The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (76 page)

Although new technologies, like anything else, may be used to excess at times, their promise is not just a matter of adding a fourth cell phone or doubling the number of unwanted e-mails. Rather, it means perfecting the technologies to conquer cancer and other devastating diseases, creating ubiquitous wealth to overcome poverty, cleaning up the environment from the effects of the first industrial revolution (an objective articulated by McKibben), and overcoming many other age-old problems.

Broad Relinquishment.
Another level of relinquishment would be to forgo only certain fields—nanotechnology, for example—that might be regarded as too dangerous. But such sweeping strokes of relinquishment are equally untenable. As I pointed out above, nanotechnology is simply the inevitable end result of the persistent trend toward miniaturization that pervades all of technology. It is far from a single centralized effort but is being pursued by a myriad of projects with many diverse goals.

One observer wrote:

A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed . . . is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields. Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society. Clearly you can’t have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.

The observer I am quoting here is, again, Ted Kaczynski.
³³
Although one will properly resist Kaczynski as an authority, I believe he is correct on the deeply entangled nature of the benefits and risks. However, Kaczynski and I clearly part company on our overall assessment of the relative balance between the two. Bill Joy and I have had an ongoing dialogue on this issue both publicly and privately, and we both believe that technology will and should progress and that we need to be actively concerned with its dark side. The most challenging issue to resolve is the granularity of relinquishment that is both feasible and desirable.

Fine-Grained Relinquishment.
I do think that relinquishment at the right level needs to be part of our ethical response to the dangers of twenty-first-century technologies. One constructive example of this is the ethical guideline proposed by the Foresight Institute: namely, that nanotechnologists agree to relinquish the development of physical entities that can self-replicate in a natural environment.
³⁴
In my view, there are two exceptions to this guideline. First, we will ultimately need to provide a nanotechnology-based planetary immune system (nanobots embedded in the natural environment to protect against rogue self-replicating nanobots). Robert Freitas and I have discussed whether or not such an immune system would itself need to be self-replicating. Freitas
writes: “A comprehensive surveillance system coupled with prepositioned resources—resources including high-capacity nonreplicating nanofactories able to churn out large numbers of nonreplicating defenders in response to specific threats—should suffice.”
³⁵
I agree with Freitas that a prepositioned immune system with the ability to augment the defenders will be sufficient in early stages. But once strong AI is merged with nanotechnology, and the ecology of nanoengineered entities becomes highly varied and complex, my own expectation is that we will find that the defending nanorobots need the ability to replicate in place quickly. The other exception is the need for self-replicating nanobot-based probes to explore planetary systems outside of our solar system.

Another good example of a useful ethical guideline is a ban on self-replicating physical entities that contain their own codes for self-replication. In what nanotechnologist Ralph Merkle calls the “broadcast architecture,” such entities would have to obtain such codes from a centralized secure server, which would guard against undesirable replication.
³⁶
The broadcast architecture is impossible in the biological world, so there’s at least one way in which nanotechnology can be made safer than biotechnology. In other ways, nanotech is potentially more dangerous because nanobots can be physically stronger than protein-based entities and more intelligent.

As I described in
chapter 5
, we can apply a nanotechnology-based broadcast architecture to biology. A nanocomputer would augment or replace the nucleus in every cell and provide the DNA codes. A nanobot that incorporated molecular machinery similar to ribosomes (the molecules that interpret the base pairs in the mRNA outside the nucleus) would take the codes and produce the strings of amino acids. Since we could control the nanocomputer through wireless messages, we would be able to shut off unwanted replication, thereby eliminating cancer. We could produce special proteins as needed to combat disease. And we could correct the DNA errors and upgrade the DNA code. I comment further on the strengths and weaknesses of the broadcast architecture below.

Dealing with Abuse.
Broad relinquishment is contrary to economic progress and ethically unjustified given the opportunity to alleviate disease, overcome poverty, and clean up the environment. As mentioned above, it would exacerbate the dangers. Regulations on safety—essentially fine-grained relinquishment—will remain appropriate.

However, we also need to streamline the regulatory process. Right now in the United States, we have a five- to ten-year delay on new health technologies for FDA approval (with comparable delays in other nations). The harm caused by holding up potential lifesaving treatments (for example, one million lives
lost in the United States for each year we delay treatments for heart disease) is given very little weight against the possible risks of new therapies.

Other protections will need to include oversight by regulatory bodies, the development of technology-specific “immune” responses, and computer-assisted surveillance by law-enforcement organizations. Many people are not aware that our intelligence agencies already use advanced technologies such as automated keyword spotting to monitor a substantial flow of telephone, cable, satellite, and Internet conversations. As we go forward, balancing our cherished rights of privacy with our need to be protected from the malicious use of powerful twenty-first-century technologies will be one of many profound challenges. This is one reason such issues as an encryption “trapdoor” (in which law-enforcement authorities would have access to otherwise secure information) and the FBI’s Carnivore e-mail-snooping system have been controversial.
³⁷

As a test case we can take a small measure of comfort from how we have dealt with one recent technological challenge. There exists today a new fully nonbiological self-replicating entity that didn’t exist just a few decades ago: the computer virus. When this form of destructive intruder 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 communication links that harbor them.

One might counter that computer viruses do not have the lethal potential of biological viruses or of destructive nanotechnology. This is not always the case; we rely on software to operate our 911 call centers, monitor patients in critical-care units, fly and land airplanes, guide intelligent weapons in our military campaigns, handle our financial transactions, operate our municipal utilities, and many other mission-critical tasks. To the extent that software viruses do not yet pose a lethal danger, however, this observation only strengthens my argument. 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.

Although software pathogens remain a concern, the danger exists today mostly at a nuisance level. Keep in mind that our success in combating them has taken place in an industry in which there is no regulation and minimal certification for practitioners. The largely unregulated computer industry is also enormously productive. One could argue that it has contributed more to our technological and economic progress than any other enterprise in human history.

But the battle concerning software viruses and the panoply of software pathogens will never end. We are becoming increasingly reliant on mission-critical software systems, and the sophistication and potential destructiveness of self-replicating software weapons will continue to escalate. When we have software running in our brains and bodies and controlling the world’s nanobot immune system, the stakes will be immeasurably greater.

The Threat from Fundamentalism.
The world is struggling with an especially pernicious form of religious fundamentalism in the form of radical Islamic terrorism. Although it may appear that these terrorists have no program other than destruction, they do have an agenda that goes beyond literal interpretations of ancient scriptures: essentially, to turn the clock back on such modern ideas as democracy, women’s rights, and education.

But religious extremism is not the only form of fundamentalism that represents a reactionary force. At the beginning of this chapter I quoted Patrick Moore, cofounder of Greenpeace, on his disillusionment with the movement he helped found. The issue that undermined Moore’s support of Greenpeace was its total opposition to Golden Rice, a strain of rice genetically modified to contain high levels of beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A.
³⁸
Hundreds of millions of people in Africa and Asia lack sufficient vitamin A, with half a million children going blind each year from the deficiency, and millions more contracting other related diseases. About seven ounces a day of Golden Rice would provide 100 percent of a child’s vitamin A requirement. Extensive studies have shown that this grain, as well as many other genetically modified organisms (GMOs), is safe. For example, in 2001 the European Commission released eighty-one studies that concluded that GMOs have “not shown any new risks to human health or the environment, beyond the usual uncertainties of conventional plant breeding. Indeed, the use of more precise technology and the greater regulatory scrutiny probably make them even safer than conventional plants and foods.”
³⁹

It is not my position that all GMOs are inherently safe; obviously safety testing of each product is needed. But the anti-GMO movement takes the position
that every GMO is by its very nature hazardous, a view that has no scientific basis.

The availability of Golden Rice has been delayed by at least five years through the pressure of Greenpeace and other anti-GMO activists. Moore, noting that this delay will cause millions of additional children to go blind, quotes the grain’s opponents as threatening “to rip the G.M. rice out of the fields if farmers dare to plant it.” Similarly, African nations have been pressured to refuse GMO food aid and genetically modified seeds, thereby worsening conditions of famine.
⁴⁰
Ultimately the demonstrated ability of technologies such as GMO to solve overwhelming problems will prevail, but the temporary delays caused by irrational opposition will nonetheless result in unnecessary suffering.

Certain segments of the environmental movement have become fundamentalist Luddites—“fundamentalist” because of their misguided attempt to preserve things as they are (or were); “Luddite” because of the reflexive stance against technological solutions to outstanding problems. Ironically it is GMO plants—many of which are designed to resist insects and other forms of blight and thereby require greatly reduced levels of chemicals, if any—that offer the best hope for reversing environmental assault from chemicals such as pesticides.

Actually my characterization of these groups as “fundamentalist Luddites” is redundant, because Ludditism is inherently fundamentalist. It reflects the idea that humanity will be better off without change, without progress. This brings us back to the idea of relinquishment, as the enthusiasm for relinquishing technology on a broad scale is coming from the same intellectual sources and activist groups that make up the Luddite segment of the environmental movement.

Fundamentalist Humanism.
With G and N technologies now beginning to modify our bodies and brains, another form of opposition to progress has emerged in the form of “fundamentalist humanism”: opposition to any change in the nature of what it means to be human (for example, changing our genes and taking other steps toward radical life extension). This effort, too, will ultimately fail, however, because the demand for therapies that can overcome the suffering, disease, and short lifespans inherent in our version 1.0 bodies will ultimately prove irresistible.

In the end, it is only technology—especially GNR—that will offer the leverage needed to overcome problems that human civilization has struggled with for many generations.

Development of Defensive Technologies and the Impact of
Regulation