Regenesis (41 page)

Still, it is possible to outlaw entire technologies. In 2006 Kevin Kelly, the former editor of
Wired
magazine, did a study of the effectiveness of technology prohibitions across the last thousand years, beginning in the year 1000. During this period governments had banned numerous technologies
and inventions, including crossbows, guns, mines, nuclear bombs, electricity, automobiles, large sailing ships, bathtubs, blood transfusions, vaccines, television, computers, and the Internet. Kelly found that few technology prohibitions had any staying power and that in general, the more recent the prohibition, the shorter its duration.

Figure Epilogue
Kevin Kelly's chart of the duration of a technology prohibition plotted against the year in which it was imposed.

“Prohibitions are in effect postponements,” Kelly concluded. “You might be able to delay the arrival of a specific version of technology, but not stop it. If we take a global view of technology, prohibition seems very ephemeral. While it may be banned in one place, it will thrive in another. In a global marketplace, nothing is eliminated. Where a technology is banned locally, it later revives to global levels.”

Even if a technology is banned globally, as for example under the terms of a legally binding international treaty, the ban will not necessarily stop its development. In 1972 seventy-nine nations signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological and Toxin Weapons, more popularly known as the biological weapons convention (BWC). But in 1996, more than twenty years after the weapons convention came into force, US intelligence sources claimed that twice as many countries possessed or were actively developing biological weapons as when the treaty was signed. Most of the violators of the convention, including the Soviet Union, India, Bulgaria, China, Iran, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos, were also signatories to the convention.

The moral of the story is that prohibitions are generally ineffective and counterproductive, and have negative unintended consequences. There is no reason to think that a prohibition would halt the development of synthetic genomics, although it might slow down the pace of progress—and the potential benefits that unimpeded progress would have brought.

In general, concerns about a new technology arise mainly during the transition to it. The year 2010 marked the 200th anniversary of the Luddite response to the industrial revolution. It was also the thirty-fifth anniversary of the recombinant DNA moratorium. Ten years earlier a few deaths in the first gene therapy trials drastically reduced funding for this promising new field. But the industrial revolution that the Luddites tried to prevent in 1811 has brought us enormous benefits.

Travel speeds could be considered one of our first transitional human traits—going from natural long-distance rates of 10 km/hr to 1,000 km/hr in passenger jets, to 26,720 km/hr in orbit. Other technologies have radically increased our ability to sense and interact with the universe around us.

Our technologies have already given us more than a few transhuman qualities, and the trend toward transhumanism is only likely to accelerate in the future. Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns notes that the progress of certain technologies is not linear but exponential (see
Figure 7.1
), and Kurzweil himself holds that future technological change will be so rapid and profound that it will constitute “a rupture in the fabric of human history.”

Of course a healthy dose of scientific skepticism is always prudent in the face of such extrapolations. For example, an event or series of events may occur that suddenly derails the rate of accelerating returns. The antipredictionist Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in his book
The Black Swan
, presents a vivid example of how a prolonged and steady trend may come to an abrupt halt unexpectedly: “Consider a turkey that is fed every single day. Every single feeding will firm up the bird's belief that it is the general rule of life to be fed every day by members of the human race . . . On the afternoon of the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, something
unexpected
will happen to the turkey. It will incur a revision of belief.”

On a more scientific level, physicist Stephen Wolfram has claimed that certain systems are so complex that it's inherently impossible to predict their future behavior reliably by any means. He regards such systems as “computationally irreducible.” It can be argued that the body of technologies we have today forms a complex system that is computationally irreducible, especially given the fact that these technologies are products of millions of human minds, free agents, and innumerable decisions. If that complex, dynamic network is in fact computationally irreducible, then in Wolfram's words, “there can be no way to predict how the system will behave except by going through almost as many steps of computation as the evolution of the system itself.”

But even if the rate of technological progress, including genomic technology and the march toward transhumanism, is not knowable in advance, it is at least within human control. And that should be a comforting thought.

At the end of such a great story you may ask, What's next? The safest way to make a bet about a future event is to heavily influence it. Like many great stories, the story of the genome includes a moral, a prescription for the future. Twenty years, the length of time we've been able to read the language of DNA, seems ridiculously short compared to the long saga of the genome itself. But twenty years seems like an eternity now that key technologies (like electronics) are changing exponentially at a 1.5-fold per year rate, or even at the 10-fold per year speed at which improvements are being made in DNA reading and writing. Whether passive or active, we can study the future by projecting the consequences of taking either of two branches at the many forks in the road ahead—and taking each to its logical extreme.

1. Natural versus exotic:
How will we change ourselves individually? This can be done without cloning. Using ever more complex consumer devices and by engineering our adult biology, we could all become more alike (e.g., the best of our ancestors or contemporaries) . . . or more radically different from each other. With so many decision forks confronting us, and with so many options ahead of us conferred by advanced technologies, we cannot be content simply to ask, What
can
we do? No. When we're faced with such myriad possibilities, we must go one step further and ask, What
should
we do? While some may object that this is not a scientific question, yet an attempt to answer it is a neural and an evolutionary process (hence subject to scientific inquiry), and anyway, it's a question forced on us by the breakneck progress of science itself.

So, how should we prioritize our research and life goals? Without goals and measures of progress, we are amoral, apathetic, and wasteful. We could join George Mallory, who justified a huge and risky effort with the phrase “Because it's there”—referring to Mount Everest where his body was lost, frozen in ice, for seventy-five years. But this is to blunder along blindly. In a similar vein, we could say that “pure science” payoffs aren't predictable, meaning that it's futile even to try to plan ahead. But these are clearly cop-outs. We might say that our mission should be to maximize happiness or reduce suffering, but some might respond that suffering and
death are natural and therefore desirable, or required for radical change and therefore good for us, at least as a species.

Perhaps there is no one thing that all of us should do collectively, but I would like to offer my own personal take on what at least some of us should be doing, albeit on a vast level. As a general goal I propose that, as a minimum, we ought to avoid the loss of all intelligent life in the universe. A variety of models and measures indicate that meteor impacts have caused massive planet-wide extinctions and are likely to do so again. What should we do? We should develop equipment for rapidly detecting and deflecting such events and/or moving some of our civilization out of the way, and off the planet. Clearly, technological stagnation; economic depression; exhaustion of key nonrenewable resources; conventional warfare; nuclear, biological, or chemical terrorism; environmental waste; pandemics; and various combinations of these could interfere with our ability and our will to deflect extraterrestrial threats—as well as constituting potential existential threats in their own right.

What should we do? Doing nothing, or doing what is traditional or natural, is not even close to a recipe for survival. If we chose tomorrow to behave in the way that our primitive ancestors did, nearly all of our 7 billion humans would die.

The genome should become not just the genome of one lonely being or one planet. It should become the genome of the Universe.

2. Staying at home versus jet-setting:
The stay-at-home option could be driven by the desire to avoid energy waste, the terrorist threat, the tally of 1.2 million global transportation accidents per year, and the prospect of pathogen exposure. The same choice could be made even more attractive by improvements in virtual reality, 3-D displays with gigapixel teleconferencing, and easily engaging other senses like tactile (haptic) feedback. The ultimate jet-set option, by contrast, would be the rocket ride, escaping the inevitable collision of a stray rock with the earth, while adding new challenges of choosing a destination, ensuring radiation protection, and maintaining diversity, energy, and sanity along the way.