Armageddon Science (23 page)

In principle, it is possible to make a computer that is unhackable, simply by not connecting it to anything else. This is likely to be the case for the most dangerous systems, though some military computers could be open to a more direct cyberattack, for instance by tapping into the optical cables used to connect them. In practice, though, cyberattacks causing a nuclear holocaust can be left with Hollywood—the hijacking of the systems controlling our businesses and utilities could still cause chaos with much less effort and risk.

We aren’t going to stop communicating, or making use of information technology. It has become an essential part of everyday life. But those who are responsible for the key systems that run our infrastructure and defense need to be constantly aware of the threats we face. Communication is, after all, one of the essential behaviors of human beings. But there are other aspects of humanity that could come under threat. Perhaps the most subtle peril the human race faces is that we could cease to be human beings at all, as the ever increasing pace of biotechnology enables something better to come along and replace us.

The idea that human beings are driven to go beyond nature is nothing new, as the quote from a Roman natural philosopher at the start of this chapter shows. In my book
Upgrade Me,
I suggest that the urge to enhance ourselves is part of what makes us human. Our technologies, and the changes that we have made to our bodies, both physically and chemically, have gradually given us capabilities that go far beyond anything that early human beings could do.

It all started with the ability to think outside the here and now, to consider what might be. Once we were asking “What if?” it was inevitable that we would begin to look for ways to enhance the basic capabilities of the human body. There were at least five separate drivers for making these changes. Just like us, the early humans wanted to become more attractive to the opposite sex, to put off death, to enhance their strength to defend themselves more effectively against physical threats, to make better use of their remarkable brains, and to repair damage to their bodies.

Just consider how much progress we have made, how much we have modified ourselves and our environments, in each of these categories. If we take the single category of putting off death, we need to include everything from preventive medicine to the simple but powerful act of cooking food. More recently we’ve seen a huge amount of effort put into science that may enable us to extend the human life span, whether by preventing the action of killers like cancer or by making changes to the fundamental aspects of our biology that promote aging.

Along the way, quite unintentionally, we have subtly changed what it is to be human. Biologists will tell you that we are still the same animal that we were 100,000 years ago. Homo sapiens as a species has not evolved in a biological sense. But in terms of function and capability, in terms of the way our bodies work with the various enhancements we provide, we are already human version 2.0, a whole new creature.

There is nothing wrong with the urge to upgrade. It really isn’t exaggerating to say that without it we wouldn’t be human beings—so it’s meaningless to simply try to discard it. Some argue that we need to say, “Stop, enough, we don’t want any more development of the human being.” Such commentators really don’t understand people. You might as well say, “Stop now, we don’t want there to be any more breathing, it’s bad for the environment.” Yet there is the chance that our pressing demand for more and more enhancement will in the end prove terminally destructive to the human race.

A relatively low-risk possibility is that our attempts to improve on nature will result in a medical catastrophe. It is possible to imagine a scenario where, for example, a hugely popular cosmetic caused a worldwide breakdown in the human immune system, or a common, everyday drug proved to have massively damaging long-term side effects. But it’s unlikely that any single product will ever have large enough market penetration to have a truly devastating effect on the planetary population, and products that do have a vast reach always have a wide range of testing incorporated into their design.

A more subtle variant on the medical catastrophe would be if a universal, or near-universal, product rendered us particularly vulnerable to a pandemic from an existing virus or other illness that in itself could not cause mass death, but that was transformed into something more dangerous by the product.

We can never be 100 percent sure of the impact of a medical treatment or of a product we consume. Witness the tragedy that resulted from an unexpected side effect of the drug thalidomide, which was used in the late 1950s for a number of purposes, notably suppressing morning sickness. Between ten thousand and twenty thousand children would be born with birth defects as a result of their mothers taking thalidomide.

It’s a horrible story—but it also reflects the relative difficulty of inadvertently causing a disaster on a scale that would wipe out a major portion of the human race. The medication would have to be taken by a huge population across the world, but such of widespread distribution of drugs is rare with anything less tested and safe than aspirin.

Of course, not all human upgrading is harmless. There is one technological enhancement to our bodily capabilities that already kills forty-five thousand people each year in the United States and more than a million people yearly worldwide. It’s hard to imagine that we can tolerate a product that has proved so deadly, but the fact is, we do. We can’t get by without it. It has become such an integral part of our nature that we couldn’t contemplate managing without this upgrade, even though it is responsible for so high a mortality rate—and, what’s more, it damages the environment at the same time.

This rampant killer is the car (or, more precisely, road vehicles). Yet even at this level of deaths, we aren’t looking at an enhancement that is in any danger of wiping out humanity (unless you consider climate change). But some believe that we are not far from being able to upgrade human beings so much that normal, unmodified humans will eventually become extinct.

This is the possibility that future gazer Ray Kurzweil refers to as the Singularity, based on an idea first conceived in the 1980s by science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge. Vinge predicted that “within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will end.” His prediction, which should have been coming to fruition around now, overestimated the speed of technological development; Kurzweil now suggests that the Singularity is likely to be reached around 2040. Yet the threat remains the same.

In this vision of the future, human beings become merged with computing technology to form a new type of life, a unique hybrid species with vastly enhanced thinking capabilities that would render ordinary human beings obsolete. This new intelligence may continue into the future with a biological-electronic hybrid brain, but is more likely to discard the biological aspect entirely as the capabilities of electronics continue to be exponentially enhanced.

With, perhaps, an unemotional view of the nature of life and what it is to be human, it seems likely that any human-computer hybrid would not be content with the capabilities of a fleshy body. It would begin to replace the less effective physical aspects of the human frame. As enhancement technology improved, more and more of our biological functions would probably be surpassed by a constructed alternative, or a biological-mechanical hybrid.

The idea of discarding the biological entirely was suggested as the most likely outcome by a trio working at the new technology labs of the British telecommunications company BT back in 1995, looking speculatively at the “future evolution of man.” Ian Pearson, Chris Winter, and Peter Cochrane imagined that by around 2015, computing and robotics would be so advanced that Homo sapiens would be overtaken in all abilities by a robot species they dubbed Robotus primus.

At the same time they imagined human beings becoming sufficiently enhanced with electronic implants to be considered a new species themselves—Homo cyberneticus. But this first cyborg, they felt, was a transitional move to Homo hybridus, which would have biological enhancements as well as the cybernetic. (Back in 1995 it wasn’t obvious that genetic engineering would race ahead of the interface between man and machine.) This hybrid, too, was expected to be relatively short-lived. As the capabilities of electronics continued to grow, the parts of the hybrid where normal biological processes were better than the electronic would become fewer and fewer. Between 2100 and 2150, Pearson, Winter, and Cochrane imagined, we would abandon flesh and become purely electronic—Homo machinus.

This new species would be quite different from anything we know. In the BT trio’s words, the citizens of the future would see a creature that was “vastly more intelligent and has access to whatever physical capability is required. It can travel at the speed of light, exist in many places at once, and would be essentially immortal. It would coexist with Robotus primus, but we could expect that the two would closely interact and may quickly converge.”

They also envisaged that many humans would reject enhancement, initially living in parallel with the increasingly enhanced forms, as perhaps Neanderthal man did with the early Homo sapiens. Sadly, the BT visionaries predicted that peaceful coexistence would not be sustained for long, and the remnants of Homo sapiens (or Homo ludditus, as they condescendingly christened our descendants) would soon be rendered extinct by their creations.

It is interesting to make that comparison to Neanderthal man, a second human species that coexisted with Homo sapiens for thousands of years. Recent research has shown Neanderthal man in a new light. Traditionally portayed as apelike, hairy, and unintelligent, it now seems likely that Neanderthals were fair skinned, looked much more like existing humans than like apes, and had language and a fair degree of intelligence. It was long thought that Neanderthals were wiped out by the deadly, competitive Homo sapiens, but it now seems that Neanderthals were simply less flexible, more stuck in their ways, and so didn’t make the changes in lifestyle necessary to survive the last ice age. Perhaps there are lessons to be learned for any future members of Homo sapiens confronting a new hybrid human race. But it seems unlikely this will be an issue for many of us alive today.

The BT time frame (particularly the development of a superior robot species by 2015) now seems as far out of touch with reality as Vernor Vinge’s, but there is a certain amount of logic to the progression they envisaged. Although such a cyborg future human would not have to take on the hive mind of
Star Trek
’s frightening Borg aliens, it is possible that they would share either the Borgs’ urge to assimilate other creatures, or at the very least a tendency to oust nonmodified humans first from positions of power and skill, and then from existence. This would not require any malice on the part of the new race. It would be sufficient that they were functionally superior and competing for the Earth’s limited resources. Over time, they would come to dominate.

However, before we all panic about our impending replacement by our cyborg superhuman creations, it is worth noting a few lessons from history—all too often, it seems those who predict this kind of future are relying entirely on science fiction for their guide to the future, whereas the past can sometimes be more usefully informative. Science fiction is not an oracle that sees into the future—the key word here is “fiction.”

The first consideration that throws doubt on a future when true humans are ousted by electronic hybrids is that just because we gain added capabilities doesn’t mean that we will lose control of the upgrade, so that upgraded individuals become something other than human. Our existing upgrades in the form of a car and a computer, for example, have vastly more physical power and speed of computation, respectively, than is available to a basic human being, but we have ensured that they remain subservient to the human will. There is no reason to be sure that with any future enhancement, we will suddenly lose this upper hand.

The other problem with Kurzweil’s vision is that it depends on a risky approach to predicting the future of technology. The assumption is that there will be intelligent, conscious technology that will engineer this replacement of the basic human in a relatively short time (by around 2040 on Kurzweil’s predictions), because the growth in capabilities of information technology has to date been exponential, getting more and more powerful at an explosive rate.

We have often seen technology develop like this—but it also has the habit of suddenly hitting a plateau or even reversing the trend. This is something that those predicting the Singularity seem to have missed. At the moment, for example, artificial intelligence and robotic development are not seeing anything like the speed of development that we are witnessing in basic information technology. Even if true thinking robots were getting closer as quickly as processor speeds were being enhanced, it isn’t a safe bet to assume that developments would continue at the same hectic pace.

Science writer Damien Broderick has pointed out, as a model for the way computing technology and robotics will develop, the way that human speed of travel has changed. For millions of years, humanity moved around by foot, with no other choice. A few thousand years ago we speeded up a little by using horses and other animals. It was just two hundred years ago that we added the steam engine to our kit, and since then we have seen a rapidly accelerating speed curve, with cars, planes, jets, and rockets.

This is a seductive but flawed argument. We achieved rocket flight into space back in 1957, it’s true, but if things were continuing to speed up exponentially, we should have come up with several quicker means of transport since then. We haven’t. Admittedly there have been tweaks and technical improvements in space flight, but nothing much quicker has emerged. The developments in transport have decayed since 1957. More important, this picture of ever-increasing speeds does not even compare like with like.

It is only really meaningful to make a comparison of the transport available to ordinary citizens, who have never had access to rocket travel. For us, the last big increase in speed was the introduction of supersonic commercial airliners with Concorde in the early 1970s. At around 2,000 kilometers per hour (1,300 miles per hour), this was a big step forward from conventional jets, more than doubling their speed. Yet since, not only has there been no enhancement, but with Concorde’s retirement we have fallen back to the speeds available thirty or forty years ago. This could be just as good a model of the way intelligent technology could develop as visions of computer capabilities that continue to shoot up an exponential curve.

Yes, there is a risk from our rampant drive to self-enhance, but it is much smaller than many of the dangers we face as a human race. Those who predict the Singularity have a false picture of the nature of humanity. They see us as the biologists do, as being just human 1.0. But we have already come this far, and from the evidence to date, the enhancements they envisage wiping out humanity are not likely to be so extreme, but will simply continue the incremental modification and growth in capability of that most remarkable species that is Homo sapiens.