Macrolife (26 page)

 

In the apartment's library niche, John called up Richard Bulero's major work,
The Sociology of Macrolife
. The desk screen showed a small biographical note:

The frame changed, giving titles of biographies, a complete list of works, and reference codes for information about Janet Marquand Bulero, Jack Bulero, and dozens of related historical persons.

John passed on to the work itself, planning to skip forward to get a good general impression before considering a closer study.

by Richard Bulero

He had not expected to see the original document. The typescript seemed strangely immediate and real on the bright screen. The past was there, reaching out to claim him. He started to read, and the words seemed to speak in his mind as if they were his own thoughts.

INTRODUCTION

The central political fact of Macrolife is that power exists solely for maintaining the economic framework that makes freedom possible; economic management and political authority are limited to enhancing creative and constructive opportunities within the social container. These powers of government and the physical structures are the social container, the basic features that must be preserved when the society reproduces, regardless of what other styles the social organism may develop. An attack on these essential features of Macrolife from outside poses no moral problems, since the defense of genuinely free institutions is always justified. The only forbidden freedom is the freedom to jeopardize the framework. All other serious challenges to society are given a clear procedure by which they may become influential.

 

John touched the control surface and the screen blurred, becoming clear again about a third of the way through the introduction.

 

A society of unlimited economic capacity might still go wrong internally; this may happen as the result of a variety of mental frustrations and pressures. How, then, do we deal with the darker side of human nature? By giving the individual a generous share of power within the society, beyond the economic essentials. Dissidents are free to leave at any time. They can settle on any number of natural worlds…

 

How much choice had there been in the village? There was little freedom to be found outside the largess of macrolife. What freedom was there to be gained by choosing to live outside? He was not free to choose to live outside.

 

…or, after suitable planning by the Projex Council, they can start the construction of a new container, which will hold the kind of society that pleases them. To date, this open-ended society has been possible because it restricts power to economic management, the policing of the various civil liberties, and the planning of creative projects (reproduction of Macrolife being the most important such project). Stricter forms are possible for Macrolife, but these would limit the very creative possibilities for human ambition and desire, both intellectual and aesthetic, that prompted the creation of Macrolife.

 

John skipped forward a few pages, admiring the thousand-year-old English.

 

The city was the first form of Macrolife, an organized way of life that looked to interests beyond agriculture, to science and art; but the finitude of planetary resources doomed the city. Macrolife offered a unique extension of human community concepts, a redemption of urban civilization, the city-state, as well as the saving of various aspects of rural life….

An observer raised in the restrictive conditions of a natural world, where resources are scarce and the power of the necessary few frustrates the yearnings of the many, might ask: What compels the Macroworlders to be true to their design? What prevents the fatal abuse of power? Human conduct is, after all, a fallible thing. Our answer is that we live without scarcity, without the need to represent valuable work and resources with equally scarce precious metals or a limited currency supply. Negatively stated, greed is satisfied; powerful ambitions are satisfied. Whoever wants power can have it; we rotate responsibilities among the citizens, making power an obligation, not the end of life….

 

But I'm a failure,
John thought.
I couldn't even do something small right. I was too selfish to succeed.

 

All status comes from achievements; rebels learn this quickly enough and have to put up or shut up. The acts of a successful, strongly cooperative ego, are effective because it looks beyond itself; the ineffective ego is concerned with itself, and fails to the extent that it misperceives what is not itself. Our wealth makes conscience, goodwill and personal development possible, where before it was the luxury of the secure minority, which often pointed to the lack of these qualities in the majority as a reason for keeping it down. (The minority could do little else in any case, short of abolishing itself, and with it the means of passing beyond agriculture and primitive technology).

 

“You should take more of an interest in history,” Margaret had told him a long time ago. “The only sense of identity I see in you is the physical one, in the care you take with sports. Our citizens are brought up like kings, but that doesn't mean you have to be as silly as kings were.” He had not understood. “If you knew history, you'd be angry at what I said, but then I wouldn't have had to say it.”

“There's no reason I have to do anything I don't want to,” he had told her. “I mind my own business and leave everyone alone.”

“You're too much of a loner, and you don't know what you're missing.”

“Stop picking at me.”

 

And yet, human perversity will remain. Perfection is not possible, or desirable. The universe seems to be made for the conscious intelligence which is lacking, and which strives to remedy this by gaining in knowledge, experience, pleasure, and insight, but not to the point of perfection or certainty. This universe is not exhaustible, as if by design, since the alternatives (stricter determinism or greater chaos) do not seem to be desirable, even though the universe may be moving toward one or the other, away from the optimum balance between a severe limitation of freedom and its augmentation.

We are not concerned with becoming angels, or anything much beyond a hyperpersonal, cooperative humanity. The solution of secondary problems, the classical difficulties of administration and distribution, does not lead us to claim a final solution to the difficult problems involving the intractable aspects of human nature. Human plasticity is a genetic heritage. It is an array of general potentials. Aggression is one of them, but it may appear in a variety of forms; all of them are socially elicited, in worthwhile or in damaging modes. Our environments will be designed to elicit the constructive potentials of those tendencies which make aggression possible.

 

A few pages later, he picked up the growing boldness of the words:

 

Civilization is a harnessing of reason, feelings, and imagination to practicality. Nature is modified by social life, using the tools of language and information; social life is modified through material organization; when these activities have been successful, it remains to modify human nature and the physical form of the body.

 

Suddenly John realized that Richard Bulero had written all this when Asterome was little more than a hollow rock. Hindsight made all the ideas familiar, but for Richard Bulero these words had been the instrument of foresight.

 

The technological environments of Macrolife will attain the complexity of nature, becoming “second nature” as they become homeostatic, self-regulating, more a living organism than a machine. Nature seems unmachinelike only because its error-evolved adaptive systems work at smaller, in-depth scales; they are subtle, made of soft materials, and super-redundant (for a reliable efficiency)….

Government must be like a natural environment—supportive, an antagonist at times, a realm which provides basics, like earth, air, fire, and water—within which individuals may flourish….

Economics is the way in which a civilization uses energy, how it stores, transfers and records the use of energy in the form of individual access and credit….

The problem is not economics, or social structure, entirely—primarily it is the problem of human nature, a nature that cannot be confined, only educated and persuaded….

Human history is the battle of the cortex against the older, impulsive, instinctual layers of the brain; the cortex has an ally, however, in certain areas of feeling, those portions that give rise to feelings of sympathy for those of our own kind, making their welfare the same as our own. This sense by which we blur our individualities, by which we share and overcome our separation, is the basis for a sound naturalistic ethics, one that may extend even to other forms of intelligence.

A human being is a multicellular organism, a form of macrolife, the step beyond unicellular life; society is a form of macrolife, the step beyond the individual human, the superman; the superman need not be an individual, as Cole says—an individual society may be the superman….

We are building a society that augments its individuals. Specialization, the management of automatic details in the logistics of life-support, library storage and retrieval systems—these custodial tasks are carried out by artificial intelligences operating below the surface of the social structure, much as portions of the brain carry out automatic functions without the intervention of human consciousness. In the human brain, we will retain unspecialized skills—the capacity to see wholes, to see the relationships among entire blocks of information, to generalize, to create new wholes in all the modes of human creative activity, from the arts to the sciences. No matter how much we may change through genetic creativity, all such changes will have to be introduced around the central core of unspecialized human plasticity; bioengineering for specialized functions would fragment us psychologically.

 

It seemed strange to see these old words reaching forward into their future, his present. Would they move past him into some further vision? He read on.

 

The size of the human brain can be increased; but the brain's capacity can also be extended through symbiosis with artificial intelligence, either in reversible or irreversible modes. The mental tools that we think with will certainly grow, and they will drive the human brain to grow in outlook and sophistication, as once the simple tools of knife, hammer, and wheel helped create a new life. Biological modifications are simply part of a two-way process, by which humankind creates cultural environments and is then affected by them, only to see the possibility of a still further development.

 

John skipped a few pages of detailed example.

 

By the late twentieth century, the expansion of the physical brain had leveled off, while artificial intelligence was still growing by a factor of 10 every 7 years. Our infant Humanity II intelligence is not a
personality
as we understand it in ourselves. It is growing in consciousness, perhaps even in curiosity, but it is without a localized ego, lacks ambition and will; it is not
anyone
in the specific sense. Biological intelligent self-consciousness, by contrast, is a declaration of independence from nature's blind sleep; it is nature coming awake. The individual ego sometimes feels itself to be a bit of something general become specific and defined, sharpened and directed by a yearning will. The symbiosis of these two kinds of intelligence will make Macrolife the wisest and most knowledgeable society in history. No experience will be lost to it; no individual will be without the benefit of its cumulative effort and common inheritance; no one will have to start from scratch. Perhaps this reconstruction of human existence will do something to relieve the sense of doomed finitude, of smallness, so common in perceptive minds.

Each citizen will have the benefit of a quality-controlled birth (rather than the reproductive roulette of past ages), the benefits of a limited population, educational techniques, the vistas of an ongoing exploration of nature, access to the necessities; the life problem will be one of further growth, what to do with one's indefinitely long life. Ours will be an uncoercive pluralism, providing both stability and novelty.

 

John ran the pages forward, looking for more about the Humanity II intelligences.

 

Humanity II is the child of our fleshy intelligence. As I write, humankind is still dominant, the teacher requiring service in return for programming and improvements; but one day these children of ours will develop on their own, coalescing into bundles of individual personality within the system, perhaps acquiring equal say in the further development of Macrolife. Perhaps they will be our successors; at the least they will become our companions, inhabiting a universe psychologically coextensive with our own. The great convergence of intelligence in nature will certainly ignore evolutionary origins, be they biological or nonbiological, humanlike or alien.

 

John turned to the concluding pages of the introduction:

 

The confrontation of science and older cultures posed difficult questions of personal and social identity, calling into doubt the age-long affirmations of ethnic and regional humanity. A nonsimplistic scientific solution to the problem of culture-bound man called for a highly fluid and critical personal and social identity, one that would be open to growth not through the assumed posture of educated sufficiency, but through the homeostasis of egoless error recognition. For example, indefinite life span will lead to complete changes in an individual much in the way that cultures have changed over the ages. A person would be led on by the logic of newly acquired knowledge and understanding, as well as by the interests of his creativity and curiosity. In past cultures, this kind of activity would have been pursued in bits and pieces between the physical chores of staying alive, if at all, or passed across a few generations of workers, as in the cumulative effort of the sciences. This new freedom is what at bottom threatened culture-bound man, preserver of the past, national man, clinger to distinctive markings—the fear that little may remain of an overrated past, that identity may shift and transform itself with the emergence of genuinely new things.