The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (87 page)

The rich-poor divide remains a critical issue, and at each point in time there is more that can and should be done. It is tragic, for example, that the developed
nations were not more proactive in sharing AIDS drugs with poor countries in Africa and elsewhere, with millions of lives lost as a result. But the exponential improvement in the price-performance of information technologies is rapidly mitigating this divide. Drugs are essentially an information technology, and we see the same doubling of price-performance each year as we do with other forms of information technology such as computers, communications, and DNA base-pair sequencing. AIDS drugs started out not working very well and costing tens of thousands of dollars per patient per year. Today these drugs work reasonably well and are approaching one hundred dollars per patient per year in poor countries such as those in Africa.

In
chapter 2
I cited the World Bank report for 2004 of higher economic growth in the developing world (over 6 percent) compared to the world average (of 4 percent), and an overall reduction in poverty (for example, a reduction of 43 percent in extreme poverty in the East Asian and Pacific region since 1990). Moreover, economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin examined eight measures of global inequality among individuals, and found that all were declining over the past quarter century.
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The Criticism from the Likelihood of Government Regulation

These guys talking here act as though the government is not part of their lives. They may wish it weren’t, but it is. As we approach the issues they debated here today, they had better believe that those issues will be debated by the whole country. The majority of Americans will not simply sit still while some elite strips off their personalities and uploads themselves into their cyberspace paradise. They will have something to say about that. There will be vehement debate about that in this country.

                   —L
EON
F
UERTH, FORMER NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER TO
V
ICE
P
RESIDENT
A
L
G
ORE, AT THE 2002
F
ORESIGHT
C
ONFERENCE

Human life without death would be something other than human; consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest accomplishments.

                   —L
EON
K
ASS, CHAIR OF THE
P
RESIDENTIAL
C
OMMISSION ON
B
IOETHICS, 2003

The criticism concerning governmental control is that regulation will slow down and stop the acceleration of technology. Although regulation is a vital issue, it has actually had no measurable effect on the trends discussed in this book, which have occurred with extensive regulation in place. Short of a worldwide
totalitarian state, the economic and other forces underlying technical progress will only grow with ongoing advances.

Consider the issue of stem-cell research, which has been especially controversial, and for which the U.S. government is restricting its funding. Stem-cell research is only one of numerous ideas concerned with controlling and influencing the information processes underlying biology that are being pursued as part of the biotechnology revolution. Even within the field of cell therapies the controversy over embryonic stem-cell research has served only to accelerate other ways of accomplishing the same goal. For example, transdifferentiation (converting one type of cell such as a skin cell into other types of cells) has moved ahead quickly.

As I reported in
chapter 5
, scientists have recently demonstrated the ability to reprogram skin cells into several other cell types. This approach represents the holy grail of cell therapies in that it promises an unlimited supply of differentiated cells with the patient’s own DNA. It also allows cells to be selected without DNA errors and will ultimately be able to provide extended telomere strings (to make the cells more youthful). Even embryonic stem-cell research itself has moved ahead, for example, with projects like Harvard’s major new research center and California’s successful three-billion-dollar bond initiative to support such work.

Although the restrictions on stem-cell research are unfortunate, it is hard to say that cell-therapy research, let alone the broad field of biotechnology, has been affected to a significant degree.

Some governmental restrictions reflect the perspective of fundamentalist humanism, which I addressed in the previous chapter. For example, the Council of Europe proclaimed that “human rights imply the right to inherit a genetic pattern that has not been artificially changed.”
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Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the council’s edict is its posing a restriction as a right. In the same spirit, I assume the council would advocate the human right not to be cured from natural disease by unnatural means, just as activists “protected” starving African nations from the indignity of consuming bioengineered crops.
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Ultimately the benefits of technical progress overwhelm such reflexive antitechnology sentiments. The majority of crops in the United States are already GMOs, while Asian nations are aggressively adopting the technology to feed their large populations, and even Europe is now beginning to approve GMO foods. The issue is important because unnecessary restrictions, although temporary, can result in exacerbated suffering of millions of people. But technical progress is advancing on thousands of fronts, fueled by irresistible economic gains and profound improvements in human health and well-being.

Leon Fuerth’s observation quoted above reveals an inherent misconception
about information technologies. Information technologies are not available only to an elite. As discussed, desirable information technologies rapidly become ubiquitous and almost free. It is only when they don’t work very well (that is, in an early stage of development) that they are expensive and restricted to an elite.

Early in the second decade of this century, the Web will provide full immersion visual-auditory virtual reality with images written directly to our retinas from our eyeglasses and lenses and very high-bandwidth wireless Internet access woven in our clothing. These capabilities will not be restricted just to the privileged. Just like cell phones, by the time they work well they will be everywhere.

In the 2020s we will routinely have nanobots in our bloodstream keeping us healthy and augmenting our mental capabilities. By the time these work well they will be inexpensive and widely used. As I discussed above, reducing the lag between early and late adoption of information technologies will itself accelerate from the current ten-year period to only a couple of years two decades from now. Once nonbiological intelligence gets a foothold in our brains, it will at least double in capability each year, as is the nature of information technology. Thus it will not take long for the nonbiological portion of our intelligence to predominate. This will not be a luxury reserved for the rich, any more than search engines are today. And to the extent that there will be a debate about the desirability of such augmentation, it’s easy to predict who will win, since those with enhanced intelligence will be far better debaters.

The Unbearable Slowness of Social Institutions
. MIT senior research scientist Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld writes: “Just looking back over the course of the past century and a half, there have been a succession of political regimes where each was the solution to an earlier dilemma, but created new dilemmas in the subsequent era. For example, Tammany Hall and the political patron model were a vast improvement over the dominant system based on landed gentry—many more people were included in the political process. Yet, problems emerged with patronage, which led to the civil service model—a strong solution to the preceding problem by introducing the meritocracy. Then, of course, civil service became the barrier to innovation and we move to reinventing government. And the story continues.”
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Gershenfeld is pointing out that social institutions even when innovative in their day become “a drag on innovation.”

First I would point out that the conservatism of social institutions is not a new phenomenon. It is part of the evolutionary process of innovation, and the law of accelerating returns has always operated in this context. Second, innovation
has a way of working around the limits imposed by institutions. The advent of decentralized technology empowers the individual to bypass all kinds of restrictions, and does represent a primary means for social change to accelerate. As one of many examples, the entire thicket of communications regulations is in the process of being bypassed by emerging point-to-point techniques such as voice over Internet protocol (VOIP).

Virtual reality will represent another means of hastening social change. People will ultimately be able to have relationships and engage in activities in immersive and highly realistic virtual-reality environments that they would not be able or willing to do in real reality.

As technology becomes more sophisticated it increasingly takes on traditional human capabilities and requires less adaptation. You had to be technically adept to use early personal computers, whereas using computerized systems today, such as cell phones, music players, and Web browsers, requires much less technical ability. In the second decade of this century, we will routinely be interacting with virtual humans that, although not yet Turing-test capable, will have sufficient natural language understanding to act as our personal assistants for a wide range of tasks.

There has always been a mix of early and late adopters of new paradigms. We still have people today who want to live as we did in the seventh century. This does not restrain the early adopters from establishing new attitudes and social conventions, for example new Web-based communities. A few hundred years ago, only a handful of people such as Leonardo da Vinci and Newton were exploring new ways of understanding and relating to the world. Today, the worldwide community that participates in and contributes to the social innovation of adopting and adapting to new technological innovation is a substantial portion of the population, another reflection of the law of accelerating returns.

The Criticism from Theism

Another common objection explicitly goes beyond science to maintain that there is a spiritual level that accounts for human capabilities and that is not penetrable by objective means. William A. Dembski, a distinguished philosopher and mathematician, decries the outlook of such thinkers as Marvin Minsky, Daniel Dennett, Patricia Churchland, and Ray Kurzweil, whom he calls “contemporary materialists” who “see the motions and modifications of matter as sufficient to account for human mentality.”
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Dembski ascribes “predictability [as] materialism’s main virtue” and cites
“hollowness [as] its main fault.” He goes on to say that “humans have aspirations. We long for freedom, immortality, and the beatific vision. We are restless until we find our rest in God. The problem for the materialist, however, is that these aspirations cannot be redeemed in the coin of matter.” He concludes that humans cannot be mere machines because of “the strict absence of extramaterial factors from such systems.”

I would prefer that we call Dembski’s concept of materialism “capability materialism,” or better yet “capability patternism.” Capability materialism/patternism is based on the observation that biological neurons and their interconnections are made up of sustainable patterns of matter and energy. It also holds that their methods can be described, understood, and modeled with either replicas or functionally equivalent re-creations. I use the word “capability” because it encompasses all of the rich, subtle, and diverse ways in which humans interact with the world, not just those narrower skills that one might label as intellectual. Indeed, our ability to understand and respond to emotions is at least as complex and diverse as our ability to process intellectual issues.

John Searle, for example, acknowledges that human neurons are biological machines. Few serious observers have postulated capabilities or reactions of human neurons that require Dembski’s “extramaterial factors.” Relying on the patterns of matter and energy in the human body and brain to explain its behavior and proficiencies need not diminish our wonderment at its remarkable qualities. Dembski has an outdated understanding of the concept of “machine.”

Dembski also writes that “unlike brains, computers are neat and precise.... [C]omputers operate deterministically.” This statement and others reveal a view of machines, or entities made up of patterns of matter and energy (“material” entities), that is limited to the literally simpleminded mechanisms of nineteenth-century automatons. These devices, with their hundreds and even thousands of parts, were quite predictable and certainly not capable of longings for freedom and other such endearing qualities of the human entity. The same observations largely hold true for today’s machines, with their billions of parts. But the same cannot necessarily be said for machines with
millions of billions
of interacting “parts,” entities with the complexity of the human brain and body.

Moreover it is incorrect to say that materialism is predictable. Even today’s computer programs routinely use simulated randomness. If one needs truly random events in a process, there are devices that can provide this as well. Fundamentally, everything we perceive in the material world is the result of many trillions of quantum events, each of which displays a profound and irreducible quantum randomness at the core of physical reality (or so it seems—the scientific
jury is still out on the true nature of the apparent randomness underlying quantum events). The material world—at both the macro and micro levels—is anything but predictable.