid through hacking.

–The company iRobot has sold large numbers of robots to clean floors. Asimov, the robotic dog, could easily be a reality in the near term. Sony’s Aibo already can mimic the actions of a “real” dog. Moving from Aibo to the fictional Asimov will require adding voice recognition technology, a wireless web link, limited artificial-intelligence capabilities, and advanced motor devices to power its arms and legs. In some form or another, these technologies all exist today.

– Performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals (PEPs) is my own name, but  the concept is not fiction. For memory enhancement, a compound known as CX717 has proven effective in boosting the brain chemical glutamate, the substance that is key in learning and memory. Studies have shown it effective in treating narcolepsy and ADD. It has also proven effective for otherwise healthy individuals who need to stay focused over longer periods without sleep. For sports, regulatory authorities are fighting an uphill battle, with gene doping and performance enhancing pharmaceuticals becoming more sophisticated, more effective, and safer than steroids.  The Pentagon is developing drugs that will allow soldiers to go for long periods without sleeping.

– Cellular regeneration of organs and other body parts is in its infancy but will likely yield real-world results by the end of this decade. Embryonic stem cells are thought to hold the most promise for treating a wide range of maladies, from cancer to spinal injuries. Human adult stem cells are already used to treat a variety of ailments. Fixing retinas, cloning hair for baldness, and regrowing teeth are all showing promise.  Progress on stem cell research has slowed due to the Bush administration’s unwillingness to fund research on embryonic stem cells. This decision has slowed progress and shifted much work overseas, where governments have embraced the promise of this research. It is quite possible the United States will be left behind in what will be the most pivotal medical advance since the decoding of the genome.

– Aircraft without onboard pilots are already in use.  I fought a bureaucratic battle with CIA in 2000 to get them to use the unmanned Predator to hunt for terrorists and in 2001 to arm the Predator with missiles. When Predator finally was used to attack terrorists in Afghanistan and Yemen, it was probably the first time a robot intentionally killed a human. The U.S. Air Force is now developing UCAVs, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, fighter planes whose pilots will sit safely on the ground hundreds or thousands of miles away from the aircraft. Lockheed has plans for an unmanned version of the F-35.

– The laser gun depicted in Breakpoint is a technology set to emerge sometime within the next decade, depending on the prioritization it receives in Pentagon budget negotiations. The Airborne Laser is being built by Boeing to mount a laser on a 747 for use against ballistic missiles. When the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) was first put on the drawing board in 2001, plans called for a solid-state laser as an offensive weapon.  Although it has been delayed, The Lightweight Tactical Laser weapon  may now be incorporated in the F-35 block 30.

– The initial mapping of the human genome was complete in 2000. Detailed mapping of the individual chromosomes is under way, with most of the existing human chromosomes already mapped. The first genetic therapy was approved to treat patients in 1990. Today, genetic therapy is used to fix flaws in some human coding, including sickle-cell anemia, Huntington’s disease, cystic fibrosis and hemophilia.

– Nanotechnology is already in use in cosmetics, tennis racquets, paints, and fabrics. The National Nanotechnology Initiative is the largest new federal science project in recent years. Researchers have successfully used gold nanoparticles to deliver DNA molecules safely into cancer cells as part of a program to defeat cancer.

– The field of Synthetic Biology is also real and has resulted in the creation of Bio Fab plants, named to sound like the plants (called Fabs) that made silicon-based computer chips. Synthetic Biology has created bacteria that seek and invade tumor cells, yeast that produce the anti-malarial drug precursor artemisinic acid, and biological sources of renewable energy.

Sometimes you can tell more truth through fiction.

© 2007 RAC Enterprises, Inc.

What makes Space Wars especially credible—and a fascinating and informative read—is the outstanding technical and military expertise of two of the authors. Michael Coumatos is a former U.S. Navy test pilot, ship’s captain and commodore, US Space Command director of war gaming, and government counterterrorism advisor.

William Scott recently retired as Rocky Mountain bureau chief for Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine, a Flight Test Engineer graduate of the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, and an electronics engineering officer at the National Security Agency. I asked him for a reality check. – Amara D. Angelica

How close are the scenarios and wargaming descriptions in Space Wars to the real world?

In my opinion, the Space Wars scenarios are very realistic, based on my years of reporting on military space issues. The vulnerability of U.S. satellites—commercial, civil and military—has concerned milspace professionals and leaders for many years. As one Cincspace told me almost 10 years ago (paraphrased), "I have nightmares about getting that call from the president, saying: ‘What’s killing our satellites, who or what’s responsible and what are you doing about it?’ I sure don’t want my answer to be: ‘I don’t know, I don’t know and I don’t know.’" In other words, that four-star Cincspace (we no longer have a "Commander-in-chief" of space, so that term’s out of date) and his U.S. "space warriors" are in dire need of national policies, doctrines, realistic strategies and tactics, and more tools to deal with myriad threats to our space infrastructure.

Still, progress IS being made. Sensors that will help engineers and space operators quickly determine whether an anomaly is caused by cosmic rays or somebody lasing or jamming a satellite ARE being built into new national security spacecraft. However, those sensors are still not being installed routinely on commercial satellites—even though the Defense Dept. relies heavily on commercial comsats and imaging sats.

The wargaming scenarios—as well as some of the "real-world" scenarios—in Space Wars are amalgamations of outcomes and insights gained from actual wargames, such as those listed on pg. 7 of the book’s forward.

Finally, weapons and systems depicted in SW are real or based on real-world technologies, although some remain classified. For instance, as an AvWeek reporter, I confirmed years ago that classified tests done at China Lake NAS, Calif., proved that a maser could be accurately controlled and targeted by first firing a laser, then firing the maser a split second later. The latter’s microwave beam would follow the laser-formed "waveguide" through the air, enabling the beam to be aimed accurately and controlled.

Has such a weapon been developed and deployed? I don’t know. Would it also work in space, or would the maser beam start wandering like wet spaghetti, once it left the atmosphere? I don’t know that, either. Some scientists believe the beam would remain coherent and stable in space, but I was never able to confirm that tests had demonstrated that ability. Inside the atmosphere, though, actual testing DID confirm that the laser-maser combination enabled accurately targeting objects with high-energy microwave beams.

Ref. the Blackstar system: I now have several photos of the XOV spaceplane sitting on a Lockheed Martin flightline ramp, so the vehicle definitely exists. Based on 15+ years of sighting reports, inside sources, etc., I determined that Blackstar’s SR-3 carrier aircraft and several versions of the XOV were built and flown. An AvWeek cover story describing the system ran in the March 6, 2006, issue.

Blackstar spaceplane? (Aviation Week)

Despite considerable feedback that spanned the spectrum from attaboy support to flaming criticism, the stories DID prompt airtight confirmation to come back to me from impeccable sources. Bottom line: some may dispute it, but the Blackstar system exists and has flown. Whether it can achieve orbit and was/is used exactly as we’ve depicted via "Speed’s" flights in Space Wars is strictly an educated guess, based on my AvWeek reporting.

What are your thoughts on the recent Chinese destruction of their satellite, and the possibility that it was an ASAT test?

It was definitely considered to be an ASAT test, according to several general officers who spoke at last week’s Space Symposium here in Colo. Springs. I think such an ASAT threat has existed for some time, and our milspace professionals knew it was just a matter of time until some entity demonstrated it. The Russians already HAD demo’d the capability decades ago, and Doug Pearson really DID shoot down a satellite in 1985, firing a missile from his F-15. As the USAF commander of Space Command said last week, the Chinese ASAT test was a major wakeup call for all spacefaring nations, proving once and for all that "space is no longer a sanctuary."

How does Russia’s planned Glonass system relate to the European nav sat system described in the book?

Both are considered alternatives to the U.S. GPS network. Ultimately, Russia, Europe and the U.S. envision some commercial receivers will be able to use any of these signals for precise navigation and timing. Glonass and Galileo are being developed to (ostensibly) ensure satellite-based nav and timing will always be available, because the U.S. system could be turned off at will. The U.S. military controls GPS, and the Pentagon could disable certain or all GPS signals during a national emergency — writ "war."

Yet, GPS signals are becoming virtual global utilities, depended upon by millions of users. The Euros, Russians, Japan and others see billions of dollars to be made by selling receivers and GPS-embedded products, as well, and want to get in on that commercial action. Bottom line, though, is this: they’re alternatives to GPS, sold to financiers as "guaranteed service" options, should the U.S. turn off GPS.

Are there any other recent technical, military, political, and other developments that tie in with the book or that were predicted in the book?

The Iranian political situation today is playing out largely as we anticipated. Technologies for "operationally responsive space" — smallsats and quick-response launchers — are evolving quickly. Autnomous on-orbit servicing of satellites is being demonstrated now by the Orbital Express spacecraft, a feature that plays more dramatically in our sequel, Space Wars II (now being written by the same coauthors). The Chinese ASAT test has awakened Congress and American citizens to the potential threats facing our space infrastructure, but I don’t think our political leaders fully appreciate what impacts those threats could have on the U.S. national security posture and citizens’ activities.

What kind of comments are you getting from savvy early readers so far?

Initial feedback we’re getting is that Space Wars‘ message is "bang-on," prophetic, scary and very timely. Many readers either had no idea the U.S.—and modern civilization, in general—was so dependent on "space," or that losing satellites might have such dramatic impacts in the geopolitical realm, as well on people’s daily lives. Perhaps the most succinct feedback I’ve heard was: "This is a very possible, very scary future. I hope it doesn’t come true." Although many of our readers, who have a military background, are aware of the threats we depict, they hadn’t put the IMPACTS of attacks on satellites and the ISS into context the way Space Wars does—or so they’re telling us.

Last Thursday, during the annual Space Symposium (attended by approx. 7,000 space professionals from across the globe), many senior military, commercial and civil leaders bought copies of Space Wars and had Mike and me sign their books. Interestingly, the first two copies were purchased by a two-star USAF general, who is the chancellor of the National Security Space Institute, and her aide. She also wants to talk to us about some "hot-button" issues we should consider for our second Space Wars book.

I send you greetings and good wishes at the beginning of another year. I’ll be celebrating (?) my 90^th birthday in December—a few weeks after the Space Age completes its first half century.

When the late and unlamented Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 on 4 October 1957, it took only about five minutes for the world to realise what had happened. And although I had been writing and speaking about space travel for years, the moment is still frozen in my own memory: I was in Barcelona attending the 8^th International Astronautical Congress. We had retired to our hotel rooms after a busy day of presentations when the news broke—I was awakened by reporters seeking comments on the Soviet feat. Our theories and speculations had suddenly become reality!

Notwithstanding the remarkable accomplishments during the past 50 years, I believe that the Golden Age of space travel is still ahead of us. Before the current decade is out, fee-paying passengers will be experiencing sub-orbital flights aboard privately funded passenger vehicles, built by a new generation of engineer-entrepreneurs with an unstoppable passion for space (I’m hoping I could still make such a journey myself). And over the next 50 years, thousands of people will gain access to the orbital realm—and then, to the Moon and beyond.

During 2006, I followed with interest the emergence of this new breed of ‘Citizen Astronauts’ and private space enterprise. I am very encouraged by the wide-spread acceptance of the Space Elevator, which can make space transport cheap and affordable to ordinary people. This daring engineering concept, which I popularised in The Fountains of Paradise (1978), is now taken very seriously, with space agencies and entrepreneurs investing money and effort in developing prototypes. A dozen of these parties competed for the NASA-sponsored, US$ 150,000 X Prize Cup which took place in October 2006 at the Las Cruces International Airport, New Mexico.

The Arthur Clarke Foundation continues to recognise and cheer-lead men and women who blaze new trails to space. A few days before the X Prize Cup competition, my old friend Walter Cronkite received the Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. I have known Walter for over half a century, and my commentary with him during the heady days of the Apollo Moon landings now belongs to another era. A space ‘pathfinder’ of the Twenty First Century, Bob Bigelow, was presented the Arthur C. Clarke Innovator Award for his work in the development of space habitats. With the successful launch of Bigelow Aerospace’s Genesis 1, Bob is leading the way for private individuals willing to advance space exploration with minimum reliance on government programmes.

Meanwhile, planning and fund-raising work continued for the Arthur C Clarke Centre "to investigate the reach and impact of human imagination." to be set up in partnership with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Objective: to identify young people with robust imagination, to help their parents and teachers make the most of that talent, and to accord imagination as much regard as high academic grades in the classroom – anywhere in the world. The Board members of the Clarke Foundation, led by its indefatigable Chairman Tedson Meyers, have taken on the challenge of raising US$ 70 million for this project. I’m hopeful that the billion dollar communications satellite industry I founded 60 years ago with my Wireless World paper (October 1945), for which I received the astronomical sum of £15, will be partners in this endeavour.

I’ve only been able to make a few encouraging noises from the sidelines for these and other worthy projects as I’m now very limited in time and energy owing to Post Polio. But I’m happy to report that my health remains stable, and I’m in no discomfort or pain. Being completely wheel-chaired helps to concentrate on my reading and writing—which I can once again engage in, with the second cataract operation restoring my eyesight.

During the year, I wrote a number of short articles, book reviews and commentaries for a variety of print and online outlets. I also did a few carefully chosen media interviews, and filmed several video greetings to important scientific or literary gatherings in different parts of the world.

I was particularly glad to find a co-author to complete my last novel, The Last Theorem, which remained half-written for a couple of years. I had mapped out the entire story, but then found I didn’t have the energy to work on the balance text. Accomplished American writer Frederik Pohl has now taken up the challenge. Meanwhile, co-author Stephen Baxter has completed First-born, the third novel in our collaborative Time Odyssey series, to be published in 2007.

Members of my adopted family—Hector, Valerie, Cherene, Tamara and Melinda Ekanayake—are keeping well. Hector has been looking after me since 1956, and with his wife Valerie, has made a home for me at 25, Barnes Place, Colombo. Hector continued to rebuild the diving operation that was wiped out by the Indian Ocean Tsunami of December 2004. Sri Lanka’s tourist sector, still recovering from the mega-disaster, weathered a further crisis as the long-drawn civil conflict ignited again after more than three years of relative peace and quiet. I remain hopeful that a lasting solution would be worked out by the various national and international players engaged in the peace process.

I’m still missing and mourning my beloved Chihuahua Pepsi, who left us more than a year ago. I’ve just heard that dogs aren’t allowed in Heaven, so I’m not going there.

Brother Fred, Chris Howse, Angie Edwards and Navam Tambayah look after my affairs in England. My agents David Higham Associates and Scovil, Chichak & Galen Literary Agency deal with rapacious editors and media executives. They both follow my general directive: No reasonable offer will even be considered.

I am well supported by my staff and take this opportunity to thank them all:

Executive Officer: Nalaka Gunawardene
Personal Assistant: Rohan De Silva
Secretary: Dottie Weerasooriya
Valets: Titus, Saman, Chandra, Sunil
Drivers: Lalith & Anthony
Domestic Staff: Kesavan, Jayasiri & Mallika
Gardener: Jagath

Let me end with an extract from my tribute to Star Trek on its 40^th anniversary — this message is more relevant today than when the series first aired in the heady days of Apollo: “Appearing at such a time in human history, Star Trek popularised much more than the vision of a space-faring civilisation. In episode after episode, it promoted the then unpopular ideals of tolerance for differing cultures and respect for life in all forms—without preaching, and always with a saving sense of humour.”

Colombo, Sri Lanka
28 January 2007

© Sir Arthur C. Clarke 2007.

Optimism exists on a continuum in between confidence and hope.Let me take these in order.

I am confident that the acceleration and expanding purview of informationtechnology will solve within twenty years the problems that nowpreoccupy us.

Consider energy. We are awash in energy (10,000 times more thanrequired to meet all our needs falls on Earth) but we are not verygood at capturing it. That will change with the full nanotechnology-basedassembly of macro objects at the nano scale, controlled by massivelyparallel information processes, which will be feasible within twentyyears. Even though our energy needs are projected to triple withinthat time, we’ll capture that .0003 of the sunlight needed to meetour energy needs with no use of fossil fuels, using extremely inexpensive,highly efficient, lightweight, nano-engineered solar panels, andwe’ll store the energy in highly distributed (and therefore safe)nanotechnology-based fuel cells. Solar power is now providing 1part in 1,000 of our needs, but that percentage is doubling everytwo years, which means multiplying by 1,000 in twenty years.

Almost all the discussions I’ve seen about energy and its consequences(such as global warming) fail to consider the ability of futurenanotechnology-based solutions to solve this problem. This developmentwill be motivated not just by concern for the environment but alsoby the $2 trillion we spend annually on energy. This is alreadya major area of venture funding.

Consider health. As of just recently, we have the tools to reprogrambiology. This is also at an early stage but is progressing throughthe same exponential growth of information technology, which wesee in every aspect of biological progress. The amount of geneticdata we have sequenced has doubled every year, and the price perbase pair has come down commensurately. The first genome cost abillion dollars. The National Institutes of Health is now startinga project to collect a million genomes at $1,000 apiece. We canturn genes off with RNA interference, add new genes (to adults)with new reliable forms of gene therapy, and turn on and off proteinsand enzymes at critical stages of disease progression. We are gainingthe means to model, simulate, and reprogram disease and aging processesas information processes. In ten years, these technologies willbe 1,000 times more powerful than they are today, and it will bea very different world, in terms of our ability to turn off diseaseand aging.

Consider prosperity. The 50-percent deflation rate inherent ininformation technology and its growing purview is causing the declineof poverty. The poverty rate in Asia, according to the World Bank,declined by 50 percent over the past ten years due to informationtechnology and will decline at current rates by 90 percent in thenext ten years. All areas of the world are affected, including Africa,which is now undergoing a rapid invasion of the Internet. Even sub-SaharanAfrica has had an average annual 5 percent economic growth ratein the last few years.

OK, so what am I optimistic (but not necessarily confident) about?

All of these technologies have existential downsides. We are alreadyliving with enough thermonuclear weapons to destroy all mammalianlife on this planet-weapons that are still on a hair-trigger. Rememberthese? They’re still there, and they represent an existential threat.

We have a new existential threat, which is the ability of a destructivelyminded group or individual to reprogram a biological virus to bemore deadly, more communicable, or (most daunting of all) more stealthy(that is, having a longer incubation period, so that the early spreadis undetected). The good news is that we have the tools to set upa rapid-response system like the one we have for software viruses.It took us five years to sequence HIV, but we can now sequence avirus in a day or two. RNA interference can turn viruses off, sinceviruses are genes, albeit pathological ones. Sun Microsystems founderBill Joy and I have proposed setting up a rapid-response systemthat could detect a new virus, sequence it, design an RNAi (RNA-mediatedinterference) medication, or a safe antigen-based vaccine, and gearup production in a matter of days. The methods exist, but as yeta working rapid-response system does not. We need to put one inplace quickly.

So I’m optimistic that we will make it through without sufferingan existential catastrophe. It would be helpful if we gave the twoaforementioned existential threats a higher priority.

And, finally, what am I hopeful, but not necessarily optimistic,about?

Who would have thought right after September 11, 2001, that wewould go five years without another destructive incident at thator greater scale? That seemed unlikely at the time, but despiteall the subsequent turmoil in the world, it has happened. I am hopefulthat this respite will continue.

© Ray Kurzweil 2007

There is a time machine clearly visible right outside your front door. It’s easy to see–in fact, it’s impossible to overlook–although its awesome powers are generally ignored by all but a discerning few. The unearthly beauty, the ineffable grandeur, and the ingenuity of construction of this time machine are humbling to every human being who makes an effort to probe into the enigma of its origin and the mystery of its ultimate destiny. The time machine of which I speak is emphatically not of human origin. Indeed, a few venturesome scientists are beginning to entertain a truly incredible possibility: that this device is an artifact bequeathed to us by a supreme intelligence that existed long, long ago and far, far away. All knowledgeable observers agree that the scope of its stupendous powers and the sheer delicacy of its miniscule moving parts seem nothing short of miraculous.

A second amazing but incontrovertible fact confronts those trained in the science of cosmology: We human beings are living our daily lives in the midst of extraterrestrial entities. These entities are everywhere–in the air we breathe, in the food we eat, in the ground beneath our feet, and inside our bodies. These extraterrestrials have made an incredible journey from the venue of their birth to reach planet Earth. Their epic migration, spanning millions of light-years, dwarfs the fictional interstellar voyages of the starship Enterprise. They are the real star trekkers, with more mileage on their odometers than we are capable of imagining. And perhaps most astonishing, we could not possibly survive without their constant presence, and the unfailing exercise of their special powers.

Could the existence of this purported time machine be anything but outrageous science fiction? And how could there be extraterrestrials among us that we have never noticed? Surely not even an inebriated television producer would find these ideas sufficiently credible to weave into an X-Files plot!

Yet I can assure you that both propositions are correct. Indeed, they are indisputable.

The time machine is the universe itself. We see its local features every night in the starry sky above us. The firmament we observe is not a picture of the stars and galaxies as they exist today, but rather a kind of cinematic image of our corner of the cosmos as it existed years ago–in the case of the great galaxy Andromeda, millions of years ago. Because starlight travels through the immensity of interstellar and intergalactic space at a finite pace, and because of the inconceivable vastness of the cosmos, we look backward in time with every glance at the nighttime sky.

With powerful spectacles to aid our vision–massive instruments such as the telescopes that dot the peak of Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope–we can extend our gaze incredibly far back into the past, indeed virtually to the moment of the Big Bang. And with even more sophisticated observational instruments, such as the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational- Wave Observatory (LIGO) and the space-based Big Bang Observer (BBO) that NASA hopes to deploy by 2025, there is hope that we will be able to glimpse the moment of cosmic creation itself–the very genesis of space and time.

What about those extraterrestrials? They are the atoms that combine to form the molecules from which our bodies and virtually everything else in our world and the solar system are made. These extraterrestrials were not, for the most part, born ex nihilo in the fireball of the Big Bang. Instead, they were hammered into existence in the forges of supernova explosions–rare conflagrations that release more energy in a flash than the normal output of the billions of ordinary stars in a typical galaxy.

Of all these extraterrestrial entities, the one with the most unusual birth story is carbon, the essential foundation of life as we know it. The peculiar process of stellar alchemy by which elemental carbon is coaxed into existence is so delicate and improbable that it prompted a giant of British astronomy, Sir Fred Hoyle, to utter the most famous and controversial remark of his storied career:

Would you not say to yourself, "Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule?" Of course you would…. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.¹

Hoyle’s remark is the inspiration for The Intelligent Universe. The book is the story of an idea, and the idea is quite simple: The best way to think about life, intelligence, and the universe is that they are not separate things, but are different aspects of a single phenomenon. To take liberties with a popular ballad, "We are the world, we are the people, and we are the universe." To state this proposition from the opposite perspective, the universe is coming to life and waking up through the processes of our lives and thoughts, and, very probably, through the lives and thoughts of countless other beings scattered throughout the cosmos.

One startling implication of this idea is that the true story of the origin of the human species is longer than the saga of terrestrial evolution conceived of by Charles Darwin and his intellectual progeny. Thanks to the discoveries of Hoyle and other cosmologists, it is now beyond dispute that the life history of humanity includes the entire history of the cosmos itself. Why? Because an inconceivably ancient and immense universe is needed to create even one species of minuscule living creatures on a single planet orbiting a nondescript star in the outer reaches of an ordinary galaxy.

If the cosmos were not so old and large, multiple generations of stars could not have formed, burned brightly for billions of years, and then blown themselves to pieces in titanic supernovae explosions, thereby synthesizing all the higher elements in the periodic table. Absent those elements (especially carbon and oxygen), there could be no life anywhere amid the countless galaxies that fill the universe.

A second implication of this concept is that if extraterrestrial life and intelligence should exist, it will inevitably be related to mankind. No, I am not talking about a government-suppressed history of alien visitation and cross-breeding, or even the slightly more plausible scenario outlined by Nobel laureate Francis Crick of directed panspermia.

Directed Panspermia

In Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature² Nobel laureate Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA, put forward a hypothesis about the origin of life on Earth that many of his scientific colleagues viewed as outlandish, even scandalous. The essence of Crick’s scenario was that, contrary to Darwin’s speculation that the first living things may have emerged spontaneously in a warm little pond, terrestrial life was deliberately seeded by an advanced alien race billions of years ago. Crick’s ideas built on those of Swedish physicist Svante August Arrhenius, who suggested in the late 19^th century that life did not get started on Earth, but was seeded by microorganisms drifting in from outer space under the gentle pressure of ambient starlight.

A perceived weakness of Arrhenius’s theory–called simply panspermia, which translates literally as seeds everywhere–was that it was thought unlikely that spores or microorganisms could survive the harsh radiation of space for the decades, centuries, or even millennia that would be required for bacteria to slowly waft from even the nearest stars to our solar system.

Crick sought to remedy this weakness in Arrhenius’s theory by proposing that the transplanted extraterrestrial microorganisms had actually traveled to Earth within the protective hull of an alien spaceship! As Crick put it:

Life started here when these organisms were dropped into the primitive ocean and began to multiply.³

Why would this obviously serious-minded and gifted scientist put forward such a seemingly eccentric proposal? Essentially, Crick was attempting to take seriously the logical implications of what he recognized as "the very high degree of [the] organized complexity [of living things] we find at every level, and especially at the molecular level."⁴ In order for even the simplest living creature to metabolize and reproduce, a vast array of incredibly complicated and interdependent molecular machinery must function, at a nanoscale level, with a degree of flawless precision that makes the operations of a Boeing 747 look downright primitive by comparison. As Crick put it in a candid and colorful remark that has become a key talking point for the Intelligent Design crowd:

The origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.⁵

But if life originated on an alien world and was later transported here by a race of intelligent aliens, then the probabilistic resources available to explain a random origin of life’s organized complexity can be expanded exponentially. The major conceptual weakness of Crick’s directed panspermia scenario is that it merely postpones the ultimate question: How did life originally get going, either on a distant planet or in that proverbial warm little pond right here on Earth?

I am asserting that wherever and however life and intelligence may exist elsewhere in the cosmos, it will have originated and evolved from a universally shared substrate: the chemical elements of the periodic table and the basic forces and parameters of physics. As far as anyone can tell, these elements, forces, and parameters appear invariant throughout the visible universe. They can be thought of as a kind of "deep DNA"–a universal genetic code inscribed far below the level of terrestrial genomes. At this fundamental level, everyone and everything that exists in the universe, whether animate or inanimate, is intimately related. And because all of this living and not-yet-living stuff owes its ultimate origin to a common genesis event (the Big Bang), we are all related in a family way. With apologies to Saint Francis of Assisi, we can confidently state that Earth’s satellite truly is Sister Moon, and that the life-giving star 93 million miles away is genuinely Brother Sun.

A third implication of the concept is that because the vast preponderance of the lifetime of the universe lies in the distant future rather than in the past, the historical achievements of life and mind are meager foreshadowings of the starring role that intelligent life is likely to play in shaping the future of the cosmos. Indeed, this new way of looking at the intimate linkage of life, mind, and the cosmos suggests a novel way of thinking about the ultimate destiny of our universe.

Traditionally, scientists have offered two bleak answers to the profound issue of how the universe will end: fire or ice. The cosmos might end in fire–a cataclysmic Big Crunch in which galaxies, planets, and any life forms that might have endured to the end time are consumed in a raging inferno as the universe contracts in a kind of Big Bang, but in reverse.

Or the universe might end in ice–a ceaseless expansion of the fabric of spacetime in which the thin soup of matter and energy is eternally diluted and cooled. Under this scenario, stars wither and die, constellations of cold matter recede further and further from one another, and the vast project of cosmic evolution simply fades into quiet and endless oblivion.

The Intelligent Universe proposes a third possibility: that the universe might end in intelligent life. Not life as we know it, but life that has acquired the capacity to shape the cosmos as a whole, just as life on Earth has acquired the ability to shape the land, the sea, and the atmosphere. As Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson puts it:

Mind, through the long course of biological evolution, has established itself as a moving force in our little corner of the universe. Here on this small planet, mind has infiltrated matter and has taken control. It appears to me that the tendency of mind to infiltrate and control matter is a law of nature.⁶

My first book, Biocosm,⁷ was one long argument that the cosmos possesses a utility function (some value or outcome that is being maximized) and that the specific utility function of our cosmos is propagation of baby universes exhibiting the same life-friendly physical qualities as their parent-universe. Under this scenario, the mission of sufficiently evolved intelligent life in the universe is essentially to serve as a cosmic reproductive organ, spawning an endless succession of life-friendly offspring that are themselves endowed with the same reproductive capacities as their predecessors. The fact that our universe seems queerly hospitable to carbonbased intelligent life–an astronomically improbable oddity that many leading scientists have identified as the deepest mystery in all of science–emerges in the context of this hypothesis as a predictable outcome (a falsifiable retrodiction, in the jargon of science).

Falsifiable Retrodictions

Traditionally, scientists insist that new hypotheses generate falsifiable predictions of experimental results in order to qualify as genuine science. However, there are some fields of science–especially archaeology and cosmology, which involve events that occurred in the distant past or in physically inaccessible regions–that cannot generate predictions susceptible to laboratory testing. Although a few purists regard these fields as intrinsically unscientific, most scientists concede that it is appropriate for so-called "historical" sciences, such as geology, evolutionary biology, cosmology, paleontology, and archaeology to rely on retrodiction as an alternate means of testing a scientific hypothesis. A retrodiction essentially compares previously gathered observational evidence (for instance, the fossil record, in the case of evolutionary biology) with the implications of a scientific hypothesis (such as Darwinian natural selection). If the observational evidence agrees with the implications of the hypothesis, the hypothesis is said to retrodict the evidence. A detailed discussion of retrodiction as a tool for testing scientific hypothesis is contained in Appendix A.

Though The Intelligent Universe reprises some of the key themes of Biocosm, its primary objective is different. Unlike Biocosm, the purpose of this book is not to lay out a scientific hypothesis but rather to tell an extraordinary story–the story of the probable future of the universe. In telling this story, I am going to introduce you to some very unusual and interesting people.

You will meet a senior NASA official whose passion is investigating the probable impact on religion of the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence. You will encounter a computer scientist who is coaxing software to undergo a special kind of Darwinian evolution, thus becoming more adept and financially valuable over time. And you will meet a technology prophet who, in my view, is the true contemporary heir to Darwin’s intellectual legacy.

You will also meet a fascinating cast of nonhuman players likely to have leading roles on tomorrow’s cosmic stage. They include: (1) super-smart machines capable of out-thinking humans without breaking a sweat; (2) speedy and cost-efficient interstellar probes that will consist of nothing more substantial than elaborate software algorithms capable of "living" in the innards of alien computers they may encounter on far-off planets; and (3) intelligent extraterrestrials, which SETI researchers have not yet discovered but whose probable existence is strongly predicted by my Biocosm hypothesis.

The Intelligent Universe, then, is a kind of projected travelogue–an imagined future history–of the cosmic journey that lies ahead. The foundation for that projection is a vision of the deep linkage between the three ostensibly separate phenomena previously mentioned: the appearance of life, the emergence of intelligence, and the seemingly mindless physical evolution of the cosmos. In discussing these topics, the book will not only provide news dispatches from the frontiers of cosmological science, but also offer musings about the philosophical implications of emerging scientific insights for our self-image as a species.

Some skeptics and traditionalists will doubtless protest that such philosophizing is out of place in a book that seeks to chronicle the latest scientific thinking about the nature of the universe. In rebuttal, I offer the timeless words of Galileo:

Philosophy is written in this grand book–I mean the universe–which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the characters in which it is written.

In the spirit of Galileo, I invite you to gaze into this grand book–I mean our cosmos–and begin to learn the language and the characters in which it is written. As we shall see, the grand book is not only a tale of the past, but also a story about our tomorrows. Above all, it is a book that, carefully deciphered, foretells the incredible journey that intelligent life will make across the vast expanse of the cosmic future and the projected consummation of that voyage–the emergence of the biocosm.

1. Hoyle, Fred. "The Universe: Past and Present Reflections." Engineering & Science magazine (November, 1981): 8-12, quoted in Owen Gingerich, "Foreword" to Simon Mitton, Conflict in the Cosmos: Fred Hoyle’s Life in Science. Washington, D.C.: Joseph Henry Press, 2005: xi.

2. Crick, Francis. Life Itself: Its Origin and Nature. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.

3. Ibid., 15-16.

4. Ibid., 49.

5. Ibid., 88.

6. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions. New York: Harper Perennial Library, 1988; 118.

7. Gardner, James. Biocosm–The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe. Makawao, Maui, Hawaii: Inner Ocean Publishing, 2003.

© 2007 James Gardner

The universe might end in intelligent life, not a Big Crunch or oblivion in an infinite expansion, says James Gardner in The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos (February 2007).

Gardner envisions a final state of the cosmos in which a highly evolved form of group intelligence  — a cosmic community — marshals the assets of matter and energy bequeathed by the Big Bang and engineers a cosmic renewal: the birth of a new baby universe endowed with the same life-giving propensity that our cosmos enjoys.

“My first book, Biocosm, was one long argument that the cosmos possesses a utility function (i.e., some value or outcome that is being maximized) and that the specific utility function of our cosmos is propagation of baby universes exhibiting the same life-friendly physical qualities as their parent-universe, a sort of cosmic reproductive organ,” Gardner said.

“The purpose of this book is to tell an extraordinary story. You will meet a senior NASA official whose passion is investigating the probable impact on religion of the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence; a computer scientist who is coaxing software to undergo a special kind of Darwinian evolution, thus becoming ever more adept and financially valuable over time; and a technology prophet who, in my view, is the true contemporary heir to Darwin’s intellectual legacy.

“You will also meet a fascinating cast of non-human players likely to have leading roles on tomorrow’s cosmic stage. They include:

• Super-smart machines capable of out-thinking humans without breaking a sweat.
• Speedy and cost-efficient interstellar probes consisting of elaborate software algorithms capable of “living” in the innards of alien computers they may encounter on far-off planets.
• Intelligent extraterrestrials, which SETI researchers have not yet discovered but whose probable existence is strongly predicted by my Biocosm hypothesis.

“The Intelligent Universe, then, is a kind of projected travelogue — an imagined future history — of the cosmic journey that lies ahead. The foundation for that projection–the defining leitmotif of that imagined future–is a vision of the deep linkage between three ostensibly separate phenomena: the appearance of life, the emergence of intelligence, and the seemingly mindless physical evolution of the cosmos. In discussing these topics, the book will not only provide news dispatches from the frontiers of cosmological science but also offer musings about the philosophical implications of emerging scientific insights for our self-image as a species.”

“Gardner has taken Gaia to its furthest conceivable magnitude: extending the role and influence of life to the stars and beyond,” said Seth Shostak, Senior Astronomer at the SETI Institute. Gardner is a Kurzweil Network contributor and also a Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member, along with Shostak.

Ray Kurzweil’s foreword to James Gardner’s book, The Intelligent Universe, published by New Page Books in February 2007:

Consider that the price-performance of computation has grown at a superexponential rate for over a century. The doubling time (of computes per dollar) was three years in 1900 and two years in the middle of the 20^th century; and priceperformance is now doubling each year.

This progression has been remarkably smooth and predictable through five paradigms of computing substrate: electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, transistors, and now several decades of Moore’s Law (which is based on shrinking the size of key features on a flat integrated circuit).

The sixth paradigm — three-dimensional molecular computing — is already beginning to work and is waiting in the wings. We see similar smooth exponential progressions in every other aspect of information technology, a phenomenon I call the law of accelerating returns.

Where is all this headed? It is leading inexorably to the intelligent universe that Jim Gardner envisions.

Consider the following: As with all of the other manifestations of information technology, we are also making exponential gains in reverse-engineering the human brain. The spatial resolution in 3D volume of in-vivo brain scanning is doubling each year, and the latest generation of scanners is capable of imaging individual interneuronal connections and seeing them interact in real time.

For the first time, we can see the brain create our thoughts, and also see our thoughts create our brain (that is, we create new spines and synapses as we learn). The amount of data we are gathering about the brain is doubling each year, and we are showing that we can turn this data into working models and simulations.

Already, about 20 regions of the human brain have been modeled and simulated. We can then apply tests to the simulations and compare these results to the performance of the actual human brain regions. These tests have had impressive results, including one of a simulation of the cerebellum, the region responsible for physical skill, and which comprises about half of the neurons in the brain.

I make the case in my book (The Singularity is Near) that we will have models and simulations of all several hundred regions, including the cerebral cortex, within 20 years. Already, IBM is building a detailed simulation of a substantial portion of the cerebral cortex. The result of this activity will be greater insight into ourselves, as well as a dramatic expansion of the AI tool kit to incorporate all of the methods of human intelligence.

By 2029, sufficient computation to simulate the entire human brain, which I estimate at about 10¹⁶ (10 million billion) calculations per second (cps), will cost about a dollar. By that time, intelligent machines will combine the subtle and supple skills that humans now excel in (essentially our powers of pattern recognition) with ways in which machines are already superior, such as remembering trillions of facts accurately, searching quickly through vast databases, and downloading skills and knowledge.

But this will not be an alien invasion of intelligent machines. It will be an expression of our own civilization, as we have always used our technology to extend our physical and mental reach. We will merge with this technology by sending intelligent nanobots (blood-cell-sized computerized robots) into our brains through the capillaries to intimately interact with our biological neurons. If this scenario sounds very futuristic, I would point out that we already have blood-cell-sized devices that are performing sophisticated therapeutic functions in animals, such as curing Type I diabetes and identifying and destroying cancer cells. We already have a pea-sized device approved for human use that can be placed in patients’ brains to replace the biological neurons destroyed by Parkinson’s disease, the latest generation of which allows you to download new software to your neural implant from outside the patient.

If you consider what machines are already capable of, and apply a billion-fold increase in price-performance and capacity of computational technology over the next quarter century (while at the same time we shrink the key features of both electronic and mechanical technology by a factor of 100,000), you will get some idea of what will be feasible in 25 years.

By the mid-2040s, the nonbiological portion of the intelligence of our humanmachine civilization will be about a billion times greater than the biological portion (we have about 10²⁶ cps among all human brains today; nonbiological intelligence in 2045 will provide about 10³⁵ cps). Keep in mind that, as this happens, our civilization will be become capable of performing more ambitious engineering projects.

One of these projects will be to keep this exponential growth of computation going. Another will be to continually redesign the source code of our own intelligence. We cannot easily redesign human intelligence today, given that our biological intelligence is largely hard-wired. But our future — largely nonbiological — intelligence will be able to apply its own intelligence to redesign its own algorithms.

So what are the limits of computation? I show in my book that the ultimate one-kilogram computer (less than the weight of a typical notebook computer today) could perform about 10⁴² cps if we want to keep the device cool, and about 10⁵⁰ cps if we allow it to get hot. By hot, I mean the temperature of a hydrogen bomb going off, so we are likely to asymptote to a figure just short of 10⁵⁰ cps. Consider, however, that by the time we get to 10⁴² cps per kilogram of matter, our civilization will possess a vast amount of intelligent engineering capability to figure out how to get to 10⁴³ cps, and then 10⁴⁴ cps, and so on.

So what happens then? Once we saturate the ability of matter and energy to support computation, continuing the ongoing expansion of human intelligence and knowledge (which I see as the overall mission of our human-machine civilization), will require converting more and more matter into this ultimate computing substrate, sometimes referred to as “computronium.”

What is that limit? The overall solar system, which is dominated by the sun, has a mass of about 2 × 10³⁰ kilograms. If we apply our 10⁵⁰ cps per kilogram limit to this figure, we get a crude estimate of 10⁸⁰ cps for the computational capacity of our solar system. There are some practical considerations here, in that we won’t want to convert the entire solar system into computronium, and some of it is not suitable for this purpose anyway. If we devoted 1/20^th of 1 percent (.0005) of the matter of the solar system to computronium, we get capacities of 10⁶⁹ cps for “cold” computing and 10⁷⁷ cps for “hot” computing. I show in my book how we will get to these levels using the resources in our solar system within about a century.

I’d say that’s pretty rapid progress. Consider that in 1850, a state-of-the-art method to transmit messages was the Pony Express, and calculations were performed with an ink stylus on paper. Only 250 years later, we will have vastly expanded the intelligence of our civilization. Just taking the 10⁶⁹ cps figure, if we compare that to the 10²⁶ cps figure, which represents the capacity of all human biological intelligence today, that will represent an expansion by a factor of 10⁴³ (10 million trillion trillion trillion).

Now for the intelligent universe. At this point, the ongoing expansion of our intelligence will require moving out into the rest of the universe. Indeed, this process will start before we saturate the resources in our midst. When this happens, we will immediately confront a key issue — the speed of light — which we understand to be the cosmic speed limit. But what is it a speed limit for? We can easily cite examples of phenomena that exceed the speed of light. For example, we know the universe to be expanding, and the speed with which galaxies recede from each other exceeds the speed of light if the distance between the two galaxies is greater than what is called the Hubble distance.

But the speed of light, as postulated by Einstein in his special theory of relativity, represents a limit on the speed with which we can transmit information. The phenomenon of receding galaxies does not violate Einstein’s theory because it is caused by space expanding, rather than the galaxies moving through space. As such, it does not help us to transmit information at speeds faster than the speed of light.

Another phenomenon that appears to exceed the speed of light is quantum disentanglement of two entangled particles. Two particles created together may be “quantum entangled,” meaning that if we resolve the ambiguity of a undetermined property (such as the phase of its spin) in one of the paired particles (by measuring it), it will also be resolved in the other particle as the same value, and at exactly the same time. There is the appearance of some sort of communication link between the two particles, and this phenomenon has been experimentally measured at many times the speed of light. But again, this does not allow us to transmit information (such as a file), because what is being “communicated” by quantum disentanglement is not information, but quantum randomness. As such, it can be used to generate profoundly random encryption codes (and that application has already been exploited in a new generation of quantum encryption devices), but it does not allow faster-than-light communication.

There are suggestions that the speed of light has changed slightly. In 2001, astronomer John Webb presented results that suggested that the speed of light may have changed by 4.5 parts out of 10⁸ over the past 2 billion years. These observations need confirmation. That may not seem like much of a change, but it is the nature of engineering to take a subtle effect and amplify it. So perhaps there are ways to engineer a change in the speed of light.

The theory that the early universe went through a rapid expansion in an inflationary period does postulate a speed far greater than the speed of light, so we may be able to find an engineering approach to harnesses the conditions that existed in the early universe.

The most compelling idea of circumventing the speed of light is not to change it at all, but simply to find shortcuts to places in the universe that seem to be far away. The theory of general relativity does not rule out the existence of wormholes in time-space that could allow us to travel to a far-off location in a short period of time. California Institute of Technology physicists Michael Morris, Kip Thorne, and Uri Yurtsever have described theoretical methods to engineer wormholes to get to faraway locations in a brief period of time. The amount of energy required might make it difficult to set up a passageway for biological humans to pass through, but our exploration and colonization of the universe requires only nanobots.

Physicists David Hochberg and Thomas Kephart have shown how gravity was strong enough in the very early universe to have provided the energy required to spontaneously create massive numbers of self-stabilizing wormholes. A significant portion of these wormholes is likely to still be around and may be pervasive, providing a vast network of corridors that reach far and wide throughout the universe. It might be easier to discover and use these natural wormholes than to create new ones.

We have to regard these proposals to exceed or bypass the speed of light as speculative. But while this may be regarded as an interesting intellectual reflection today, it will be the primary issue confronting human civilization a century from now. And keep in mind that we’re talking about a civilization that will be trillions of trillions of times more capable than we are today. So one thing we can be confident of, is that if there is any way to transmit devices and information at speeds exceeding the speed of light (or circumventing it through wormholes), our future civilization will be both motivated and capable of discovering and exploiting that insight.

The price-performance of computation went from 10^-5 to 10⁸ cps per thousand dollars in the 20^th century. We also went from about a million dollars to a trillion dollars in the amount of capital devoted to computation, so overall progress in nonbiological intelligence went from 10^-2 to 10¹⁷ cps in the 20^th century, which is still short of the human biological figure of 10²⁶ cps. We will achieve around 10⁶⁹ cps by the end of the 21^st century. If we can circumvent the speed of light, we only need about another 20 orders of magnitude to convert the entire universe into computronium, and that can be done well within another century. On the other hand, if the speed of light remains unperturbed by the vast intelligence that will seek to overcome it, it will take billions of years. But it will still happen.

I make this case more fully in my book, and Jim makes it quite forcefully in this book. It is remarkable to me that almost all of the discussions of cosmology fail to mention the role of intelligence. In the common cosmological view, intelligence is just a bit of froth, something interesting that happens on the sidelines of the great cosmic story. But in the standard view, whether the universe winds up or down, ends up in fire (a great crunch and new Big Bang), or ice (an ever-expanding and ultimately dead universe), or something in-between, depends only on measures of dark matter, dark energy, and other parameters we have yet to discover. That the story of the universe is a story yet to be written by the intelligence it will spawn is almost never mentioned. This book will help to change the common “unintelligent” view.

So what will we do when our intelligence is in the range of a googol (10¹⁰⁰) cps? One thing we may do is to engineer new universes. Similarly, our universe may be the creation of some superintelligences in another universe. In this case, there was an intelligent designer of our universe — that designer would be the evolved intelligence of some other universe that created ours. Perhaps our universe is a science fair experiment of a student in another universe. (Reading the news of the day, you might get the impression that this erstwhile adolescent superintelligence who designed our universe is not going to get a very good grade on his or her project.)

But the evolution of intelligence here on Earth is actually going very well. All of the vagaries (and tragedies) of human history, such as two world wars, the cold war, the great depression, and other notable events, did not make even the slightest dent in the ongoing exponential progressions I previously mentioned.

Clearly, the universe we live in does appear to be an intelligent design, in that the constants in nature are precisely what are required for the universe to have grown in complexity. If the cosmological constant, the Planck constant, and the many other constants of physics were set to just slightly different values, atoms, molecules, stars, planets, organisms, humans, and this book would have been impossible. As Jim Gardner says, “A multitude of…factors are fine-tuned with fantastic exactitude to a degree that renders the cosmos almost spookily bio-friendly.” How the rules of the universe happened to be just so is a profound question, one that Gardner explores in fascinating detail.

Or perhaps our universe is not someone’s science experiment, but rather the result of an evolutionary process. Leonard Susskind, the developer of string theory, and Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist and expert on quantum gravity, have suggested that universes give rise to other universes in a natural, evolutionary process that gradually refines the natural constants. Smolin postulates that universes best able to product black holes are the ones that are most likely to reproduce. Smolin explains, “Reproduction through black holes leads to a multiverse in which the conditions for life are common — essentially because some of the conditions life requires, such as plentiful carbon, also boost the formation of stars massive enough to become black holes.”¹

As an alternative to Smolin’s concept of it being a coincidence that black holes and biological life both need similar conditions (such as large amounts of carbon), Jim Gardner and I have put forth the conjecture that it is precisely the intelligence that derives from biological life and its technological creations that are likely to engineer new universes with intelligently set parameters. In this thesis, there is still an important role for black holes, because black holes represent the ultimate computer. Now that Stephen Hawking has conceded that we can get information out of a black hole (because the particles comprising the Hawking radiation remain quantum-entangled with particles flying into the black hole), the extreme density of matter and energy in a black hole make it the ultimate computer. If we think of evolving universes as the ultimate evolutionary algorithm, the utility function (that is, the property being optimized in an evolutionary process) would be its ability to produce intelligent computation.

This line of reasoning sheds some light on the Fermi paradox. The Drake formula provides a means to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in a galaxy or in the universe. Essentially, the likelihood of a planet evolving biological life that has created sophisticated technology is tiny, but there are so many star systems, that there should still be many millions of such civilizations. Carl Sagan’s analysis of the Drake formula concludes that there should be around a million civilizations with advanced technology in our galaxy, while Frank Drake estimated around 10,000. And there are many billions of galaxies. Yet we don’t notice any of these intelligent civilizations, hence the paradox that Fermi described in his famous comment. As Jim Gardner and others have asked, where is everyone?

We can readily explain why any one of these civilizations might be quiet. Perhaps it destroyed itself. Perhaps it is following the Star Trek ethical guideline to avoid interference with primitive civilizations (such as ours). These explanations make sense for any one civilization, but it is not credible, in my view, that every one of the billions of technology capable civilizations that should exist has destroyed itself or decided to remain quiet.

The SETI project is sometimes described as trying to find a needle (evidence of a technical civilization) in a haystack (all the natural signals in the universe). But actually, any technologically sophisticated civilization would be generating trillions of trillions of needles (noticeably intelligent signals). Even if they have switched away from electromagnetic transmissions as a primary form of communication, there would still be vast artifacts of electromagnetic phenomenon generated by all of the many computational and communication processes that such a civilization would need to engage in.

Now let’s factor in the law of accelerating returns. The common wisdom (based on what I call the intuitive linear perspective) is that it would take many thousands, if not millions of years, for an early technological civilization to become capable of technology that spanned a solar system. But as I argued previously, because of the explosive nature of exponential growth, it will only take a quarter of a millennium (in our own case) to go from sending messages on horseback to saturating the matter and energy in our solar system with sublimely intelligent processes.

According to most analyses of the Drake equation, there should be billions of civilizations, and a substantial fraction of these should be ahead of us by millions of years. That’s enough time for many of them to be capable of vast galaxy-wide technologies. So how can it be that we haven’t noticed any of the trillions of trillions of “needles” that each of these billions of advanced civilizations should be creating?

My own conclusion is that they don’t exist. If it seems unlikely that we would be in the lead in the universe, here on the third planet of a humble star in an otherwise undistinguished galaxy, it’s no more perplexing than the existence of our universe with its ever so precisely tuned formulas to allow life to evolve in the first place.

It is not possible to do justice to this dilemma in a foreword. It would take a book to do that, and Jim Gardner has written that book. Muriel Rukeyser wrote, “The universe is made of stories, not atoms,” and in this book, Gardner tells us the universe’s own fascinating and unfinished story. Perhaps even more intriguing, Gardner relays in a clear and compelling manner the gripping stories of the rich, intellectual ferment from which our understanding of the universe is emerging.

The Web is entering a new phase of evolution. There has been much debate recently about what to call this new phase. Some would prefer to not name it all, while others suggest continuing to call it “Web 2.0.” However, this new phase of evolution has quite a different focus from what Web 2.0 has come to mean.

John Markoff of the New York Times recently suggested naming this third-generation of the Web, “Web 3.0.” This suggestion has led to quite a bit of debate within the industry. Those who are attached to the Web 2.0 moniker have reacted by claiming that such a term is not warranted while others have responded positively to the term, noting that there is indeed a characteristic difference between the coming new stage of the Web and what Web 2.0 has come to represent.

The term Web 2.0 was never clearly defined and even today if one asks ten people what it means one will likely get ten different definitions. However, most people in the Web industry would agree that Web 2.0 focuses on several major themes, including AJAX, social networking, folksonomies, lightweight collaboration, social bookmarking, and media sharing. While the innovations and practices of Web 2.0 will continue to develop, they are not the final step in the evolution of the Web.

In fact, there is a lot more in store for the Web. We are starting to witness the convergence of several growing technology trends that are outside the scope of what Web 2.0 has come to mean. These trends have been gestating for a decade and will soon reach a tipping point. At this juncture the third-generation of the Web will start.

More intelligent Web

The threshold to the third-generation Web will be crossed in 2007. At this juncture the focus of innovation will start shift back from front-end improvements towards back-end infrastructure level upgrades to the Web. This cycle will continue for five to ten years, and will result in making the Web more connected, more open, and more intelligent. It will transform the Web from a network of separately siloed applications and content repositories to a more seamless and interoperable whole.

Because the focus of the third-generation Web is quite different from that of Web 2.0, this new generation of the Web probably does deserve its own name. In keeping with the naming convention established by labeling the second generation of the Web as Web 2.0, I agree with John Markoff that this third-generation of the Web could be called Web 3.0.

A more precise timeline and definition might go as follows:

Web 1.0. Web 1.0 was the first generation of the Web. During this phase the focus was primarily on building the Web, making it accessible, and commercializing it for the first time. Key areas of interest centered on protocols such as HTTP, open standard markup languages such as HTML and XML, Internet access through ISPs, the first Web browsers, Web development platforms and tools, Web-centric software languages such as Java and Javascript, the creation of Web sites, the commercialization of the Web and Web business models, and the growth of key portals on the Web.

Web 2.0. According to the Wikipedia, "Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004¹, refers to a supposed second generation of Internet-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users." I would also add to this definition another trend that has been a major factor in Web 2.0—the emergence of the mobile Internet and mobile devices (including camera phones) as a major new platform driving the adoption and growth of the Web, particularly outside of the United States.

Web 3.0. Using the same pattern as the above Wikipedia definition, Web 3.0 could be defined as: "Web 3.0, a phrase coined by John Markoff of the New York Times in 2006, refers to a supposed third generation of Internet-based services that collectively comprise what might be called ‘the intelligent Web’—such as those using semantic web, microformats, natural language search, data-mining, machine learning, recommendation agents, and artificial intelligence technologies—which emphasize machine-facilitated understanding of information in order to provide a more productive and intuitive user experience."

Web 3.0 Expanded Definition. I propose expanding the above definition of Web 3.0 to be a bit more inclusive. There are actually several major technology trends that are about to reach a new level of maturity at the same time. The simultaneous maturity of these trends is mutually reinforcing, and collectively they will drive the third-generation Web. From this broader perspective, Web 3.0 might be defined as a third-generation of the Web enabled by the convergence of several key emerging technology trends:

Ubiquitous Connectivity

• Broadband adoption
• Mobile Internet access
• Mobile devices

Network Computing

• Software-as-a-service business models
• Web services interoperability
• Distributed computing (P2P, grid computing, hosted “cloud computing” server farms such as Amazon S3)

Open Technologies

• Open APIs and protocols
• Open data formats
• Open-source software platforms
• Open data (Creative Commons, Open Data License, etc.)

Open Identity

• Open identity (OpenID)
• Open reputation
• Portable identity and personal data (for example, the ability to port your user account and search history from one service to another)

The Intelligent Web

• Semantic Web technologies (RDF, OWL, SWRL, SPARQL, Semantic application platforms, and statement-based datastores such as triplestores, tuplestores and associative databases)
• Distributed databases—or what I call “The World Wide Database” (wide-area distributed database interoperability enabled by Semantic Web technologies)
• Intelligent applications (natural language processing, machine learning, machine reasoning, autonomous agents)

© 2006 Nova Spivack.

BROOKS: This is a double-headed event today. We’re going to start off with a debate. Then we’re going—maybe it’s a triple-headed event. We’re going to start off with a debate, then we’re going to have a break for pizza and soda—pizza lover here—outside, and then we’re going to come back for a lecture.

The event that this is around is the 70^th anniversary of a paper by Alan Turing, "On Computable Numbers," published in 1936, which one can legitimately, I think—I think one can legitimately think of that paper as the foundation of computer science. It included the invention of the Turing—what we now call the Turing Machine. And Turing went on to have lots of contributions to our field, we at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. In 1948, he had a paper titled, "Intelligent Machinery," which I think is really the foundation of artificial intelligence.

So in honor of that 70^th anniversary, we have a workshop going on in the next couple days and this even tonight. This event is sponsored by the Templeton Foundation. Charles Harper of the Templeton Foundation is here, and so is Mary Ann Meyers and some other people sponsoring this event. And Charles, I have to ask you one question —A or B? You have to say. You have to choose. This is going to choose who goes first, but I’m not telling you who A or B is.

HARPER: A.

BROOKS: OK. So we’re going to start this debate between Ray Kurzweil and David Gelernter. And it turns out that Ray is going to go first. Thanks, Charles. So I’m first going to introduce Ray and David. I will point out that after we finish and after the break, we’re going to come back at 6:15, and Jack Copeland, who’s down here, will then give a lecture on Turing’s life. And Jack has been—runs the Alanturing.net, the archives in New Zealand of Alan Turing, and he’s got a wealth of material and new material that’s being declassified over time that he’ll be talking about some of Alan Turing’s contributions.

But the debate that we’re about to have is really about the AI side of Alan Turing and the limits that we can expect or that we might be afraid of or might be celebrating of whether we can build superintelligent machines, or are we limited to building just superintelligent zombies. We’re pretty sure we can build programs with intelligence, but will they just be zombies that don’t have the real oomph of us humans? Will it be possible or desirable for us to build conscious, volitional, and perhaps even spiritual machines?

So we’re going to have a debate. Ray is going to speak for five minutes and then David is going to speak for five minutes—opening remarks. Then Ray will speak for ten minutes, David for ten minutes —that’s a total of 30 minutes, and I’m going to time them. And then we’re going to have a 15-minute interplay between the two of them. They get to use as much time as they can get from the other one during that. And then we’re going to open up to some questions from the audience. But I do ask that when we have the questions, the questions shouldn’t be for you to enter the debate. It would be better if you can come up with some question which you think they can argue about, because that’s what we’re here to see.

Ray Kurzweil has been a well-known name since his—in artificial intelligence since his appearance on Steve Allen’s show in 1965, where he played a piano piece that a computer he had built had composed. Ray has gone on to—

KURZWEIL: I was three years old.

BROOKS: He was three years old, yes. Ray has gone on to build the Kurzweil synthesizers that many musicians use, the Kurzweil reading machines, and many other inventions that have gone out there and are in everyday use. He’s got prizes and medals up the wazoo. He won the Lemelson Prize from MIT, he won the National Medal of Technology, presented by President Clinton in 1999. And Ray has written a number of books that have been—come out and been very strong sellers on all sorts of questions about our future and the future of robot kind.

David Gelernter is a professor at Yale University, professor of computer science, but he’s sort of a strange professor of computer science, in the sense that he writes essays for Weekly Standard, Time, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and many other sorts of places. And I see a few of my colleagues here, and I’m glad they don’t write columns for all those places. His research interests include AI, philosophy of mind, parallel distributed systems, visualization, and information management. And you can read all about them with Google if you want to get more details. Both very distinguished people, and I hope we have some interesting things to hear from them. So we’ll start with Ray. And five minutes, Ray.

KURZWEIL: OK. Well, thanks, Rodney. You’re very good at getting a turnout. That went quickly. [laughter] So there’s a tie-in with my tie, which this was given to me by Intel. It’s a photomicrograph of the Pentium, which I think symbolizes the progress we’ve made since Turing’s relay-based computer Ultra that broke the Nazi Enigma code and enabled Britain to win the Battle of Britain. But we’ve come a long way since then.

And in terms of this 70^th anniversary, the course I enjoyed the most here at MIT, when I was here in the late ’60s, was 6.253—I don’t remember all the numbers, and numbers are important here —but that was theoretical models of computation, and it was about that paper and about the Turing Machine and what it could compute and computable functions and the busy beaver function, which is non-computable, and what computers can do, and really established computation as a sub-field of mathematics and, arguably, mathematics as a sub-field of computation.

So in terms of the debate topic, I thought it was interesting that there’s an assumption in the title that we will build superintelligent machines, we’ll build superintelligent machines that are conscious or not conscious. And it brings up the issue of consciousness, and I want to focus on that for a moment, because I think we can define consciousness in two ways. We can define apparent consciousness, which is an entity that appears to be conscious—and I believe, in fact, you have to be apparently conscious to pass the Turing test, which means you really need a command of human emotion. Because if you’re just very good at doing mathematical theorems and making stock market investments and so on, you’re not going to pass the Turing test. And in fact, we have machines that do a pretty good job with those things. Mastering human emotion and human language is really key to the Turing test, which has held up as our exemplary assessment of whether or not a non-biological intelligence has achieved human levels of intelligence.

And that will require a machine to master human emotion, which in my view is really the cutting edge of human intelligence. That’s the most intelligent thing we do. Being funny, expressing a loving sentiment—these are very complex behaviors. And we have characters in video games that can try to do these things, but they’re not very convincing. They don’t have the complex, subtle cues that we associate with those emotions. They don’t really have emotional intelligence. But emotional intelligence is not some sideshow to human intelligence. It’s really the cutting edge. And as we build machines that can interact with us better and really master human intelligence, that’s going to be the frontier. And in the ten minutes, I’ll try to make the case that we will achieve that. I think that’s more of a 45-minute argument, but I’ll try to summarize my views on that.

I will say that the community, AI community and myself, have gotten closer in our assessments of when that will be feasible. There was a conference on my 1999 book, Spiritual Machines, at Stanford, and there were AI experts. And the consensus then—my feeling then was we would see it in 2029. The consensus in the AI community was, oh, it’s going to—it’s very complicated, it’s going to take hundreds of years, if we can ever do it. I gave a presentation—I think you were there, Rodney, as well, at AI50, on the 50th anniversary of the Dartmouth Conference that gave AI its name in 1956. And we had these instant polling devices, and they asked ten different ways when a machine would pass the Turing test—when will we know enough about the brain, when will we have sophisticated enough software, when will a computer actually pass the Turing test. They got the same answer—it was basically the same question, and they got the same answer. And of course it was a bell curve, but the consensus was 50 years, which, at least if you think logarithmically, as I do, that’s not that different from 25 years.

So I haven’t changed my position, but the AI community is getting closer to my view. And I’ll try to explain why I think that’s the case. It’s because of the exponential power of growth in information technology, which will affect hardware, but also will affect our understanding of the human brain, which is at least one source of getting the software of intelligence.

The other definition of consciousness is subjectivity. Consciousness is a synonym for subjectivity and really having subjective experience, not just an entity that appears to have subjective experience. And fundamentally—and I’ll try to make this point more fully in my ten-minute presentation—that’s not a scientific concept. There’s no consciousness detector we can imagine creating, that you’d slide an entity in—green light goes on, OK, this one’s conscious, no, this one’s not conscious—that doesn’t have some philosophical assumptions built into it. So John Searle would make sure that it’s squirting human neurotransmitters—

BROOKS: Time’s up.

KURZWEIL: OK. And Dan Dennett would make sure it’s self-reflexive. But we’ll return to this.

[applause]

BROOKS: David?

GELERNTER: Let’s see. First, I’d like to say thanks for inviting me. My guess is that the position I’m representing—the anti-cognitivist position, broadly speaking—is not the overwhelming favorite at this particular site. But I appreciate your willingness to listen to unpopular opinions, and I’ll try to make the most of it by being as unpopular as I can. [Laughter]

First, it seems to me we won’t even be able to build superintelligent zombies unless we attack the problem right, and I’m not sure we’re doing that. I’m pretty sure we’re not. We need to understand, it seems to me, in model thought as a whole the cognitive continuum. Not merely one or a discrete handful of cognitive styles, the mind supports a continuum or spectrum of thought styles reaching from focused analytical thought at one extreme, associated with alertness or wide-awakeness, toward steadily less-focused thought, in which our tendency to free-associate increases. Finally, at the other extreme, that tendency overwhelms everything else and we fall asleep.

So the spectrum reaches from focused analysis to unfocused continuous free association and the edge of sleep. As we move down-spectrum towards free association, naturally our tendency to think analogically increases. As we move down-spectrum, emotion becomes more important. I have to strongly agree with Ray on the importance of emotion. We speak of being coldly logical on the one hand, but dreaming on the other is an emotional experience. Is it possible to simulate the cognitive continuum in software? I don’t see why not. But only if we try.

Will we ever be able to build a conscious machine? Maybe, but building one out of software seems to me virtually impossible. First, of course, we have to say what conscious means. For my purpose, consciousness means a subjectivity. And Ray’s—and consciousness means the presence of mental states that are strictly private, with no visible functions or consequences. A conscious entity can call up some thought or memory merely to feel happy, to enjoy the memory, be inspired or soothed or angered by the thought, get a rush of adrenaline from the thought. And the outside world needn’t see any evidence of all that this act of thought or remembering is taking place.

Now, the reason I believe consciousness will never be built out of software is that where software is executing, by definition we can separate out, peel off a portable layer that can run in a logically identical way on any computing platform—for example, on a human mind. I know what it’s like to be a computer executing software, because I can execute that separable, portable set of instructions just as an electronic digital computer can and with the same logical effect. If you believe that you can build consciousness out of software, you believe that when you execute the right sort of program, a new node of consciousness gets created. But I can imagine executing any program without ever causing a new node of consciousness to leap into being. Here I am evaluating expressions, loops, and conditionals. I can see this kind of activity producing powerful unconscious intelligence, but I can’t see it creating a new node of consciousness. I don’t even see where that new node would be—floating in the air someplace, I guess.

And of course, there’s no logical difference between my executing the program and the computer’s doing it. Notice that this is not true of the brain. I do not know what it’s like to be a brain whose neurons are firing, because there is no separable, portable layer that I can slip into when we’re dealing with the brain. The mind cannot be ported to any other platform or even to another instance of the same platform. I know what it’s like to be an active computer in a certain abstract sense. I don’t know what it’s like to be an active brain, and I can’t make those same statements about the brain’s creating or not creating a new node of consciousness.

Sometimes people describe spirituality—to move finally to the last topic—as a feeling of oneness with the universe or a universal flow through the mind, a particular mode of thought and style of thought. In principle, you could get a computer to do that. But people who strike me as spiritual describe spirituality as a physical need or want. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God, as the Book of Psalm says. Can we build a robot with a physical need for a non-physical thing? Maybe, but don’t count on it. And forget software.

Is it desirable to build intelligent, conscious computers, finally? I think it’s desirable to learn as much as we can about every part of the human being, but assembling a complete conscious artificial human is a different project. We might easily reach a state someday where we prefer the company of a robot from Wal-Mart to our next door neighbors or roommates or whatever, but it’s sad that in a world where we tend to view such a large proportion of our fellow human beings as useless, we’re so hot to build new ones. [laughter]

In a Western world that no longer cares to have children at the replacement rate, we can’t wait to make artificial humans. Believe it or not, if we want more complete, fully functional people, we could have them right now, all natural ones. Consult me afterwards, and I’ll let you know how it’s done. [laughter]

BROOKS: OK, great.

GELERNTER: Thank you.

KURZWEIL: You heard glimpses in David’s presentation of both of these concepts of consciousness, and we can debate them both. I think principally he was talking about a form of performance that incorporates emotional intelligence. Because emotional intelligence, even though it seems private and we assume that there is someone actually home there experiencing the emotions that are apparently the case, we can’t really tell that when we look at someone else. In fact, all that we can discuss scientifically is objective observation, and science is really a synonym for objectivity, and consciousness is a synonym for subjectivity, and there is an inherent gulf between them.

So some people feel that actual consciousness doesn’t exist, since it’s not a scientific concept, it’s just an illusion, and we shouldn’t waste time talking about it. That’s not fully satisfactory, in my view, because our whole moral and ethical and legal system is based on consciousness. If you cause suffering to some other conscious entity, that’s the basis of our legal code and ethical values. Some people describe some magical or mystical property to consciousness. There were some elements in David’s remarks, say, in terms of talking about a new node of consciousness and how that would suddenly emerge from software.

My view is it’s an emergent property of a complex system. It’s not dependent on substrate. But that is not a scientific view, because there’s really no way to talk about or to measure the subjective experience of another entity. We assume that each other are conscious. It’s a share human assumption. But that assumption breaks down when we go out of shared human experience. The whole debate about animal rights has to do with are these entities actually conscious. Some people feel that animals are just machines in the old-fashioned sense of that term, not—there’s nobody really home. Some people feel that animals are conscious. I feel that my cat’s conscious. Other people don’t agree. They probably haven’t met my cat, but —(laughter)

But then the other view is apparent consciousness, an entity that appears to be conscious, and that will require emotional intelligence. There are several reasons why I feel that we will achieve that in a machine, and that has to do with the acceleration of information technology—and this is something I’ve studied for several decades. And information technology, not just computation, but in all fields, is basically doubling every year in price, performance, capacity, and bandwidth. We certainly can see that in computation, but we can also see that in other areas, like the resolution of brain-scanning in 3D volume is doubling every year, the amount of data gathering on the brain is doubling every year. And we’re showing that we can actually turn this data into working models and simulations of brain regions. There’s about 20 regions of the brain that have already been modeled and simulated.

And I’ve actually had a debate with Tomaso Poggio as to whether this is useful, because he kept saying, well, OK, we’ll learn how the visual cortex works, but that’s really not going to be useful in creating artificial vision systems. And I said, well, when we got these early transformations of the auditory cortex, that actually did help us in speech recognition. It was not intuitive, we didn’t expect it, but when we plugged it into the front-end transformations of speech recognition, we got a big jump in performance. They haven’t done that yet in visual modeling of the visual cortex. And I saw him recently—in fact, at AI50—and he said, you know, you were right about that, because now they’re actually getting models, these early models of how the visual cortex works, and that that has been helpful in artificial vision systems.

I make the case in chapter four of my book that we will have models and simulations of all several hundred regions of the human brain within 20 years. And you have to keep in mind that the progress is exponential. So it’s very seductive. It looks like nothing is happening. People dismissed the genome project. Now we think it’s a mainstream project, but halfway through the project, only 1% of the project had been done, but the amount of genetic data doubled smoothly every year and the project was done on time. If you can factor in this exponential pace of progress, I believe we will have models and simulations of these different brain regions—IBM is already modeling a significant slice of the cerebral cortex. And that will give us the templates of intelligence, it will expand the AI toolkit, and it’ll also give us new insights into ourselves. And we’ll be able to create machines that have more facile emotional intelligence and that really do have the subtle cues of emotional intelligence, and that will be necessary to passing the Turing test.

But that still doesn’t—that still begets the key question as to whether or not those entities just appear to be conscious and feeling emotion or whether they really have emotional subjective experiences. David, I think, was giving a sophisticated version of John Searle’s Chinese room argument, where—I don’t have time to explain the whole argument, but for those of you familiar with it, you’ve got a guy that’s just following some rules on a piece of paper and he’s answering questions in Chinese, and John says, well, isn’t it ridiculous to think that that system is actually conscious? Or he has a mechanical typewriter which types out answers in Chinese, but it’s following complex rules. The premise seems absurd that that system could actually be—have true understanding and be conscious when it’s just following a simple set of rules on a piece of paper.

Of course, the sleight of hand in that argument is that these set of rules would be immensely complex, and the whole premise is unrealistic that such a simple system could, in fact, realistically answer unanticipated questions in Chinese or any language. Because basically what the man is doing in the Chinese room, in John Searle’s argument, is passing a Turing test. And that entity would have to be very complex. And in that complexity is a key emergent property. So David says, well, it seems ridiculous to think that software could be conscious or even—and I’m not sure if he’s—which flavor of consciousness he’s using there, the true subjectivity or just apparent consciousness, but in either case it seems absurd that a little software program could display that kind of complexity and self-emergent awareness.

But that’s because you’re thinking of software as you know it today, if in fact you have a massively parallel system, as the brain is, with 100 trillion internal connections, all of which are computing simultaneously, and which in fact we can model those internal connections and neurons quite realistically in some cases today. We’re still in the early part of that process. But even John Searle agrees that a neuron is basically a machine and can be modeled and simulated, so why can’t we do that with massively parallel system with 100 trillion-fold parallelism? And if that seems ridiculous, that is ridiculous today, but it’s not ridiculous with the kind of technology we’ll have with 30 more doublings of price, performance, capacity, and bandwidth of information technology, the kind of technology we’ll have around 2030.

These massively parallel systems with the complexity of the human brain, which is a moderate level of complexity, because the design of the human brain is in the genome and the genome has 800 million bytes, but that’s uncompressed, has massive redundancies—ALU’s repeated 300,000 times. If you apply loss that’s compression of the genome, you can reduce it to 30-50 million bytes, which is not simple, but it’s a level of complexity we can manage.

BROOKS: Ray, the logarithm of your remaining time is one. [laughter]

KURZWEIL: So the—we’ll be able to achieve that level of complexity. We are making exponential progress in reverse engineering the brain. We’ll have systems that have the suppleness of human intelligence. This will not be conventional software as we understand it today. There is a difference in the (inaudible) field of technology when it achieves that level of parallelism and that level of complexity, and I think we’ll achieve that if you consider these exponential progressions. And it still doesn’t penetrate the ultimate mystery of how consciousness can emerge, true subjectivity. We assume that each other are conscious, but that assumption breaks down in the case of animals, and we’ll have a vigorous debate when we have these machines. But I’ll make one point. We will—I’ll make a prediction that we will come to believe these machines, because they’ll be very clever and they’ll get mad at us if we don’t believe them, and we won’t want that to happen. So thank you.

BROOKS: OK. David?

GELERNTER: Well, thank you for those very eloquent remarks. And I want to say, first of all, many points were raised. The premise of John Searle’s Chinese room and of the thought experiment which is related, that I outlined, is certainly unrealistic. Granted, the premise is unrealistic. That’s why we have thought experiments. If the premise were not unrealistic, if it were easy to run in a lab, we wouldn’t need to have a thought experiment.

Now, the fact remains that when we conduct a thought experiment, any thought experiment needs to be evaluated carefully. The fact that we can imagine something doesn’t mean that what we imagine is the case. We need to know whether our thought experiment is based on experience. I would say the thought experiment of imagining that you’re executing the instructions that constitute a program or that realize a virtual machine is founded on experience, because we’ve all had the experience of executing algorithms by hand. It isn’t any—and there’s no exotic ingredient in executing instructions. I may be wrong. I don’t know for sure what would happen if I executed a truly enormous program that went on for billions of pages. But I don’t have any reason for believing that consciousness would emerge. It seems to me a completely arbitrary claim. It might be true. Anything might be true. But I don’t see why you make the claim. I don’t see what makes it plausible.

You mentioned massive parallelism, but massive parallelism, after all, adds absolutely zero in terms of expressivity. You could have a billion processors going, or ten billion or ten trillion or 1081, and all those processors could be simulated on a single jalopy PC. I could run all those processes asynchronously on one processor, as you know, and what I get from parallelism is performance, obviously, and a certain amount of cleanliness and modularity when I write the program, but I certainly don’t get anything in terms of expressivity that I didn’t have anyway.

You mentioned consciousness, which is the key issue here. And you pointed out consciousness is subjective. I’m only aware of mine, you’re only aware of yours, granted. You say that consciousness is an emergent property of a complex system. Granted, of course, the brain is obviously a complex system and consciousness is clearly an emergent property. Nobody would claim that one neuron tweezed out of the brain was conscious. So yes, it is an emergent property. The business about animals and people denying animal consciousness, I haven’t really heard that since the 18th century, but who knows, maybe there are still Cartesians out there—raise your hands.

But in the final analysis, although it’s true that consciousness is irreducibly subjective, you can’t possibly claim to understand the human mind if you don’t understand consciousness. It’s true that I can’t see yours and you can’t see mine. It doesn’t change the fact that I know I’m conscious and you know that you are. And I’m not going to believe that you understand the human mind unless you can explain to me what consciousness is, how it’s created and how it got there. Now, that doesn’t mean that you can’t do a lot of useful things without being—creating consciousness. You certainly can. If your ultimate goal is utilitarian, forget about consciousness. But if your goals are philosophical and scientific and you want to understand how the mind really operates, then you must be able to tell me how consciousness works, or you don’t have a theory of the human mind.

One element that I think you left out in your discussion of the thought experiment and the fact that, granted, we’re able to build more and more complex systems and they are more and more powerful, and we’re able to build more and more accurate and effective simulations of parts of the brain and indeed of other parts of the body—because keep in mind that when we allow the importance of emotion and thinking, it’s clear that you don’t just think with your brain, you think with your body. When you feel an emotion, when you have an emotion, the body acts as a resonator or a sounding board or an amplifier, and you need to understand how the body works, as well as the brain does, if you’re going to understand emotion. But granted, we’re getting—we’re able to build more complex and more and more effective simulators.

What isn’t clear is the role of the brain’s chemical structure. The role of the brain stuff itself, of course, is a point that Searle harps on, but it goes back to a paper by Paul Ziff in the late 1950s, and many people have remarked on this point. We don’t have the right to dismiss out of hand the role of the actual chemical makeup of the brain in creating the emergent property of consciousness. We don’t know whether it can be created using any other substance. Maybe it can’t and maybe it can. It’s an empirical question.

One is reminded of the famous search that went on for so many centuries for a substitute source of the pigment ultramarine. Ultramarine, a tremendously important pigment for any painter. You get it from lapis lazuli, and there are not very many sources of lapis lazuli. It’s very expensive, and it’s a big production number to get it and grind it down, turn it into ultramarine. So ultramarine paint used to be as expensive as gold leaf. People wanted to know, where else can I get ultramarine? And they went to the scientific community, and the scientific community said, we don’t know. There’s no law that says there is some other place to get ultramarine from lapis lazuli, but we’ll try. And at a certain point in the late 19th century, a team of French chemists did succeed in producing a fake ultramarine pigment which was indeed much cheaper than lapis lazuli. And the art world rejoiced.

The moral of the story? If you can do it, great, but you have no basis for insisting on an a priori assumption that you can do it. I don’t know whether there is a way to achieve consciousness in any way other than living organisms achieve it. If you think there is, you’ve got to show me. I have no reason for accepting that a priori. And I think I’m finished.

BROOKS: I can’t believe it. Everyone stopped—Ray, I think—stay up there, and we’ll—now we’ll go back and forth in terms of, Ray, maybe you want to answer that.

KURZWEIL: So I’m struggling as I listen to your remarks, David, to really tell what you mean by consciousness. I’ve tried to distinguish these two different ways of looking at it—the objective view, which is usually what people lapse into when they talk about consciousness. They talk about some neurological property, or they talk about self-reflection, an entity that can create models of its own intelligence and behavior and model itself, or what-if experiments in its mind or have imagination, thinking about itself and transforming models of itself and this kind of self-reflection. That is consciousness. Or maybe it has to do with mirror neurons and that we can empathize—that is to say, understand the conscious or the emotions of somebody else.

But that’s all objective performance. And these—our emotional intelligence, our ability to be funny or be sad or express a loving sentiment, those are things that the brain does. And I’d make the case that we are making progress, exponential progress in understanding the human brain and different regions, and modeling them in mathematical terms and then simulating them and testing those simulations. And the precision of those simulations is gearing up. We can argue about the timeframe. I think, though, within a quarter century or so, we will have detailed models that—and simulations that can then do the same things that the brain does apparently. And we won’t be able to really tell them apart.

That is what the Turing test is all about, that this machine will pass the Turing test. But that is an objective test. We could argue about the rules. Mitch Kapor and I argued for three months about the rules. Turing wasn’t very specific about them. But it is a objective test and it’s an objective property. So I’m not sure if you’re talking about that or talking about the actual sense one has of feeling, your apparent feelings, the subjective sense of consciousness. And so you talk about—

GELERNTER: (inaudible), could I answer that question?

BROOKS: Yeah, let (inaudible).

GELERNTER: You say there are two kinds of consciousness, and I think you’re right. I think most people, when they talk about consciousness, think of something that’s objectively visible. As I said, for my purposes, I want consciousness to mean mental states, mental states —specifically a mental state that has no external functionality.

KURZWEIL: But that’s still—

GELERNTER: You know that you are capable of feeling or being happy. You know you’re capable of thinking of something good that makes you feel good, of thinking of something bad that makes you depressed, or thinking of something outrageous that makes you angry. You know you’re capable of mental states that are your property alone. As you say, there’s objective—absolutely—

KURZWEIL: But these mental states do have—

GELERNTER: That’s what I mean by consciousness.

KURZWEIL: But these mental states still have objective neurological correlates. And in fact, we now have means of where we can begin to look inside the brain with increasing resolution—strike doubling in 3D volume every year—to actually see what’s going on in the brain. So sitting there quietly, thinking happy thoughts and making myself happy, you can—there are actually things going on inside the brain, we’re able to see them. And so now this supposedly subjective mental state is, in fact, becoming an objective behavior. Not—

GELERNTER: Can I comment on that? I think you’re—I think the idea that you’re arguing with Descartes is a straw man approach. I don’t think anybody argues anymore that the mind is a result of mind stuff, some intangible substance that has no relation to the brain. By arguing that consciousness is objective—I’m agreeing with you that consciousness is objective—I’m certainly not denying that it’s created by physical mechanisms. I’m not claiming there’s some magical or transcendental metaphysical property. But that doesn’t change the fact that in terms of the way you understand it and perceive it, your experiences of it is subjective. That was your term, and I’m agreeing with you. And that doesn’t change the fact that it is created by the brain.

Clearly, we’re reaching better and better understandings of the brain and of everything else. You’ve said that a few times, and I certainly don’t disagree. The fact that we’re getting better and better doesn’t mean that necessarily we’re going to reach any arbitrary goal. It depends on our methods. It depends if we understand the problem the right way. It depends if we’re taking the right route. It seems to me that consciousness is necessary. Unless we understand consciousness as this objective phenomenon that we’re all aware of, our brain simulators haven’t really told us anything fundamental about the human mind. Haven’t told us what I want to know.

KURZWEIL: I think our brain simulators are going to have to work not just the level of the Turing test, but at the level of measuring the objective neurological correlates of these supposedly internal mental states. And there’s some information processing going on when we daydream and we think happy thoughts or sad thoughts or worry about something. There’s same kinds of things going on as when we do more visibly intelligent tasks. We’re, in fact, more and more able to penetrate that by seeing what’s going on and modeling these different regions of the brain, including, say, the spindle cells and the mirror neurons, which are involved with things like empathy and emotion—which are uniquely human, although a few other animals have some of them—and really beginning to model this.

We’re at an early stage, and it’s easy to ridicule the primitiveness of today’s technology, which will also always appear primitive compared to what will be feasible, given the exponential progression. But these internal mental states are, in fact, objective behaviors, because we will need to expand our definition of objective behavior to the kinds of things that we can see when we look inside the brain.

GELERNTER: If I could comment on that? If your tests are telling us that they are unable to distinguish that the same thing creates, on the one hand, a mental state of sharply-focused, in which I’m able to concentrate on a problem without my mind drifting and solving it—there’s no way to distinguish that mental state from a mental state in which my mind is wandering, I am unable to focus or concentrate on what I’m doing, and then I start dreaming. In fact, cognitive psychologists have found out that we start dreaming and then we fall asleep. If your tests or your simulators are unable to distinguish between the mental state of dreaming or continuous free association on the one hand and focused logical analytic problem-solving on the other, then I think you’re just telling us that your tests have failed, because we know that these states are different and we want to know why they’re different. It doesn’t do any good to say, well, they’re caused in the same way. We need to explain the difference that we can observe.

BROOKS: Can I ask a question which I think gets at what this disagreement is? Then I’ll ask you two different questions. The question for David is, what would it take to convince you so that you would accept that you could build a conscious computer built on digital substrate? And Ray, what would it take to convince you that digital stuff isn’t good enough, we need some other chemicals or something else that David talked about?

KURZWEIL: To answer it myself, I wouldn’t get too hung up on digital, because, in fact, the brain is not digital. The neurotransmitters are kind of a digitally-controlled analog phenomena. But when we figure out the salient—the important thing is to figure out what is salient and how information is modeled and what these different regions are actually doing to transform information.

The actual neurons are very complex. There’s lots of things going on, but we find out in the—one region of the auditory cortex is basically conducting a certain type of algorithm, the information is represented perhaps by the location of certain neurotransmitters in relation to another, whereas in another case it has to do with the production of some unique neurotransmitter. There’s different ways in which the information is represented. And these are chemical processes, but we can model really anything like that at whatever level of specificity is needed digitally. We know that. We can model it analog—

BROOKS: OK, so you didn’t answer the question. Can you then answer the question? (laughter)

GELERNTER: I will continue in exactly the same spirit, by not answering the question. I wish I could answer the question. It is a very good question and a deep question. Given the fact that mental states that are purely private are also purely subjective, how can we tell when they are present? And the fact is, just as you don’t know how to produce them, I don’t know how to tell whether they are there. It’s a research question, it’s a philosophical question.

It’s—we know how to understand particular technologies. That is, we say I’ve created consciousness and I’ve done it by running software on a digital computer. I can think about that and say I don’t buy that, I don’t believe there’s consciousness there. If you wheel in some other technology, my only stratagem is to try and understand that new technology. I need to understand what you’re doing, I need to understand what moves you’re making, because unfortunately I don’t know of any general test. The only test that one reads about or hears about philosophically is relevant similarity—that is, we assume that our fellow human beings are conscious, because we can see they’re people like us. We assume that if I had mental states, other similar creatures have mental states. And we make that same assumption about animals. And the more similar to us they seem, the more we assume their mental states are like ours.

How are we going to handle creatures who are—or things or entities, objects, that are radically unlike us and are not organic? It’s a hard question and an interesting question. I’d like to see more work done on it.

KURZWEIL: In some ways, they’ll be more like us than animals, because animals are not perfect models of humans either medically or mentally. Whereas as we really reverse-engineer what’s going on, the salient processes, and learn what’s important in the different regions of the brain and recreate those properties and abilities to transform information similar ways, and then get an entity that in fact acts very human-like and a lot more human-like than an animal, for example, can pass a Turing test, which involves mastery of language which animals basically don’t have, for the most part, they will be closer to humans than animals are.

If we really model—take an extreme case. I don’t think this is necessary to model neuron by neuron and neurotransmitter by neurotransmitter, but one could in theory do that. And we have, in fact, do have simulations of neurons that are highly detailed already, of one neuron or a cluster of three or four of them. So why not extend that to 100 billion neurons? It’s theoretically possible, and it’s a different substrate, but it’s really doing the same things. And it’s closer to humans than animals are.

BROOKS: So while David responds, if people who want to ask questions can come to the two microphones. Go ahead.

GELERNTER: When you say act very human-like, this is a key issue. You have to keep in mind that the Turing test is rejected by many people, and has been from the very beginning, as a superficial test of performance, a test that fails to tell us anything about mental states, fails to tell us the things that we really most want to know. So when you say something acts very human-like, that’s exactly what we don’t do when we attribute the presence of consciousness on the basis of relevant similarity.

When I see somebody, even if he isn’t acting human-like at all, if he’s fast asleep, even if he’s out cold, I don’t need to see him do anything, I don’t need to have him answer any fancy questions on the Turing test. I can see he’s a creature like I am, and I therefore attribute to him a mind and believe he’s capable of mental states. On the other hand, the Turing test, which is a test of performance rather than states of being, has been—has certainly failed to convince people who are interested in what you would call the subjective kind of consciousness.

KURZWEIL: Well, I think now we’re—

GELERNTER: That doesn’t tell me anything about—

KURZWEIL: Well, now I think we’re getting somewhere, because I would agree. The Turing test is an objective test. And we can argue about making it super-rigorous and so forth, but—and if an entity passed that test, the super-rigorous one, it is really convincingly human. It’s convincingly funny and sad, and we really—is really displaying those emotions in a way that we cannot distinguish from human beings. But you’re right—I mean, this gets back to a point I made initially. That doesn’t prove that that entity is conscious, and we don’t absolutely know that people are conscious. I think we will come to accept them as conscious. That’s a prediction I can make. But fundamentally, this is the underlying ontological question.

There is actually a role for philosophy, because it’s not fundamentally a scientific question. If you reject the Turing test or any variant of it, then we’re just left with this philosophical issue. My own philosophical take is if an entity seems to be conscious, I would accept its consciousness. But that’s a philosophical and not a scientific position.

BROOKS: So I think we’ll take the first question. And remember, not a monologue, something to provoke discussion.

M: Yeah, no problem. Let’s see. What if everything is conscious and connected, and it’s just a matter of us learning how to communicate and connect with it?

KURZWEIL: That’s a good point, because we can communicate with other humans, to some extent—although history is full of examples where we dehumanize a certain portion of the population and don’t really accept their conscious experience—and we have trouble communicating with animals, so that really underlies the whole animal rights— what’s it like to be a giant squid? Their behavior seems very intelligent, but it’s also very alien and we don’t—there’s no way we can even have the terminology to express that, because it’s not experiences that are human. And that is part of the deep mystery of consciousness and gets at the subjective aspects of it.

But as we do really begin to model our own brain and then extend that to other species, as we’re doing with the genome—we’re now trying to reverse-engineer the genome in other species, and we’ll do the same thing ultimately with the brain—that will give us more insight. We can translate into our own human terms the kinds of mental states as we can see them manifest as we really understand how to model other brains.

GELERNTER: If we think we are communicating with a software-powered robot, we’re kidding ourselves, because we’re using words in a fundamentally different way. To use an example that Turing himself discusses, we could ask the computer or the robot, do you like strawberries, and the computer could lie and say yes or it could, in a sense, tell the truth and say no. But the more fundamental issue is that not only does it not like strawberries, it doesn’t like anything. It’s never had the experience of liking, it’s never had the experience of eating. It doesn’t know what a strawberry is or any other kind of berry or any other kind of fruit or any other kind of food item. It doesn’t know what liking is, it doesn’t know what hating is. It’s using words in a purely syntactic way with no meanings behind them.

KURZWEIL: This is now the Searlean argument, and John Searle’s argument can be really rephrased to prove that the human being has no understanding and no consciousness, because each neuron is just a machine. Instead of just shuffling symbols, it’s just shuffling chemicals. And obviously, just shuffling chemicals around is no different than shuffling symbols around. And if shuffling chemicals and symbols around doesn’t really lead to real understanding or consciousness, then why isn’t that true for a collection of 100 neurons, which are all just little machines, or 100 billion?

GELERNTER: There’s a fundamental distinction, which is software. Software is the distinction. I can’t download your brain onto the computer up there—

KURZWEIL: Well, that’s just a limitation of my brain, because we don’t have—we don’t have quick downloading ports.

GELERNTER: You need somebody else’s brain in the audience?

KURZWEIL: No, that’s something that biology left out. We’re just not going to leave that out of our non-biological base.

GELERNTER: It turns out to be an important point. It’s the fundamental issue—

KURZWEIL: It’s a limitation, not—

GELERNTER: I think there’s a very big difference whether I can take this computer and upload it to a million other computers or to machines that are nothing like this digital computer, to a Turing machine, to an organic computer, to an optical computer. I can upload it to a class full of freshmen, I can upload it to all sorts of things. But your mind is yours and will never be downloaded (multiple conversations; inaudible)—

KURZWEIL: That’s just because we left—

GELERNTER: It’s stuck to your brain.

KURZWEIL: We left out the—

GELERNTER: And I think that’s a thought-provoking fact. I don’t think you can just dismiss it as an—

KURZWEIL: You’re posing that as a—

GELERNTER:—envir—a developmental accident. Maybe it is, but—

KURZWEIL: You’re posing that as a benefit and advantage of biological intelligence, that we don’t have these quick downloading ports to access information—

GELERNTER: Not an advantage. It’s just a fact.

KURZWEIL: But that’s not an advantage. If we added quick downloading ports, which we will add to our non-biological brain emulations, that’s just an added feature. We could leave it out. But we put it in there, that doesn’t deprive it of any capability that it would otherwise have.

GELERNTER: You think you could upload your mind to somebody with a different body, with a different environment, who had a different set of experiences, who had a different set of books, feels things in a different way, has a different set of likes, responds in a different kind of way, and get an exact copy of you? I think that’s a naïve idea. I don’t think there’s any way to upload your mind anywhere else and that lets you upload your entire being, including your body.

KURZWEIL: Well, it’s hard to upload to another person who already has a brain and a body that’s—it’s like trying to upload to a machine that’s incompatible. But ultimately we will be able to gather enough data on a specific brain and simulate that, including our body and our environmental influences.

BROOKS: Next question.

M: Thanks. If we eventually develop a machine which appears intelligent, and let’s say given appropriate body so that it can answer meaningful questions about how does a strawberry taste or something like that or whether it likes strawberries, if we are wondering if this machine is actually experiencing consciousness the same way that we do, why not just ask it? They’ll presumably have no reason to lie if you haven’t specifically gone out of your way to program that in.

KURZWEIL: Well, that doesn’t tell us anything, because we can ask it today. You can ask a character in a video game and it will say, well, I’m really angry or I’m sad or whatever. And we don’t believe it, because it doesn’t—it’s not very convincing yet. It doesn’t—because it doesn’t have the subtle cues and it’s not as complex and not a realistic emulation of—

M: Well, if we built 1000 of them, let’s say—

GELERNTER: I strongly agree with (inaudible)—

M:—presumably they wouldn’t all agree to lie ahead of time. Somebody—one of them might tell us the truth if the answer is no.

BROOKS: We’ll finish that question (multiple conversations; inaudible)—

GELERNTER: I strongly agree. Keep in mind that the whole basis of the Turing test is lying. The computer is instructed to lie and pass itself off as a human being. Turing assumes that everything it says will be a lie. He doesn’t talk about the real deep meaning of lying, or he doesn’t care about that, and that’s fine, that’s not his topic. But he’d—it’s certainly not the case that the computer is in any sense telling the truth. It’s telling you something about its performance, not something about facts or reality or the way it’s made or what its mental life is like.

KURZWEIL: John Searle, by the way, thinks that a snail could be conscious if it had this magic property, which we don’t understand it, that causes consciousness. And when we figure it out, we may discover that snails have it. That’s his view. So I do think that—

GELERNTER: Do you think it’s inherently implausible that we should need a certain chemical to produce a certain result? Do you think chemical structure is irrelevant?

KURZWEIL: No, but we can simulate chemical interactions. We just simulated the other day something that people said will never be able to be simulated, which is protein folding. And we can now take an arbitrary amino acid sequence and actually simulate and watch it fold up, and it’s an accurate simulation (multiple conversations; inaudible)

GELERNTER: You understand it, but you don’t get any amino acids out. As Searle points out, if you want to talk Searlean, you can simulate photosynthesis and no photosynthesis takes place. You can simulate a rainstorm, nobody gets wet. There’s an important distinction. Certainly you’re going to understand the process, but you’re not going to produce the result—

KURZWEIL: Well, if you simulate creativity, you’ll—if you simulate creativity, you’ll get real ideas out.

BROOKS: Next—sure.

M: So up until this point, there seems to have been a lot of discussion just about a fully—just software, just a human or whatnot. But I’m kind of curious your thoughts towards more of a gray area, if it’s possible. That is, if we in some way augment the brain with some sort of electronic component, or somebody has some sort of operation to add something to them. I don’t think it’s been done yet today, but just is it possible to have fully—what you would consider to be a fully conscious human take part of the brain out, say, replace it with something to do a similar function, and then have obviously the person still survive. Is that person conscious? Is it (inaudible)?

KURZWEIL: Absolutely. And we’ve done things like that, which I’ll mention. But I think—in fact, that is the key application or one key application of this technology. We’re not just going to create these superintelligent machines to compete with us from over the horizon. We’re going to enhance our own intelligence, which we do now with the machines in our pockets—and when we put them in our bodies and brains, we’ll enhance our bodies and brains with them.

But we are applying this for medical problems. You can get a pea-sized computer placed in your brain or placed at biological neurons (inaudible) Parkinson’s disease. And in fact, the latest generation now allows you to download new software to your neural implant from outside the patient, and that does replace the function of the corpus of biological neurons. And now you’ve got biological neurons in the vicinity getting signals from this computer where they used to get signals from the biological neurons, and this hybrid works quite well. And there’s about a dozen neural implants, some of which are getting more and more sophisticated, in various stages of development.

So right now we’re trying to bring back "normal" function, although normal human function is in fact a wide range. But ultimately we will be sending blood cell-sized robots to the bloodstream non-invasively to interact with our biological neurons. And that sounds very fantastic. I point out there’s already four major conferences on blood cell-sized devices that can produce therapeutic functions in animals and—we don’t have time to discuss all that, but we will—

BROOKS: Let’s hear David’s response.

GELERNTER: When you talk about technological interventions that could change the brain, it’s a remarkable—it’s a fascinating topic, and it can do a lot of good. And one of the really famous instances of that is the frontal lobotomy, an operation invented in the 1950s or maybe the last 1940s. Made people feel a lot better, but somehow it didn’t really catch on, because it bent their personality out of shape. So the bottom line is not everything that we do, not every technological intervention that affects your mental state is necessarily going to be good.

Now, it is a great thing to be able to come up with something that cures a disease, makes somebody feel better. We need to do as much of that as we can, and we are. But we—it’s impossible to be too careful when you fool around with consciousness. You may make a mistake that you will regret. And lobotomy cases are undoable.

BROOKS: I’m afraid this is going to be the last question.

M: How close do the brain simulation people know they are to the right architecture, and how do they know it? You made the assertion that you don’t need to simulate the neurons in detail, and that the IBM people are simulating a slice of neocortex and that’s good. And I think that is good, but do they have a theory that says this architecture good, this architecture not good enough? How do they measure it?

KURZWEIL: Well, say, in the case of the simulation of a dozen regions of the auditory cortex done on the West Coast, they’ve applied sophisticated psychoacoustic tests to the simulation and they get very similar results as applying the same test to human auditory perception. There’s a simulation of the cerebellum where they apply skill formation tests. It doesn’t prove that these are perfect simulations, but it does show it’s on the right track. And the overall performance of these regions appears to be doing the kinds of things that we can measure, that the biological versions do. And the scale and sophistication and resolution of these simulations is scaling up.

The IBM one on the cerebral cortex is actually going to do it neuron by neuron and ultimately at the chemical level, which I don’t believe is actually necessary when we—ultimately, to actually create those functions, when we learn the salient algorithms, we can basically implement them using our computer science methods more efficiently. But that’s a very useful project to really understand how the brain works.

GELERNTER: I’m all in favor of neural simulations. I think one should keep in mind that we don’t think just with our brains, we think with our brains and our bodies. Ultimately, we’ll have to simulate both. And we also have to keep in mind that unless our simulators can tell us not only what the input/output behavior of the human mind is, but how it understands and how it produces consciousness —unless it can tell us where consciousness comes from, it’s not enough to say it’s an emergent phenomenon. Granted, but how? How does it work? Unless those questions are answered, we don’t understand the human mind. We’re kidding ourselves if we think otherwise.

BROOKS: So with that, I think I’d like to thank both Ray and David. [applause]

Today nature has slipped, perhaps finally, beyond our field of vision.

-O. B. Hardison Jr.

Now after six million years of evolution, where do we go next? How will evolution, our newly arrived intellect, our primal drives and the powerful technologies we continually create, change us?

Our current situation is unlike anything nature has seen before because we are not simply a by-product of evolution, we are ourselves now an agent of evolution. We are this animal, filled with ancient emotions and needs, amplified by our intellects and a conscious mind, embarking on a new century where we are creating fresh tools and technologies so rapidly that we are struggling to keep pace with the very changes we are bringing to the table.

Where will this lead? Will we develop new brain modules, new appendages, revamped capabilities just as we have over the past six million years? Absolutely, but probably not in the way we suspect. It appears, if we look closely, that the DNA that has been such a perfect ally in the evolution of life, may itself be in for a revamping. Evolution may be prowling for a new partner. And the partner may be us, or at least the technologies we make possible.

The irony is that it takes a being like us, a human being, to bring about change this fundamental. The job requires an amalgamation of high intelligence and emotion, conscious intent, primal drives and great quantities of knowledge made possible by minds that can communicate in highly complex ways. If you pulled any one of these out, the future, at least one involving intelligent, conscious creatures like us, would fall apart. It takes not just cleverness, but passion, sometimes fear, fired by focused intention, to create and invent. Without this combination there would be no technologies, no wheels or steam engines or nuclear bombs or computers. And there would be nothing like the world we live in today. At best we would still be huddled in the black African night, eking out whatever existence the predators waiting in the darkness around us would allow. Not even fire would be our friend.

But the traits that have shaped us into the human beings we are have endowed us with strange abilities, and they are hurtling us into a future radically unlike the past out of which we have emerged. And that future will be profoundly different from anything most of us can imagine.

Take the thinking of Hans Moravec as an object lesson. Moravec is a highly respected robotics scientist at Carnegie Mellon University. In the late 1980s, he quietly passed his spare time writing a book that predicted the end of the human race. The book, entitled Mind Children, didn’t predict that we would destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons or rampant, self-inflicted diseases, or undo the species with self-replicating nanotechnology. Instead, Moravec, who had an abiding and life-long fascination with intelligent machines, predicted we would invent ourselves out of existence, and robots would be the technology of choice.

In a subsequent book (Robot, Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind) Moravec explained that this transformation would unfold one technological generation at a time, and, because of the blistering rate of change today, would pretty much run its course by the middle of the 21^st century. We would manage this by boosting robots up the evolutionary ladder, roughly in decade-long increments, making them smarter, more mobile, more like us. First they would be as intelligent as insects or a simple guppy (we are about there right now), then lab rats, then monkeys and chimps until, finally one day, the machines would become more adept and adaptive than their makers. That, of course, would quickly raise the question: “Now who is in charge?” Would Homo sapiens, after some 200,000 years living on top of the planet’s food chain, no longer rule the roost? Would we, in the cramped space of this evolutionary ellipsis, find ourselves playing Neanderthal to technologies that had become, like us, self-aware—the first conscious tools built by a conscious toolmaking creature?

The unavoidable answer would be, yes. Evolution will have found through us a new way to make a new creature; one that could forsake its ladders of DNA and the fragile, carbon-based biology that nature had been using for nearly four million millennia to manage the job.

The “end” would not come in the form of a Terminator style invasion, it would simply unfold in the natural course of evolutionary events where one species, better adapted to its environment replaces another that is no longer very fit to continue. Except the new species wouldn’t be cobbled out of DNA, it would be fashioned from silicon, alloy, and who knows what else, invented by us. But once successfully invented, we wouldn’t be necessary any more.

Whether events will play out like this or not remains to be seen. But Moravec’s scenario makes a point—the world and the life upon it changes, and simply because we are the agents of change, doesn’t mean we won’t be affected by it.

***

It is strange to think of the invention of machines, even robotic ones, as having anything to do with Darwin’s natural selection. We usually regard evolution as biological—a world of cells, DNA and “living” creatures. And we think of our machines as unalive, unintelligent and shifted by economic forces more than natural ones. But it isn’t written anywhere that evolution has to be constrained by what we traditionally think of as biology. In fact each day the lines between biology and technology, humans and the machines we create are blurring. We are already part and parcel of our technology.

Since the day Homo habilis whacked his first flint knife out of flakes of flint, it has been difficult to know whether we invented our tools or our tools invented us. The world economy would crash if its computer systems failed. We can’t live without laptops, palmtops, cell phones or iPods, which grow continually smaller and more powerful. We regularly engineer genes, despite the raging debates over stem cell therapy. A human being will very likely be cloned within the next five years. We now have computer processors working at the nano (molecular) level and microelectromechanical machines (MEMS) that operate at cellular dimensions. Already electronic prosthetics make direct connections with human nerves, and electronic brain implants for Parkinson’s disease and weak hearts are common place. Scientists are even experimenting with electronic, implantable eyes. New clothing weaves digital technologies into their fiber and brings them a step closer to being a part of us. The military are working on “battlesuits” that will fit like gloves, a kind of second skin and amplify a soldier’s senses, strength and ability to communicate, even triangulate the direction of a bullet headed his or her way.

What next? Speech, writing and art enabled us to share inner feelings in new and powerful ways. But it takes months or years to learn a new language or how to play the piano or master the art of engineering bridges and buildings. Will new technologies that accelerate communication (virtual reality, telepresence, digital implants, nanotechnology) create new ways to communicate that can by-pass speech? Will we someday communicate by a kind of digital telepathy, downloading information, experiences, skills, even emotions the way we download a file from the Internet to our laptop? Will we become machines, or will machines become more powerful versions of us? And if any of this comes to pass, what ethical issues do we face? At what point to do we stop being human?

Lynn Margulis, probably the world’s leading microbiologist, has argued that this blurring of technology and biology isn’t really all that new. She has observed¹ that the shells of clams and snails are a kind of technology dressed in biological clothing. Is there really that much difference between the vast skyscrapers we build or the malls in which we shop, even the cars we drive around, and the hull of a seed? Seeds and clam shells, which are not alive, hold in them a little bit of water and carbon and DNA, ready to replicate when the time is right, yet we don’t distinguish them from the life they hold. Why should it be any different with office buildings, hospitals and space shuttles?

Put another way, we may make a distinction between living things and the tools those things happen to create, but nature does not. The processes of evolution simply witness new adaptations and preserve those that perform better than others. That would make Homo habilis’s first flint knife a form of biology as sure as a clamshell, one that set our ancestors on a fresh evolutionary path just as if their DNA had been tweaked to create a new, physical mutation, say an opposable thumb or a big toe.

Even if these technological adaptations were outside what we might consider normal biological bounds, the effect was just as profound, and far more rapid. In an evolutionary snap, that first flint knife changed what we ate and how we interacted with the world and one another. It enhanced our chances of survival. It accelerated our brain growth which in turn allowed us to create still more tools which led to yet bigger brains. And on we went, continually and with increasing speed and sophistication, fashioning progressively more complex technologies right up to the genetic techniques that enable us to fiddle with the self-same ribbons of our chromosomes that made the brains that conceived tools in the first place. If this is true, all of our technologies are an extension of us, and each human invention is really another expression of biological evolution.

Moravec and Margulis aren’t alone in asking questions that force us to bend our traditional thinking about evolution. Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has, like Moravec, pointed out that the rate of technological change is increasing at an exponential rate. Also like Moravec, he foresees machines as intelligent as we are evolving by mid century. Unlike Moravec he doesn’t necessarily believe they will arrive in the form of robots.

Initially Kurzweil sees us reengineering ourselves genetically so that we will live longer and healthier lives than the DNA we were born with might normally allow. We will first rejigger genes to reduce disease, grow replacement organs, and generally postpone many of the ravages of old age. This, he says, will get us to a time late in the 2020s when we can create molecule-sized nanomachines that we will program to tackle jobs our DNA never evolved naturally to undertake.

Once these advances are in place we will not simply slow aging, but reverse it, cleaning up and rebuilding our bodies molecule by molecule. We will also use them to amplify our intelligence; nestling them among the billions of neurons that already exist inside our brains. Our memories will improve; we will create entirely new, virtual experiences, on command, and take human imagination to levels our currently unenhanced brains can’t begin to conceive.² In time (but pretty quickly) we will reverse engineer the human brain into a vastly more powerful, digital version.

This view of the futures isn’t fundamentally different from Moravec’s brain-to-robot download, except it is more gradual. Either way we will have melded with our technology if, in fact, those barriers ever really existed in the first place, and in the end, erase the lines between bits, bytes, neurons and atoms.

Or looked at another way, we will have evolved into another species. We will no longer be Homo sapiens, but Cyber sapiens—a creature part digital and part biological that will have placed more distance between its DNA and the destinies they force upon us than any other animal. And we will have become a creature capable of steering its own evolution (“cyber” derives from the Greek word for a ship’s steersman or navigator—kybernetes). The world will face an entirely new state of affairs.

Why would we allow ourselves to be displaced? Because in the end, we won’t really have a choice. Our own inventiveness has already unhinged our environment so thoroughly that we are struggling to keep up. In a supreme irony we have created a world fundamentally different from the one into which we originally emerged. A planet with six and a half billion creatures on it, traveling in flying machines every day by the millions, their minds roped together by satellites and fiber optic cable, rearranging molecules on the one hand and leveling continents of rain forest on the other, growing food and shipping it overnight by the trillions of tons—all of this is a far cry from the hunter-gatherer, nomadic life for which evolution had fashioned us 200,000 years ago.

So it seems the long habit of our inventiveness has placed us in a pickle. In the one-upmanship of evolution, our tools have rendered the world more complex and that complexity requires the invention of still more complex tools to help us keep it all under control. Our new tools enable us to adapt more rapidly, but one advance begs the creation of another, and each increasingly powerful suite of inventions shifts the world around us so powerfully that still more adaptation is required.

The only way to survive is to move faster, get smarter, change with the changes, and the best way to do that is to amplify ourselves eventually right out of our own DNA so we can survive the new environments—physical, emotional and mental—that we keep recreating.

Is all of this too implausible to consider? Will Homo sapiens really give way to Cyber sapiens that seamlessly integrate the molecular and digital worlds just as our ancestors merged the technological and biological worlds two million years ago? Evolution has presided over stranger things. It took billions of years before the switching and swapping of genes brought us into existence. Our particular brain then took 200,000 years to get us from running around in skins with stone weapons to the world we live in today. Evolution is all about the implausible. And the drive to survive is a relentless shaper of the seemingly impossible. We ourselves are the best proof.

If all of this should happen; if DNA itself goes the way of the dinosaur, what sort of creature will Cyber sapiens be? In some ways we can’t know the answer anymore than Homo erectus could imagine how his successors would someday create movies, invent computers and write symphonies. Our progeny, our “mind children,” will certainly be more intelligent with brains that are both massively parallel, like the current version we have, and unimaginably fast. But what of those primal drives that we carry inside our skulls, and those non-verbal, unconscious ways of communicating? What of laughter and crying and kissing? Will Cyber sapiens know a good joke when he hears one, or smile appreciatively at a fine line of poetry? Will he tousle the machine made hair of his offspring, hold the hand of the one he loves, kiss soulfully, wantonly and uncontrollably? Will there be a difference between the “brains” and behaviors of he and she? Will there even be a he and a she? And what of pheromones and body language and nervous giggles? Maybe they will have served their purpose and gone away. Will Cyber sapiens sleep, and if they do, will they dream? Will they connive and gossip, grow mad with jealousy, plot and murder? Will they carry with them a deep, if machine made, unconscious that is the dark matter of the human mind, or will all of those primeval secrets be revealed in the bright light cast by their newly minted brains?

We may face these questions sooner than we imagine. The future gathers speed every day.

I’d like to think the evolutionary innovations and legacies that have combined to make us so remarkable, and so human, won’t be left entirely behind as we march ahead. Perhaps they can’t be. After all, evolution does have a way of working with what is already there, and even after six million years of wrenching change, we still carry with us the echoes of our animal ancestors. Maybe the best of those echoes will remain. After all, as heavy as some baggage can be, preserving a few select pieces might be a good thing, even if we are freaks of nature.

1. This was during a conversation with Professor Margulis at her home in western Massachusetts.

2. Note: the current version of a creature can never comprehend the exerience of the creature that will follow because it does not yet have the evolved capacity (whatever it is) that will make that experience possible. We cannot accurately imagine what a digitally enhanced brain will conceive any more than Homo erectus could imagine our experience of the world.

© 2006 Chip Walter. Reprinted with permission.

“That should be the overarching reason for moving there, not to mine resources or for the sake of a grand adventure. And the move outward must start with the Moon, not Mars. The Moon is three or four days away, not a year, so it makes logistical sense and is cheaper. And if there’s an accident on the Moon, help or a safe haven are likewise four days away. Finally, the lunar colony ought to be NASA’s overriding (but not only) mission, especially since it walked off a cliff after Apollo. That’s what the book is about.It’s my gift to the home planet.”

Burrows presents a dramatic scenario of a killer-asteroid impact and highlights other existential risks facing the Earth, including nuclear war, terrorism, and in the future, graygoo and nanoweapons—”a far greater danger” than nuclear weapons, he says, quoting Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines. And he lays out a revitalized national space program that coordinates efforts in global defense, environmental protection, communications, and military security.

“Planetary defense should be conducted, not as a major program within the space agency, but as the agency’s highly focused, overarching, mission…. The core mission, in its totality, would send humans and robots to space for mutually supportive operations specifically designed to protect the planet. That is to say, NASA, its collective foreign counterparts, and other cooperating U.S. agencies, should assume the role of Earth’s guardians.” (From Chapter 8, The Guardians, which can be read here.)

Reviving the spirit of Gerard O’Neill

Futurist/author Howard Bloom agrees, and is bringing together key space activists on October 21st in Las Cruces, New Mexico, to help make imaginative new space programs—including solar power from space to head off a global energy crisis—a key factor in the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections.

“One or more generations of Americans does not see a reason for spending a dime on space,” he says. “One or more generations of Americans imprinted as kids on something very different than we did. They imprinted on spaceship Earth, on the view that this is a planet with dwindling resources and that we have sinned against nature and must atone.

“Our goal is to accomplish in the early 21st century what Werner Von Braun, Willy Ley, Chesley Bonestell, and Robert Heinlein accomplished in the early 1950s with their TV show (Tom Corbett Space Cadet), their film (Destination Moon), their magazine articles,and their books. They planted the image of an as-yet-unborn space program so tangibly in the public imagination that it made Americans hunger for space for half a century.

“I’d like to propose an NFL-style press campaign to elevate the visibility of the space efforts of the non-NASA players and to raise the level of public aspiration by inspiring it with the immediacy of a new frontier we can open wide in our lifetime, a new frontier that can dramatically upscale the lives of our children and of their children after them.

“As a scientist of mass behavior who did his fieldwork byf ounding the leading public relations firm in the music industry, I have a sense of a structure that can achieve this aim. Each of our participants also is far above average in organizational abilities. Together I believe we can forge a plan that’s practical, delivers results, and lifts the eyes of humanity.”

The LifeboatFoundation, which also supports this goal, is “assembling the best minds on the planet to develop these and other strategies for dealing with existential risks,” said founder Eric Klien.”In the near future, terrorism will become a serious problem, first with biological and nuclear weapons and later with nanoweapons. It is time to secure the future of humanity by establishing a locationo ff this planet.”

Uploading to the moon?

The moon as digital archive could also play an important future role in the CyBeRev program being developed by satellite communications pioneer Dr.Martine Rothblatt. She visualizes storing one’s life history —”digital reflections of their mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values—with as great a fidelity as is possible.”

Future developments in mind-uploading technology and regenerative medicine would then “enable the recovered cyberconscious CyBeRev person to transfer their mind into a synthetic body (including brain), such as one made out of nanotechnological materials.”

Eventually, these would be instantiated into “a flesh body (including brain) grown from totipotent stem cells in which genetice ngineering techniques have suppressed the development of a separate mind.”

Interview by Gregory T. Huang

Technology doesn’t make everyone happy. Just ask computer scientist Bill Joy, who has pioneered everything from operating systems to networking software. These days the Silicon Valley guru is best known for preaching about the perils of technology with a gloom that belies his name. Joy’s message is simple: limit access to information and technologies that could put unprecedented power into the hands of malign individuals (what is sometimes called asymmetric warfare). He is also translating that message into action: earlier this year, his venture-capital firm announced a $200 million initiative to fund projects in biodefence and preparation for pandemics. Gregory T. Huang caught up with Joy at the recent Technology Entertainment Design conference in Monterey, California.

Do you think your fears about technological abuse have been proven right since your Wired essay?

When I wrote that essay in 2000, I was very concerned about the potential for abuse. Throughout history, we dealt with individuals through the Ten Commandments, cities through individual liberty, and nation states through mutual non-aggression plus an international bargain to keep the peace. Now we face an asymmetric situation where technology is so powerful that it extends beyond nations to individuals — some with revenge on their minds. On 11 September 2001 I was living in New York City. Our company had a floor in a building that went down. I had a friend on a plane that crashed. That was a huge warning about asymmetric warfare and terrorism.

Did we learn the right lesson?

We can’t give up the rule of law to fight an asymmetric threat, which is what we seem to be doing at the moment, because that is to give up what makes us a civilisation. A million-dollar act causes a billion dollars’ damage and then a trillion-dollar response that makes the problem worse. September 11 was essentially a collision of early 20th-century technology: the aeroplane and the skyscraper. We don’t want to see a collision of 21st-century technology.

What would that sort of collision look like?

A recent article in Science said the 1918 flu is too dangerous to FedEx: if you want to work on it in a lab, just reconstruct it yourself. The reason we can do this is a consequence of the fact that new technologies tend to be digital. You can download gene sequences of pathogens from the internet. So individuals and small groups super-empowered by access to self-replicating technologies are clearly a danger. They can cause a pandemic.

Why do pandemics pose such a huge danger?

AIDS is a sort of pandemic, but it moves slowly. We don’t have much experience with the fast-moving varieties. We are not very good as a society at adapting to things we don’t have gut-level experience with. People don’t understand the magnitude of the problem: in terms of the number of deaths, there’s a factor of 1000 between a pandemic and a normal flu season. Public policy has not been constructive, and scientists continue to publish pathogen sequences, which is really quite dangerous.

Why is it so dangerous?

If in turning AIDS into a chronic disease, or making cocktails of antivirals for flu, or using systems biology to construct broad-spectrum cures for many diseases, we make the tools universally available to people of bad intent, I don’t know how we will defend ourselves. We have only a certain amount of time to come to our senses and realise some information has to be handled in a different way. We can reduce the risk greatly without losing much of our ability to innovate. I understand why scientists are reluctant, but it’s the only ethically responsible thing to do.

So more technology is making the problem worse?

Unfortunately, yes. We need more policy.

What would that look like?

We could use the very strong force of markets. Rather than regulate things, we could price catastrophe into the cost of doing business. Right now, if you want approval for things, you go through a regulatory system. If we used insurance and actuaries to manage risk, we might have a more rational process. Things judged to be dangerous would be expensive, and the most expensive would be withdrawn. Drugs would make it to market on economic estimates of risk not regulatory evaluations of safety. This process could also be used to make companies more liable for the environmental consequences of their products. It’s both less regulation and more accountability.

How are you combating the threat of pandemics?

We recently raised $200 million for biodefence and pandemic preparedness. We have started out focusing on bird flu. We need several antivirals, better surveillance, rapid diagnostics and new kinds of vaccines that can be manufactured quickly. If we fill these gaps, we can reduce the risk of a pandemic.

Do other technological advances excite you?

I have great confidence that we will extend the limits of Moore’s law to give us another factor of 100 in what computer chips can do. If a computer costs $1000 today, we can have that for $10 in 2020. The challenge is: will we develop educational tools to take advantage of such devices? That’s a great force for peace.

Another area that gives us hope is new materials. The world’s urban population is expected to more than double to 6 billion this century. We need clean water, energy and transportation. Carbon nanotubes have incredible properties, and can be applied to develop fuel cells, make clean water, or make ethanol for electric-powered transport. My company has dedicated $100 million to this.

How do you see the increasing connectedness of human societies affecting innovation?

It’s diffusing ideas at an incredible rate. You can use communications and search tools and find out incredible things. You see companies doing interesting things, and you can find out huge amounts very quickly. We can write a worldwide research briefing paper in an hour if we shut the door and unplug the telephone. That’s something you couldn’t do before.

What’s the downside?

It’s like putting a stick in a hornet’s nest. We have religious and secular societies coming into contact, pre-Enlightenment values conflicting with Enlightenment values. It will be a messy process of change. Technology has brought western pop culture to the rest of the world. I’m not a fan of it, but the values it has brought to the world actually offend people in cultures that have been around for longer than my particular set of world views.

Will the human race survive the next 100 years?

We have to make it through a pandemic to understand the nature of that sort of threat. Whether we do that before we unleash the technology, I’m not sure. Either way, I don’t believe we will become extinct this century, though we could make a pretty big mess. I hope we can do some sensible things. It is not enough to do great science and technology, we need sensible policy. We still think that if we find true things and publish them, good things happen. We should not be that naive.

If you could ask the god of technology one question, what would it be?

It seems that a perfect immune system is a disadvantage. If you are perfectly immune, you cannot evolve. A lot of evolution occurs because of selective pressure that your perfect immune system would prevent. This would leave the abusers of biotechnology with the advantage over the defenders, because society needs to be vulnerable so it can evolve. My question is, is that true, because it would prove that we had better limit access to some information. It would mean not only that we cannot make a perfect immune system, but that it would be a bad idea.

© 2006 New Scientist

The development of molecular nanotechnology (MNT) promises to lead rapidly to cheap superior replacements for a large majority of durable goods, a substantial fraction of all non-durable goods, all existing utilities, and some services. For this reason and due to the relatively low expected cost of developing nanofactories,¹ MNT represents the largest commercial opportunity of all time. Unfortunately, the very size of the opportunity —combined with its extreme suddenness, military significance, potential for disruption of existing institutions, and ease of duplication—creates certain severe complications that lead to difficulties in capturing the value created.

MNT also has the potential to impact the timeframes and severities of a number of major global risks such as those of terrorism, emergent disease, global warming, omnicidal war, and human extinction due to competition by either intelligent or unintelligent robotic competitors, for which reason there are important non-commercial motivations for preventing its unrestricted utilization. As a result of these difficulties and of the intrinsic uncertainty associated with any particular attempt to develop MNT, commercial development of MNT is likely to be much less rapid than would be predicted from a simple consideration of the value to be created, relevant time horizon, and risk adjusted discount rate.

Despite this, it remains highly probable that MNT will first be realized by a commercial project for the simple reason that probabilistic priors so strongly favor commercial development of new technologies. A slew of militarily relevant technologies were developed by the US, German, and Russian governments during the Second World War and in its aftermath, but that was at a time when the commercial and public sectors were far more fully integrated than they are today and when the external pressures forcing governmental efficacy were greater. By contrast, over the last few decades, virtually every significant technological development has been commercial in origin (or even recreational, e.g. the Open Source movement and SpaceShip One) rather than public. Governmental R&D initiatives, such as those aimed at curing cancer and AIDS and at developing space travel and fusion power have tended to fail totally or almost totally during the past 30+ years.

Given that an important subset of possible scenarios are driven by commercial development, it seems prudent to examine in some detail the major features of most commercial scenarios and to identify the ways in which developers may experience unique difficulties distinct from those associated with the development of other products and the ways in which they may manage those difficulties. This paper will attempt to do that, examining the probable implications of both relatively open and relatively secretive development programs in the event of successful development of MNT. It will be assumed that the developers are highly rational and informed, and that they are attempting to maximize profit in the relatively short term while avoiding the most serious risks of MNT. Development will be assumed to occur within the next 20 years, over the backdrop of a world politically and technologically fairly similar to our own, and with a historically typical gap of a few years between the initial development of the technology and its successful imitation or implementation by competing projects. It also will be assumed that the more powerful MNT applications, such as those in intelligence amplification, neuroscience, extremely powerful distributed robotic systems, and artificial intelligence (AI) will take some time to emerge even given nanofactories and massive funding.

Part 1: Competitive Strategy

Pricing

The simplest and most traditional of the problems facing MNT developers is competitive pricing. Setting the prices of MNT goods close to the cost of production provides little profit with which to expand or compensate for risk undertaken, while setting prices too high threatens both to unnecessarily reduce consumption below the optimal level and to draw both legal and illegal competitors into the field. In addition, given the number of industries in which MNT products are likely to compete and the political clout of many of those industries, either high or low prices could motivate antitrust concerns. Theoretically, a higher price is indicative of a monopoly while a lower price indicates competition, but a lower price will also lead to more successful and rapid competition with existing companies and to greater market share, and this could be seen as evidence of monopoly status or of anticompetitive tactics.

Motivating competitors to develop MNT is probably the most serious risk associated with high pricing. In order to minimize this risk it will be necessary for prices to be relatively low, and also for expenses to appear as great as possible. It will be particularly desirable (from the commercial developer’s point of view) that the apparent cost of developing MNT be as great as possible, as this is the expense that can most easily be inflated. One way in which this can be done is to publicly spend as much money as possible on research ostensibly aimed at developing nanofactories over a fairly long period of time after nanofactories actually have been developed. Money can soundly be borrowed in order to fund this research, even at high interest rates, due to the certainty of eventual success. Meanwhile, profits can be generated via the sale of supposedly incremental results of the nanofactory research such as gem quality or better diamonds, doped silicon computers modestly more powerful than those otherwise available at a given price, and inexpensive carbon nanotubes.

Once the nanofactories are publicly acknowledged to exist, the apparent low hanging fruit associated with the supposed development trajectory will be depleted, and a substantial fraction of the global pool of technical experts plausibly capable of relevant work will have already been recruited, discouraging imitation. In addition, the creditors will constitute a class of stakeholders in the new technology who are nonetheless integrated into the existing economic system. Loan repayment will contribute to the justification of profit to the public and to the government. In general, the public appears to accept the legitimacy of high profit margins most readily when the product in question is an extremely expensive luxury, an extremely inexpensive everyday item, or a new product with an explicit need to amortize development costs. It is important to point out that it is excessive profit margins, not excessive profits that usually are considered objectionable. For this reason, actual profits will be greater if expenses can be increased, because the dollar value of a 200% markup is larger on a product costing $100 to produce than on one costing $10. Wasteful expenditures on supposed inputs also can create stakeholders.

Like software, restricted versions of MNT products can easily be designed and can be sold for lower prices than unrestricted versions. For instance, less expensive copies of a given product can be sold to less wealthy countries, or even less wealthy regions within a country. This might be accomplished without competing with the products sold to wealthier regions by installing GPS or inertial locators to monitor product location and disable them from functioning outside of their licensed area. In this manner, profitability can be maximized by selling to all potential customers for prices that constitute a reasonable fraction of their willingness to pay. With built-in biometric sensors, some MNT devices could even be assigned prices based on the personal characteristics of their purchaser. In addition to maximizing profit, this sort of strategy should greatly reduce any humanitarian concerns regarding the distribution of MNT products. The public generally accepts the existence of restricted software without resentment. Nanostructured physical objects can be made more difficult to hack than either software or contemporary hardware, so the restrictions on use built into MNT products can be more robust than those built into today’s printers or software.

IP Protection

The most likely outcome of patenting nanofactories in any given country would be widespread patent violation both by other countries and by many criminal organizations. This would probably be followed by the slew of problems² that long have been predicted to accompany uncontrolled MNT development, such as unstable arms races, malicious grey goo, and massively oppressive MNT empowered governments. In addition, pirate nanofactories would be used to build nanofactories of unpatented design, which then would be patented.

All this does not mean that IP law cannot contribute some value to an MNT “first mover.” A large number of patents of variable scope can be produced to restrict the products that a competing MNT developer can produce legally. Patents on key components can obstruct possible commercial efforts to develop competing nanofactories without revealing too much about the workings of existing nanofactories. In a field as large and as unexplored as nanotechnology, there surely will be room for a number of extremely broad patents that can be used to slow down competitors. In such a fast moving field, even a patent that delays competition by a few months before being overturned could be extremely valuable. Potential patents might include mechanochemistry, carbon mechanochemistry, self-replicating machines, self-replicating programmable productive systems, diamondoid nanoscale machines, and more, but should be chosen to avoid revealing too much about how a nanofactory can be built.

Governments may attempt to force developers to share MNT production capabilities or may simply steal such capabilities. When high-level officials finally begin to distinguish between reality and science fantasy and to recognize the technology’s potential, they rightly will see MNT as a national security issue. However, preventing simple theft is relatively easy. Nanofactories can be made large enough that they can’t be stolen covertly and/or lost. They can also be networked wirelessly or otherwise equipped for easy inventory. It would add little complexity to equip all nanofactories with oxidative self-destruction systems. The best way to resist forceful interrogation is probably to not have any individuals within the company who know everything or almost everything that is needed in order to build a new nanofactory, and to hold out the threat of not doing business with countries that violate the company’s rights. Directly threatening a country like the United States in this manner would be unwise. Rather than doing that, an indirect threat could be delivered by setting up production facilities in some high political risk countries with little respect for private property. If this is done, it is likely that one of these countries will attempt to steal MNT production capabilities prior to any developed country doing so. If the company responds by destroying all stolen assets, not sharing information, and refusing to trade with that country, this will deter other nations from repeating their mistake, at least in the short term. The desire not to imitate the behavior of disreputable states will be another incentive for developed countries to respect the rights of the developing company.

Throughout the early commercialization of MNT, the continual borrowing of as much money as possible will be a major imperative. This is true for several reasons. The first of these is that it is important to retain control of the company and associated technology in order to implement a relatively long-term plan rather than one that might maximize shareholder profits in the very short term, for which reason stock should not be sold to raise capital. The second is that over the first decade or so, the scale of operation associated with the developing company will be continually increasing at such a rate as to make even ludicrous debts from a few years back trivial. The third reason is to acquire the previously mentioned sets of justificatory expenses and of influential stake-holding creditors. A fourth reason will become relevant later in development, once the potential of MNT is well established and the broader public and public intellectuals become hostile. Hostility is a nearly certain early result of any massive technological disruption regardless of the quality of life improvements it makes available (aging reversal technologies may turn out to be an exception to this generalization, since their psychological impact will be unprecedented in scope and is not easily predicted, but thus far even aging reversal seems to fit this generalization). As hostility develops in response to massive technological impact, it may be both possible and desirable to slow governmental activity by reducing governmental access to funds. This might be accomplished by competing with the government to drive up the price of debt and by releasing products which make an attractive lifestyle achievable on the interest payments from a moderate amount of high yield debt, reducing the size of the work-force and thus increasing the cost of running a large bureaucracy. Such actions should be undertaken gradually so that they are not interpreted as an attack on borrowers and bureaucracies, as that would lead to escalation. By raising both the interest rate and the wages of skilled labor, potential competitors can be further prevented from developing MNT independently.

Dealing with Opposition

Due to the potential for economic and social disruption, some countries may refuse to allow the import of MNT-derived products. This is not a serious problem for an MNT producer. A general boycott by all major nations is extremely unlikely, especially considering the magnitude of the benefits that MNT will make available. Tariffs would take some time to put into effect and whatever nation stood to improve its trade balance via MNT exports would petition the WTO for tariff elimination. In addition, MNT can be used to produce traditional capital for the production of non-MNT products.4

One of the earliest products released by an MNT developer is likely to be inexpensive hydrocarbons for fuel and other applications. These can be made by harvesting solar energy over the oceans, using it to hydrolyze water, and using the hydrogen to reduce atmospheric or other (limestone?) CO2. The machinery for all of this can be produced quickly in any quantity with MNT. Floating solar platforms can be made with either hydrocarbon production or MNT manufacturing capabilities. The manufacturing centers should be designed to utilize the hydrocarbons as feedstock and solar energy as a power source in order to rapidly produce more platforms of both types. Design and control for such platforms should be non-problematic, and their products could be sold on the global petrochemicals and natural gas market. In this case, there would be no practical difference between a country that chooses to purchase oil from traditional sources and one that purchases MNT-derived oil, as both would apply demand to the same pool of global production and impacting the same global price, making boycotts ineffective unless they were extremely broad. Hydrocarbon storage facilities probably will have to conform to all normal laws regarding the storage and transport of hydrocarbons, complicating implementation somewhat. However, simply violating regulations and hiring legal teams to delay the imposition of fines until they are no longer relevant may be an acceptable strategy for faster implementation if the regulatory framework would otherwise slow development overly much.

While MNT will accelerate the development of new products, it will reduce the time required to build new capital even more. As a result, production capabilities sufficient to satisfy global petrochemical demand should take much less time to develop than designs capable of competing in a wide variety of industries. The revenue generated via the initial products will be an important part of what enables the rapid development of newer products.

The revenue from this early activity will be more than sufficient to hire as many researchers and administrators as can be productively utilized to develop new MNT designs. Integrating so many new employees without critical security risks will be a difficult problem, but it should be a manageable one as there are already many companies that face similar difficulties. At this point, the MNT developers also should have enough money to purchase both public opinion and political influence in so far as these goods can be rapidly purchased.

In order to minimize opposition it will be critically important for the developers not to be seen as a non-competitive monolith. This will be particularly difficult if MNT development is overt as opposed to remaining a secret, but it is probably possible under either secret or public development. The company may be best able to avoid conveying the impression of monopoly if it carefully and legally shares its technology with a few select partners who thoroughly appreciate the dangers associated with MNT (especially the critical dangers of uncontrolled AI and unstable arms races), the need to avoid them, and the consequent need to avoid further disseminating the basic technology. If these partners compete in the production and sale of relatively safe MNT products, it is possible that the market generally will be seen as saturated and further entrants will be discouraged. This decision would constitute a non-secretive alternative to the earlier prospect of inflating the apparent cost and difficulty of MNT development, although both strategies could be pursued sequentially. In the case of such a strategy, as in contemporary oligopoly arrangements, branding will become an extremely important part of profit maximization. A more trusted brand probably would be able to charge a substantial premium, especially for nanomedical products and services once those are developed.
d) First Mover Advantages

A large fraction of the profitability associated with nanomedicine, and to a lesser degree that associated with any new MNT product, is likely to occur during the period of initial release. This is true because MNT products often will solve problems cleanly and completely, leaving no significant vestigial market. For instance, one of the first novel nanomedical devices produced using MNT is likely to be a powder of biocompatible glucose oxygen fuel cells with internal temperature sensors to avoid excess waste heat and a binding site for later removal from the bloodstream. The purpose of this device would be simply to burn fuel, producing waste heat. From the public’s perspective it will be a rapid weight loss infusion capable of safely producing one to two pounds of weight loss per day (or several times that in extremely cold weather or while the body is immersed in cool water). Once this system is safely developed and successfully marketed, the market effectively will be gone. People may continue to become overweight, but the world’s accumulated pool of overweight people willing to use nanomedicine will be expended. Those overweight people who are reluctant to use new medical technologies will surely still prefer, when they eventually decide to use one, to use the established brand even if it costs somewhat more than its competition, as its safety will have been more thoroughly established. Furthermore, later nanomedical devices will incorporate the weight loss function as a mere side effect of their other capabilities, making this design obsolete. In other fields, the advantages from safety, branding, superior R&D, and expansion into a technological frontier will not favor the first mover as completely, but it is a basic economic result that, all else being equal, oligopoly quantity competition leaves first movers with dominant market share even in the long run.³

Given the above result, are competing MNT producers likely to engage in the alternation of de facto collusion and quantity or monopolistic competition typical of contemporary oligopolies? The simple answer is yes, at least in the short term, as this behavior maximizes short run profits for all competitors under the constraints imposed by antitrust law and prisoner’s dilemmas. However, MNT will be associated with novel productive powers that may call the default assumption into doubt. For instance, the traditional MNT vision of home manufacturing, the software metaphor of unlimited manufacturing capacity matching production precisely to demand, and even the growing paradigm of online agent-based purchasing all suggest price competition as a plausible alternative. Still, there seem to be few large examples of actual price competition in the world of retail, even where they would be most expected, such as in the sale of bottled water, public domain IP, internet retailing, and the like. Even freelance service work such as housekeeping, therapy, tutoring, and most other examples of work by the self employed are far from perfectly competitive, with agencies matching consumers to producers and keeping large commissions and with many producers spending more time searching for clients than working, and demanding far more for an hour of work than the value of an hour of their time.

By reducing the scale of manufacture, in addition to improving the ability to match supply to demand, MNT and nanoblock⁴ assembly seem likely to produce a world where retail is relatively more important and wholesale less. Wal-Mart or its successor still may sell MNT-built products, but if they do, they probably will sell them primarily through large factory/grocery stores rather than from giant wholesale stores, as the combination of a nanofactory with virtual reality environments for trying out products will greatly reduce the necessary floor space and inventory space. It is also reasonable to suggest that members of a much wealthier society will be less inclined to travel substantial distances in order to shop, and less likely to accept uninteresting work for under ten dollars an hour. Smaller stores that offer a better atmosphere and knowledgeable service thus will have both more customers and less difficulty finding employees. As a result, brands will be easily differentiated and price competition will be even less prevalent than it is today.

The sale of energy will provide the first MNT mover with yet another advantage over later competitors. If claims can be established to solar energy streams sufficient to satisfy global energy demand, and environmental laws can be passed to restrict the utilization of solar energy streams other than those initially tapped, competitors may have to pay a larger amount for solar energy inputs than first movers.

At this point, it is still far from clear whether the developers of MNT will or should choose to publicize their achievement. Their decision probably will be driven in part by the nature of the company that makes the final enabling innovations, and in part by the intensity of the technological competition. If MNT is developed in a world where it is still widely considered a retro-futurist fantasy, competition will be much less intense than in one where it is developed as the result of intense international competition. I personally expect a scenario reminiscent of that accompanying the birth pangs of the airplane, i.e. many competitors all over the world but no very large and competent concerted efforts aiming at a technology that was still taken by consensus to be impossible despite a technological infrastructure that was making its achievement noticeably less difficult every year. In such a scenario, a private company that wishes to utilize MNT productive capabilities will be able to do so rather overtly without creating widespread awareness of what is happening. Inexpensive solar panels are surely within the range of what they can publicly produce, but rapidly deployed macroscale floating solar oil factories are not. In a world where MNT is seen as completely discredited, or in one where ubiquitous but mundane “nanotechnology” had made Drexlerian predictions seem as quaint as those once made about nuclear energy or space travel, even the solar oil factories might not lead to widespread correct conclusions without an accurate explanation; conversely, if MNT was the 21^st century’s space race, there would be little point in secrecy and every reason to develop and market all important applications possible applications as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, it is hard to imagine a world where the replacement of traditional industry by molecular manufacturing is taken for granted by everyone even moderately future-oriented in the same way that today all such people see as inevitable the digital replacement of analogue film-making, Chinese dominance of durable goods manufacture, or the transition to HDTV. The economic and political havoc that would be expected to result from a widespread belief in truly radically near future change is difficult to calculate, and might even be sufficient to make such a prophesy self-preventing. For this reason among others, it is fair to say that even weeks after the development of MNT is announced, the majority of investors still will not know about it. Even those who do will probably understand it less well than today’s typical science fiction author, and will thus not base any informed investment decisions on their knowledge of MNT. It is also easy to imagine a near-future world filled with constant inaccurate claims of MNT breakthroughs, such that accurate information would not trigger immediate market adjustments upon its release.

Part 2: MNT Risk Management

Economic Disruption

Much has been made of the large number of jobs that might be eliminated with the advent of molecular manufacturing. If all or nearly all jobs were to rapidly become unnecessary, the resulting economic disruption would not necessarily cause major hardship, as some have feared. However, most work is not associated with the production of products that can easily be replaced by MNT. Instead, early MNT products will almost eliminate certain sectors, such as manufacturing; will greatly reduce the need for workers in some others, such as mining, utilities, construction, and transportation/warehousing of goods; will have little direct impact on the demand for work in some fields, such as educational services, management, and food services; and will greatly increase the demand for a few professions, especially information technology and possibly scientific and technical services. Theoretically, capital can be substituted for most varieties of labor, and MNT also will greatly expand the ease of creation of capital while devaluing existing capital, but it will take time for new capital to replace most workers. For instance, in the short term, trash-collecting robots are unlikely, but in the long term, home recycling and incineration units are likely.

I estimate that MNT will make 10% – 20% of all current US jobs obsolete within a year of development, 20% – 40% within two years, and in the absence of strong AI will make 60% – 80% of current work unnecessary within a decade of development, as more powerful tools multiply the capabilities of service workers in fields like waste management and accommodations/food services. Many workers probably will be retained by their employers for months or years after their services are no longer necessary due either to contractual stipulations or simply to slow managerial reaction times. In addition, laws may be passed further restricting the elimination of jobs, but ultimately obsolete industries will disappear even with government life support and will eliminate jobs by closing if they can’t do so with layoffs.

At the same time that many jobs disappear, so will many workers. Great uncertainty, high discount rates, high interest rates, and novel low cost lifestyle options will provide many workers with strong incentives to leave their jobs and either retire or try to found businesses more suited to the new economy. This will drive the expenses faced by many employers upwards, as noted earlier, but will do little to mitigate the problem of unemployment, as the workers who have the capital to invest and retire are by definition not those most threatened by the loss of their jobs and typically cannot be easily replaced by even larger numbers of inappropriately trained workers.

Most of the neediest workers will be covered by state unemployment insurance, which will have the added benefit of increasing non-discretionary governmental spending. Increases in the duration of unemployment payouts should be lobbied for, but even if these are successful, more will be needed. Further subsidies for the unemployed may be possible through investments in companies (such as MyRichUncle.com) that give loans in exchange to a fraction of the borrower’s future earnings. However, several million people still will be in need of both money to live on and meaningful work that they are not able to find for themselves. Dealing with those people is not a core business function, but providing low cost goods to any agencies that show competence in doing so (groups such as Habitat for Humanity, etc.) probably will be a very sound investment in good will.

By contrast, although it would be possible to support all of the displaced people or hire them for make-work, spending money directly to do so generally would be expected to aggravate the resentment that was supposed to be mitigated. One of the most important things to do when mitigating resentment is to work hard to fight the impression that people with MNT can do anything and that all remaining problems are therefore their fault. For PR purposes, it is probably best to downplay what the technology is capable of. This also will tend to reduce governmental fear, public paranoia, and pressure to share dangerous technologies with militaries that cannot be trusted with them.

Abuse of Novel Capabilities

The second major class of risk that must be avoided is that associated with intentional abuse. This includes everything from the production of self-replicating robots to rapid military build-ups to universal intrusive surveillance (even, possibly, surveillance of brain activity, hence of thoughts). The extreme number of potentially disastrous abuses that MNT lends itself to is a very strong argument for making every possible effort to either maintain secrecy regarding MNT techniques, or at least to limiting access to extremely trustworthy parties. Many other essays in this collection will discuss the consequences of failing to maintain secrecy, but for the purposes of this paper, it should suffice to assert that so long as MNT remains tightly controlled these risks should be manageable.

Dangerous Consequences of Excessive Computing Power

The final and most critical danger associated with MNT is that it will lead to the release of massive computing power and the acquisition of neurological knowledge that will make it easier to develop AI (artificial intelligence) than to control it, leading to a total loss of control and human extinction. It is obviously best to respond to this by being extremely judicious with respect to the distribution of devices for studying the brain and by limiting the available computing power available for a dollar to a level significantly greater than that being produced by competing companies but far less than what could be made available. It is best if the gap between available MNT computers and traditional

9 computers is great enough to dominate the market and end incremental development of computing power, but small enough not to contribute substantially to reducing the cost of parallel projects aimed at developing MNT or AI. Despite such precautions, MNT development will accelerate AI development in many ways. The most significant of these may be the increased ability to spend time on long-term personal projects resulting from increased personal freedom.

The largest risks are likely to be of an internal origin, as some of the thousands of researchers in the company may attempt to evolve an AI on internal nanocomputers. An obvious way to ameliorate this problem is to limit design and production to low power computers, or to dedicated computers for running molecular simulations and designing products, or for other very specific purposes. In the long run though, this is a stopgap measure. Some strategy must be developed for ensuring that mankind is not accidentally wiped out by an AI. The scope of this problem goes beyond that of this paper, but it is probably a good starting place to assert the desirability of doing whatever is possible to direct global R&D towards the development of technology for making people more intelligent and away from technology for making machines more intelligent.

Ultimately, it does appear that AI can be developed safely and that preventing unsafe AI permanently should be possible, but it also appears that the level of intelligence required to safely develop AI is approximately independent of the available level of computing power, while that required to unsafely develop AI decreases with computing power. For this reason, increasing intelligence and reducing available computing power both contribute to risk reduction. Anti-aging technology also may contribute, because it provides a de facto increase in the amount of thought that a person can ultimately apply to any given problem, although the development of anti-aging technology will be strongly commercially and PR driven in any event, and thus requires no further justification.

1. “Molecular Manufacturing: What, Why and How” by Chris Phoenix (http://wise-nano.org/w/Doing_MM)

2. See “Dangers of Molecular Manufacturing” (http://www.crnano.org/dangers.htm)

3. In price competition, producers compete to sell for the lowest possible price. They choose what price they will sell at and then sell as many as the public demands at that price. In practice, this requires that the company be able to match supply precisely to demand. Economically this is equivalent to perfect competition and eliminates all profit. In quantity competition, producers sell undifferentiated products to wholesalers, setting the quantity sold to maximize profits. As the number of competitors increases this becomes more like perfect competition because each producer has increasingly little incentive to restrict quantity in order to maintain demand. By committing to a particular level of production in advance, earlier entrants can establish equilibria where they sell larger volumes than later entrants. With a linear demand curve, each entrant will sell half the volume of its predecessor. In monopolistic competition, companies sell similar but branded goods and use marketing and reputation to maintain a willingness to pay a premium over the market price for branded products. Branded goods are imperfect substitutes with high cross elasticities of demand, so as the price of one brand increases, consumers gradually switch over to its competition.

4. For an explanation of nanoblock manufacturing, see “Safe Utilization of Advanced Nanotechnology” by Chris Phoenix and Mike Treder (http://www.crnano.org/safe.htm).

Most students of artificial intelligence are familiar with this forecast made by Vernor Vinge in 1993¹: "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

That was thirteen years ago. Many proponents of super-intelligence say we are on track for that deadline, due to the rate of computing and software advances. Skeptics argue this is nonsense and that we’re still decades away from it.

But fewer and fewer argue that it won’t happen by the end of this century. This is because history has shown the acceleration of technology to be exponential, as explained in well-known works by inventors such as Ray Kurzweil and Hans Moravec, some of which are elucidated in this volume of essays.

A classic example of technology acceleration is the mapping of the human genome, which achieved most of its progress in the late stages of a multi-year project that critics wrongly predicted would take decades. The rate of mapping at the end of the project was exponential compared to the beginning, due to rapid automation that has since transformed the biotechnology industry.

The same may be true of molecular manufacturing (MM) as self-taught machines learn via algorithms to do things faster, better, and cheaper. I won’t describe the technology of MM here because that is well covered in other essays by more competent experts.

MM is important to super-intelligence because it will revolutionize the processes required to understand our own intelligence, such as neural mapping via neural probes that non-destructively map the brain. It also will accelerate three-dimensional computing, where the space between computing units is reduced and efficiency multiplied in the same way that our own brains have done it. Once this happens, the ability to mimic the human brain will accelerate, and self-aware intelligence may follow quickly.

This type of acceleration suggests that Vinge’s countdown to the beginning of the end of the human era must be taken seriously.

The pathways by which super-human intelligence could evolve have been well explained by others and include: computer-based artificial intelligence, bioelectronic AI that develops super-intelligence on its own, or human intelligence that is accelerated or merged with AI. Such intelligence might be an enhancement of Homo sapiens, i.e. part of us, or completely separate from us, or both.

Many experts argue that each of these forms of super-intelligence will enhance humans, not replace them, and although they might seem alien to unenhanced humans, they will still be an extension of us because we are the ones who designed them.

The thought behind this is that we will go on as a species.

Critics, however, point to a fly in that ointment. If the acceleration of computing and software continues apace, then super-intelligence, once it emerges, could outpace Homo sapiens, with or without piggybacking on human intelligence.

This would see the emergence of a new species, perhaps similar in some ways, but in other ways fundamentally different from Homo sapiens in terms of intelligence, genetics, and immunology.

If that happens, the gap between Homo sapiens and super-intelligence could quickly become as wide as the gap between apes and Homo sapiens.

Optimists say this won’t happen, because everybody will get an upgrade simultaneously when super-intelligence breaks out.

Pessimists say that just a few humans or computers will acquire such intelligence first, and then use it to subjugate the rest of us Homo sapiens.

For clues as to who might be right, let’s look at outstanding historical examples of how we’ve used technology and our own immunology in relation to less technologically adept societies, and in relation to other species.

When technologically superior Europeans arrived in North and South America, the indigenous populations didn’t have much time to contemplate such implications because in a just few years, most who came in contact with Europeans were dead from disease. Many who died never laid eyes on a European, as death spread so quickly ahead of the conquerors through unknowing victims.

Europeans at first had no idea that their own immunity to disease would give them such an advantage, but when they realized it, they did everything to use it as a weapon. They did the same with technologies that they consciously invented and knew were superior.

The rapid death of these ancient civilizations, numbering in the tens of millions of persons across two continents, is not etched into the consciousness of contemporary society because those cultures left few written records and had scant time to document their own demise. Most of what they put to pictures or symbols was destroyed by religious zealots or wealth-seeking exploiters.

And so, these civilizations passed quietly into history, leaving only remnants.

By inference, enhanced intelligence easily could take choices about our future out of our hands, and may also be immune to hazards such as mutating viruses that pose dire threats to human society.

Annihilation of Homo sapiens could occur in one of many ways:

• The "oops" factor: accidental annihilation at the hands of a very smart klutz, e.g. by something that is unwittingly immune to things that kill us, or that is smart in one way, but inept in others. Predecessors to super-intelligence may only be smarter than us in some ways, and therein lies a danger. An autistic intelligence could do us in by accident. Just look at current technology, where computers are more capable than humans in some ways but hopeless in others.
• Annihilation in the crossfire of a war-like competition between competing forms of super-intelligence, some of which might include upgraded Homo sapiens. One of the early, deadlier competitions could be for resources as various forms of super-intelligence gobble up space that we occupy, or remake our ecology into an environment more suitable to their needs.
• Deliberate annihilation or assimilation because we are deemed inferior.

If Vernor Vinge is right, we have 18 years before we will face such realities. Centuries ago, the fate of Indian civilizations in North and South America was decided in a similar time span. So, the time to address such risks is now.

This is especially true because paradigms shift more quickly now; therefore, when the event occurs we’ll have less time, perhaps five years or even just one, to consider our options.

What might we use as protection against these multi-factorial threats?

Sun Microsystems’ cofounder Bill Joy’s April 2000 treatise, "Why the future doesn’t need us,"² summarized one field of thought, arguing the case for relinquishment– eschewing certain technologies due to their inherent risks.

Since that time, most technology proponents have been arguing why relinquishment is impractical. They contend that the march of technology is relentless and we might as well go along for the ride, but with safeguards built in to make sure things don’t get too crazy.

Nonetheless, just how we build safeguards into something smarter than us, including an upgraded version of ourselves, has as yet gone unanswered. To see where the solutions might lie, let’s again look at the historical perspective.

If we evaluate the arguments between technology optimists and relinquishment pessimists in relation to the history of the natural world, it becomes apparent that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The ‘rock’ in this case could be an asteroid or comet. If we were to relinquish our powerful new technologies, chances are good that an asteroid would eventually collide with Earth, as has occurred before, thus throwing human civilization back to the dark ages or worse.

For those who scoff at this as an astronomical long shot, be reminded that Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 punched Earth-sized holes in Jupiter less than a decade after the space tools necessary to witness such events were launched, and just when most experts were forecasting such occurrences to be once-in-a-million-year events that we would likely never see.

Or perhaps we would be thrown back by other catastrophic events that have occurred historically, such as naturally induced climate changes triggered by super-volcanos, collapse of the magnetosphere, or an all-encompassing super-nova.

Due to those natural risks, I argue in my book, Our Molecular Future, that we may have no choice but to proceed with technologies that could just as easily destroy us as protect us.

Unfortunately, as explained in the same book, an equally bad "hard place" sits opposite the onrushing "rock" that threatens us. The hard place is our social ineptness.

In the 21st century, despite tremendous progress, we still do amazingly stupid things. We prepare poorly for known threats including hurricanes and tsunamis. We go to war over outdated energy sources such as oil, and some of us increasingly overfeed ourselves while hundreds of millions of people ironically starve. We often value conspicuous consumption over saving impoverished human lives, as low income victims of AIDS or malaria know too well.

Techno-optimists use compelling evidence to argue that we are vanquishing these shortcomings and that new technologies will overcome them completely. But one historical trend bodes against this: emergence of advanced technologies has been overwhelmingly bad for many of the less intelligent species on Earth.

To cite a familiar refrain: We are massacring millions of wild animals and destroying their habitat. We keep billions more domestic farm animals under inhumane, painful, plague-breeding conditions in increasingly vast numbers.

The depth and breadth of this suffering is so vast that we often ignore it, perhaps because it is too terrible to contemplate. When it gets too bothersome, we dismiss it as animal rights extremism. Some of us rationalize it by arguing that nature has always extinguished species, so we are only fulfilling that natural role.

But at its core lies a searing truth: our behavior as guardians of less intelligent species, which we know feel pain and suffering, has been and continues to be atrocious.

If this is our attitude toward less intelligent species, why would the attitude of superior intelligence toward us be different? It would be foolish to assume that a more advanced intelligence than our own, whether advanced in all or in only some ways, will behave benevolently toward us once it sees how we treat other species.

We therefore must consider that a real near-term risk to our civilization is that we invent something which looks at our ways of treating less intelligent species and decides we’re not worth keeping, or if we are worth keeping, we should be placed in zoos in small numbers where we can’t do more harm. Resulting questions:

• How do we instill into super-intelligence ‘ethical’ behavior that we ourselves poorly exhibit?
• How do we make sure that super-intelligence rejects certain unsavory practices as we banned slavery?
• Can we reach into the future to prevent a super-intelligence from changing its mind about those ethics?

These questions have been debated, but no broad-based consensus has emerged. Instead, as the discussions run increasingly in circles, they suggest that we as a species might be comparable to ‘apes designing humans’.

The ape-like ancestors of Homo sapiens had no idea they were contributing DNA to a more intelligent species. Nor could they hope to comprehend it. Likewise, can we Homo sapiens expect to comprehend what we are contributing to a super-intelligent species that follows us?

As long as we continue to exercise callous neglect as guardians of species less intelligent than ourselves, it could be argued that we are much like our pre-human ancestors: incapable of consciously influencing what comes after us.

The guardianship issue leads to another question: How well are we balancing technology advantages against risks?

In the mere 60 years since our most powerful weapons—nuclear bombs—were invented, we’ve kept them mostly under wraps and congratulated ourselves for that, but we have also seen them proliferate from at first just one country to at least ten, with some of those balanced on the edge of chaos.

Likewise, in the nanoscale technology world that precedes molecular manufacturing, we’ve begun assessing risks posed to human health by engineered nanoparticles, but those particles are already being put into our environment and into us.

In other words, we are still closing the proverbial barn doors after the animals have escaped. This limited level of foresight is light years away from being able to assess how to control the onrushing risks of molecular manufacturing or of enhanced intelligence.

Many accomplished experts have pointed out that the same empowerment of individuals by technologies such as the Internet and biotech could make unprecedented weapons available to small disaffected groups.

Technology optimists argue that this has occurred often in history: new technologies bring new pros and cons, and after we make some awful mistakes with them, things get sorted out.

However, in this case the acceleration rate by its nature puts these technologies in a class of their own, because the evidence suggests they are running ahead of our capacities to contain or balance them. Moreover, the number of violently disaffected groups in our society who could use them is substantial.

To control this, do we need a “pre-crime” capacity as envisaged in the film Minority Report, where Big Brother methods are applied to anticipate crime and strike it down preemptively?

The pros and cons of preemptive strikes have been well elucidated recently. The idea of giving up our freedom in order to preserve our freedom from attack by disaffected groups is being heavily debated right now, without much agreement.

However, one thing seems to have been under-emphasized in these security debates:

Until we do the blatantly positive things such as eliminate widespread diseases, feed the starving, house the homeless, disenfranchise dictators, stop torture, stop inhumane treatment of less intelligent species, and other do-good things that are treated today like platitudes, we will not get rid of violently disaffected groups.

By doing things that are blatantly humane, (despite the efforts of despots and their extremist anti-terrorist counterparts to belittle them as wimpy) we might accomplish two things at once: greatly reduce the numbers of violently disaffected groups, and present ourselves to super-intelligence as being enlightened guardians.

Otherwise, if we continue along the present path, we may someday seem to superintelligence what our ape-like ancestors seem to us: primitive.

In deciding what to do about Homo sapiens, a superior form of intelligence might first evaluate our record as guardians, such as how we treat species less intelligent than ourselves, and how we treat members of our same species that are less technologically adept or just less fortunate.

Why might super-intelligences look at this first? Because just as we are guardians of those less intelligent or fortunate than us, so super-intelligences will be the guardians of us and of other less intelligent species. Super-intelligences will have to decide what to do with us, and with them.

If Vinge is accurate in his forecast, we don’t have much time to set these things straight before someone or something superior to us makes a harsh evaluation.

Being nice to dumb animals or poor people is by no means the only way of assuring survival of our species in the face of something more intelligent than us. Using technology to massively upgrade human intelligence is also a prerequisite. But that, on its own, may not be sufficient.

Compassion by those who possess overwhelming advantages over others is one of the special characteristics that Homo sapiens (along with a few other mammals) brings to this cold universe. It is what separates us from an asteroid or super-nova that doesn’t care whether it wipes us out.

Further, compassionate behavior is something most of us could agree on, and while it is often misinterpreted by some as a weakness, it is also what makes us human, and what most of us would want to contribute to future species.

If that is so, then let’s take the risk of being compassionate and put it into practice by launching overarching works that demonstrate the best of what we are.

For example, use molecular manufacturing and its predecessor nanotechnologies to eliminate the disease of aging, instead of treating the symptoms. That is what I personally have decided to focus on, but there are many other good examples out there, including synthesized meat that eliminates inhumane treatment of billions of animals, and cheap photovoltaic electricity that could slash our dependence on oil—and end wars over it.

Such works are not hard to identify. We just have to give them priority. Perhaps then we will seem less like our unwitting ancestors and more like enlightened guardians.

1. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/singularity.html

2. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

© 2006 Douglas Mulhall. Reprinted with permission.

Those responsible for the safety of a nation—leaders and military and police forces—might be hard pressed to deal with a world in which any weapon or dangerous device could be manufactured in large quantities at the press of a button, at the same time that economic and social norms are being overthrown by rapid change.

We can expect that—by default—authorities will want molecular manufacturing (MM) to be tightly restricted—kept out of private hands, and limited to the few nations that initially have it. That approach might provide some added security—or it might simply create such incredible pent-up demand that any barriers and restrictions are quickly overcome by black markets, intellectual property piracy, rogue-nation programs to duplicate MM, etc.

This essay attempts to chart a middle path for the early years of MM availability—one that allows most of the benefits of MM to be widely available to all individuals and nations, while maintaining some control over key elements. I will not go into who will hold that control, other than to suggest the obvious—that those nations that hold the reins of world power are likely to exercise it to retain power, by delegating it in a controlled fashion to cooperative nations and subordinate authorities.

It is not the objective of this essay to look at radical social changes that might arise due to molecular manufacturing, but rather to see how well MM can fit with existing forms.

Definitions

Atom Precise – each atom and bond between atoms in an object is as planned in a design. Also used to describe the process or capability of making atom precise objects.

Nanoblocks – atom precise constructs with size on the order of 100 nanometers that can be mechanically connected to form larger objects. Each nanoblock would have one or more functions—as simple as providing physical strength and support, or as complex as digital computation and communication.

Fabber – a device that automatically assembles individual products for human use. In the context of this essay, it will refer to a device that constructs products out of nanoblocks, specifically excluding atom precise nanofactories – those that build products directly atom-by-atom.

Technical Advantages of Using Nanoblocks

Nanoblock-based fabbers will have a number of technical advantages over direct atom precise molecular manufacturing. Even their disadvantages (less precision, lower strength in products) can be considered advantages for purposes of security.

Standardization of nanoblocks—their modes of interconnection and interaction, their functions, and so on—can greatly simplify the process of designing atom precise products. Use of nanoblocks raises the level of design above the point that requires deep understanding of nanoscale physics and chemistry, to the point where anyone could use automated software tools to design simple but useful products, and expert engineers could reasonably design extremely complex and capable products. For example, there would be no need to re-design a nanoscale computer out of individual atoms every time one wished to incorporate information processing into a product, or to re-invent means of digital communication throughout a product.

While the amount of energy expended to form a single atom-to-atom bond and the waste heat generated is tiny, the number of atoms and bonds in a typical finished product for human use is so large that energy and heat issues will be non-trivial when constructing human-scale products. The energy used and heat released to build things out of nanoblocks should be orders of magnitude smaller, as most of the energy is consumed and heat released in the process of making the nanoblocks. Energy supply and heat removal will be much easier for nanoblock fabbers, allowing them to be more compact and operate much faster—though, of course, they still will need a supply of "raw materials"—a store of nanoblocks rather than whatever atomic or molecular feedstock atom precise nanofactories may use.

The nanoblocks needed by a fabber could be made in advance. Energy consumption and heat dissipation would be spread over time, with nanoblocks being stored in the fabber for later quick construction of finished products. Alternatively, nanoblocks could be produced in bulk by centralized nanofactories near convenient energy supplies, to be distributed and sold to owners of fabbers. The energy required to ship a kilogram of nanoblocks, even halfway around the world, should be a fraction of the energy required to produce them.

It should be possible to design nanoblocks to allow controlled disassembly—i.e. recycling of products made out of reusable nanoblocks. Each nanoblock could have an ID embedded that specifies its type—reliably sorting nanoblocks would be far more efficient than sorting atoms. This would mean that the energy that goes into producing them would not be wasted when one no longer needs or wants the product they compose. Instead, the unwanted object could be taken apart, and the nanoblocks sorted for re-use in making new objects. This would save energy and avoid the massive production of junk that could result from large-scale use of inexpensive manufacturing.

A related concept—utility fog¹—would be a programmable substance consisting of "foglets." Each foglet would be a tiny simple robot, able to interact with vast numbers of other foglets to form nearly any shape imaginable, including objects that are able to move and react to human beings. One might be able to re-create the Star Trek "holodeck" using foglets—an environment in which almost anything becomes possible. The flexibility that makes this idea attractive also creates the risk that the utility fog might be infected with an information virus designed to take it over for malicious purposes, harming or killing or simply trapping a human in the utility fog environment. The fixed-function approach of building things out of nanoblocks and recycling things when they are no longer needed seems safer, at least for the early days of molecular manufacturing.

Fabber Safety and Security Issues

The use of nanoblocks creates opportunities to make molecular manufacturing safer.

With a careful selection of the types of nanoblocks made available, a fabber should not be able to build an atom precise nanofactory out of nanoblocks, nor devices that will be a significant help in any attempt to "bootstrap" production of an atom precise nanofactory, reducing the risk of proliferation of atom precise MM to "rogue nations" or terrorists.

A nanoblock-only fabber (i.e. one which cannot produce its own nanoblocks, and so requires a supply of nanoblocks as input) could be distributed world-wide without releasing atom precise MM to everyone, avoiding any risk that anyone could start using it to produce massive quantities of dangerous products out of freely available atoms. Yet it would allow construction of almost as wide a range of products as an atom precise nanofactory, for not much more cost—reducing demand for atom precise MM.

There would be products that could not be made out of nanoblocks, of course—such as nanoblocks themselves. This fact could give official security forces with access to atom precise nanofactories an advantage, as weapons and systems made with atom precise nanofactories will be somewhat more capable than any created using nanoblock fabbers.

Products of commercial or security value that cannot be made out of nanoblocks and require atom precise assembly could be made in centralized plants where security measures could be taken. One simple security measure would be to have such products made by dedicated function nanofactories, with the design built in at the lowest level and unable to be altered without destroying the nanofactory. These dedicated function nanofactories would be produced using general-purpose programmable nanofactories in a few extremely high security plants.

The Risk of Exponential Self-Replication

Anyone familiar with the "grey goo" exponential self-replication scenario might ask whether a device made of nanoblocks might disassemble objects made of recyclable nanoblocks and re-use those nanoblocks to produce copies of the device—a "lumpy goo" scenario.

To prevent this, one solution would be to design nanoblocks to require use of a key-like manipulator—too small to be made of or emulated by nanoblocks—to lock blocks together in order to fabricate objects. So long as the key-like manipulator is only built into fabbers, and never made part of or attached to a commonly available nanoblock, only fabbers will be able to build things from those nanoblocks—eliminating much of the potential to build a malicious self-replicator out of nanoblocks. The same key would be required to disassemble objects for recycling—preventing malicious disassembly of objects made of nanoblocks, outside of dedicated recycling devices.

One could object that preventing the fabber from making copies of itself would eliminate a potentially major advantage. A fabber that can make copies of itself could be distributed very rapidly, creating a huge market for nanoblocks and nanoblock-based designs in a very short period of time. That should be a significant advantage for a manufacturer willing to give up income from the fabber and focus on selling nanoblocks. So long as the nanoblocks were non-reusable, the risk of exponential self-replication would be minimized—and the manufacturer could expect their fabber to become a universal standard before competitors got to market, making their nanoblock business quite profitable.

However, other companies would very quickly begin producing reverse-engineered "clone" and improved nanoblocks, cutting into the original manufacturer’s revenues. It would likely not be long before someone offered re-usable nanoblocks, opening the way to exponentially self-replicating systems.

Given the value of recyclable nanoblocks for energy and cost savings and convenient disposal, and the security risks of self-copying fabber components, it seems wisest to allow recyclable nanoblocks but prohibit fabbers that can self-copy. Very likely the cost of fabbers will fall rapidly in any case, since they would themselves be made with atom precise MM.

The above assumes a relatively free market in fabber and nanoblock designs. That may not be the case if the government is involved and sets a single standard that all manufacturers must follow. In that case, one might see a "utility" model, where nanoblock prices are controlled to allow manufacturers a "reasonable" profit. This scenario would be likely to slow innovation—but, of course, that might be exactly the effect desired by the government. Non-self-copying fabbers with recyclable nanoblocks seem the most likely choice in such a standard.

Limiting Other Potential Abuses

Fabbers will very likely be targeted with the equivalent of computer viruses—malware designs that will attempt to infect fabbers and transmit copies of themselves, and probably use the fabber to produce something annoying or dangerous. The greatest danger would be if fabbers were connected directly to the Internet, allowing very rapid spread of such a virus without human intervention.

One way to fight this would be to keep all fabbers "offline"—designed to only allow loading new designs by manually transferring a design on a physically separate storage medium. This should slow the spread of malware down to human speeds, allowing humans a chance to become aware of the problem and deal with it.

It may prove useful to establish a program that allows anyone with an interest in "clever fabber hacks" or atom precise molecular manufacturing to exercise their curiosity in a safe, controlled environment. This would help reduce the incidence of ‘experiments’ analogous to releasing computer viruses and worms into the wild, by giving hackers an alternative and encouraging environment. Their creative—or potentially destructive—ideas could benefit society or help plan defenses against potential dangers. It also provides an opportunity to catch the few who are going down the wrong path and turn them around – or at least keep know who they are if they seem inclined to persist in dangerous pursuits.

Malicious users could produce dangerous or otherwise undesirable nanoblock-based products. For example, a murderer might create a knife, kill someone, and disassemble the evidence. Or perhaps create a household robot—but program it to wreak havoc. Defenses against such abuses should be taken into consideration. There are several approaches that might be helpful.

Since recyclable nanoblocks would have a readable type-ID built in, it would be trivial to extend that to a unique ID, making it possible to backtrack the source of an otherwise anonymous malicious automated device, or obtain a clue from nanoblocks torn off a more mundane object such as a knife. With users knowing this, fewer will seriously contemplate engaging in malicious production.

Life with Fabbers

The use of nanoblock-limited fabbers (i.e., those which cannot make their own nanoblocks) has some likely implications for society. Certainly costs of many material goods should fall, raising the standard of living of many people around the world.

If instead, self-copying fabbers and non-recyclable nanoblocks are available, benefits for less developed nations may arrive a bit sooner, but the need to continually buy more nanoblocks will limit their long-term impact.

Some visions of life with atom precise MM have people going "off the grid"—quitting their jobs, setting up independent solar powered homesteads, and ending capitalism and perhaps economics as we know them. That scenario would be very unlikely with non-recyclable nanoblocks, and limited with recyclable nanoblocks, as people would still need to engage in productive economic activity in order to have money to buy replacement nanoblocks.

With most jobs in manufacturing and distribution eliminated, people would largely find jobs in the service sector. Service jobs will shift even more to specialization, due to increased competition. Developed nations have already gone far in this direction, and other nations will likely be forced to follow suit. This will be a difficult transition for nations that have only recently begun developing and have been heavily dependent upon manufacturing for export—services will be more difficult to export, and local consumers may not be as used to consuming services.

Another common vision of life after the arrival of atom precise MM has a tension between free "open source" designs and commercially available designs. The greater ease of designing with nanoblocks instead of atoms would likely give the open source approach extra impetus. Still, there will also be a fair number of things that people will not trust to be made from nanoblocks, and conventional commerce in those products will continue. Also, as always, there will be elements of style and usage that will cause people to pay for things even though free alternatives are available, just as people today will pay more for a real Rolex™; than a fake, or pay for a commonly used operating system even though free operating systems are available.

With so many choices, and so many people seeking employment in services, it seems likely that many stores will focus on personal service and product advice. Goods purchased in a shop will be priced based on a combination of service and the prestige of certain designers, with a very small component of the cost of the nanoblocks used in product construction. There still will be "big chain" stores with vast showrooms filled with goods, but even there, the key will be the service of providing one place to go see and compare a huge variety of goods. They may make some goods while you wait, others they’ll have available off the shelf, still others—especially larger goods—they’ll make and deliver to your home. Likely, there also will be a way to buy "limited uses" designs for home production.

Conclusions

Making nanoblock-limited fabbers available to everyone promises to provide most of the easily imaginable benefits of unrestricted atom precise MM, with significantly fewer risks. Fabbers can provide useful advantages of speed, efficiency, and safety. Certainly, they are not a cure-all, creating a perfect utopia—but the problems remaining may be humanly manageable.

Perhaps fabbers would only be a transition phase before a shift to a more liberal availability of atom precise MM, but given all the risks and uncertainties raised by molecular manufacturing, this more controlled introduction seems warranted. The most likely alternative is not free release of atom precise MM, but even tighter restrictions. Fabbers limited to constructing things out of nanoblocks seem like a reasonable compromise approach, and one that government authorities and others may consider acceptable.

^1. J. Storrs Hall, "Utility Fog: The Stuff that Dreams are Made Of", http://discuss.foresight.org/% 7Ejosh/Ufog.html

In one of those essays, “The Need for Limits,” Chris Phoenix speaks of the Enlightenment in terms of a synergy: enhanced human productivity with machines, partially supporting a philosophical examination of the human condition. Though certainly that, the Enlightenment also was a watershed period when the economic foundations of the European economy changed, and the authority of Revealed Truth was forced to contend with the authority of Rational Thought and its practical cousin, Scientific Inquiry. The shifts in the economy created a massive transformation of social life, from agrarian to urban. The current era has parallels to all of these forces, movements already in play but not yet complete…and in some cases not fully articulated.

As a peripheral member of a futurists group² in my professional field (policing, and more broadly, criminal justice), I have noticed that futurists tend to be concerned with the end results of trends, the state of things ten, twenty, or fifty years from now. By contrast, I am more concerned with the collateral damage we may sustain in the process of getting to those future states from where we are now.

This essay approaches that interstitial state in four sections. The first section looks at the control of the technology; the second, for the criminal potentials inherent in it. Using the template of the Enlightenment, the third section looks at the darker channels of social transformation, particularly the impact on work and social worth. The fourth section draws an admittedly leap-of-faith parallel between the Enlightenment’s impact on religious authority, and technology’s impact upon the authority of economic capital and law.

Nanotechnology holds remarkable potential to change the world, but like most recent technologies, it emerges within a larger system of laws, codes of conduct, and social expectations developed for previous capacities. Those mechanisms will shape its emerging uses, possibly retarding or constraining the applications of the technology in undesirable ways. At issue is whether micro-level processing will be merely one more tool (and thus alter our lives incrementally), or a Promethean breakthrough that will alter human existence in profound ways. My interest, as one who stands outside the Halls of Science looking in, tends to center on the possibilities that I can understand from a layman’s perspective.

Trying to grasp in layman’s terms the implications of a new and only marginally understood technology leads to a search for analogies, framing the new in terms of the familiar (for good or ill).

Control

As a non-scientist, the most salient question for me is, “When do I get to play with the new toy?” Given the general limits of corporate use of nanotechnology, the first new toy that will become available to me most likely will be the desktop assembler, or personal nanofactory (PN).

The most knowledgeable members of CRN’s Global Task Force³ have engaged in a lengthy discussion about desktop manufacturing and its social consequences, and as of this writing, there seems to be a lack of consensus about the capacity, and thus the full impact, of PNs. If we accept the position of the optimists, and expect fully-capable devices to be available in the not-too-distant future, secondary questions arise: Will the devices be provided in fully-capable form (probably transformative), or will their functionality be curtailed in defense of the corporate profits to be derived from them? If the latter, how will control be maintained? Some answers are perhaps to be found in current trends, since the courts often look to historical analogs in dealing with new issues.

If we posit that desktop manufacturing becomes widely available, as seems inevitable, the dominant forces of the economy have two avenues of recourse to maintain control over the new technology for monetary benefit. The first will be the control of raw materials for molecular assembly, which appears to share the delivery profile of heating fuels in contemporary life. More important is the second area, already suggested by Phoenix: patents and copyrights.⁴

The development of nanotechnology is taking place within a corporate nest of ideas and resources (much like licensed computer software development), with some independent researchers and consortia operating on a freeware basis. Molecular assembly at any sort of commercial or individual level will require patterns to guide assembly, and these are likely to be controlled by patents. The majority of patents are almost certain to be controlled by corporate interests. Renewable user site licenses, comparable to commercial software packages, are the most likely form of retaining economic benefit for a corporate entity. One of the possible ways of maintaining economic control over site licenses would be some form of cyber-degradable program that self-destructs after a finite period, and must be renewed. For example, a user could download (or purchase on a one-use or renewable-use media platform) the code that would allow the manufacture of only a certain number of rolls of toilet paper by a personal nanofactory.

Patents and the fundamental premises of intellectual property are already under challenge, but the challenges have been met with an equally strong legal response anchored in precedent. The courts have handed the reins of control over digital recordings of music to the star-making machinery behind the popular songs through conservative interpretation of intellectual property statutes. The huge profits to be made from licensing technological advancements for industry virtually assures that the field of nanotechnology will be similarly bound.

The most recent Promethean technology, file-sharing, theoretically stood to liberate music from the chains of capital. However, Napster, Kaaza, Grokster, and their lesser clones have lost the legal battles, and the technology has been co-opted by industry giants into new distribution-for-profit mechanisms. Corporations and universities alike write eminent domain over patents and patentable discoveries into their employment contracts, and genetic patterns and discoveries are subject to copyright. Unknown garage bands and the metaphorical garage workshops of independent researchers still can be found beyond the current reach of over-grasping capital, but only until they become good or useful enough to attract attention.

As new genetic “building block” discoveries and other chemical compounds are placed under patent, the copyright has become the new castle moat or the new dog in the manger (depending upon one’s perspective), intended to keep easily-duplicated “properties” under the control of their owners. Paradoxically, only those products deemed legitimate are defended by patents and lawsuits so vigorously; illegal products and contraband are not. Corporate interests have far deeper pockets and a true metric for measuring loss and injury. There is greater freedom in the illicit trades, where control of trafficked, harmful artifacts rests with hugely inefficient, underfunded, and understaffed public enforcement agencies.

The exponential explosion of child pornography (and its hate- and racial supremacy-based counterparts) over the Internet is a cautionary tale in its own right. Like the illicit drug trade in the physical world, neither child porn nor hate-mongering is impervious to law enforcement efforts, but the occasional victories of enforcement seem to have little long-term effect on the larger industry or movement. The underground distribution of molecular patterns for assembly might easily be accomplished by the same mechanisms, like the basic virus codes that any script-kiddie can download, tinker with, and release back into the wild.

While the first generation of personal nanofactories probably will come with a fixed number of pre-programmed patterns, market forces will demand versatility. Units will need a capacity to acquire new assembly patterns as they are developed, and there seem to be few options beyond what is now available for computer data. Patterns may be downloaded over hardwired or Wi-Fi networks, or be manually transferred by whatever media replace the current disk drives and flash memory sticks. Each format would spawn a black market of unknown proportions, and with the black markets come the accompanying risks of epidemic and pandemic consequences of criminal use.

Criminal Potentials

We should anticipate that a new drug industry will piggyback on the basic molecular assembly phenomenon, and the potential implications for the social fabric are enormous. One of the most desirable benefits of nanotechnology is that of precise targeting of therapeutic drugs; however, the same technology will have associated benefits for illegal pharmacopoeia. While the complexity of the patterns most likely will delay this until a second or third-level level of PN development, once the basic patterns for psychotropic drugs are understood and the assembly technology sufficiently enabled, individual drug manufacture is almost certain to become a social tsunami. There are strong analogies to the current methamphetamine epidemic: less than two decades ago, the manufacture of crystal methamphetamine required a well-equipped clandestine lab, a chemist, a criminal organization for protection and distribution. Today, meth is the new bathtub gin, easily made in any number of Rube Goldberg processes in basements, trailers, campers, garages, or pickup trucks.

Unlike methamphetamine, a micro-assembly drug manufacture process would need only the basic molecular components, not the more elaborate precursor chemicals (like pseudoephedrine) whose control is now part of our anti-drug strategy. That suggests a much greater availability, with corollary hazards of greater social experimentation and conceivably even poly-drug experimentation. The toxic byproducts of meth labs are threats to law enforcement agencies, the families of meth addicts, and neighborhoods. We do not yet know the degree to which micro-manufacture byproducts will be toxic, if at all.

Illicit micro-manufacture may be a mixed blessing. On the one hand, effectively eliminating organized crime from the market may lessen the toxic effects of the war on drugs: the corruption involved with importation of drugs, and the violence of competing drug markets. At least potentially, even the criminogenic nature of drug dependency may be lessened: since the base materials would likely be the same as for legitimate micro-manufacture, it is less likely that a specialized, higher-priced supply chain would be necessary. The dynamics of that supply chain create additional crimes: violence among criminal enterprises competing for turf high, and both personal and property crime committed by addicts desperate to meet the dealer’s price. Absent the supply market, the cost of personally manufactured drugs would be cheaper, and the risks of their creation considerably lower in terms of legal discovery and interdiction. However, the potential free access to addictive and mind-altering substances will almost certainly exacerbate the social problems associated with the addictions and dependencies that result. The same delivery method could surreptitiously create markets for new designer drugs, addictive and involuntarily piggybacked on legitimately disseminated nanoproduct codes. The number of “what ifs” that need to be resolved before either scenario happens leave the possibilities within the realm of fiction for now, but if the analogies to the Internet hold true, they must be anticipated as a contingency.

Should we ever develop a drug-based cure for the addictions, of course, it might be to our collective advantage to attempt to disseminate it via whatever outlaw networks and mechanisms develop, the angelic counterpart to the demonic assault-by-micro-drugs of the original scenario. Therapeutic nano-rehab, even at the time of a medical crisis, may not be sufficient to stem the drug crisis, however. Involuntary detoxification has a poor history of neutralizing the psychological dependencies that drive post-sobriety returns to addictive substances. The “evil twin” of involuntary detoxification is involuntary addiction.

Lurking beyond therapeutic use is the possibility of totalitarian control using the same methods. The Promethean paradox that attends all new technologies is even more pronounced for those that escape Newtonian-level detection. Medical research is racing ahead in its understanding of neural processes, including the sites in the brain responsible for certain behaviors. As nanomedicine develops capacities for intervening in psychological dependencies or other maladies, it also develops the capacity for inducing mind control or other forms of incapacitation.

Downstream, there is also the potential for mass murder via compromised assembly codes. In the physical world, tainting a medicine with poison can only be done efficiently at the factory source, and even then must bypass or defeat stringent quality control measures. Any other corruption can take place only on a relatively small scale. The introduction of a virulent and unsuspected corruption of a drug assembly code is not so limited. It shares more in common with the computer virus than the Tylenol poisoner. Since black market codes originate and enter the data stream outside the domain of legitimate quality control measures, and the drug-using community is unlikely to give designer drug codes great scrutiny (at least in the initial rounds), “massassination” (mass assassination or “pharmaceutical cleansing”) via bogus codes is a distinct possibility in a networked distribution system. It would challenge both medical institutions and law enforcement agents. It is admittedly an outside possibility, requiring a rare combination of technological savvy and social alienation, but the world since September 2001 has been dealing with more and more “one in a bazillion” scenarios. Nothing should be taken off the table in terms of exploring, and preparing for, unpleasant misappropriation of technology.

To a certain degree, the massassination scenario depends upon the nature of the dissemination of manufacture codes. The most logical assumption is that distribution of product blueprints for desktop manufacturing will be done via the Internet or its successor entity. The current attempts to defeat music and film pirate copies would have serious analogs in any new process that challenged traditional sources of corporate and investment income, especially unrestricted use of molecular assembly technology. The Spy vs. Spy battle between corporate interests and hacktivism will doubtless continue in the nano- and micro-arenas as in cyberspace. Even if controls evolve another way, such as physical distribution of codes on one-use portable media like the flash memory stick, markets for stolen and counterfeit products will emerge, just as the current computer viruses and malware are piggybacked on the legitimate use of the Internet. Beating security encryptions to transform a one-use code into a version capable of electronic dissemination will be an instant challenge for the criminal and black-hat hacking communities.

There are some differences, though. While the viruses and Trojan horses that hector cyberspace have consequences ranging from irritating (the Blue Screen of Death) to life-changing (severe financial crises resulting from identity theft), it is only at the most extreme range that they could be considered life-threatening. Identity theft that labels an innocent citizen as a dangerous criminal has some potential for creating life-threatening situations, but most of the jeopardy is financial or social. Viruses and worms may take down a network or three, or transform the World Wide Web into the World Wide Wait with deleterious consequences for commerce, but they do not directly assault the networks’ users. A corrupted, mislabeled, or maliciously designed micro-manufacture code could “break the fourth wall,” crossing out of cyberspace into the physical realm.

The closest parallel in the physical world, the batch of bad heroin that kills users in clusters, does not really provide an accurate analog for a malicious assembly code incident. Relatively few seek heroin under any circumstances, and no one but the most desperate heroin addict would seek out bad heroin (as has happened in some isolated cases). The first “killer virus” loose in whatever network provides product codes for PNs will affect hundreds and perhaps thousands of innocents, whether it comes as a terrorist strike or an unintended consequence of a hacking adventure. No one will have to seek it: once in the wild, it will arrive unbidden in the In Box.

Defenses to such a scenario potentially exist, but security measures are one of the most attractive fruits of the Tree of Knowledge. Like contemporary Internet defenses, and the laws passed to outlaw new designer drugs, defensive maneuvers almost always stimulate new offensive attacks. Any combination of zeros and ones, in any transportation medium, can be hijacked and compromised: the track record of Internet security does not bode well for the free and easy commercial transfer of assembly codes for the molecules-up creation of products.

Social

During the Industrial Revolution in England, improved agricultural efficiencies accelerated the process of enclosure, dislocating the rural population no longer needed for raising and harvesting crops. Simultaneous improvements in the production of iron and steel, in weaving, and other areas began to transform cottage industries into factory-based industries, and urbanization rapidly changed the face of the country. The nature of trade shifted from one-off mercantile ventures and royal charters to stable capital for long-term ventures. Factory industries supplanted cottage industries, local artisans, and craft guilds, but the concentration of work in brick-and-mortar containers still left some out of work: the notorious “surplus labor” that kept wages low. The expansion of the new manufacturing base managed to absorb surplus labor for some time, until the advent of widespread robotics in the second half of the twentieth century.

A robust generation of personal nanofactories may very well bifurcate commerce into those items that can be manufactured at home and those which still must be purchased through the familiar retail supply chains. While a certain amount of jobs will be created around the transportation of raw materials for PNs, they will be paltry in comparison to the jobs the devices displace in manufacture, transport, and sales. Globalization has already imposed a certain amount of social dislocation in the manufacturing sectors; a maturing nanotechnology could very well trigger a long-term social dislocation not seen since the English migration from the newly-enclosed farmlands to the new factories of the Industrial Revolution.

The need for human labor seems to be diminishing at an accelerated rate inverse to Ray Kurzweil’s description⁵ of the advance of technology. The shift from human muscle to animal muscle took millennia; from animal to human-guided mechanical, centuries; from human-guided to robotic, decades; and the emergence of computer-directed manufacture seems measured in years if not months. Human society, however, still is anchored in a near-medieval paradigm where social worth is measured by the type and extent of work one engages in. The pecking order of work starts at the menial and dirty level, maids and animal rendering and manual labor (the province of illegal immigrants and paroled convicts) comparable to carrying the hod. The next step up is the marginally cleaner and less taxing “service economy” of McJobs, which jousts with the decline of blue-collar union-affiliated manufacturing jobs for the next higher rung (salaries and benefits alone give the advantage to unionized jobs, regardless of the decades-long decline in union membership, though the recent perturbations in the airline and automobile industries in particular, and corporate pension plans generally, leave even that in doubt). Above that are the traditional white-collar jobs, but the new aristocracy—sharply defined by the accelerating concentration of wealth in at least American society—is comprised of those who “let their money work for them,” the investing class, the owners of the means of production.

Work is devalued in other ways: in the symbolic change of language in which employees are now called “associates,” with a presumed stake in the corporate success that is not mirrored anywhere in the reward system; in the stock market rewarding corporate actions that trim the workforce; and in the precipitous erosion of industry-sponsored pensions. Human labor has been, or is in the process of being, effectively decoupled from the part of the economy that is valued. The long-term consequences of this are by no means clear, but the advent of a personal –nanofactories will not necessarily create a widespread leisure class.

Another of the volumes on my physical desktop is William Julius Wilson’s When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. It deals with the “left behind” problem of those under a double burden of low social status and of being dependent upon jobs in industries that have moved elsewhere (to Alabama, to Mexico, or to China). While the analogy to a nanotechnology shift need not be exact, Wilson’s depictions and analyses offer a powerful warning we may need to confront within a generation: what are the social consequences when there are no alternative employment outlets for surplus labor? American history of the 20^th century holds small hope that our social attitudes will change rapidly: the unemployed, underemployed, and “idle” always have been despised for not somehow rising above the crushing weight of social and economic forces beyond their control. Revolution traditionally has been pointless or counterproductive, and Cite Soliel endures in its multiple forms around the globe despite the potential and promises of globalization, the Green Revolution, and countless other advances.

It is tempting to suggest that nano-communes, with internal self-sufficiency that leaven the worst effects of industrial-era unemployment, will free the human spirit for more cerebral endeavors. Futures are almost never equally distributed when they arrive, and Utopian dreams of that kind have a history of being measured in months rather than decades or eras. It is difficult to envision the rise of a labor movement comparable to those of nineteenth-century Britain and the United States; it is almost easier to predict the widespread distribution of limited-capacity PNs as a form of social welfare (and social placation of the underclass).

Larger questions arise out of this potential for increased social marginality. The income gap between rich and poor has been widening for more than two decades. Globalization has transformed the American economy, and the household economy has suffered as a result. The degree to which nanotechnology, the Internet, and other technologies accelerate or buffer the social decoupling of work and status is still an undiscovered country. If the cumulative effect is acceleration, we need to anticipate the range of human adaptations that will follow. If one no longer is attached in any meaningful way to an economy and the political ideology that supports it, how long can that authority hold one’s allegiance? And what are the alternatives if the allegiance cannot otherwise be reinforced?

Authority

Although it is a commonplace to think of religious worship as timeless, it actually undergoes periodic major shifts, often triggered by secular events. In the first century of the Common Era, the nature of revelation itself was transformed from the direct presence of a transcendent deity to the interpretation of a written Scripture. For Jews, the destruction of the Holy of Holies in the Second Temple ended the traditional direct contact of the High Priests. For Christians, the sudden absence of their Messiah from the streets of Jerusalem transformed the Judaic concept of messianic return into an entirely new understanding the relationship between human beings and their Creator.

The struggle for primacy between the Catholic Church and secular governments began soon after Christianity was adopted as the official religion of the Roman Empire. It continued through the Investiture Controversy of the Middle Ages, and was the decisive factor in the success of the Reformation. However, the waning of the dominance of religion was a process begun centuries earlier by resistance (“heresy”) within the Church itself, beginning with the Great Schism of the Eastern Orthodox traditions. The purification movements that created monastic orders within the Church presaged the later coming of the Reformation, which relocated purifying reform outside the Church and ended the sole authority of Rome to arbitrate Christian salvation. The secular challenges arising from the Enlightenment remain at play in the contemporary questions of Church and State, Science and Belief, and authority to define human relations. Increasing secularity jousts with the rise of fundamentalism and of sects, undermining traditional “mainstream” churches.

Whether the maturing of nanotechnology will impact the continuing struggle of religious authority is unclear. The potential is there, certainly, as the manipulation of matter at the molecular level comes perilously close to “playing God,” especially where it might affect what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and cybernetic enhancements pose imminent challenges to the religious understandings of “human,” and nanotechnology bids to play a major role within each of those technologies. Public discourse in areas where the definitions of “life” are most contended are fueled as much by symbolism and metaphor as by science; misapprehensions and misunderstandings about nanotechnology may well be fuel for new battlefronts in what has been dubbed “the culture wars.”

During the Reformation, the monolithic authority of the Church of Rome was transformed into a limited number of Protestant denominations. The existence of each one allowed anyone to resist the Authority of the Catholic Church, and beyond that, the authority of any other church. (The earliest attempt to incorporate a denial of secular authority, under the banner of “No Bishops, No Barons,” was ruthlessly suppressed by secular forces, whose worldly enforcement had more immediate clout than the afterlife of religion.) The transformation of monolithic Authority into micro-authority created a market for allegiances. The old concept of rules defined and enforced by a monopolistic Church—enforced by excommunication, the denial of sacraments, and the resulting condemnation to an infernal afterlife—gave way to a free market of ideas and selection of, rather than submission to, authority that continues to this day. Catholic priests who wish to marry may find refuge in the Anglican communion. Protestant churches may fracture over rules of control and worship, and denominations may enter schism over ecclesiastical matters, as witness the current strain in the Anglican communion over the issue of gay bishops and clergy, and the social acceptance of homosexuality. Other issues less anchored in scriptural interpretation, like finances, may also trigger the sundering of ways for a congregation.

Using this as an analogy for secular considerations, it is an interesting exercise in speculation to consider whether nanotechnology generally, and desktop manufacturing in particular, will lead to nano-communes that eventually decouple individuals from the larger economy and the political system so closely tied to it. Such communities would be the natural descendants of the self-sufficient medieval monastic orders, the utopian communities of the mid-1800s, and the communes of the 1960s and beyond. Unlike their predecessors, they could be “off the grid” in important ways, but not necessarily withdrawn from the larger society.

In other realms, there is some additional promise in the potential for using nanotechnology as a recycling outlet. Molecular disassembly as a precursor to molecular assembly may be a completely different set of technological difficulties, and raises a series of questions about disposal of nonessential elements. The Newtonian-world vision of a methane burnoff is impractical at the molecular level, and the state of byproduct disposal is unclear at this point. If unwanted matter can be converted to energy, and stored for use, nanotechnology could change the nature of both recycling and of power. If each household ran on a “green power” combination of solar energy and molecular conversions, entire industries might be transformed. It stretches the imagination a bit to think that factories could be powered with wind, solar, and nano power, so the traditional power industries might not disappear, but important sectors might achieve relative independence from them.

At the same time, the intellectual property forces would still work to bind nano­based anything to the existing corporate world. If nano goes “into the wild,” via bootleg or Robin Hood dissemination, it could weaken the corporate hold, inspire a widespread law enforcement crackdown on piracy, or dissolve society into above-ground and Morlock-like subcultures that coexist because they have little reason to compete. In any of these scenarios, nanotechnology by itself is not an actor: it is a tool of other interests, and its impacts are dampened or enhanced by the decisions of social engineering and politics. But if the end result is the alienation of large masses of citizens from the engines of the economy and the icons of government, the costs and secondary developments will be far ranging.

Nanotechnology has its own limits. A host of major decisions in the social realm will not be changed to any great degree by nanotechnology. It will not protect the Arctic Natural Wildlife Refuge (indeed, if natural gas is the first and basic fuel for desktop manufacturing, it may exacerbate the pressures on the ANWR), nor will it stop the denuding of the Amazon rain forest. It will not eliminate prejudice, nor resolve the multiple questions of authority and Authority that attend the modern estate of humankind. We can predict safely that when this particular future of mature nanotechnology arrives, it will not be equally distributed, and may easily be a weapon of social dominance rather than the delivery vehicle of social equity. Even the utopian visions of Gene Roddenberry included a period of troubled dystopia, which Alvin Toffler captured in Future Shock: “the premature arrival of the future… the imposition of a new culture on an old one” that results in “human beings…. increasingly disoriented, progressively incompetent to deal with their environments.”

Which leaves me almost where I began: What do I make of this nanotechnology thing? I suspect it will be very much like its predecessors, a potentially transformative technology that will be bound on the bed of Procrustes of the older social and economic systems that midwifed it. Because of that, it has considerable potential to be more Pandora’s Box than Holy Grail in the early going. Assuming that its byproducts do not poison the groundwater or become an airborne grey goo, it will almost have to achieve an outlaw status (or its more egalitarian potential championed by those who will be deemed outlaws) before it reaches a socially transformative cusp. In the near term, whether I buy it in a store or make it with my nanofactory, I will still have to pay for toilet paper.

Michael Buerger, an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Bowling Green State University and a former police officer, is a member of the Futures Working Group, a collaboration between the FBI and the Society of Police Futurists International. His broad interests mainly concern the impact of large-scale social changes and reactions to them.

¹ Nanotechnology Perceptions: A Review of Ultraprecision Engineering and Nanotechnology (Collegium Basilea, Basel, Switzerland), Volume 2, Number 1a

² The Futures Working Group, a collaboration between the FBI and the Society of Police Futurists International (http://www.policefuturists.org/futures/fwg.htm)

³ Global Task Force on Implications and Policy (http://www.crnano.org/CTF.htm), organized by the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology

⁴ “The Need For Limits” (http://www.kurzweilai.net/the-need-for-limits)

⁵ The Singularity is Near (http://singularity.com/)

1. Some eleven thousand years ago, in the neighborhood of Mesopotamia, some of our ancestors took up agriculture, thereby beginning the end of the hunter-gatherer existence that our species had lived ever since it first evolved. Population exploded even as nutritional status and quality of life declined, at least initially. Eventually, greater population densities led to greatly accelerated cultural and technological development.

In 1448, Johan Gutenberg invented the movable type printing process in Europe, enabling copies of the Bible to be mass-produced. Gutenberg’s invention became a major factor fueling the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the scientific revolution, and helped give rise to mass literacy. A few hundred years later, Mein Kampf was mass-produced using an improved version of the same technology.

Work in atomic physics and quantum mechanics in the first three decades of the 20^th century laid the foundation for the subsequent Manhattan project during World War II, which raced to beat Hitler to the nuclear bomb.

In 1957, Soviet scientists launched Sputnik 1. In the following year, the US created the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to ensure that US would keep ahead of its enemies in military technology. DARPA began developing a communication system that could survive nuclear bombardment by the USSR. The result, ARPANET, later became the Internet—the long-term consequences of which remain to be seen.

2. Suppose you are an individual involved in some way in what may become a technological revolution. You might be an inventor, a funder of research, a user of a new technology, a regulator, a policy-maker, an opinion leader, or a voting citizen. Suppose you are concerned with the ethical issues that arise from your potential involvement. You want to act responsibly and with moral integrity. What does morality require of you in such a situation? What does it permit but does not require? What questions do you need to find answers to in order to determine what you ought to do?

If you consult the literature on applied ethics, you will not find much advice that applies directly to this situation. Ethicists have written at length about war, the environment, our duties towards the developing world; about doctor-patient relationships, euthanasia, and abortion; about the fairness of social redistribution, race and gender relations, civil rights, and many other things. Arguably, nothing humans do has such profound and wide-ranging consequences as technological revolutions. Technological revolutions can change the human condition and affect the lives of billions. Their consequences can be felt for hundreds if not thousands of years. Yet, on this topic, moral philosophers have had precious little to say.

3. In recent years, there have been increasing efforts to evaluate the ethical, social, and legal implications (“ELSI”) of important new technologies ahead of time. Much attention has been focused on ethical issues related to the human genome project. Now there is a push to look at the ethics of advances in information technology (information and computer ethics), brain science (neuroethics), and nanotechnology (nanoethics).

Will “ESLI” research produce any important findings? Will it have any significant effects on public policy, regulation, research priorities, or social attitudes? If so, will these effects be for the better or for the worse? It is too early to tell.

But if we believe that nanotechnology will eventually amount to a technological revolution, and if we are going to attempt nanoethics, then we might do well to consider some of the earlier technological revolutions that humanity has undergone. Perhaps there are hidden features of our current situation with regard to nanotechnology that would become more easily visible if we considered how our moral principles and technology impact assessment exercises would have fared if they had been applied in equivalent circumstances in any of the preceding technological revolutions.

If such a comparison were made, we might (for example) become more modest about our ability to predict or anticipate the long-term consequences of what we were about to do. We might become sensitized to certain kinds of impacts that we might otherwise overlook—such as impacts on culture, geopolitical strategy and balance of power, people’s preferences, and on the size and composition of the human population. Perhaps most importantly, we might be led to pay closer attention to what impacts there might be in terms of further technological developments that the initial revolution would enable. We might also become more sophisticated, and perhaps more humble, in our thinking about how individuals or groups might exert predictable positive influence on the way things develop. Finally, we might be led to focus more on systems level aspects, such as institutions and technologies for aggregating and processes information, for making decisions regarding e.g. regulations and funding priorities, and for implementing these decisions.

In “The Singularity Is Always Near,” an essay in

Allow me to clarify the metaphor implied by the term “singularity.” The metaphor implicit in the term “singularity” as applied to future human history is not to a point of infinity, but rather to the event horizon surrounding a black hole. Densities are not infinite at the event horizon but merely large enough such that it is difficult to see past the event horizon from outside.

I say difficult rather than impossible because the Hawking radiation emitted from the event horizon is likely to be quantum entangled with events inside the black hole, so there may be ways of retrieving the information. This was the concession made recently by Hawking. However, without getting into the details of this controversy, it is fair to say that seeing past the event horizon is difficult (impossible from a classical physics perspective) because the gravity of the black hole is strong enough to prevent classical information from inside the black hole getting out.

We can, however, use our intelligence to infer what life is like inside the event horizon even though seeing past the event horizon is effectively blocked. Similarly, we can use our intelligence to make meaningful statements about the world after the historical singularity, but seeing past this event horizon is difficult because of the profound transformation that it represents.

So discussions of infinity are not relevant. You are correct that exponential growth is smooth and continuous. From a mathematical perspective, an exponential looks the same everywhere and this applies to the exponential growth of the power (as expressed in price-performance, capacity, bandwidth, etc.) of information technologies. However, despite being smooth and continuous, exponential growth is nonetheless explosive once the curve reaches transformative levels. Consider the Internet. When the Arpanet went from 10,000 nodes to 20,000 in one year, and then to 40,000 and then 80,000, it was of interest only to a few thousand scientists. When ten years later it went from 10 million nodes to 20 million, and then 40 million and 80 million, the appearance of this curve looks identical (especially when viewed on a log plot), but the consequences were profoundly more transformative. There is a point in the smooth exponential growth of these different aspects of information technology when they transform the world as we know it.

You cite the extension made by Kevin Drum of the log-log plot that I provide of key paradigm shifts in biological and technological evolution (which appears on page 17 of The Singularity Is Near). This extension is utterly invalid. You cannot extend in this way a log-log plot for just the reasons you cite. The only straight line that is valid to extend on a log plot is a straight line representing exponential growth when the time axis is on a linear scale and the a value (such as price-performance) is on a log scale. Then you can extend the progression, but even here you have to make sure that the paradigms to support this ongoing exponential progression are available and will not saturate. That is why I discuss at length the paradigms that will support ongoing exponential growth of both hardware and software capabilities. But it is not valid to extend the straight line when the time axis is on a log scale. The only point of these graphs is that there has been acceleration in paradigm shift in biological and technological evolution.

If you want to extend this type of progression, then you need to put time on a linear x axis and the number of years (for the paradigm shift or for adoption) as a log value on the y axis. Then it may be valid to extend the chart. I have a chart like this on page 50 of the book.

This acceleration is a key point. These charts show that technological evolution emerges smoothly from the biological evolution that created the technology creating species. You mention that an evolutionary process can create greater complexity—and greater intelligence—than existed prior to the process. And it is precisely that intelligence creating process that will go into hyper drive once we can master, understand, model, simulate, and extend the methods of human intelligence through reverse-engineering it and applying these methods to computational substrates of exponentially expanding capability.

That chimps are just below the threshold needed to understand their own intelligence is a result of the fact that they do not have the prerequisites to create technology. There were only a few small genetic changes, comprising a few tens of thousands of bytes of information, that distinguish us from our primate ancestors: a bigger skull (allowing a larger brain), a larger cerebral cortex, and a workable opposable appendage. There were a few other changes that other primates share to some extent such as mirror neurons and spindle cells

As I pointed out in my long now talk, a chimp’s hand looks similar but the pivot point of the thumb does not allow facile manipulation of the environment. In contrast, our human ability to look inside the human brain and to model and simulate and recreate the processes we encounter there has already been demonstrated. The scale and resolution of these simulations will continue to expand exponentially. I make the case that we will reverse-engineer the principles of operation of the several hundred information processing regions of the human brain within about twenty years and then apply these principles (along with the extensive tool kit we are creating through other means in the AI field) to computers that will be many times (by the 2040s, billions of times) more powerful than needed to simulate the human brain.

You write that “Kurzweil found that if you make a very crude comparison between the processing power of neurons in human brains and the processing powers of transistors in computers, you could map out the point at which computer intelligence will exceed human intelligence.” That is an oversimplification of my analysis. I provide in book four different approaches to estimating the amount of computation required to simulate all regions of the human brain based on actual functional recreations of brain regions. These all come up with answers in the same range, from 10¹⁴ to 10¹⁶ cps for creating a functional recreation of all regions of the human brain, so I’ve used 10¹⁶ cps as a conservative estimate.

This refers only to the hardware requirement. As noted above, I have an extensive analysis of the software requirements. While reverse-engineering the human brain is not the only source of intelligent algorithms (and, in fact, has not been a major source at all up until just recently because we did not have scanners that could see into the human with sufficient resolution until recently), my analysis of reverse-engineering the human brain is along the lines of an existence proof that we will have the software methods underlying human intelligence within a couple of decades.

Another important point in this analysis is that the complexity of the design of the human brain is about a billion times simpler than the actual complexity we find in the brain. This is due to the brain (like all biology) being a probabilistic recursively expanded fractal. This discussion goes beyond what I can write here (although it is in the book). We can ascertain the complexity of the design of the human brain because the design is contained in the genome and I show that the genome (including non-coding regions) only has about 30 to 100 million bytes of compressed information in it due to the massive redundancies in the genome.

So in summary, I agree that the singularity is not a discrete event. A single point of infinite growth or capability is not the metaphor being applied. Yes, the exponential growth of all facts of information technology is smooth, but is nonetheless explosive and transformative.

© 2006 Ray Kurzweil

All sorts of new technologies promise to empower individuals, but the ultimate empowerer of ordinary people may well turn out to be nanotechnology, the much-hyped but still important technology of molecular manufacturing and computing. Indeed, for all the nano-hype, the reality of nanotechnology may turn out to exceed the claims. The result may be as big a change as the Industrial Revolution, but in a different direction.

Nanotechnology derives its name from the nanometer, or a billionth of a meter, and refers to the manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular level. The ideas behind nanotechnology are simple ones: every substance on Earth is made up of molecules composed of one or more atoms (the smallest particles of elements). To describe the molecules that constitute a physical object and how they interrelate is to say nearly everything important about the object. It follows, then, that if you can manipulate individual atoms and molecules and put them together in certain configurations, you should be able to create just about anything you desire. And if technologies like computers and the Internet have empowered individuals by giving them drastically more control over the organization of information, the impact of nanotechnology—which promises similar control over the material world—is likely to be much greater. This goes well beyond home-brewing beer, though, as with making beer, nanotechnology involves letting someone else do the hard work at the microscopic level.

Richard Feynman’s first description of nanotechnology still serves:

The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom…. [I]t would be, in principle, possible for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed—a development which I think cannot be avoided.¹

Modern nanotechnology researchers want to go beyond synthesizing “substances” (though that has great importance) to use nanotechnology’s atom-by-atom construction techniques to produce objects: tiny, bacterium-sized devices that can repair clogged arteries, kill cancer cells, fix cellular damage from aging, and (via what are called “assemblers”) make other devices of greater size or complexity by plugging atoms, one at a time, into the desired arrangements, very quickly. Other researchers believe that nanotechnology will allow for a degree of miniaturization that might permit computers a millionfold more efficient than anything available now. Still others believe that nanotechnology’s tiny devices will be able to unravel mysteries of the microscopic world (such as cell metabolism, the aging process, and cancer) in ways that other tools will not be able to.

So far, pioneers like Eric Drexler and Robert Freitas have worked out a lot of the details, and research has produced some small devices, but nothing as exotic as those described above. But nanotechnologists are refining both their instrumentation and their understanding of nanofabrication at an accelerating rate. Will they be able to fulfill the field’s promise? Richard Feynman thought so. That raises a lot of interesting possibilities—and questions.

The digital revolution brought us a debate over the difference between virtual reality and physical reality, a distinction the courts are still trying to figure out. But we are also at the dawn of a new technological revolution—the nanotech revolution—that may challenge our definition of what physical reality is. Superman could create diamonds by squeezing lumps of coal, using heat and pressure to rearrange the carbon atoms. Nanotechnology could achieve the same transformation, with considerably less fuss, simply by plugging carbon atoms together, one at a time, in the correct manner—and without the embarrassing blue tights.

This sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and it is: In Michael Crichton’s thriller, Prey, nanotech plays the bad guy. But in real life, nanotech is already being used by everyone from Lee Jeans, which uses nanofibers to make stain-proof pants, to the U.S. military, which uses nanotechnology to make better catalysts for rockets and missiles, to scientists who are using nano-technology to develop workable artificial kidneys.²

“JUST ADD SUNLIGHT AND DIRT”

Many scientists initially doubted that nanotechnology’s precise positioning of molecules was possible, but that skepticism appears to have been misplaced. That’s no surprise, really, since living organisms, including our own bodies, make things like bone and muscle by manipulating individual atoms and molecules. Yet as criticism has shifted from claims that nanotechnology won’t work to fears that it might, there have been calls to stop progress in the field of nanotechnology before research really gets off the ground. The ETC Group, an anti-technology organization operating out of Canada, has proposed a moratorium on nanotechnology research and on research into self-replicating machines. (At the moment, the latter is like calling for a moratorium on antigravity or faster-than-light travel—nobody’s doing it anyway.)

Proponents of this line of criticism face an uphill battle. What’s attractive about devices that can be programmed to manipulate molecules is that they let you make virtually anything you want, and you can generally make it out of cheap and commonly available materials and energy—what nanotech enthusiasts call “sunlight and dirt.” Selectively sticky probes on tiny bacterium-scale arms, attached either to tiny robots or to a silicon substrate and controlled by computer, can grab the atoms they need from solution, and then plug them together in the proper configuration. It’s not quite molecular Legos, but it’s close. General purpose devices that can do this are called “assemblers,” and the process is known among nanotechnology proponents as “molecular manufacturing.”

This process raises some problems of its own, though. Assemblers that can manufacture virtually anything from sunlight and dirt might, as the result of a program error, manufacture endless copies of themselves, which would then go on to make still more copies, and so on. The fear that nanobots might turn the world into mush is known in the trade as the “gray goo problem,” the apocalyptic scenario raised in Crichton’s novel.

Nanotech’s backers, however, believe the real problem won’t be accident, but abuse. With mature nanotechnology, it might be possible to disassemble enemy weapons. (Imagine bacterium-sized devices that convert high explosives into inert substances, a technique that would neutralize even nuclear weapons, whose detonators are made of chemical high explosive.) On a more threatening note, sophisticated nanodevices could serve as artificial “disease” agents of great power and subtlety. Highly sophisticated nanorobots could even hide out in people’s brains, manipulating their neurochemistry to ensure that they genuinely loved Big Brother. Like nuclear weapons, these devices would be awesome in their destructiveness, and their misuse would be terrifying. Still, the race to harness this power is well underway: Defense spending on nanotechnology is climbing, and civilian spending is over $1 billion a year.³

In a world in which the promises of nanotechnology were realized, practically anyone could live a life that would be extraordinary by today’s standards, in terms of health (thanks to nanomedicine) and material possessions. DNA damaged by radiation, toxins, or aging could be repaired; arterial plaque could be removed; and cancerous or senescent cells could be destroyed or fixed. Organs could be replaced or even enhanced. Researcher Robert Freitas surveys many of these issues in his book Nanomedicine, which explores such topics as “respirocytes”—tiny devices in the bloodstream that could deliver oxygen when the body wasn’t able to, protecting against everything from drowning to heart attacks and strokes long enough to allow medical assistance. And this just scratches the surface in terms of potential enhancements, which might also involve stronger muscles, better nerves, and enhanced cognition—the last being the subject of an ongoing Department of Defense research project already.⁴

Most physical goods could be manufactured onsite at low cost from cheap raw materials. Imagine owning an appliance the size of a refrigerator, full of nanoassemblers, that ran on sunlight and dirt (well, solar electricity and cheap feedstocks, anyway) and made pretty much everything you need, from clothing to food. The widespread availability of such devices would make things very, very different. Material goods wouldn’t be quite free, but they would be nearly so.

In such a world, personal property would become almost meaningless. Some actual physical items would retain sentimental value, but everything else could be produced as needed, then recycled as soon as the need passed. (As someone who writes on a laptop that was cutting edge last year and is now old news, with its value discounted accordingly, I sometimes think we’re already there except for the recycling part. Don’t even ask about my MP3 player.)

Real property would retain its value—as my grandfather used to say, “They’re not making any more of it,” especially oceanfront acreage—but what would “value” mean? Value usually describes an object’s ability to be exchanged for another item. But with personal property creatable on demand from sunlight and dirt, it’s not clear what the medium of exchange would be. Value comes from scarcity, and most goods wouldn’t be scarce. Intellectual property—the software and designs used to program the nano­devices—would be valuable, though once computing power became immense and ubiquitous, developing such designs wouldn’t be likely to pose much of a challenge.

One thing that would remain scarce is time. Personal services like teaching, lawyering, or prostitution wouldn’t be cheapened in the same fashion. We might wind up with an economy based on the exchange of personal services more than on the purchase of goods. As I mentioned earlier, that’s where we’re headed already to a point. Even without nanotechnology, the prices of many goods are falling. Televisions, once expensive, are near-commodity goods, as are computers, stereos, and just about all other electronics. It’s cheaper to build new ones than to fix old ones, and prices continue to fall as capabilities increase. Nanotechnology would simply accelerate this trend and extend it to everything else. Ironically, it may be the combination of capitalism and technology that brings about a utopia unblemished by the need for ownership, the sort that socialists (usually no fans of capitalism) and romantics (no fans of technology) have long dreamed of.

PIONEERS’ PROGRESS

We’re not there yet, but things are progressing faster than even I had realized. Recently, I attended an EPA Science Advisory Board meeting where nanotechnology was discussed. What struck me is that even for people like me who try to keep up, the pace of nanotechnology research is moving much too fast to catch everything.

One of the documents distributed at that meeting was a supplement to the president’s budget request, entitled National Nanotechnology Initiative: Research and Development Supporting the Next Industrial Revolution.⁵ I expected it to be the usual bureaucratic pap, but in fact, it turned out to contain a lot of actual useful information, including reports of several nanotechnology developments that I had missed.

The most interesting, to me, was the report of “peptide [ring] nanotubes that kill bacteria by punching holes in the bacteria’s membrane.” You might think of these as a sort of mechanical antibiotic. As the report notes, “By controlling the type of peptides used to build the rings, scientists are able to design nanotubes that selectively perforate bacterial membranes without harming the cells of the host.”⁶ It goes on to note, “In theory, these nano-bio agents should be far less prone than existing antibiotics to the development of bacterial resistance.”⁷ What’s more, if such resistance appears, it is likely to be easier to counter. Given the way in which resistance to conventional antibiotics has exploded, this is awfully good news.

Another item involved the use of nanoscale particles of metallic iron to clean up contaminated groundwater. In one experiment, aimed at the contaminant trichloroethylene (TCE), the results were quite impressive: “The researchers carried out a field demonstration at an industrial site in which nanoparticles injected into a groundwater plume containing TCE reduced contaminant levels by up to 96 percent.” The report goes on to observe, “A wide variety of contaminants (including chlorinated hydrocarbons, pesticides, explosives, polychlorinated biphenyls and perchlorate) have been successfully broken down in both laboratory and field tests.”⁸ Not too shabby.

And there’s more: the development of nanosensors capable of identifying particular microbes or chemicals, of nanomotors, and dramatic advances in materials. These advances shouldn’t be underestimated.

We tend to forget this, but it’s possible for a technology to have revolutionary effects long before it reaches its maturity. The impact of high-strength materials, for example, is likely to be much greater than people generally realize. Materials science isn’t sexy the way that, say, robots are sexy, but when you can cut the weight, or boost the strength, of aircraft, or spacecraft, or even automobiles by a factor of ten or fifty, the consequences are enormous. Ditto for killing germs, or even detecting them in short order. These sorts of things aren’t as exciting as true molecular manufacturing, and they’re not as revolutionary, but they’re still awfully important, and awfully revolutionary, by comparison with everything else.

When I gave my talk at the Science Advisory Board, I divided nanotechnology into these categories:

• Fake: where it’s basically a marketing term, as with nanopants

• Simple: high-strength materials, sensors, coatings, etc.—things that are important, but not sexy

• Major: advanced devices short of true assemblers

• Spooky: assemblers and related technology (true molecular nanotechnology, capable of making most anything from sunlight and dirt, creating supercomputers smaller than a sugar cube, etc.)

I noted that only in the final category did serious ethical or regulatory issues appear, and also noted that the recent flood of “it’s impossible” claims relating to “spooky” nanotechnology seem to have more to do with fear of ethical or regulatory scrutiny than anything else. People in the industry are hoping to keep the critics away with a smokescreen of doubt as to the capabilities of the technology. That probably won’t work, especially as nanotechnology develops and is put to use in more and more ways.

Up to now, talk of nanotechnology has generally involved either the “fake” variety (stain-resistant pants) or the “spooky” variety (full-scale molecular nanotechnology with all it implies). But as what might be called midlevel nanotechnology—neither fake nor spooky—begins to be deployed, it’s likely to have a substantial effect on the nature of the debate. It’s one thing to worry about (fictitious) swarms of predatory nanobots, a la Michael Crichton’s novel Prey. It’s another to talk about nanotech bans or moratoria when nanotechnology is already at work curing diseases and cleaning up the environment.

LEARNING FROM EXPERIENCE

I think that these positive uses will probably shift the debate away from the nano-Luddites. But, on the other hand, as nanotechnology becomes commonplace, serious discussion of its implications may be short-circuited. I think that the nanotech business community is actually hoping for such an outcome, in fact, but I continue to believe that such hopes are shortsighted. Genetically modified foods, for example, came to the market with the same absence of discussion, but the result wasn’t so great for the industry. Will nanotechnology be different? Stay tuned. Whatever happens, I think that trying to stand still might well prove the most dangerous course of action.

This may seem surprising, but experience suggests that it’s true.

For an academic project I worked on awhile back, I reviewed the history of what used to be called “recombinant DNA research” and is now generally just called genetic engineering or biotechnology. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, this was very controversial stuff, with opponents raising a variety of frightening possibilities.

Not all the fears were irrational. We didn’t know very much about how such things worked, and it was possible to imagine scary scenarios that at least seemed plausible. Indeed, such plausible fears led scientists in the field to get together, twice, holding conferences at Asilomar in California, to propose guidelines that would ensure the safety of recombinant DNA research until more was known.

Those voluntary guidelines became the basis for government regulations, regulations that work so well that researchers often voluntarily submit their work to government review even when the law doesn’t require it—and standard DNA licensing agreements often even call for such submission. Self-policing was their key element, and it worked.

When the DNA research debate first started, scientific critics such as Erwin Chargaff met the notion of scientific self-regulation with skepticism. Chargaff predicted modern-day Frankensteins or “little biological monsters” and compared the notion of scientific self-regulation to that of “incendiaries forming their own fire brigade.” Such critics warned that the harms that might result from permitting such research were literally incalculable, and thus it should not be allowed.

Others took a different view. Physicist Freeman Dyson, who admitted that (as a physicist, not a biologist) he had no personal stake in the debate, noted, “The real benefit to humanity from recombinant DNA will probably be the one no one has dreamed of. Our ignorance lies equally on both arms of the balance. The public costs of saying no to further development may in the end be far greater than the costs of saying yes.” Harvard’s Matthew Meselson agreed. The risk of not going forward, he argued, was the risk of being left open to “forthcoming catastrophes,” in the form of starvation (which could be addressed by crop biotechnology) and the spread of new viruses. Critics like Chargaff pooh-poohed this view, saying that the promise of the new technology to alleviate such problems was unproven.⁹

Meselson and Dyson have been vindicated. Indeed, Meselson’s comments about “forthcoming catastrophes” were made (though no one knew it at the time) just as AIDS was beginning to spread around the world. Without the tools developed through biotechnology and genetic engineering, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus could not even have been identified, and treatment efforts would have been limited. Had we listened to the critics, in other words, it’s likely that many more people would have died. Meanwhile, the critics’ Frankensteinian fears have not come true, and the research that was feared then has become commonplace, as this excerpt from John Hockenberry’s DNA Files program on NPR illustrates:

Hockenberry: In those early days [Arthur] Caplan says people were concerned about what would happen if we tried to genetically engineer different bacteria.

Caplan: The mayor of Cambridge, Massachusetts, at one point said he was worried if there were scientific institutions in his town that were doing this, he didn’t want to see sort of Frankenstein-type microbes coming out of the sewers.

Hockenberry: Today those early concerns seem almost quaint. Now even high school biology classes like this one in Maine do the same gene combining experiments that once struck fear into the hearts of public officials and private citizens.¹⁰

This experience suggests that we need to pay close attention to the downsides of limiting scientific research, and that we need to scrutinize the claims of fearmongering critics every bit as carefully as the claims of optimistic boosters. This is especially true at the moment, because, arguably, we’re in a window of vulnerability where many technologies are concerned. For example, in 2002 researchers at SUNY-Stony Brook synthesized a virus using a commercial protein synthesizer and a genetic map downloaded from the Internet. This wasn’t really news from a technical standpoint (I remember a scientist telling me in 1999 that anyone with a protein synthesizer and a computer could do such a thing), but many found it troubling.¹¹

But at the moment, it’s troubling because we know more about viruses than about their cures, meaning that it’s easier to cause trouble by making viruses than it is to remedy viruses once made. In another decade or two, depending on the pace of research, developing a vaccine or cure will be just as easy. That being the case, doesn’t it make sense to progress as rapidly as possible, to minimize the timespan in which we’re at risk? It does to me.

Critics of biotechnology feel otherwise. But their track record hasn’t been very impressive so far. What’s more interesting is who’s not criticizing nanotechnology. Typically Luddite Greenpeace, for instance, has been surprisingly moderate in its response. The environmental organization has sponsored a report entitled “Future Technologies, Today’s Choices: Nanotechnology, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics; A Technical, Political and Institutional Map of Emerging Technologies”¹² that looks rather extensively at nanotechnology.

Surprisingly, the report rejects the idea of a moratorium on nanotechnology, despite calls to squelch nanotech from other environmental groups. Instead, it finds that a moratorium on nanotechnology research “seems both unpractical and probably damaging at present.”¹³ The report also echoes warnings from others that such a moratorium might simply drive nanotechnology research underground.

Though overlooked in the few news stories to cover the report, this finding is significant. With a moratorium taken off the table, the question then becomes one of how, not whether, to develop nanotechnology. The report also takes a rather balanced view of the technology’s prospects. It notes that there has been a tendency to blur the distinction between nanoscale technologies of limited long-term importance (e.g., stain-resistant “nanopants”) and build-anything general assembler devices and other sophisticated nanotechnologies, so as to make incremental work look sexier than it is. This is important: the report’s not-entirely-unreasonable worries about the dangers of nanomaterials are distinguishable from more science-fictional concerns of the Crichton variety. (Remember, Crichton rhymes with “frighten.”) Thus, it will be harder for Greenpeace to conflate the two kinds of concerns itself, as has been done in the struggle against genetically modified foods where opponents have often mixed minor-but­proven threats with major-but-bogus ones in a rather promiscuous fashion.

Indeed, it seems to me that nano-blogger Howard Lovy is right in saying, “Take out the code words and phrases that are tailored to Greenpeace’s audience, and you’ll find some sound advice in there for the nanotech industry.”¹⁴ Greenpeace is calling for more research into safety. Now is a good time to do that—even for the industry, which currently doesn’t have a lot of products at risk. Quite a few responsible nanotechnology researchers are calling for this kind of research as well. Such research is likely to do more good than harm at blocking Luddite efforts to turn nanotechnology into a political football—the next Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) derived food. Despite the vast promise of GMO foods (including vitamin-enhanced “golden rice” that can prevent widespread blindness among Third-World children), environmentalist hostility and fearmongering has kept most of them out of the market. As Rice University researcher Vicki Colvin noted in congressional testimony:

The campaign against GMOs was successful despite the lack of sound scientific data demonstrating a threat to society. In fact, I argue that the lack of sufficient public scientific data on GMOs, whether positive or negative, was a controlling factor in the industry’s fall from favor. The failure of the industry to produce and share information with public stakeholders left it ill-equipped to respond to GMO detractors. This industry went, in essence, from “wow” to “yuck” to “bankrupt.” There is a powerful lesson here for nanotechnology.¹⁵

She’s right, and the nanotechnology industry would do well to learn from the failings she outlines. As I noted above, some companies and researchers have tended to dismiss the prospects for advanced nanotechnology in the hopes of avoiding the attention of environmental activists. That obviously isn’t working. The best defense against nano-critics is good, solid scientific information, not denial—especially given the strong promise of nanotechnology in terms of environmental improvement.

Nanotechnology legislation recently passed by Congress calls for some investigation into these issues of safety and ethics. I hope that there will be more emphasis on exploring both the scientific and the ethical issues involved in nanotechnology’s growth. That sort of exploration—done by serious people, not the charlatans and fearmongers who are sure to target the area regardless—will be important in making nanotechnology succeed.

The critics won’t shut up, of course, but some aspects of their criticism will have more weight than others, leaving the scaremongering less influential than the scaremongers hope. And if that’s not enough, the argument for nanotechnology’s role in maintaining military supremacy is likely to rear its head. Nanotechnology is likely to be as important in the twenty-first century as rocketry or nuclear physics were in the twentieth. The United States has a fairly competent nanotechnology research program, though many feel its efforts are misdirected. Europe has a substantial but comparatively muted one. Other countries seem very interested indeed.

In the United States, and especially in Europe, research into nanotechnology is facing growing resistance from the same forces that have opposed biotechnology—and, for that matter, nuclear energy and other new technologies. The claim is that concerns about the safety and morality of nanotechnology justify limitations on research and development. Even Prince Charles has weighed in against nanotechnology, although Ian Bell wonders if the real fuss is about something other than the science:

Charles is afraid that the science could, yes, run amok, with minuscule robots reproducing themselves and proceeding to turn the world into “grey goo.”

Many might suspect that the only grey goo we have to worry about is between the ears of HRH, but scientists fear that the prince could do to them what he did to the reputation of contemporary architecture. Charles, clearly, can have no way of knowing what he is talking about, but the fear he expresses is common: do any of us really know what we are doing when we follow where science leads?¹⁶

The real problem isn’t a distrust of science. It’s a distrust of people. Such fear is strongest when pessimism about humanity is at a high. Europe, perhaps understandably pessimistic about humanity’s prospects in light of recent history, leads the way in throwing some people’s only favored invention—the wet blanket—over nanotechnology research.

In the more optimistic United States, concerns exist, but they haven’t yet led to a strong interest in regulating nanotechnology. Instead, the U.S. takes an ostrich-like approach to dealing with the realities of the technology; scientific and corporate types try to shift the focus to short-term technological developments while scoffing at the prospects for genuine molecular manufacturing—the “spooky” stuff, as I’ve labeled it. Some promising developments are taking place, both at the National Nanotechnology Initiative and within the nanotechnology industry itself, but it’s still too early to tell whether this turnaround will really take hold.

MANDARINS AND MEMORIES

In the meantime, other cultures, unencumbered by the residual belief in original sin plaguing even the most secular Westerners, show far less reluctance. Perhaps they are less comfortable and more ambitious than we are, as well. Chinese interest in military nanotechnology has begun to alarm some, especially as China is already third in the world in nanotechnology patent applications.¹⁷

India’s president, Abdul Kalam, is also touting nanotechnology, and as a recent press account captured, he’s quite straightforward in saying that one reason for treating nanotechnology as important is that it will lead to revolutionary weaponry:

[Kalam] said carbon nano tubes and its composites would give rise to super strong, smart and intelligent structures in the field of material science and this in turn could lead to new production of nano robots with new types of explosives and sensors for air, land and space systems. “This would revolutionise the total concepts of future warfare,” he said.¹⁸

Yes, it would. Westerners tend to forget it, but it was a few key technologies—primarily steam navigation and repeating firearms—that made the era of Western colonialism possible. (See Daniel Headrick’s The Tools of Empire¹⁹ for more on this.)

It is, no doubt, as hard for American and European Mandarins to imagine being conquered by Chinese troops equipped with superior weaponry as it was for Chinese Mandarins to imagine the reverse two hundred years ago. Will our mandarins be smart enough to learn from that experience? That’s the question, isn’t it?

But in the long run, the growth of nanotechnology means that we won’t just be worrying about countries, but about individuals. With mature nanotechnology, individuals and small groups will possess powers once available only to nation-states. As with all powers possessed by individuals, these will sometimes be used for good, and sometimes for ill.

Of course, that’s just an extension of existing phenomena. My own neighborhood has a few dozen families in it; between them, they probably have enough guns and motorized vehicles (conveniently, mostly SUVs) to wipe out a Roman legion, or a Mongol horde—forces that, in both cases, once represented the peak of military power on the planet. Nobody worries about the military power that my neighborhood represents, because it’s (1) unlikely to be misused, and (2) negligible in a world where most anyone can afford guns and SUVs anyway.

What this suggests is that a world in which nanotechnology is ubiquitous is likely to be less threatening than one in which it’s a closely held government monopoly. A world in which nanotechnology is ubiquitous is a rich world. That doesn’t preclude bad behavior, but it helps. A world with such diffuse power makes abuse by smaller groups, or even governments, less threatening overall. The average Roman or Mongolian citizen didn’t really need guns or SUVs. Back then, the hobbyist machine shop in my neighbor’s basement would have been a tool of strategic, even world-changing, importance all by itself. Now, in a different world, it’s just a toy, even though it could, in theory, produce dangerous weaponry. It’s probably best if nano-technology works out the same way, with diffusion minimizing the risk that anyone will gain disproportionate power over the rest of us.

In his recent book, The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil notes that technology often suffices to deal with technological threats, even in the absence of governmental intervention:

When [the computer virus] first appeared, strong concerns were voiced that as they became more sophisticated, software pathogens had the potential to destroy the computer-network medium in which they live. Yet the “immune system” that has evolved in response to this challenge has been largely effective. Although destructive self-replicating software entities do cause damage from time to time, the injury is but a small fraction of the benefit we receive from the computers and communications links that harbor them.²⁰

Software viruses, of course, aren’t usually a lethal threat. But Kurzweil notes that this cuts both ways:

The fact that computer viruses are not usually deadly to humans only means that more people are willing to create and release them. The vast majority of software-virus authors would not release viruses if they thought they would kill people. It also means that our response to the danger is that much less intense. Conversely, when it comes to self-replicating entities that are potentially lethal on a large scale, our response on all levels will be vastly more serious.²¹

I think that’s right. In fact, prophetic works of science fiction—Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, for instance—generally feature such defensive technologies against rogue nanotechnology. Given the greater threat potential of nanotechnologies, we may have to rely on more than Symantec and McAfee for protection—but on the other hand, given the huge benefits promised by nanotechnology, we should be willing to go ahead anyway. And I expect we will.

1. Richard P. Feynman, There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom, ed. Horace D. Gilbert (1961), 295-96.

2. On the artificial kidneys, see "Nanotechnology Used to Help Develop Artificial Kidney," ABC News Online.

3. Information on the National Nanotechnology Initiative can be found at its website, http://www.nano.gov—but information on classified Defense Department work is, of course, classified.

4. Robert J. Freitas, Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities (Landes Bioscience, 1999). See also Robert J. Freitas, Nanomedicine, Volume IA: Biocompatibility (Landes Bioscience, 2003). On enhanced cognition, see Kelly Hearn, "Future Soldiers Could Get Enhanced Minds," UPI, 19 March 2001, LexisNexis Library, UPI File (describing planned use of nanotechnology to enhance soldiers’ cognition and decision-making under stress).

5. National Science and Technology Council (2004), available online at http://nano.gov/nni04_budget_supplement.pdf.

6. National Science and Technology Council, 27.

7. National Science and Technology Council.

8. National Science and Technology Council, 33.

9. For a summary of this debate, see Judith P. Swazey, et al., "Risks and Benefits, Rights and Responsibilities: A History of the Recombinant DNA Research Controversy," Volume 51, Southern California Law Review (1978), 1019.

10. Available online at http://www.dnafiles.org/PDFs/therapy.pdf.

11. See David Whitehouse, "First Synthetic Virus Created," BBC News, 11 July 2002. Available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm.

12. Available online at http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/5886.pdf.

13. Available online at http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/MultimediaFiles/Live/FullReport/5886.pdf.

14. Howard Lovy, Nanobot blog, http://nanobot.blogspot.com/2003_07_20_nanobot_archive.html#105905157013774164.

15. Testimony of Dr. Vicki L. Colvin, director, Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology (CBEN), and associate professor of chemistry, Rice University, Houston, Texas, before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, in regard to "Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003," 9 April 2003. Available online at http://www.house.gov/science/hearings/full03/apr09/colvin.htm.

16. Ian Bell, "Upgrading the Human Condition," Sunday Herald (Glasgow), 1 August 2004. Available online at http://www.sundayherald.com/43701.

17. "China’s Nanotechnology Patent Applications Rank Third in World," InvestorIdeas.com, 3 October 2003, http://www.investorideas.com/Companies/Nanotechnology/Articles/China’sNanotechnology1003,03.asp. See also Dennis Normile, "China’s R&D Power, Truth about Trade & Technology," 2 September 2005, http://www.truthabouttrade.org/article.asp?id=4364. ("Ernest Preeg, senior fellow in trade and productivity for the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI, warns in his just released book, The Emerging Chinese Advanced Technology Superstate (jointly pub­lished by the Manufacturers Alliance/MAPI and the US Hudson Institute in June 2005) that ‘China is right up there with the US in nanotechnology and coming on strong in biotech and in genetically modified agriculture.’")

18. "Indian Scientists Should Make Breakthrough in Nano Technology: Kalam," IndiaExpress.com, 1 July 2004, http://www.indiaexpress.com/news/technology/20040701-0.html.

19. Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford University Press, 1981).

20. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005), 415.

21. Kurzweil.

© 2006 Glenn Reynolds

Concern: Convincing society that the brain needs to keep up with the changes ahead.

Each one of us has been entrusted with the care and nourishment of what might be the most extraordinary and complex creation in the universe. Home to mind and personality, the human brain archives cherished memories and hopes for the future. It arranges and coordinates the elements of consciousness that gives us purpose, passion, motion, and emotion.

But the brain is too fragile. It is far too vulnerable to be allowed to continue in its current state. In order to properly sustain the brain, we need to know what it likes, the challenges it craves, the rest it requires, and the protection it deserves. In short, the brain must have a strategy for its future.

But is it really necessary to take action now? I submit that if events have altered the day-to-day operations of the brain, affecting how it performs its operations and whether it can sustain for the long haul, then now is the right time to take action.

Recently, there has been a series of technological events causing irrevocable changes in the external environment of the brain. People are living longer; there is a notable increase in the number of activists supporting life extension technologies; economic reporting predicts an increase in research and development of molecular manufacturing and nanotechnology; programming engineers are reveling in the increase in research and development of superintelligence; and conservative organizations are publishing warnings indicating an increased awareness of the potential threats of superintelligence. These events will directly or indirectly affect the brain, resulting in a set of expectations for the brain to function over a longer period of time and operate at a higher level of quality than it has ever achieved in the past.

To keep pace and sustain itself for the long haul, the brain needs a strategy that takes into account the present circumstances and what the future may hold. Currently, the brain is challenged by a demand to produce better cognitive capabilities more quickly and efficiently for a longer period of time. Simultaneously there is an increased rate of neurological degeneration of brain cells resulting from increased longevity. And even though it is not a current threat, soon there will be a need to keep up with the acceleration of competitive superintelligence.

Developing a strategy for the brain requires a balance of several elements: a compelling vision for its future, strategic goals, an action plan, and a means for measuring the success of the plan. But before we can develop a strategic plan for the brain, we have to know more about the brain’s ability to meet the needs of the contemporary mind. This may seem like an abstract project because it would require us to separate the brain as a functioning organization of cells, or agents, from the mind. Nevertheless, an effective way to do this is to fictionalize the brain—make it a character or a business entity.

If the brain had an executive statement, for example, it might read something like this:

---

Executive Statement of the Brain

The mission of the brain is to serve its cells by adopting the advantages of emerging technologies to ensure a smart, safe and sustainable environment.

The brain develops best practices for cognitive and creative processes. The brain’s central operating system is located in the neocortex, and has connections through the internal and external communications network.

The brain’s quality services are unique and exclusive, and its target supply chain is nerve cells and synapses with upper-end job-related responsibilities. The brain’s competitive "intelligence" edge is that its services are 100% man-made, unlike competitors, such as superintelligence and friendly artificial intelligences. By this fact, the brain’s mind hopes to attract inventors and investors that value the artistry of producing neurological connections and their emergent properties such as critical thinking, imagination, day-dreaming, problem-solving, humor and intellection. Since the brain’s responsibilities are mostly to serve the day-to-day functions of the mind, as well as to elaborate networking and communications assistance for the mind and body, it is considered to be in the communications market, although some mental personas use the end-result products, such as ideas, for themselves.

In the year 2006, the brain plans to develop strategic initiatives to protect its future and gain a competitive edge in the "intelligence" marketplace. Over the past few decades, the brain’s longevity has increased along with its competitors, necessitating a reevaluation of its position and its future.

The brain’s future is uncertain due to advancing cogitative systems such as AI and superintelligence. Adding to the external environment of the brain is the fact that new intelligence enterprises entering the marketplace are drawing business away from the brain. Encephalitis and other invasive viral infections, as well as dementia and neurological breakdowns, are eating away at the resources of the brain’s affiliates. This pending shortage has created an immense demand for increased memory.

Regardless of some of the internal flaws of the brain, there is great potential for its continued success. The brain will improve faltering memory by adding a backup system; will expand to direct mind-linkup ubiquitous computing networks; will add error-correction memory replay and a global Net connection with remote neural access, guarded by security protocol. The brain plans to support its entire system by eliminating degenerative processes that impede the ability for a healthy, vital life in its goal to keep up with the many changes ahead.

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While the executive statement is a fictionalized story, it does contain tangible elements. The reality is that our brains need to be protected and improved upon. The brain’s future depends upon how we want our brains to perform in the coming years and how much augmentation is actually needed, both invasively and noninvasively, to satisfy this end. Since our brains contain our memories, and our memories build our identities, this is a serious matter. But because we cannot see it as clearly as we see our expanding or shrinking bodies, the brain is dismissed while our mind presses for more immediate attention, forgetting the hard fact that unless the brain is in good physical shape, the entire system will falter.

Today the brain is vulnerable. It is vulnerable because the axial skeleton’s skull that encloses and protects the brain is not built from impenetrable material; its command-and-control center, including the white matter in between, is in constant danger of breakdown, infection, and disease; and its cognitive processes are subject to loss of information.

Trends five to ten years in the future suggest an increase in technologies, including biotech and nanotech, for building better brains to operate with better bodies in meeting the needs of people living longer. Further future trends suggest people opting for the synthetic brain over a biological brain. Markets point to an expected increase in neurosurgery, neuroinformatics, neuromarketing, biotechnologies, and human performance enhancements with an explicit focus on nanotechnology. But the consequential inclination is that of machine intelligence challenging human intelligence. Lurking in the foreground of the future is whether or not the brain will be able to keep pace with new technologies that will otherwise outperform it.

Based on potential threats and opportunities, and on the brain’s mission to serve its cells by adopting the advantages of emerging technologies to ensure a smart, safe and sustainable environment, the brain’s strategy narrows down to: (1) enhancing its performance and sustainability in order to satisfy the needs of people living longer; (2) competing with emerging superintelligence; and (3) enhancing its cognitive capabilities in order to deal with the problems of an increasingly complex world.

With these issues on the table, the brain needs a practical approach hedged by a strong vision that helps society understand the opportunities and the threats that await all of us. This is not just an abstract discussion; it includes everyone, not a select few. It is not simply a matter of being smarter or more capable; it is a matter of healthy and vital living. It is a matter of being prepared for the challenges of the future, and a measurable goal of convincing others to be prepared as well.

Convincing people is not an easy task, especially when minds have already been made up. But I think that we must work toward convincing society that the brain needs to accelerate with the rate of technological change, as our vision and audition have through innovative corrective technologies, and our arms and legs have with robotic prosthetics, and as other parts of our bodies have transformed and renewed in working together to keep us alive.

© 2006 Natasha Vita-More

Human enhancement—our ability to use technology to enhance our bodies and minds, as opposed to its application for therapeutic purposes—is a critical issue facing nanotechnology. It will be involved in some of the near-term applications of nanotechnology, with such research labs as MIT’s Institute for Soldier Technologies working on exoskeletons and other innovations that increase human strength and capabilities. It is also a core issue related to far-term predictions in nanotechnology, such as longevity, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence and other issues.

The implications of nanotechnology as related to human enhancement are perhaps some of the most personal and therefore passionate issues in the emerging field of nanoethics, forcing us to rethink what it means to be human or, essentially, our own identity. For some, nanotechnology holds the promise of making us superhuman; for others, it offers a darker path toward becoming Frankenstein’s monster.

Without advocating any particular side of the debate, this essay will look at a growing chorus of calls for human enhancement, especially in the context of emerging technologies, to be embraced and unrestricted. We will critically examine recent “pro-enhancement” arguments—articulated in More Than Human (2005) by Ramez Naam¹, as one of the most visible works on the subject today—and conclude that they ultimately need to be repaired, if they are to be convincing.

I

Before we proceed, we should lay out a few actual and possible scenarios in order to be clear on what we mean by “human enhancement.” In addition to steroid use to become stronger and plastic surgery to become more attractive, people today also use drugs to boost creativity, attentiveness, perception, and more. In the future, nanotechnology might give us implants that enable us to see in the dark, or in currently non-visible spectrums such as infrared. As artificial intelligence advances, nano-computers might be imbedded into our bodies in order to help process more information faster, even to the point where man and machine become indistinguishable.

These scenarios admittedly sound like science fiction, but with nanotechnology, we move much closer to turning them into reality. Atomically-precise manufacturing techniques continue to become more refined and will be able to build cellular-level sensors and other tools that can be integrated into our bodies. Indeed, designs have already been worked out for such innovations as a “respirocyte”—an artificial red blood cell that holds a reservoir of oxygen.² A respirocyte would come in handy for, say, a heart attack victim to continue breathing for an extra hour until medical treatment is available, despite a lack of blood circulation to the lungs or anywhere else. But in an otherwise-healthy athlete, a respirocyte could boost performance by delivering extra oxygen to the muscles, as if the person were breathing from a pure oxygen tank.

What we do not mean by “human enhancement” is the mere use of tools, such as a hammer or Microsoft Word, to aid human activities, or “natural” improvements of diet and exercise—though, as we shall discuss later, agreeing on a definition may not be a simple matter. Further, we must distinguish the concept from therapeutic applications, such as using steroids to treat any number of medical conditions, which we take to be unobjectionable for the purposes of this essay.

Also, our discussion here can benefit from quickly noting some of the intuitions on both sides of the debate. The anti-enhancement camp may point to steroids in sports as an argument for regulating technology: that it corrupts the notion of fair competition. Also, some say, by condoning enhancement we are setting the wrong example for our children, encouraging risky behavior in bodies that are still developing. “Human dignity” is also a recurring theme for this side, believing that such enhancements pervert the notion of what it means to be human (with all our flaws).

On the pro-enhancement side, it seems obvious that the desire for self-improvement is morally laudable. Attempts to improve ourselves through, for example, education, hard work, and so on are uncontroversially good; why should technology-based enhancements be viewed any differently? In addition to virtue-based defenses of technological enhancement, we might also appeal to individual autonomy to defend the practice: so long as rational, autonomous individuals freely choose to participate in these projects, intervention against them is morally problematic.

In More Than Human, it is interesting to see that the debate is framed as a conservative (anti-enhancement) versus liberal (pro-enhancement) issue³. This proposed dichotomy is undoubtedly influenced by the creation and work of the U.S. President’s Council on Bioethics. Led by Leon Kass, M.D., PhD, the council released a report, Beyond Therapy, in 2004 that endorsed an anti-enhancement position; this report has become the prime target for both liberals and pro-enhancement groups. However, it would be a mistake to think that the issue necessarily follows political lines, since there may be good reason for a liberal to be anti-enhancement, as well as for a conservative to support it.

II

In his introductory chapter, Naam outlines the overarching theme that is supported by his research and analysis in subsequent chapters. He offers four distinct arguments in defending the pro-enhancement position: first, there are pragmatic reasons for embracing enhancement; second, regulation will not work anyway; third, respect for our autonomy licenses the practices; and, fourth, that the desire to enhance is inherently human and therefore must be respected.

1. In his first argument, Naam points out that “scientists cannot draw a clear line between healing and enhancing.”⁴ The implied conclusion here is that, if no principled distinction can be made between two concepts, it is irrational to afford them different moral status. So, since there are no restrictions on therapy, in that we have a right to medical aid, there also should be no restrictions on human enhancement, i.e. using the same medical devices or procedures to improve our already-healthy bodies. In other words, there is no significant or moral difference between therapy and enhancement.

There are numerous problems with such a claim; we will herein elucidate two. The first problem can be illustrated by the famous philosophical puzzle called “The Paradox of the Heap”: given a heap of sand with N number of grains of sand, if we remove one grain of sand, we are still left with a heap of sand (that now only has N-1 grains of sand). If we remove one more grain, we are again left with a heap of sand (that now has N-2 grains). If we extend this line of reasoning and continue to remove grains of sand, we see that there is no clear point where we can definitely say that on side A, here is a heap of sand, but on the side B, this is less than a heap. In other words, there is no clear distinction between a heap of sand and a less-than-a-heap or even no sand at all. However, the wrong conclusion to draw here is that there is no difference between them; so likewise, it would be fallacious to conclude that there is no difference between therapy and enhancement. It may still be the case that there is no moral difference between the two, but we cannot arrive at it through the argument that there is no clear defining line.

But, second, there likely are principled distinctions that can be made between enhancement and therapy.⁵ For example, Norm Daniels has argued for the use of “quasi-statistical concepts of ‘normality’ to argue that any intervention designed to restore or preserve a species-typical level of functioning for an individual should count as [therapy]“⁶ and the rest as enhancement. Alternatively, Eric Juengst has proposed that therapies aim at pathologies which compromise health, whereas enhancements aim at improvements that are not health-related.⁷

Another pragmatic reason Naam gives is that “we cannot stop research into enhancing ourselves without also halting research focused on healing the sick and injured.”⁸ However, this claim seems to miss the point: anti-enhancement advocates can simply counter that it is not the research they want stopped or regulated, but rather the use of that research or its products for enhancement. For instance, we may want to ban steroids from sports, but no one is calling for an outright ban on all steroids research, much of which serves healing purposes.

Naam also puts the burden of proof—that regulation of enhancement is needed—on the anti-enhancement side, instead of offering an argument that enhancement need not be regulated.⁹ But it is unclear here why we should abandon the principle of erring on the side of caution, particularly where human health may be at stake as well as other societal impacts. Further, both sides have already identified a list of benefits or harms that might arise from unregulated human enhancement. The problem now is to evaluate these benefits and harms against each other (e.g., increased longevity versus overpopulation), also factoring in any relevant human rights. If neither side is able to convincingly show that benefits outweigh harms, or vice versa, then burden of proof seems to be a non-issue.

2. In his second argument, Naam compares a ban on enhancement to the U.S. “War on Drugs," citing its ineffectiveness as well as externalities such as artificially high prices and increased safety risks (e.g., users having to share needles because they cannot obtain new or clean ones) for those who will use drugs anyway.¹⁰ If people are as avidly driven to enhancement as they are to drugs, then yes, this may be the case. But is that a good enough reason to not even try to contain a problem, whether it is drugs, prostitution, gambling, or whatever? While such laws may be paternalistic, they reflect the majority consensus that a significant number of people cannot act responsibly in these activities and need to be protected from themselves and from inevitably harming others. Even many liberals are not categorically opposed to these regulations and may see the rationale of “greater good” behind similar regulation of enhancement.

Further, that we are unable to totally stop an activity does not seem to be reason at all against prohibiting that activity. If it were, then we would not have any laws against murder, speeding, “illegal” immigration—in fact, it is unclear what laws we would have left. Laws exist precisely because some people inescapably have tendencies to the opposite of what is desired by society or government. Again, this is not to say that human enhancement should be prohibited, only that a stronger and more compelling argument is needed.

3. In his third argument, Naam ties human enhancement to the debate over human freedom: “Should individuals and families have the right to alter their own minds and bodies, or should that power be held by the state? In a democratic society, it’s every man and woman who should determine such things, not the state…Governments are instituted to secure individual rights, not to restrict them.”¹¹

Besides politicizing a debate that need not be political, Naam’s arguments are increasingly not anti-conservative but pro-libertarian. You would need to have already adopted the libertarian philosophy to accept this line of reasoning (as well as the preceding argument), since again, even liberals can see that the state has a broader role in creating a functioning, orderly society. This necessarily entails reasonable limits to whatever natural rights we have and also implies new responsibilities—for example, we shouldn’t exercise our right to free speech by slandering or by yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater.

A democratic society is not compelled to endorse laissez-faire political philosophy and the minimal state, as some political philosophers have suggested.¹² Nor would reasonable people necessarily want unrestricted freedom, e.g. no restrictions or background checks for gun ownership. Even in a democracy as liberal as ours in the United States, we understand the value of regulations as a way to enhance our freedom. For instance, our economic system is not truly a “free market”—though we advocate freedom in general, regulations exist not only to protect our rights, but also to create an orderly process that greases the economic wheel, accelerating both innovations and transactions. As a simpler example, by disciplining a dog to obey commands and not run around unchecked, we actually increase that pet’s freedom by now being able to take him or her on more walks and perhaps without a leash (not to compare people with dogs or laws with behavioral conditioning).

4. Finally, Naam argues that people have been enhancing themselves from the start: “Far from being unnatural, the drive to alter and improve on ourselves is a fundamental part of who we humans are. As a species we’ve always looked for ways to be faster, stronger, and smarter and to live longer.”¹³ This seems to be an accurate observation, but it is an argumentative leap from this fact about the world, which is descriptive, to a moral conclusion about the world, which is normative. Or, as the philosophical saying goes, we cannot derive “ought” from “is," meaning just because something is a certain way doesn’t mean it should be that way or must continue to be that way. For instance, would the fact that we have engaged in wars—or slavery, or intolerance—across the entire history of civilization imply that we should continue with those activities?

More seriously, this argument seems to turn on an overly-broad definition of “human enhancement," such that it includes the use of tools, diet, exercise, and so on—or what we would intuitively call “natural” improvement. An objection to Naam’s first argument also applies here: just because we cannot clearly delineate between enhancement and therapy or tool-use does not mean there is no line between them. We understand that steroid use by baseball players is a case of human enhancement; we also understand that using a rock to crack open a clam is not. Still, the fact that we have not arrived at a clear definition of “human enhancement” should not prevent us from using intuitive distinctions to meaningfully discuss the issue.

III

The point here is not that human enhancement should be restricted. It is simply that current arguments need to be more compelling and philosophically rigorous, if the pro-enhancement side is to be successful. There is admittedly a strong intuition driving the pro-enhancement movement, but it needs to be articulated more fully, resulting in an argument something like the following:

Who we are now seems to be a product of nature and nurture, most of which is beyond our control. So, if this genetic-environmental lottery is truly random, then why should we be constrained to its results? After all, we’ve never agreed to such a process in the first place. Why not enhance ourselves to be on par with the capabilities of others? And if that is morally permissible, then why not go a little—or a lot—beyond the capabilities of others?

As suggested in the above analysis, one of the first steps in discussing human enhancement is to arrive at a better definition of what it is, perhaps by adopting that used by Daniels or Juengst, though these are still tough issues. For instance, does it matter whether enhancements are worn outside our bodies as opposed to being implanted? Why should carrying around a Pocket PC or binoculars be acceptable, but having a computer or a “bionic eye” implanted in our bodies be subject to possible regulation—what is the moral difference between the two?

Further, there are societal and ethical implications that also need to be considered, apart from those already mentioned. Before we too quickly dismiss the idea of “human dignity” as romanticized and outdated, we need to give it full consideration and ask whether that concept would suffer if human enhancement were unrestricted. Is there an obligation to enhance our children, or will parents feel pressure to do so? Might there be an “Enhancement Divide,” similar to the Digital Divide, that significantly disadvantages those without? If some people can interact with the world in ways that are unimaginable to others (such as echolocation or seeing in infrared), will that create a further “Communication Divide” such that people no longer share the same basic experiences in order to communicate with each other?

In this essay, we have tried to detail some of the challenges that nanotechnology and nanoethics will confront as applications to human enhancement become technologically viable. This will not be in the distant future, but rather sooner than many of us might have expected. It seems to the authors that a balanced and reasonable perspective is more appropriate than either polarizing extreme, if we are to responsibly and productively advance nanotechnology and its applications, particularly in light of the challenges to the pro-enhancement position that we have described.

1. Ramez Naam, More Than Human (Broadway Books, New York: 2005). See also www.morethanhuman.org.

2. Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Exploratory Design in Medical Nanotechnology: A Mechanical Artificial Red Cell,” Artificial Cells, Blood Substitutes, and Immobil. Biotech. 26(1998): 411-430

3. Naam (2005), pp.3-5.

4. Naam (2005), p.5.

5. For more discussion of these ideas, see Fritz Allhoff, “Germ-Line Genetic Enhancement and Rawlsian Primary Goods,” Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journals 15.1 (2005): 43-60.

6. Norm Daniels, “Growth Hormone Therapy for Short Stature: Can We Support the Treatment/Enhancement Distinction?," Growth: Genetics & Hormones 8.S1 (1992): 46-8.

7. Eric Juengst, “Can Enhancement Be Distinguished from Prevention in Genetic Medicine?," Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 22 (1997): 125-42.

8. Naam (2005), p.5.

9. Naam (2005), p.5.

10. Naam (2005), p.6.

11. Naam (2005), p.6-9.

12. See, for example, Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

13. Naam (2005), p.9.

© 2006 Patrick Lin and Fritz Allhoff.

Can civil societies absorb the impact of MNT without degenerating almost instantly into Hobbesian micro states, where the principal currency is direct power over other humans, expressed at best as involuntary personal service and, at the worst, sadistic or careless infliction of pain and consequent brutalization of spirit in slaves and masters alike? It is a disturbing prospect, more worrying than crazed individuals or sectarian terrorists. Are we, indeed, doomed to this outcome through frailties in our evolved nature, unsuited to such challenges, or perhaps to the rapacity of the current global economy?

A deeper question might be this: even if we assume that rich consumerist and individualist First World cultures like the USA might be prone to such collapse, is that true of all extant societies? Might more rigid or authoritarian societies have an advantage, if their citizens or subjects are too cowed by existing power structures to dash headlong into lawlessness? Might technologically simpler and poorer societies, possessing fewer goods to begin with and perhaps having fewer rising expectations, rebuff the temptations of MNT? Or might they seize upon such machines eagerly, but distribute them and their cornucopia, if only locally, on models of community or tribe unfamiliar to us in the West?

These seem to me extremely important issues that will require concentrated and imaginative study by economists, sociologists and anthropologists. Nearly half a century ago, the brilliant science fiction writer Damon Knight (1922-2002) published a parable salient to one possible sheaf of outcomes arising from successful and cheaply available molecular nanotechnological compilation of goods from cheap feedstocks. In his brief novel A For Anything¹, a radical device—the Gismo—duplicates any object within its field, including human beings. It needs no feedstock supply, and draws power from batteries, thereby apparently breaching conservation laws. This premise, although invalid given our current understanding of physics, fails to dispel the force of Knight’ s allegory, since when matter compilers eventually turn information and cheap feed stocks into virtually any desirable good, the more disastrous consequences portrayed by Knight will actually become feasible, unfortunately.

Given the exponential proliferation of Gismos that apparently provide everything people need without their working for it, including copies of the Gismo and its batteries, ordered western society collapses almost instantly. Water can be produced out of the nothing (the "quantum vacuum", perhaps), greening barren lands; plans to create spacecraft that generate their own fuel in flight seem set at first to remake the entire solar system. Melodramatically yet plausibly enough, alas, Knight projects an almost instant imposition of martial law and its failure, then, worse yet, general breakdown into lawlessness and acquisition by the brutal and canny of slaves, or "slobs", who can be copied at will when they "wear out". Within half a century, America sinks into a kind of feudalism where nothing, in effect, ever again changes, where innovation seems pointless if not intolerably disruptive.

Presciently, Knight realized that this kind of stable stagnation requires more than a simple duplicator, and added the proviso that Gismos can produce "protes" or "arrested prototypes", "a gnarled lump of quasi-matter that could be stored in a pigeonhole, and would keep forever" (27). When an "inhibitor" is activated, the prote provides the information necessary to generate a complete copy of the original. In effect, the Gismo is equivalent to a nanofactory, using storable algorithms, although protes have the disadvantage of not being digitized and hence transmissible information.

The question A For Anything raises is perhaps one for specialists in cultural change and diversity. My own specialties are discourse theory and science fiction, so all I can do here is suggest diffidently certain possibilities for analytical approaches that are currently unfashionable in the academy and in the business world, but might be of use in probing the unknown. In doing so, I draw upon schemata advanced equally diffidently in my book Theory and its Discontents (1997)², and a range of overviews of individual and culture conveniently summarized in several books by Ken Wilber, Don Beck, PhD, and others of their school³. Leaving aside the more metaphysical/ "mystical" aspects of his thought, Wilber has usefully condensed the work of some hundred specialists in a number of disciplines to yield a model of cultural phases.

To simplify brutally, Wilber and Beck propose that each society tends to segment, both through time and within a given period, according to a sequence of developmental stages. For shorthand, these are color-coded. The earliest—though not "simplest", each being as complex as the rest—is Instinctive, directed to brute survival (beige), followed by tribal Animism (purple), impulsive Egocentrism (red), disciplined Authority (blue), managerial/ scientific Strategic (orange), communitarian Consensus (green), multicultural Ecology (yellow), and a sort of new age global Holism (turquoise), with perhaps several transcendent states beyond this highest level. These overlap to some degree at least with my own suggested cyclical cultural dominants, and several key stages match up with "Three Systems of Action" by Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix⁴.

Treder and Phoenix note three significantly different systems of response for social organization: Guardian, oriented principally around provision of security; Commercial, promoting science and trade; and Informational, devoted to abundance. It is easy to see that these Dominants (to borrow a term from the communications theory of Roman Jakobson) can be mapped against the most significant dynamics of certain periods, cultures, and elements of cultures. In Wilber’s terms, Guardian would be blue, and in the USA reflect Republican conservative family values; Commercial orange, representing scientific Enlightenment values; while Informational might perhaps be green, representing postmodern inclusive global or "holistic" values, enthusiasm for open source versus proprietary development of novelty, etc. The interactions between individuals and groups dominated by one mode or another can be troublesome and, indeed, mutually incomprehensible. Green, Wilber warns, tends to "dissolve blue", which can wreak catastrophic damage on prickly red (tribal/gang) cultures or subcultures struggling to shift "upward" toward Enlightenment/ Commercial orange, by invalidating support for the intermediate "conservative" or blue Guardian stage in the interests of a premature holism.

My own analysis poses six sequential phases each half a century long and comprising two generations, punctuated by wars. The 300 years can be graphed as a sine curve—an upward semicircle followed by a downward semicircle, each half comprising 150 years. (The full iterated sequence of roughly 50 year phases runs Algorithmic-We-I-It-Theory/Text-Code-Algorithmic….) I propose no numerology here, attempting rather to draw together a number of separate analyses that seem to find certain recurrences at certain intervals, not all of them compressible into a single algorithm; one influence might enhance another, a third might tend to mute it. What’s more, recent human intervention on a planetary scale might be expected to have modified, extended or suppressed such cycles anyway—although some of the theorists I quote below do carry their schemata forward into the second half of the twentieth century.

A similar model has been suggested in Generations: the History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 by William Strauss and Neil Howe (New York: Morrow, 1991), whose parsed narrative discerns, like Modelski’s (below), a basic cycle four generations long, marked by disruptive "secular" and "spiritual events". Cohorts—individuals born within a given time-frame—are said to resemble each other in temperament and trajectory more than they do those from earlier or later generations. The four phases, in order, are the Idealists (inner-driven, arrogant, creative), indulged in childhood after a secular event; the Reactives (disruptive in youth, pragmatic in maturity, uncultivated); the Civics (establishment figures); and the Adaptives (guilty conformists, aging into sensitive carers).⁵

The three phases or tonalities characterized by Treder and Phoenix match fairly well with the 150 year half cycle I discern between, say, 1850 and 2000, in which the doubled generations are characterized sequentially by the dominants I have dubbed IT (imperialism, Hot Peace, public art), THEORY (global war, religiosity, modernism) and CODE (Cold Peace, democracy, postmodernism). In tone, that half cycle begins with what Australian historian and entrepreneur J. Penman, Ph.D., calls High Vigor and moderate Stress, through Mid Vigor and High Stress, to Low Vigor today but only Medium Stress.⁶ These parameters are related to, and perhaps driven by, variations in child-rearing practices and those in turn, historically, on availability of adequate or abundant nutrients, levels of perceived threat and security, etc—see note 6.

Very roughly, we might expect Guardian/IT cultural phases to attempt to impose strong centralized and hierarchical command over the ownership of nanofactories and any distribution of their socially disruptive cheap goods. Commercial/THEORY phases might use state power as well as conglomerate capital power to restrict or co-opt MNT. Informational/CODE phases will be likely to embrace MNT and attempt to spread its benefits widely, perhaps to the whole world, and to resist conservative "moral values" restraints, corporate ownership, and copyrights. It is obvious, despite the natural affiliation of computer-savvy members of the Code or green generations, that very powerful forces will be strongly motivated to restrict MNT for reasons of private gain and public security, even in those societies falling increasingly under this dominant in the last 50 years

The problem foreshadowed by Knight’s novel is that resistance to the free development and distribution of MNT might elicit regression to earlier dominants. In Wilber’s terms these are beige (instinctual/subservience to parents), purple (magical thinking) and red (egocentric), which map moderately well with the earlier (and subsequent) 150 year semi-cycle I have proposed, summarized briefly as ALGORITHMIC (global conflict, classicism, aristocracy), WE (feudal disorder, formal religion at nadir, superstition at zenith), and finally I (romanticism, beginning with successful revolutions and perhaps global war and culminating in thwarted revolutions). Historically, in the West, these three dominants held sway between 1700 and 1850, continuing on into the three phases previously described. On this model, which is consistent with classic long cycle analyses by G. Modelski⁷ and others, we are arguably heading right now into a new algorithmic or phatic phase, with its attendant risks of banality, degeneration towards superstition, significant conflict (and perhaps the unexpected "War on Terror"—and by culturally motivated terrorists and hegemonists—is an index of this). Of course, such 300-year cycles—which I trace back through at least three iterations, and probably much farther—would presumably be interrupted forever by a Singularity, especially one in which drastic life extension becomes possible, thereby upsetting the already muddled traditional replacement of generations raised under consecutively different conditions. Nanotechnology is clearly one of the driving forces thrusting advanced technological cultures toward just such a Singularity. One question, therefore, is whether Wilber’s orange and green phases or waves can be sustained in their dominant roles at a time when external and internal factors are arguably impelling Western cultures, as well as their foes, toward what one might regard as more primitive dominants.

Indeed, this kind of analysis might lend itself usefully to the study of contemporary cultures other than the Western. Should they all be regarded, however different they remain, as in some sense synchronized with the productive and informational drivers of the global economy? One suggestion I hesitantly made in my preliminary study is that societies throughout the world have been traditionally tied, far more than we might imagine, to a kind of global clock driven by variable insolation, and the impact of available solar energy upon climate and hence food supply. Again, even if this has been the case, it might no longer be so in an epoch where human-induced global warming is skewing traditional large-scale solar-modulated weather patterns, and in which global scientific production and transport of food and raw materials to a large extent obviates reliance upon local climatic conditions.⁸

In any event, it seems arguable that an analysis of cultural dominants of this kind, and their differential impact, might provide some general guidance in our expectations of the near-future impact of any truly radical and disruptive technology such as MNT.

1. Damon Knight, A For Anything, 1965, New York: Walker Publishing Co. 1970; as The People Maker 1959; short story "A for Anything", The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Nov. 1957.

2. Damien Broderick, Theory and its Discontents, Melbourne: Deakin University Press, 1997.

3. Ken Wilber, A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality, Boston: Shambala, 2000; Boomeritis, Boston: Shambala, 2002; I am grateful to futurist Professor Richard Slaughter for drawing my attention to Wilber’s work. See also the "Spiral Dynamics" of Don Beck, for example at http://www.integralworld.net/beck2.html

4. http://crnano.org/systems.htm

5. What drives this recurrence, in Strauss and Howe’s view, is a cycle of nurturant practice. Underprotection in childhood creates a tendency in the adults so formed to pay more attention to their own children, so the next generation shows increasing nurturance. The third step is a generation smothered by overprotection, and the reaction to such stifling is a fourth phase of decreasing nurturance, which in turn leads back to the start of the cycle.

It is interesting that the linear progression suggested by Strauss and Howe resembles a compressed version of my own model and Wilber’s, with their four-step periodicity folded into every pair of consecutive Dominant regimes in mine. Inner-driven Idealists correspond in character with my "I" generations, Reactives with "IT" empiricism, Civics with "THEORY/TEXT" governance, and Adaptives with "PHATIC/ALGORITHMIC" conformity. Two stages are elided: "CODE", following "THEORY", and "WE", following "PHATIC", but the two models operate at different scales. Neither is there a gross discord between the order of the two sequences. No doubt this is connected with the individual life-stage structure that also underlies each model: Youth (which conflates "WE" and "I" stages), Rising Adults ("IT"), Midlife Adults ("THEORY/TEXT" plus the shift to "CODE"), Elders (the transition from "CODE" to "PHATIC" or "RULE").

6. Jim Penman, The Hungry Ape, Melbourne, 1992, cited Broderick, 1997.

To sketch briefly the broad basis of Penman’s mechanism, operating on cultures via typical patterns for discipline of their infants: Societies using early control tend to develop a politics based on group loyalty; in a time-frame of low Restraint they produce feudalism, and during high Restraint, they produce stable city states and nation states. Their populations are open to change, and have elaborate economic skills. By contrast, societies lacking early control favor a politics based on personal, face-to-face authority; low Restraint stretches of the cycle are marked by unstable control over regions with shifting borders, while during high Restraint regimes they build large imperial dominions. Their populations are tradition-bound, and less skilled (Penman, p. 184).

7. George Modelski, Long Cycles in World Politics, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1987.

If Modelski is correct, since 1494 the world system, parameterized in versions of the four Parsonian variables (economy, polity, societal community, and pattern maintenance or media/information apparatuses), has passed through five "long cycles", each with four generational phases. The cycles run to a little more than a century each, and climax in devastating contests for world leadership. These global conflicts last between 23 and 31 years, with the same average as his cycle generation, 27 years. The turn of the millennium marked the exhausted stage of an American century, and, if no better and more humane means is devised for adjudicating leadership, the world probably would be doomed to a new global war in perhaps 2030 (but not until then).

8. A somewhat different but arguably overlapping analysis was developed by Raymond H. Wheeler, a former professor of psychology at the University of Kansas and president of the Kansas Academy of Sciences, who constructed his own grand theory of cultural recurrence. Around the middle of the 20^th century, Wheeler orchestrated a massive research project, drawing on up to two hundred co-workers, to reduce all of recorded history to coherent summary form. As the data from 2500 years of records were tabulated, he discerned a number of recurrent patterns world-wide. The most notable was a roughly 100-year climatic cycle, varying between 70 and 120 years, which seemed to fall into four predictable phases. From this periodicity, and drawing on then-prevalent doctrines of cultural and ethnic character, he theorized a regular swing of mass psychological emphasis between "classical" or "centralist" and "romantic" or "individualist" styles of community and culture, summarized in Ellsworth Huntington, Mainsprings of Civilization, [1945] 1959, New York: Mentor, 515-7. (Huntington was an explorer and Yale professor of geography and climatology whose books ranged from Civilization and Climate (1915) to his magnum opus, Mainsprings of Civilization, published two years before his death. His thesis of strong climatic determinism strikes us today as crankily ethnocentric at best, for he sought to discover why "vigorous" peoples like wealthy Euro-Americans were so much more successful than the "indolent", "feminized" races nearer the equator or otherwise trapped and stultified by debilitating circumstances. In the era of the Asian Tigers on the Pacific Rim, not to mention the historic defeat of American military efforts by tropical Vietnamese and the current imbroglio in Iraq, this claim seems not just racist but ludicrous. We should not be entirely distracted, however, by our legitimate distaste for colonial premises and rhetoric. Huntington’s comparative ethnography remains a rich trove of data, usefully categorized, on historical and environmental flows in the fortunes of nations.)

Obviously these climate-driven distinctions cannot be found literally everywhere simultaneously, because a global shift like the El Niño vacillation will bring unusually abundant rain to one region while filching it from another. Still, events like the Maunder Minimum suggest that at least some secular climatic variations on the order of a century can be due to changes in the sun’s internal clock. It is feasible that more subtle variations depend on more regular solar pacemakers, such as the deep processes that also cause the sunspot cycle and perhaps (even in the absence of human intervention) modulate global warming and cooling.

Wheeler and his team found their data was usefully schematized by a four-fold sequence: Warm-Wet, Warm-Dry, Cold-Wet, and Cold-Dry. Each contributed to a certain characteristic mode of collective behavior, so that "similar events have occurred throughout history during the same phases of the 100-year climate cycle" (Dewey and Mandino, Cycles, 1971, New York: Manor Books, 138). Adapting this model in brutally schematic form, and projecting 20 years (without taking account of drastic global climate change), we might map the 20^th century thus (138-9):

Since Wheeler announced his model just prior to the mid-century, this makes a prescient cultural display, although he missed Greenhouse heating.

© 2006 Damien Broderick. Reprinted with permission.

In this essay, I wish to raise my concern over some of the problems of today’s world, and try to suggest how they can be eliminated, or at least their negative impact be reduced, by developing operational worldwide molecular design and manufacturing capabilities.

The Unabomber Manifesto ("Industrial Society And Its Future") by Theodore Kaczynski is one of the most interesting documents of our times, in terms of both its history and its content. Thanks to the work of Information Technology pioneers such as some of the people he targeted, you can read the full text of the Unabomber Manifesto online.

Quoting from the Wikipedia article:

The main argument of Industrial Society and Its Future is that technological progress is undesirable, can be stopped, and in fact should be stopped in order to free people from the unnatural demands of technology, so that they can return to a happier, simpler life close to nature. Kaczynski argued that it was necessary to cause a "social crash", before society became any worse. He believes a collapse of civilization is likely to occur at some point in the future; thus, it is better to end things now, rather than later, because the further society develops, the more painful things will be when the collapse occurs. If it does not occur, he says, humans will have the freedom and significance of house pets, although they may be happy, in a society dominated by machines or an elite social class.

I am (and you are, I hope) definitely against Kaczynski’s final determinations. However, I have to agree with most critics who say that the Manifesto is very well written and that its conclusions, flawed as they are and despite the horrible acts of murder they spawned, are based on a well articulated analysis of some of the problems of today’s world.

One of Kaczynski’s central points is that the "natural" social and cultural environment for a human being is a relatively small community, not too dependent on the outside world for any necessary resource, where everyone has a chance to know everyone else and to actively contribute to the life of the community. He claims that an interconnected world in which the quality of each person’s life depends on things that take place far away is dehumanizing and cannot work without decreasing the freedom, the rights, and ultimately the happiness and well-being of people. He argues that the very technologies needed to sustain a globalized world contribute to creating more dehumanization. This produces a runaway feedback loop that can only result in an unnatural environment, putting far too much strain on our mental resources—and at some point, something has to break.

So, Kaczynski wishes to go back to a world of loosely connected, relatively independent small communities. But this is difficult because in today’s world no small community could ever produce all that is needed to meet its own energy, food, communications, and health care requirements. Hence, Kaczynski proposes to break the technological foundations of our global civilization by any means, including murder.

The deep interconnectedness of today’s world also creates huge geopolitical tensions. The situation in the Middle East is a sad example of what can happen when the economy of one region is too strongly dependent on resources located in another region, and where too many players seek control over the complex planet-wide production and distribution networks crucial to the functioning of our global infrastructure.

(A big advantage of solar energy, and one of the main reasons why its deployment should be pursued much more aggressively, is that it can be produced locally by those who require it. A nation following this route would sharply reduce their vulnerability to hostile actions, and to the blackmail of others based on threatening to disrupt their energy supply. In addition, this would reduce that nation’s propensity to wage war against others for the control of energy supplies.)

I definitely do not want to go back to a pre-industrial age as Kaczynski proposes. Indeed, I like many aspects of globalization. I like that in some sense we can all regard ourselves as citizens of One World. I like that with the Internet I can know what happens and what people think on the other side of the planet, and that I can participate in virtual communities held together by common interests and values instead of geographic location. I like to see thinkers and doers from all over the world working together at near-thought speed to develop new ideas and goods.

So, I am definitely not a sympathizer of the anti-globalization movement. But I can see worth in some of the points they make, partly based on Kaczynski’s writings. Perhaps we can take their best arguments into account by recognizing that although the option of living in a global interconnected world is good for many, nobody should be forced to do so, and a local community of like-minded people who wish to live their lives in relative isolation from the rest of the world—provided of course they do not oppress their citizens or threaten other communities—should have the opportunity and the means to do so. A good, albeit perhaps extreme, example is in Damien Broderick’s Transcension.

Another problem of the modern world is that it is very difficult to build effective supranational governance bodies, because existing nation-states, especially those with a long history, refuse to give up sovereignty and power. This difficulty is often seen in the United Nations and in other supranational bodies such as the European Union. Few, if any, of today’s nation-states would seriously consider allowing such organizations to have real and effective decision-making power, let alone the means to enforce the decisions made. It appears that a gradual breakup of existing nation states into smaller entities, relatively autonomous but co-operating when co-operation is necessary for all parties involved, will be a necessary prerequisite for the creation of supranational governance structures including regional and world "governments".

I have given two different but connected arguments for “small is beautiful.” And, speaking of small things, I believe that emerging NBIC* technologies, and in particular molecular nanotechnology, will offer the opportunity to retain the benefits of globalization while at the same time significantly reducing the dependence of local communities on the external world as far as the availability of material goods (food, medicines, energy, vehicles, toys, designer items, etc.) is concerned.

Richard Feynman was the first to articulate the possibility of molecular nanotechnology (although not by that name). In his 1959 essay, "There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom," he argued that there is nothing in the laws of physics to prevent us from building molecular size machines able to precisely place individual atoms and molecules according to design specifications and build complex structures and chemical compounds one atom at a time. Feynman wrote:

It would be, in principle, possible (I think) for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance that the chemist writes down. Give the orders and the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance. The problems of chemistry and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to see what we are doing, and to do things on an atomic level, is ultimately developed—a development which I think cannot be avoided.

Eric Drexler, who coined the term "nanotechnology" and popularized it in Engines of Creation—The Coming Era of Nanotechnology, was among the first to realize that nanotechnology will achieve its disruptive potential when molecular machines will be able to build other molecular machines by assembling them from atoms and molecules available in their environment. Given replicant nanotechnology, it is easy to see how, with suitable programming and assuming that all needed molecular "bricks" can be extracted from the environment (a safe assumption in most cases), it is possible to assemble any substance or structure for which detailed design specifications are available. So, our future economy will not be based on material goods, but on design specifications for material goods. We already have examples of this today:

A document can be transmitted over the Internet and reproduced, on screen or on paper, by whomever has to read it. This technology is available to nearly all consumers, at least in the Western world, at the (relatively) low cost of a PC, a printer, and an Internet connection.

A VHDL (VHSIC hardware description language) design specification for an application specific integrated circuit is as good as the device itself in the sense that it can be taken to a suitable hardware foundry and used to reproduce the device with an automated process. The fundamental difference from the previous example is that today one needs very complex and expensive machinery and extensive know-how to generate a physical instantiation of the device. But I think we can safely predict that the costs will drop and circuit printing will become more and more like document printing.

Instead of shipping physical objects, their detailed design specification in a "Matter Description Language" or "Molecular Description Language" (MDL) will be transmitted over a global data grid evolved from today’s Internet and then physically instantiated ("printed") by "nano printers" at remote sites. The usage of nano printers, also called nanofactories, is described in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. The term “Matter Compiler” (MC) used by Stephenson in the novel is especially good as, by analogy with the software development process, it suggests the idea of organizing (compiling) matter from design specifications. Reading Stephenson’s descriptions of young Nell trying to use her mother’s cheap kitchen MC to compile clothes, toys, and mattresses makes it easier to understand the basic concepts of molecular manufacturing.

Assuming it still exists at that time, the Coca Cola Company will not sell physical cans, but will license the MDL description of its popular beverage for on-site compilation by customers. I assume Coca Cola and all other commercial companies will need some means to enforce their intellectual property rights to make sure that customers pay what they are supposed to pay. This probably will be done by a limit on the number of times a given MDL design can be assembled by a given user, with protection technologies conceptually similar to those used today for Digital Rights Management (DRM). Of course, there will be plenty of 15 year-old hackers willing and able to crack whatever DRM protection scheme manufacturers can think of, and then make available cracked DRM-free design specs on the global data grid.

I do not see any reason why molecular nanotechnology should change the basic laws of economy, so I assume that the MDL description of an Armani suit will cost as much as the Armani suit costs today. And I believe tomorrow’s designers of luxury items will be perfectly entitled to charge a lot of money for their creations. But what happens if the MDL descriptions of basic goods that a local community needs are priced beyond their reach? And what happens if these licenses are withdrawn for political reasons, perhaps to force a community to submit to an aggressor community or to an overreaching central authority?

Basic goods should be free, or priced within the means of everyone. In other words, Coca Cola can be expensive, but water must be free. Armani suits can be expensive, but basic clothing must be free. Who will develop royalty-free MDL descriptions of basic goods that everyone on the planet can use? The answer, I think (or at least I hope), is that they will be developed with an Open Source development model by armies of MDL programmers.

In the online version of this essay, I make frequent use of Wikipedia articles as references for two reasons: first, I am fond of Wikipedia as one of the best examples of Open Source development; and second, Wikipedia articles are as good as, and often better than, equivalent articles in expensive encyclopedias. I can rest assured that all Wikipedia references that I use in this article will be maintained under the spontaneous quality assurance and control processes that are emerging within the Wikipedia community, and will be further improved by countless users and experts. So, linking to Wikipedia is much safer than linking to a commercial website that may disappear if the owner goes out of business. (If you are reading a hardcopy version of this essay and wish to have further information on the terms and concepts mentioned, please go to the URL http://en.wikipedia.org/ and enter your search keywords.)

It seems likely that many of the arguments used today in favor of the Open Source movement will be applicable to tomorrow’s nanotech economy. The availability of Open Source MDL specifications for all basic goods will result, I believe, in a better world—a world where citizens and communities will be free to do their own thing (provided they do not reduce the right and ability of others to do the same) without having to give in to pressure and blackmail from hostile parties or meddlesome central authorities who threaten to disrupt their supply of basic material goods.

* Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science, Edited by Mihail C. Roco and William Sims Bainbridge, National Science Foundation, June 2002, http://www.wtec.org/ConvergingTechnologies/Report/NBIC_report.pdf

© 2006 Giulio Prisco

Conflicts, clashes, battles, and wars: this is the stuff of which history is made. The world as we know it today is largely a product of wars fought and peoples conquered.

We like to look back admiringly on other things our species has produced: great works of art, brilliant inventions, sage philosophers, brave explorers, and selfless peacemakers. But the real star of the human story is war. In fact, very often those things we admire—philosophy, technology, leadership, superb writing and speechmaking—are put to maximum use in the service of war.

The story is not yet over. Within our lifetimes, we are likely to witness battles on a scale never before seen. Powered by molecular manufacturing, an advanced form of nanotechnology, these near-future wars¹ may threaten our freedom, our way of life, and even our survival.

Some wars are between opponents of roughly equal fighting ability. As a result, these conflicts tend to drag on, often for years and killing millions, until finally one side emerges victorious. Recent examples include the American Civil War, World War I, and World War II.

Occasionally one adversary will possess huge advantages over the other, in which case the war typically is quite short. A famous instance is the spectacular one-sided victory of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro over the Incan empire in 1532. What makes this story so remarkable is that an army of 80,000 soldiers was overwhelmed and decimated in one day by a force of only 169 men.

Normally we would expect that an aggressor facing such great numbers would be a decided underdog, virtually assured of defeat. Jared Diamond, in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel,² analyzes this historic event—clearly a major turning point in the course of human civilization—and describes the elements that gave the Spaniards a stunningly easy victory.

Diamond lists superior military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases; maritime technology; centralized political organization; and writing.

These advantages can be categorized as follows (with items from 1532 in parentheses):

• Battle technology (guns, steel weapons, and horses)
• Physical fitness (infectious diseases)
• Transportation technology (maritime)
• Effective command and control (centralized organization)
• Communications technology (writing)

Looking forward, we can imagine a similar situation: an apparently strong nation, a superpower or empire within their realm, suddenly and overwhelmingly defeated by an adversary with superior technology and other advantages.

Molecular manufacturing—the ability to construct powerful, atomically precise products at an exponentially increasing pace—could provide the tools for a spectacular one-sided victory by an apparent underdog equipped with superior:

• Battle technology (nano-weapons)
• Physical fitness (nano-enabled biotechnology)
• Transportation technology (aerospace)
• Effective command and control (boosted by nano-computing)
• Communications technology (secure worldwide network)

Despite vastly greater numbers, the Incas—the most developed civilization in the Americas—were not able to mount a serious resistance against the advanced technology of Spain.

Could today’s most powerful civilization, the United States, as easily be conquered by a nano-enabled attacker? This appears possible, if molecular manufacturing does provide for huge gains in all five areas, as many analysts (including this author) believe it will.

No nation lacking the nanotech advantage will be able to resist a foe—no matter how small or weak in conventional terms—that wields the power of molecular manufacturing.³

It is not certain, of course, that large-scale war will occur within the next few decades. But if it does, and if both (or all) sides are nano-enabled, that event could last a relatively long time, and casualties could be in the billions. If, on the other hand, only one combatant possesses the awesome capabilities of nano-built weapons, computers, and infrastructure, that war might be over very quickly, and could leave the victor in total command of the world.

1. Treder, Mike (2005) “War, Interdependence, & Nanotechnology” (Future Brief) http://www.futurebrief.com/miketrederwar002.asp

2. Diamond, Jared (1997) Guns, Germs, and Steel (W. W. Norton, New York)

3. Phoenix, Chris (2003) “Molecular Manufacturing: Start Planning” (Public Interest Report, 56:2) http://www.fas.org/faspir/2003/v56n2/nanotech.htm

© 2006 Mike Treder

One of the fundamental questions driving any attempt at forecasting the future is: what kind of society do we want to live in? Or, for the farther future: what kind of society do we want our children to live in? How would widely available nanofactories change our lives and our world? Will multi-national corporations gain exclusive control of molecular manufacturing (MM), using it to dominate social institutions and dictate public policy from a purely capitalist and/or monopolist perspective? Will personal nanofactories foster global anarchy and create a form of modern tribalism based upon religion, ideology, or culture, and pit independent city-states or autonomous regions against one another? Will the world’s nations devolve further into a technologically-driven arms race with the winner dominating or destroying the planet with powerful MM-enabled weapons? Will the world’s Big Brothers grow larger and more tyrannical, using advanced nanotechnology to "protect" their law abiding masses through increasing surveillance, control and internal subjugation? Or, will personal freedom grow and evolve along with our technology, giving people and communities the ability to maintain their rights as individuals and protect the social welfare of their communities and nations while fostering global peace, security, and prosperity?

These questions and a host of others have no easy answers. One significant factor on the path to our future is our world as it exists today, a world largely dominated by governments and the forces they employ to maintain civil order and internal security. In today’s stable societies of the developed nations, government police and para-military forces provide the preponderance of domestic order maintenance services, enforcing criminal laws and ordinances, arbitrating physical disputes, investigating crimes, and responding to disasters—professional functions usually deemed appropriate in modern democracies to ensure the continued safety and security of a community or nation. These activities and the manner in which they are carried out will have a direct and profound impact on the kind of world we and our children will live in, particularly in regards to the maintenance of civil liberties and individual freedom.

It is important therefore to give careful consideration to the ways in which governments use technology today to provide for public safety and security, and how that might change as a result of new technological advances. We need to give close scrutiny to the capabilities afforded the civil police by modern technology—particularly the potential power bestowed by molecular nanotechnology and personal nanofactories—before these capabilities are realized. What capabilities do we want the police to have and which do we want to restrict? How much capability do they need in order to provide for public order and safety in an age of advanced nanotechnology? Are they capable of wielding the power afforded them through augmented reality, unmanned aerial vehicles, robots, surveillance, data-mining, and biometrics, technologies that will be greatly enhanced and widely distributed by personal nanofactories? Can we afford to place such power in the hands of government? And if not, what is the alternative for ensuring peace and social stability for the world’s billions?

As we consider the appropriate limits on police surveillance and enforcement capabilities we also need to consider the ways in which criminals and terrorists might exploit advanced technologies like personal nanofactories in carrying out their goals, and the impact their actions will have on liberty and democracy if they succeed. While government action can have dramatic and negative impacts on our ability to be and remain free, so too the actions of a lone criminal or terrorist group armed with advanced technology can have severe repercussions on the social psyche, and thereby the economy and stability of a nation or the world. Successful terrorist attacks and chronic criminal activities in a globalized world have a fundamentally destabilizing affect on communities and nations, often fostering highly reactionary programs and policies aimed at providing short-term safety for the many at the expense of liberty for a perceived few.

In other words, simply limiting police use of technology is no guarantee that civil liberties will be maintained. On the contrary, the public’s perception of danger will inevitably drive policing and security operations within communities and nations whether the civil police are equipped and empowered to act or not. Recent activities along the border between the United States and Mexico demonstrate that in today’s world, with the ready availability of advancing technology, someone will end up conducting police operations when communities believe they face criminal and terrorist threats that remain unchallenged by the civil police. Groups such as the Minutemen and the American Border Patrol are non-government organizations formed by average citizens, frustrated at the lack of response by their government regarding illegals crossing the national border. Armed with widely available technology not currently utilized by the civil police (unmanned aerial vehicles with video cameras and wireless links for surveillance), and probably more than a few weapons, these groups conduct border interdiction operations outside of government sanction.

In the wake of the September 11^th terrorist attacks, the US also has experienced a growing involvement in domestic security by military and private security forces. In the United States after 9/11, the Pentagon formed the US Northern Command, a first-ever strategic military command whose primary mission is to conduct domestic military operations—essentially law enforcement and civil security missions—in response to terrorist events and natural disasters. Similarly, private security agencies such as DynCorp and SAIC have taken on a much broader role within communities to combat terrorism and cyber-crimes such as identity theft and credit card fraud, filling a law enforcement and civil security niche that state and local police departments are either ill-equipped or unable to deal with.

Life in the 21^st Century is only getting more complex. Information technologies and mass media confront the populace on a daily basis with graphic real-time images of death and destruction along with gripping narrative accounts of all the world’s problems, raising public fear and driving citizen demands for higher and higher levels of security. The specter of technology out of control is a frequent topic of popular books, movies and television, causing many people to question the wisdom of continued technological advancement. Molecular manufacturing and personal nanofactories will raise even further the level of public fear and create new conflicts and opportunities for criminal and terrorist groups to exploit to their advantage.

Advancing technology in general and molecular manufacturing in particular make predictions about the future difficult at best. Still, conceptualizing all the potential scenarios and contemplating new and appropriate strategies, programs and policies necessary to avoid a dystopian future is important, however imprecise. Regardless of the particulars, it seems clear that in a world of growing conflict and fear, policing and law enforcement will play a rather large role, for good or for ill. When communities and nations are threatened with or confronted by persistent criminal exploitation and catastrophic terrorist attacks, the public will demand action to prevent further personal danger, economic loss or social unrest.

The type of policing we end up with and its effectiveness at preventing significant harm while lowering public fear will be a factor governing the nature and extent of our civil liberties as MM and personal nanofactories become part of our world. What would our civil liberties look like after a major terrorist attack if the military, utilizing MM-enabled surveillance devices and weapons, is in the best position with the best capabilities to conduct domestic policing operations? What kind of society would ensue if all significant policing in our communities and nations is conducted by corporations and hired security guards? Whose civil liberties would be protected when concerned citizen groups and vigilantes take community security into their own hands and use personal nanofactories to arm themselves like the military?

Of all the organizations and entities capable and willing to conduct domestic policing and security missions, only the civil police are sworn to uphold the civil liberties of all people. The military is trained and equipped to defeat opposing armies on foreign battlefields, to seize objectives and kill anyone who stands in the way. Corporate security forces and privately paid police forces are focused on the bottom line and are loyal to those who pay them. Individual citizens, concerned citizen groups and vigilantes are concerned only with their own safety and the civil liberties of those within their own interest group. Nevertheless, each of the above groups will play a role in policing neighborhoods, enforcing laws, and providing domestic security. Each will be a necessary component for effectively securing our communities and nations from criminal and terrorist predators of the future. The challenge will be to create a model in which the actions of these groups compliment one another, enhancing the collective effects of the whole, not working at cross purposes or creating additional conflicts that add to local, regional, national and global insecurity.

In a world of advanced technologies, molecular manufacturing capabilities, and personal nanofactories, an effective law enforcement process will be essential to peace and social stability. No single group can provide the right balance of domestic policing capabilities and each has dangerous tendencies that when employed in isolation can be detrimental to someone’s rights and freedoms. As with most of what troubles us in the information age, 20^th Century solutions will not solve 21^st Century problems. Centralization, parochialism and hierarchy are being replaced with distributed systems based upon collaboration across local, wide-area and global networks. The successful policing model of the future will need to move in this direction as well. To deal effectively with the challenges and dangers posed by tomorrow’s technologies, we must form a collaborative policing network, consisting of all citizens, agencies and forces with useful capabilities and appropriate law enforcement interest. A collective and collaborative effort will do a better job of upholding liberty for all people while providing the safety and security necessary for continued social and technological advancement.

© 2006 Thomas J. Cowper

In order to give you pleasant dreams tonight, let me offer a few possibilities about the days that lie ahead—changes that may occur within the next twenty or so years, roughly a single human generation. Possibilities that are taken seriously by some of today’s best minds. Potential transformations of human life on Earth and, perhaps, even what it means to be human.

For example, what if biologists and organic chemists manage to do to their laboratories the same thing that cyberneticists did to computers? Shrinking their vast biochemical labs from building-sized behemoths down to units that are utterly compact, making them smaller, cheaper, and more powerful than anyone imagined. Isn’t that what happened to those gigantic computers of yesteryear? Until, today, your pocket cell phone contains as much processing power and sophistication as NASA owned during the moon shots. People who foresaw this change were able to ride this technological wave. Some of them made a lot of money.

Biologists have come a long way already toward achieving a similar transformation. Take, for example, the Human Genome Project, which sped up the sequencing of DNA by so many orders of magnitude that much of it is now automated and miniaturized. Speed has skyrocketed, while prices plummet, promising that each of us may soon be able to have our own genetic mappings done, while-U-wait, for the same price as a simple EKG. Imagine extending this trend, by simple extrapolation, compressing a complete biochemical laboratory the size of a house down to something that fits cheaply on your desktop. A MolecuMac, if you will. The possibilities are both marvelous and frightening.

When designer drugs and therapies are swiftly modifiable by skilled medical workers, we all should benefit.

But then, won’t there also be the biochemical equivalent of “hackers”? What are we going to do when kids all over the world can analyze and synthesize any organic compound, at will? In that event, we had better hope for accompanying advances in artificial intelligence and robotics… at least to serve our fast food burgers. I’m not about to eat at any restaurant that hires resentful human adolescents, who swap fancy recipes for their home molecular synthesizers over the Internet. Would you?

Now don’t get me wrong. If we ever do have MolecuMacs on our desktops, I’ll wager that 99 percent of the products will be neutral or profoundly positive, just like most of the software creativity flowing from young innovators today. But if we’re already worried about a malicious one percent in the world of bits and bytes—hackers and cyber-saboteurs—then what happens when this kind of ‘creativity’ moves to the very stuff of life itself? Nor have we mentioned the possibility of intentional abuse by larger entities—terror cabals, scheming dictatorships, or rogue corporations.

These fears start to get even more worrisome when we ponder the next stage, beyond biotech. Deep concerns are already circulating about what will happen when nanotechnology—ultra-small machines building products atom-by-atom to precise specifications—finally hits its stride. Molecular manufacturing could result in super-efficient factories that create wealth at staggering rates of efficiency. Nano-maintenance systems may enter your bloodstream to cure disease or fine-tune bodily functions. Visionaries foresee this technology helping to save the planet from earlier human errors, for instance by catalyzing the recycling of obstinate pollutants. Those desktop units eventually may become universal fabricators that turn almost any raw material into almost any product you might desire…

… or else (some worry), nanomachines might break loose to become the ultimate pollution. A self-replicating disease, gobbling everything in sight, conceivably turning the world’s surface into gray goo.²

Others have raised this issue before, some of them in very colorful ways. Take the sensationalist novel Prey, by Michael Crichton, which portrays a secretive agency hubristically pushing an arrogant new technology, heedless of possible drawbacks or consequences. Crichton’s typical worried scenario about nanotechnology follows a pattern nearly identical to his earlier thrillers about unleashed dinosaurs, robots, and dozens of other techie perils, all of them viewed with reflexive suspicious loathing. (Of course, in every situation, the perilous excess happens to result from secrecy, a topic that we will return to, later.) A much earlier and better novel, Blood Music, by Greg Bear, presented the up and downside possibilities of nanotech with profound vividness. Especially the possibility that most worries even optimists within the nanotechnology community—that the pace of innovation may outstrip our ability to cope.

Now, at one level, this is an ancient fear. If you want to pick a single cliché that is nearly universally held, across all our surface boundaries of ideology and belief—e.g. left-versus-right, or even religious-vs-secular—the most common of all would probably be:

“Isn’t it a shame that our wisdom has not kept pace with technology?”

While this cliché is clearly true at the level of solitary human beings, and even mass-entities like corporations, agencies or political parties, I could argue that things aren’t anywhere near as clear at the higher level of human civilization. Elsewhere I have suggested that “wisdom” needs to be defined according to outcomes and processes, not the perception or sagacity of any particular individual guru or sage. Take the outcome of the Cold War… the first known example of humanity acquiring a means of massive violence, and then mostly turning away from that precipice. Yes, that means of self-destruction is still with us. But two generations of unprecedented restraint suggest that we have made a little progress in at least one kind of “wisdom.” That is, when the means of destruction are controlled by a few narrowly selected elite officials on both sides of a simple divide.

But are we ready for a new era, when the dilemmas are nowhere near as simple? In times to come, the worst dangers to civilization may not come from clearly identifiable and accountable adversaries—who want to win an explicit, set-piece competition—as much as from a general democratization of the means to do harm. New technologies, distributed by the Internet and effectuated by cheaply affordable tools, will offer increasing numbers of angry people access to modalities of destructive power–means that will be used because of justified grievance, avarice, indignant anger, or simply because they are there.

THE RETRO PRESCRIPTION—RENUNCIATION

Faced with onrushing technologies in biotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence, and so on, some bright people—like Bill Joy, former chief scientist of Sun Computers—see little hope for survival of a vigorously open society. You may have read Joy’s unhappy manifesto in Wired Magazine³, in which he quoted the Unabomber (of all people), in support of a proposal that is both ancient and new—that our sole hope for survival may be to renounce, squelch, or relinquish several classes of technological progress.

This notion of renunciation has gained credence all across the political and philosophical map, especially at the farther wings of both right and left. Take the novels and pronouncements of Margaret Atwood, whose fundamental plot premises seem almost identical to those of Michael Crichton, despite their differences over superficial politics. Both authors routinely express worry that often spills into outright loathing for the overweening arrogance of hubristic technological innovators who just cannot leave nature well enough alone.

At the other end of the left-right spectrum stands Francis Fukuyama, who is Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Fukuyama’s best-known book, The End of History and the Last Man (1992) triumphally viewed the collapse of communism as likely to be the final stirring event worthy of major chronicling by historians. From that point on, we would see liberal democracy bloom as the sole path for human societies, without significant competition or incident. No more "interesting times."⁴ But this sanguine view did not last, as Fukuyama began to see potentially calamitous “history” in the disruptive effects of new technology. As a Bush Administration court intellectual and a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics, he now condemns a wide range of biological science as disruptive and even immoral. People cannot, according to Fukuyama, be trusted to make good decisions about the use of—for example—genetic therapy. Human "improvability" is so perilous a concept that it should be dismissed, almost across-the-board. In Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002), Fukuyama prescribes paternalistic government industry panels to control or ban whole avenues of scientific investigation, doling out those advances that are deemed suitable.

You may surmise that I am dubious. For one thing, shall we enforce this research ban worldwide? Can such tools be squelched forever? From elites, as well as the masses? If so, how?

Although some of the failure modes mentioned by Bill Joy, Ralph Peters, Francis Fukuyama, and the brightest renunciators seem plausible and worth investigating, it’s hard to grasp how we can accomplish anything by becoming neo-Luddites. Laws that seek to limit technological advancement will certainly be disobeyed by groups that simmer at the social extreme, where the worst dangers lie. Even if ferocious repression is enacted—perhaps augmented with near-omniscient and universal surveillance—this will not prevent exploration and exploitation of such technologies by social elites. (Corporate, governmental, aristocratic, criminal, foreign… choose your own favorite bogeymen of unaccountable power.) For years, I have defied renunciators to cite one example, amid all of human history, when the mighty allowed such a thing to happen. Especially when they plausibly stood to benefit from something new.

While unable to answer that challenge, some renunciators have countered that all of the new mega-technologies—including biotech and nanotechnology—may be best utilized and advanced if control is restricted to knowing elites, even in secret. With so much at stake, should not the best and brightest make decisions for the good of all? Indeed, in fairness, I should concede that the one historical example I gave earlier—that of nuclear weaponry—lends a little support to this notion. Certainly, in that case, one thing that helped to save us was the limited number of decision-makers who could launch calamitous war.

Still, weren’t the political processes constantly under public scrutiny, during that era? Weren’t those leaders supervised by the public, at least on one side? Moreover, decisions about atom bombs were not corrupted very much by matters of self-interest. (Howard Hughes did not seek to own and use a private nuclear arsenal.) But self-interest will certainly influence controlling elites when they weigh the vast benefits and potential costs of biotech and nanotechnology.

Besides, isn’t elitist secrecy precisely the error-generating mode that Crichton, Atwood and so many others portray so vividly, time and again, while preaching against technological hubris? History is rife with examples of delusional cabals of self-assured gentry, telling each other just-so stories while evading any criticism that might reveal flaws in The Plan. By prescribing a return to paternalism—control by elites who remain aloof and unaccountable—aren’t renunciators ultimately proposing the very scenario that everybody—rightfully—fears most?

Perhaps this is one reason why the renunciators—while wordy and specific about possible failure modes—are seldom very clear on which controlling entities should do the dirty work of squelching technological progress. Or how this relinquishment could be enforced, across the board. Indeed, supporters can point to no historical examples when knowledge-suppression led to anything but greater human suffering. No proposal that’s been offered so far even addresses the core issue of how to prevent some group of elites from cheating. Perhaps all elites.

In effect, only the vast pool of normal people would be excluded, eliminating their myriad eyes, ears and prefrontal lobes from civilization’s error-detecting network.

Above all, renunciation seems a rather desperate measure, completely out of character with this optimistic, pragmatic, can-do culture.

THE SELDOM-MENTIONED ALTERNATIVE—RECIPROCAL ACCOUNTABILITY

And yet, despite all this criticism, I am actually much more approving of Joy, Atwood, Fukuyama, et al, than some might expect. In The Transparent Society, I speak well of social critics who shout when they see potential danger along the road.

In a world of rapid change, we can only maximize the benefits of scientific advancement—and minimize inevitable harm—by using the great tools of openness and accountability. Above all, acknowledging that vigorous criticism is the only known antidote to error. This collective version of “wisdom” is what almost surely has saved us so far. It bears little or no resemblance to the kind of individual sagacity that we are used to associating with priests, gurus, and grandmothers… but it is also less dependent upon perfection. Less prone to catastrophe when the anointed Center of Wisdom makes some inevitable blunder.

Hence, in fact, I find fretful worry-mongers invigorating! Their very presence helps progress along by challenging the gung-ho enthusiasts. It’s a process called reciprocal accountability. Without bright grouches, eager to point at potential failure modes, we might really be in the kind of danger that they claim we are. Ironically, it is an open society—where the sourpuss Cassandras are well heard—that is unlikely to need renunciation, or the draconian styles of paternalism they prescribe.

Oh, I see the renunciators’ general point. If society remains as stupid as some people think it is—or even if it is as smart as I think it is, but gets no smarter—then nothing that folks do or plan at a thousand well-intentioned futurist conferences will achieve very much. No more than delaying the inevitable.

In that case, we’ll finally have the answer to an ongoing mystery of science—why there’s been no genuine sign of extraterrestrial civilization amid the stars.⁵ The answer will be simple. Whenever technological culture is tried, it always destroys itself. That possibility lurks, forever, in the corner of our eye, reminding us what’s at stake.

On the other hand, I see every reason to believe we have a chance to disprove that dour worry. As members of an open and questioning civilization—one that uses reciprocal accountability to find and probe every possible failure-mode—we may be uniquely equipped to handle the challenges ahead.

Anyway, believing that is a lot more fun.

THE UPSIDE SCENARIO—THE SINGULARITY

We’ve heard from the gloomy renunciators. Let’s look at another future. The scenario of those who—literally—believe the sky’s the limit. Among many of our greatest thinkers, there is a thought going around—a new ‘meme’ if you will—that says we’re poised for take-off. The idea I’m referring to is that of a coming Technological Singularity.

Science fiction author Vernor Vinge has been touted as a chief popularizer of this notion, though it has been around, in many forms, for generations. More recently, Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near argues that our scientific competence and technologically-empowered creativity will soon skyrocket, propelling humanity into an entirely new age.

Call it a modern, high-tech version of Teilhard De Chardin’s noosphere apotheosis—an approaching time when humanity may move, dramatically and decisively, to a higher state of awareness or being. Only, instead of achieving this transcendence through meditation, good works or nobility of spirit, the idea this time is that we may use an accelerating cycle of education, creativity and computer-mediated knowledge to achieve intelligent mastery over both the environment and our own primitive drives.

In other words, first taking control over Brahma’s “wheel of life,” then learning to steer it wherever we choose.

What else would you call it…

• When we start using nanotechnology to repair bodies at the cellular level?
• When catching up on the latest research is a mere matter of desiring information, whereupon autonomous software agents deliver it to you, as quickly and easily as your arm now moves wherever you wish it to?
• When on-demand production becomes so trivial that wealth and poverty become almost meaningless terms?
• When the virtual reality experience—say visiting a faraway planet—gets hard to distinguish from the real thing?
• When each of us can have as many “servants”—either robotic or software-based—as we like, as loyal as your own right hand?
• When augmented human intelligence will soar and—trading insights with one another at light speed—helping us attain entirely new levels of thought?

Of course, it is worth pondering how this ‘singularity’ notion compares to the long tradition of contemplations about human transcendence. Indeed, the idea of rising to another plane of existence is hardly new! It makes up one of the most consistent themes in cultural history, as though arising from our basic natures.

Indeed, many opponents of science and technology clutch their own images of messianic transformation, images that—if truth be told—share many emotional currents with the tech-heavy version, even if they disagree over the means to achieve transformation. Throughout history, most of these musings dwelled upon the spiritual path, that human beings might achieve a higher state through prayer, moral behavior, mental discipline, or by reciting correct incantations. Perhaps because prayer and incantations were the only means available.

In the last century, an intellectual tradition that might be called ‘techno-transcendentalism’ added a fifth track. The notion that a new level of existence, or a more appealing state of being, might be achieved by means of knowledge and skill.

But which kinds of knowledge and skill?

Depending on the era you happen to live in, techno-transcendentalism has shifted from one fad to another, pinning fervent hopes upon the scientific flavor of the week. For example, a hundred years ago, Marxists and Freudians wove complex models of human society—or mind—predicting that rational application of these models and rules would result in far higher levels of general happiness.⁶ Subsequently, with popular news about advances in agriculture and evolutionary biology, some groups grew captivated by eugenics—the allure of improving the human animal. On occasion, this resulted in misguided and even horrendous consequences. Yet, this recurring dream has lately revived in new forms, with the promise of genetic engineering and neurotechnology.

Enthusiasts for nuclear power in the 1950s promised energy too cheap to meter. Some of the same passion was seen in a widespread enthusiasm for space colonies, in the 1970s and 80s, and in today’s ongoing cyber-transcendentalism, which promises ultimate freedom and privacy for everyone, if only we just start encrypting every Internet message, using anonymity online to perfectly mask the frail beings who are actually typing at a real keyboard. Over the long run, some hold out hope that human minds will be able to download into computers or the vast new frontier of mid-21^st Century cyberspace, freeing individuals of any remaining slavery to our crude and fallible organic bodies.

This long tradition—of bright people pouring faith and enthusiasm into transcendental dreams—tells us a lot about one aspect of our nature, a trait that crosses all cultures and all centuries. Quite often, this zealotry is accompanied by disdain for contemporary society—a belief that some kind of salvation can only be achieved outside of the normal cultural network…a network that is often unkind to bright philosophers—and nerds. Seldom is it ever discussed how much these enthusiasts have in common—at least emotionally—with believers in older, more traditional styles of apotheosis, styles that emphasize methods that are more purely mental or spiritual.

We need to keep this long history in mind, as we discuss the latest phase: a belief in the ultimately favorable effects of an exponential increase in the ability of our calculating engines. That their accelerating power of computation will offer commensurately profound magnifications of our knowledge and power. Our wisdom and happiness.

The challenge that I have repeatedly laid down is this: “Name one example, in all of history, when these beliefs actually bore fruit. In light of all the other generations who felt sure of their own transforming notion, should you not approach your newfangled variety with some caution… and maybe a little doubt?”

IT MAY BE JUST A DREAM

Are both the singularity believers and the renunciators getting a bit carried away? Let’s take that notion of doubt and give it some steam. Maybe all this talk of dramatic transformation, within our lifetimes, is just like those earlier episodes: based more on wishful (or fearful) thinking than upon anything provable or pragmatic.

Take Jonathan Huebner, a physicist who works at the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. Questioning the whole notion of accelerating technical progress, he studied the rate of “significant innovations per person.” Using as his sourcebook The History of Science and Technology, Huebner concluded that the rate of innovation peaked in 1873 and has been declining ever since. In fact, our current rate of innovation—which Huebner puts at seven important technological developments per billion people per year—is about the same as it was in 1600. By 2024, it will have slumped to the same level as it was in the Dark Ages, around 800 AD. "The number of advances wasn’t increasing exponentially, I hadn’t seen as many as I had expected."

Huebner offers two possible explanations: economics and the size of the human brain. Either it’s just not worth pursuing certain innovations since they won’t pay off—one reason why space exploration has all but ground to a halt—or we already know most of what we can know, and so discovering new things is becoming increasingly difficult.

Ben Jones, of Northwestern University in Illinois, agrees with Huebner’s overall findings, comparing the problem to that of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Jones differs, however, as to why this happened. His first theory is that early innovators plucked the easiest-to-reach ideas, or "low-hanging fruit," so later ones have to struggle to crack the harder problems. Or it may be that the massive accumulation of knowledge means that innovators have to stay in education longer to learn enough to invent something new and, as a result, less of their active life is spent innovating. "I’ve noticed that Nobel Prize winners are getting older," he says.

In fact, it is easy to pick away at these four arguments by Huebner and Jones.⁷ For example, it is only natural for innovations and breakthroughs to seem less obvious or apparent to the naked eye, as we have zoomed many of our research efforts down to the level of the quantum and out to the edges of the cosmos. In biology, only a few steps—like completion of the Human Genome Project—get explicit attention as “breakthroughs.” Such milestones are hard to track in a field that is fundamentally so complex and murky. But that does not mean biological advances aren’t either rapid or, overall, truly substantial. Moreover, while many researchers seem to gain their honors at an older age, is that not partly a reflection of the fact that lifespans have improved, and fewer die off before getting consideration for prizes?

Oh, there is something to be said for the singularity-doubters. Indeed, even in the 1930s, there were some famous science fiction stories that prophesied a slowdown in progress, following a simple chain of logic. Because progress would seem to be its own worst enemy. As more becomes known, specialists in each field would have to absorb more and more about less and less—or about ever narrowing fields of endeavor—in order to advance knowledge by the tiniest increments. When I was a student at Caltech, in the 1960s, we undergraduates discussed this problem at worried length. For example, every year the sheer size, on library shelves, of "Chemical Abstracts" grew dauntingly larger and more difficult for any individual to scan for relevant papers.

And yet, over subsequent decades, this trend never seemed to become the calamity we expected. In part, because Chemical Abstracts and its cousins have—in fact—vanished from library shelves, altogether! The library space problem was solved by simply putting every abstract on the Web. Certainly, literature searches—for relevant work in even distantly related fields—now take place faster and more efficiently than ever before, especially with the use of software agents and assistants that should grow even more effective in years to come.

That counter-force certainly has been impressive. Still, my own bias leans toward another trend that seems to have helped forestall a productivity collapse in science. This one (I will admit) is totally subjective. And yet, in my experience, it has seemed even more important than advances in online search technology. For it has seemed to me that the best and brightest scientists are getting smarter, even as the problems they address become more complex.

I cannot back this up with statistics or analyses. Only with my observation that many of the professors and investigators that I have known during my life now seem much livelier, more open-minded and more interested in fields outside their own—even as they advance in years—than they were when I first met them. In some cases, decades ago. Physicists seem to be more interested in biology, biologists in astronomy, engineers in cybernetics, and so on, than used to be the case. This seems in stark contrast to what you would expect, if specialties were steadily narrowing. But it is compatible with the notion that culture may heavily influence our ability to be creative. And a culture that loosens hoary old assumptions and guild boundaries may be one that’s in the process of freeing-up mental resources, rather than shutting them down.

In fact, this trend—toward overcoming standard categories of discipline—is being fostered deliberately in many places. For example, the new Sixth College of the University of California at San Diego, whose official institutional mission is to "bridge the arts and sciences," drives a nail in the coffin of C.P. Snow’s old concept that the "two cultures" can never meet. Never before have there been so many collaborative efforts between tech-savvy artists and technologists who appreciate the aesthetic and creative sides of life.⁸

What Huebner and Jones appear to miss is that complex obstacles tend best to be overcome by complex entities. Even if Einstein and others picked all the low hanging fruit within reach to individuals, that does not prevent groups—institutions and teams and entrepreneurial startups—from forming collaborative human pyramids to go after goodies that are higher in the tree. Especially when those pyramids and teams include new kinds of members, software agents and search methodologies, worldwide associative networks and even open-source participation by interested amateurs. Or when a myriad fields of endeavor see their loci of creativity get dispersed onto a multitude of inexpensive desktops, the way software has been.⁹

Dutch-American economic historian Joel Mokyr, in The Lever of Riches and The Gifts of Athena, supports this progressive view that we are indeed doing something right, something that makes our liberal-democratic civilization uniquely able to generate continuous progress. Mokyr believes that, since the 18th-century Enlightenment, a new factor has entered the human equation: the accumulation of and a free market in knowledge. As Mokyr puts it, we no longer behead people for saying the wrong thing—we listen to them. This "social knowledge" is progressive because it allows ideas to be tested and the most effective to survive. This knowledge is embodied in institutions, which, unlike individuals, can rise above our animal natures.

But Mokyr does worry that, though a society may progress, human nature does not. "Our aggressive, tribal nature is hard-wired, unreformed and unreformable. Individually we are animals and, as animals, incapable of progress." The trick is to cage these animal natures in effective institutions: education, the law, government. But these can go wrong. "The thing that scares me," he says, "is that these institutions can misfire."

While I do not use words such as "caged," I must agree that Mokyr captures the essential point of our recent, brief experiment with the Enlightenment: John Locke’s rejection of romantic oversimplification in favor of pragmatic institutions that work flexibly to maximize the effectiveness of our better efforts—the angels of our nature—enabling our creative forces to mutually reinforce. Meanwhile, those same institutions and processes would thwart our “devils”—the always-present human tendency towards self-delusion and cheating. Of course, human nature strives against these constraints. Self-deluders and cheaters are constantly trying to make up excuses to bypass the Enlightenment covenant and benefit by making these institutions less effective. Nothing is more likely to ensure the failure of any singularity than if we allow this to happen.

But then, swiveling the other way, what if it soon becomes possible not only to preserve and advance those creative enlightenment institutions, but also to do what Mokyr calls impossible? What if we actually can improve human nature?

Suppose the human components of societies and institutions can also be made better, even by a little bit? I have contended that this is already happening, on a modest scale. Imagine the effects of even a small upward-ratcheting in general human intelligence, whether inherent or just functional, by means of anything from education to “smart drugs” to technologically-assisted senses to new methods of self-conditioning.

It might not take much of an increase in effective human intelligence for markets and science and democracy, etc., to start working much better than they already do. Certainly, this is one of the factors that singularity aficionados are counting on.

What we are left with is an image that belies the simple and pure notion of a "singularity" curve… one that rises inexorably skyward, as a simple mathematical function, with knowledge and skill perpetually leveraging against itself, as if ordained by natural law. Even the most widely touted example of this kind of curve, Moore’s Law—which successfully modeled the rapid increase of computational power available at plummeting cost—has never been anything like a smooth phenomenon. Crucial and timely decisions—some of them pure happenstance—saved Moore’s Law on many occasions from collision with either technological barriers or cruel market forces.

True, we seem to have been lucky, so far. Cybernetics and education and a myriad other factors have helped to overcome the "specialization trap." But as we have seen in this section, past success is no guarantee of future behavior. Those who foresee upward curves continuing ad infinitum, almost as a matter of faith, are no better grounded than other transcendentalists, who confidently predicted other rapturist fulfillments, in their own times.

THE DAUNTING TASK OF CROSSING A MINEFIELD

Having said all of the above, let me hasten to add that I believe in the high likelihood of a coming singularity!

I believe in it because the alternatives are too awful to accept. Because, as we discussed before, the means of mass destruction, from A-bombs to germ warfare, are ‘democratizing’—spreading so rapidly among nations, groups, and individuals—that we had better see a rapid expansion in sanity and wisdom, or else we’re all doomed.

Indeed, bucking the utterly prevalent cliché of cynicism, I suggest that strong evidence does indicate some cause for tentative optimism. An upward trend is already well in place. Overall levels of education, knowledge and sagacity in Western Civilization—and its constituent citizenry—have never been higher, and these levels may continue to improve, rapidly, in the coming century. Possibly enough to rule out some of the most prevalent images of failure that we have grown up with. For example, we will not see a future that resembles Blade Runner, or any other cyberpunk dystopia. Such worlds—where massive technology is unmatched by improved wisdom or accountability—will simply not be able to sustain themselves.

The options before us appear to fall into four broad categories:

1. Self-destruction. Immolation or desolation or mass-death. Or ecological suicide. Or social collapse. Name your favorite poison. Followed by a long era when our few successors (if any) look back upon us with envy. For a wonderfully depressing and informative look at this option, see Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. (Note that Diamond restricts himself to ecological disasters that resonate with civilization-failures of the past; thus he only touches on the range of possible catastrophe modes.) We are used to imagining self-destruction happening as a result of mistakes by ruling elites. But in this article we have explored how it also could happen if society enters an age of universal democratization of the means of destruction—or, as Thomas Friedman puts it, “the super-empowerment of the angry young man”—without accompanying advances in social maturity and general wisdom.

2. Achieve some form of ‘Positive Singularity‘—or at least a phase shift to a higher and more knowledgeable society (one that may have problems of its own that we can’t imagine.) Positive singularities would, in general, offer normal human beings every opportunity to participate in spectacular advances, experiencing voluntary, dramatic self-improvement, without anything being compulsory… or too much of a betrayal to the core values of decency we share.

3. Then there is the ‘Negative Singularity‘—a version of self-destruction in which a skyrocket of technological progress does occur, but in ways that members of our generation would find unpalatable. Specific scenarios that fall into this category might include being abused by new, super-intelligent successors (as in Terminator or The Matrix), or simply being “left behind” by super entities that pat us on the head and move on to great things that we can never understand. Even the softest and most benign version of such a ‘Negative Singularity’ is perceived as loathsome by some perceptive renunciators, like Bill Joy, who take a dour view of the prospect that humans may become a less-than-pinnacle form of life on Planet Earth.¹⁰

4. Finally, there is the ultimate outcome that is implicit in every renunciation scenario: Retreat into some more traditional form of human society, like those that maintained static sameness under pyramidal hierarchies of control for at least four millennia. One that quashes the technologies that might lead to results 1 or 2 or 3. With four thousand years of experience at this process, hyper-conservative hierarchies could probably manage this agreeable task, if we give them the power. That is, they could do it for a while.

When the various paths¹¹ are laid out in this way, it seems to be a daunting future that we face. Perhaps an era when all of human destiny will be decided. Certainly not one that’s devoid of “history.” For a somewhat similar, though more detailed, examination of these paths, the reader might pick up Joel Garreau’s fine book, Radical Evolution. It takes a good look at two extreme scenarios for the future—"Heaven" and Hell"—then posits a third—"Prevail"—as the one that rings most true.

So, which of these outcomes seem plausible?

First off, despite the fact that it may look admirable and tempting to many, I have to express doubt that outcome #4 could succeed over an extended period. Yes, it resonates with the lurking tone that each of us feels inside, inherited from countless millennia of feudalism and unquestioning fealty to hierarchies, a tone that today is reflected in many popular fantasy stories and films. Even though we have been raised to hold some elites in suspicion, there is a remarkable tendency for each of us to turn a blind eye to other elites—or favorites—and to rationalize that those would rule wisely.

Certainly, the quasi-Confucian social pattern that is being pursued by the formerly Communist rulers of China seems to be an assertive, bold and innovative approach to updating authoritarian rule, incorporating many of the efficiencies of both capitalism and meritocracy.¹² This determined effort suggests that an updated and modernized version of hierarchism might succeed at suppressing whatever is worrisome, while allowing progress that’s been properly vetted. It is also, manifestly, a rejection of the Enlightenment and everything that it stands for, including John Locke’s wager that processes of regulated but mostly free human interaction can solve problems better than elite decision-making castes.

In fact, we have already seen, in just this one article, more than enough reasons to understand why retreat simply cannot work over the long run. Human nature ensures that there can never be successful rule by serene and dispassionately wise “philosopher kings.” That approach had its fair trial—at least forty centuries—and by almost any metric, it failed.

As for the other three roads, well, there is simply no way that anyone—from the most enthusiastic, “extropian” utopian-transcendentalists to the most skeptical and pessimistic doomsayers—can prove that one path is more likely than the others. (How can models, created within an earlier, cruder system, properly simulate and predict the behavior of a later and vastly more complex system?) All we can do is try to understand which processes may increase our odds of achieving better outcomes. More robust outcomes. These processes will almost certainly be as much social as technological. They will, to a large degree, depend upon improving our powers of error-avoidance.

My contention—running contrary to many prescriptions from both left and right—is that we should trust Locke a while longer. This civilization already has in place a number of unique methods for dealing with rapid change. If we pay close attention to how these methods work, they might be improved dramatically, perhaps enough to let us cope, and even thrive. Moreover, the least helpful modification would appear to be the one thing that the Professional Castes tell us we need—an increase in paternalistic control.¹³

In fact, when you look at our present culture from an historical perspective, it is already profoundly anomalous in its emphasis upon individualism, progress, and above all, suspicion of authority (SOA). These themes were actively and vigorously repressed in a vast majority of human cultures, because they threatened the stable equilibrium upon which ruling classes always depended. In Western Civilization—by way of contrast—it would seem that every mass-media work of popular culture, from movies to novels to songs, promotes SOA as a central human value.¹⁴ This may, indeed, be the most unique thing about our culture, even more than our wealth and technological prowess.

Although we are proud of the resulting society—one that encourages eccentricity, appreciation of diversity, social mobility, and scientific progress—we have no right, as yet, to claim that this new way of doing things is especially sane or obvious. Many in other parts of the world consider Westerners to be quite mad! And with some reason. Indeed, only time will tell who is right about that. For example, if we take the suspicion of authority ethos to its extreme, and start paranoically mistrusting even our best institutions—as was the case with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh—then it is quite possible that Western Civilization may fly apart before ever achieving its vaunted aims, and lead rapidly to some of the many ways that we might achieve outcome #1.

Certainly, a positive singularity (outcome #2) cannot happen if only centrifugal forces operate and there are no compensating centripetal virtues to keep us together as a society of mutually respectful sovereign citizens.

Above all (as I point out in The Transparent Society), our greatest innovations, the accountability arenas¹⁵ wherein issues of importance get decided—science, justice, democracy and free markets—are not arbitrary, nor are they based on whim or ideology. They all depend upon adversaries competing on specially designed playing fields, with hard-learned arrangements put in place to prevent the kinds of cheating that normally prevail whenever human beings are involved. Above all, science, justice, democracy, and free markets depend on the mutual accountability that comes from open flows of information.

Secrecy is the enemy that destroys each of them, and it could easily spread like an infection to spoil our frail renaissance.

THE BEST METHODS OF ERROR-AVOIDANCE

Clearly, our urgent goal is to find (and then avoid) a wide range of quicksand pits—potential failure modes—as we charge headlong into the future. At risk of repeating an oversimplification, we do this in two ways. One method is anticipation. The other is resiliency.

The first of these uses the famous prefrontal lobes—our most recent, and most spooky, neural organs—to peer ahead, perform gedankenexperiments, forecast problems, make models and devise countermeasures in advance. Anticipation can either be a lifesaver… or one of our most colorful paths to self-deception and delusion.¹⁶

The other approach—resiliency—involves establishing robust systems, reaction sets, tools and distributed strengths that can deal with almost any problem as it arises—even surprising problems the vaunted prefrontal lobes never imagined.

Now, of course, these two methods are compatible, even complementary. We have a better computer industry, overall, because part of it is centered in Boston and part in California, where different corporate cultures reign. Companies acculturated with a “northeast mentality” try to make perfect products. Employees stay in the same company, perhaps for decades. They feel responsible. They get the bugs out before releasing and shipping. These are people you want designing a banking program, or a defense radar, because we can’t afford a lot of errors in even the beta version, let alone the nation’s ATM machines! On the other hand, people who work in Silicon Valley seem to think almost like another species. They cry, “Let’s get it out the door! Innovate first and catch the glitches later! Our customers will tell us what parts of the product to fix on the fly. They want the latest thing and to hell with perfection.” Today’s Internet arose from that kind of creative ferment, adapting quickly to emergent properties of a system that turned out to be far more complex and fertile than its original designers anticipated. Indeed, their greatest claim to fame comes from having anticipated that unknown opportunities might emerge!

Sometimes the best kind of planning involves leaving room for the unknown.

This can be hard, especially when your duty is to prepare against potential failure modes that could harm or destroy a great nation. Government and military culture have always been anticipatory, seeking to analyze potential near-term threats and coming up with detailed plans to stymie them. This resulted in incremental approaches to thinking about the future. One classic cliché holds that generals are always planning to fight a modified version of the last war. History shows that underdogs—those who lost the last campaign or who bear a bitter grudge—often turn to innovative or resilient new strategies, while those who were recently successful are in grave danger of getting mired in irrelevant solutions from the past, often with disastrous consequences.¹⁷

At the opposite extreme is the genre of science fiction, whose attempts to anticipate the future are—when done well—part of a dance of resiliency. Whenever a future seems to gather a consensus around it, as happened to “cyberpunk” in the late eighties, the brightest SF authors become bored with such a trope and start exploring alternatives. Indeed, boredom could be considered one of the driving forces of ingenious invention, not only in science fiction, but in our rambunctious civilization as a whole.

Speaking as an author of speculative novels, I can tell you that it is wrong to think that science fiction authors try to predict the future. With our emphasis more on resiliency than anticipation, we are more interested in discovering possible failure modes and quicksand pits along the road ahead, than we are in providing a detailed and prophetic travel guide for the future.

Indeed, one could argue that the most powerful kind of science fiction tale is the self-preventing prophecy—any story or novel or film that portrays a dark future so vivid, frightening and plausible that millions are stirred to act against the scenario ever coming true. Examples in this noble (if terrifying) genre—which also can encompass visionary works of non-fiction—include Fail-Safe, Brave New World, Soylent Green, Silent Spring, The China Syndrome, Das Kapital, The Hot Zone, and greatest of all, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, now celebrating 60 years of scaring readers half to death. Orwell showed us the pit awaiting any civilization that combines panic with technology and the dark, cynical tradition of tyranny. In so doing, he armed us against that horrible fate. By exploring the shadowy territory of the future with our minds and hearts, we can sometimes uncover failure-modes in time to evade them.

Summing up, this process of gedanken or thought experimentation is applicable to both anticipation and resiliency. But it is only most effective when it is engendered en masse, in markets and other arenas where open competition among countless well-informed minds can foster the unique synergy that has made our civilization so different from hierarchy-led cultures that came before. A synergy that withers the bad notions under criticism, while allowing good ones to combine and multiply.

I cannot guarantee that this scenario will work over the dangerous ground ahead. An open civilization filled with vastly educated, empowered, and fully-knowledgeable citizens may be able to apply the cleansing light of reciprocal accountability so thoroughly that onrushing technologies cannot be horribly abused by either secretive elites or disgruntled AYMs (angry young men).

Or else… perhaps… that solution, which brought us so far in the 20^th Century, will not suffice in the accelerating 21^st. Perhaps nothing can work. Maybe this explains the Great Silence, out there among the stars.

What I do know is this. No other prescription has even a snowball’s chance of working. Open knowledge and reciprocal accountability seem, at least, to be worth betting on. They are the tricks that got us this far, in contrast to 4,000 years of near utter failure by systems of hierarchical command.

Anyone who says that we should suddenly veer back in that direction, down discredited and failure-riven paths of secrecy and hierarchy, should bear a steep burden of proof.

VARIETIES OF SINGULARITY EXPERIENCE

All right, what if we do stay on course, and achieve something like the Positive Singularity?

There is plenty of room to argue over what type would be beneficial or even desirable. For example, might we trade in our bodies—and brains—for successively better models, while retaining a core of humanity… of soul?

If organic humans seem destined to be replaced by artificial beings who are vastly more capable than we souped-up apes, can we design those successors to at least think of themselves as human? (This unusual notion is one that I’ve explored in a few short stories.) In that case, are you so prejudiced that you would begrudge your great-grandchild a body made of silicon, so long as she visits you regularly, tells good jokes, exhibits kindness, and is good to her own kids?

Or will they simply move on, sparing a moment to help us come to terms with our genteel obsolescence?

Some people remain big fans of Teilhard de Chardin’s apotheosis—the notion that we will all combine into a single macro-entity, almost literally godlike in its knowledge and perception. Physicist Frank Tipler speaks of such a destiny in his book, The Physics of Immortality, and Isaac Asimov offered a similar prescription as mankind’s long-range goal in Foundation’s Edge. I have never found this notion particularly appealing—at least in its standard presentation, by which some macro-being simply subsumes all lesser individuals within it, and then proceeds to think deep thoughts. In Earth, I talk about a variation on this theme that might be far more palatable, in which we all remain individuals, while at the same time contributing to a new of planetary consciousness. In other words, we could possibly get to have our cake and eat it too.

At the opposite extreme, in Foundation’s Triumph, my sequel to Asimov’s famous universe, I make more explicit something that Isaac had been alluding to all along—the possibility that conservative robots might dread human transcendence, and for that reason actively work to prevent a human singularity. Fearing that it could bring us harm. Or enable us to compete with them. Or empower us to leave them behind.

In any event, the singularity is a fascinating variation on all those other transcendental notions that seem to have bubbled, naturally and spontaneously, out of human nature since before records were kept. Even more than all the others, this one can be rather frustrating at times. After all, a good parent wants the best for his or her children—for them to do and be better. And yet, it can be poignant to imagine them (or perhaps their grandchildren) living almost like gods, with nearly omniscient knowledge and perception—and near immortality—taken for granted.

It’s tempting to grumble, “Why not me? Why can’t I be a god, too?”¹⁸

But then, when has human existence been anything but poignant?

Anyway, what is more impressive? To be godlike?

Or to be natural creatures, products of grunt evolution, who are barely risen from the caves… who nevertheless manage to learn nature’s rules, revere them, and then use them to create good things, good descendants, good destinies? Even godlike ones.

All of our speculations and musings (including this one) may eventually seem amusing and naive to those dazzling descendants. But I hope they will also experience moments of respect, when they look back at us.

They may even pause and realize that we were really pretty good… for souped-up cavemen. After all, what miracle could be more impressive than for such flawed creatures as us to design and sire gods?

There may be no higher goal. Or any that better typifies arrogant hubris.

Or else… perhaps… the fulfillment of our purpose and the reason for all that pain.

To have learned the compassion and wisdom that we’ll need, more than anything else, when bright apprentices take over the Master’s workroom. Hopefully winning merit and approval, at last, as we resume the process of creation.

name="_ftn1">1. Parts of this essay were transcribed from a speech before the conference Accelerating Change 2004: "Horizons of Perception in an Era of Change" November 2004 at Stanford University. Copyright 2005, by David Brin.

title="">2. In his article, “Molecular Manufacturing: Too Dangerous to Allow?” Robert A. Freitas Jr. describes this scenario. One common argument against pursuing a molecular assembler or nanofactory design effort is that the end results are too dangerous. According to this argument, any research into molecular manufacturing (MM) should be blocked because this technology might be used to build systems that could cause extraordinary damage. The kinds of concerns that nanoweapons systems might create have been discussed elsewhere, in both the nonfictional and fictional literature. Perhaps the earliest-recognized and best-known danger of molecular nanotechnology is the risk that self replicating nanorobots capable of functioning autonomously in the natural environment could quickly convert that natural environment (e.g., "biomass") into replicas of themselves (e.g., "nanomass") on a global basis, a scenario often referred to as the "gray goo problem" but more accurately termed global ecophagy". In explaining this scenario, Freitas does not endorse it.

name="_ftn3">3. "Why the future doesn’t need us." Wired Magazine, Issue 8.04, April 2000.

name="_ftn4">4. While my description of The End of History oversimplifies a bit, one can wish that predictions in social science were as well tracked for credibility as they are in physics. Back in 1986, at the height of Reagan-era confrontations, I forecast an approaching fall of the Berlin Wall, to be followed by several decades of tense confrontation with "one or another branch of macho culture, probably Islamic."

name="_ftn5">5. For more on this quandary and its implications, see: http://www.davidbrin.com/sciencearticles.html

name="_ftn6">6. And more quasi-religious social-political mythologies followed, from the incantations of Ayn Rand to MaoZedong. All of them crafting "logical chains of cause and effect that forecast utter human transformation, by political (as opposed to spiritual or technical) means.

name="_ftn7">7. For a detailed response to Huebner’s anti-innovation argument, see Review of "A Possible Declining Trend for Worldwide Innovation" by Jonathan Huebner, published by John Smart in the September 2005 issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change http://accelerating.org/articles/huebnerinnovation.html

name="_ftn8">8. The Exorarium Project proposes to achieve all this and more, by inviting both museum visitors and online participants to enter a unique learning environment. Combining state-of-the-art simulation and visualization systems, plus the very best ideas from astronomy, physics, chemistry, and ecology, the Exorarium will empower users to create vividly plausible extraterrestrials and then test them in realistic first contact scenarios. http://www.exorarium.com/

name="_ftn9">9. For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association’s Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society’s Benefit" or at: http://www.davidbrin.com/disputationarticle1.html

name="_ftn10">10.In other places, I discuss various proposed ways to deal with the Problem of Loyalty, in some future age when machine intelligences might excel vastly beyond the capabilities of mere organic brains. Older proposals (e.g. Asimov’s “laws of robotics”) almost surely cannot work. It remains completely unknown whether humans can “go along for the ride” by using cyborg enhancements or “linking” with external processors. In the long run, I suggest that we might deal with this in the same way that all prior generations created new (and sometimes superior) beings without much shame or fear. By raising them to think of themselves as human beings, with our same values and goals. In other words, as our children. (See: http://www.davidbrin.com/lungfish1.html)

name="_ftn11">11. Of course, there are other possibilities, indeed many others, or I would not be worth my salt as a science fiction author or futurist. Among the more sophomorically entertaining possibilities is the one positing that we all live in a simulation, in some already post-singularity “context” such as a vast computer. The range is limitless. But these four categories seem to lay down the starkness of our challenge: to become wise, or see everything fail within a single lifespan.

name="_ftn12">12. This endeavor has been based upon earlier Asian success stories, in Japan and in Singapore, extrapolating from their mistakes. Most notable has been an apparent willingness to learn pragmatic lessons, to incorporate limited levels of criticism and democracy, accepting their value as error-correction mechanisms—while limiting their effectiveness as threats to hierarchical rule. One might imagine that this tightrope act must fail, once universal education rises beyond a certain point. But that is only a hypothesis. Certainly the neo-confucians can point to the sweep of history, supporting their wager.

name="_ftn13">13. See my essay on "Beleaguered Professionals vs. Disempowered Citizens" about a looming 21^st Century power struggle between average people and the sincere, skilled professionals who are paid to protect us: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BY2PRQ/002-1071896-8741633 In a related context, a ‘futurist essay’ points out a rather unnoticed aspect of the tragedy of 9/11/01—that citizens themselves were most effective in our civilization’s defense. The only actions that actually saved lives and thwarted terrorism on that awful day were taken amid rapid, ad hoc decisions made by private individuals, reacting with both resiliency and initiative—our finest traits—and armed with the very same new technologies that dour pundits say will enslave us. Could this point to a trend for the 21^st Century, reversing what we’ve seen throughout the 20^th… the ever-growing dependency on professionals to protect and guide and watch over us? See: http://www.futurist.com/portal/future_trends/david_brin_empowerment.htm

name="_ftn14">14. Take the essential difference between moderate members of the two major American political parties. This difference boils down to which elites you accuse of seeking to accumulate too much authority. A decent Republican fears snooty academics, ideologues, and faceless bureaucrats seeking to become paternalistic Big Brothers. A decent Democrat looks with worried eyes toward conspiratorial power grabs by conniving aristocrats, faceless corporations, and religious fanatics. (A decent Libertarian picks two from Column A and two from Column B!) I have my own opinions about which of these elites are presently most dangerous. (Hint: it is the same one that dominated most other urban cultures, for four thousand years.) But the startling irony, that is never discussed, is how much in common these fears really share. And the fact that—indeed—every one of them is right to worry. In fact, only universal SOA makes any sense. Instead of an ideologically blinkered focus on just one patch of horizon, should we not agree to watch all directions where tyranny or rationalized stupidity might arise? Again, reciprocal accountability appears to be the only possible solution.

name="_ftn15">15. For a rather intense look at how "truth" is determined in science, democracy, courts and markets, see the lead article in the American Bar Association’s Journal on Dispute Resolution (Ohio State University), v.15, N.3, pp 597-618, Aug. 2000, "Disputation Arenas: Harnessing Conflict and Competition for Society’s Benefit." or at: http://www.davidbrin.com/disputationarticle1.html

name="_ftn16">16. I say this as a prime practitioner of the art of anticipation, both in nonfiction and in fiction. Every futurist and novelist deals in creating convincing illusions of prescience… though at times these illusions can be helpful.

name="_ftn17">17. It is worth noting that the present US military Officer Corps has tried strenuously to avoid this trap, endeavoring to institute processes of re-evaluation, by which a victorious and superior force actually thinks like one that has been defeated. In other words, with a perpetual eye open to innovation. And yet, despite this new and intelligent spirit of openness, military thinking remains rife with unwarranted assumptions. Almost as many as swarm through practitioners of politics.

name="_ftn18">18. Of course, there are some Singularitarians—true believers in a looming singularity—who expect it to rush upon us so rapidly that even fellows my age (in my fifties) will get to ride the immortality wave. Yeah, right. And they call me a dreamer.

© 2006 David Brin

Ray Kurzweil consistently has predicted 2029 as the year to expect truly Turing-test capable machines. Kurzweil’s estimates¹ are based on a broad assessment of the progress in computer hardware, software, and neurobiological science.

Kurzweil estimates that we need 10,000 teraops for a human-equivalent machine. Other estimates (e.g. Moravec²) range from a hundred to a thousand times less. The estimates actually are consistent, as Moravec’s involve modeling cognitive functions at a higher level with ad hoc algorithms, whereas Kurzweil is assuming we’ll have to simulate brain function at a more detailed level.

So, the best-estimate range for human-equivalent computing power is 10 to 10,000 teraops.

The Moore’s Law curve for processing power available for $1000 (in teraops) is:

2000: 0.001 2010: 1 2020: 1,000 2030: 1,000,000

Thus, sophisticated algorithmic AI becomes viable in the 2010s, and the brute-force version in the 2020s, as Kurzweil predicts. (Progress into atomically precise nanotechnology is expected to keep Moore’s Law on track throughout this period. Note that by the NNI definition, existing computer hardware with imprecise sub-100-nanometer feature sizes is already nanotechnology.)

However, a true AI would be considerably more valuable than $1000. To a corporation, a good decision-maker would be worth at leas