The Future of the Mind (51 page)

Then a ragtag army of earthlings might be able to mount a counterattack. In Eastern military strategy, like the classic teachings of Sun Tzu in
The Art of War
, there is a way to defeat even a superior army. You first allow it to enter your territory. Once it has entered unfamiliar land and its ranks are diffused, you can counterattack where they are weakest.

Another technique is to use the enemy’s strength against it. In judo, the principal strategy is to turn the momentum of the attacker to your advantage. You let the enemy attack, and then trip them or throw them off guard, exploiting the enemy’s own mass and energy. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. In the same way, perhaps the only way to fight a superior alien army is to allow it to invade your territory, learn its weaponry and military secrets, and turn those very weapons and secrets against it.

So a superior alien army cannot be defeated head-on. But it will withdraw if it cannot win and the cost of a stalemate is too high. Success means depriving the enemy of a victory.

But more than likely, I believe the aliens will be benevolent and, for the most part, ignore us. We simply have nothing to offer them. If they visit us, then it will be mainly out of curiosity or for reconnaissance. (Since curiosity was an essential feature in our becoming intelligent, it is likely that any alien species will be curious, and hence want to analyze us, but not necessarily to make contact.)

MEETING AN ALIEN ASTRONAUT

Unlike in the movies, we will probably not meet the flesh-and-blood alien creatures themselves. It would simply be too dangerous and unnecessary. In
the same way that we sent the Mars Rover to explore, aliens will more than likely send organic/mechanical surrogates or avatars instead, which can better handle the stresses of interstellar travel. In this way, the “aliens” we meet on the White House lawn may look nothing like their masters back on the home planet. Instead, the masters will project their consciousness into space through proxies.

More than likely, though, they will send a robotic probe to our moon, which is geologically stable, with no erosion. These probes are self-replicating; that is, they will create a factory and manufacture, say, a thousand copies of themselves. (These are called von Neumann probes, after mathematician John von Neumann, who laid the foundation for digital computers. Von Neumann was the first mathematician to seriously consider the problem of machines that could reproduce themselves.) These second-generation probes are then launched to other star systems, where each one in turn creates a thousand more third-generation probes, making a total of a million. Then these probes fan out and create more factories, making a billion probes. Starting with just one probe, we have one thousand, then a million, then a billion. Within five generations, we have a quadrillion probes. Soon we have a gigantic sphere, expanding at near light speed, containing trillions upon trillions of probes, colonizing the entire galaxy within a few hundred thousand years.

Dr. Davies takes this idea of self-replicating von Neumann probes so seriously that he has actually applied for funding to search the surface of the moon for evidence of a previous alien visitation. He wishes to scan the moon for radio emissions or radiation anomalies that would indicate evidence of an alien visitation, perhaps millions of years ago. He wrote a paper with Dr. Robert Wagner in the scientific journal
Acta Astronautica
calling for a close examination of the photos from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter down to a resolution of about 1.5 feet.

They wrote, “
Although there is only a tiny probability that alien technology would have left traces on the moon in the form of an artifact or surface modification of lunar features, this location has the virtue of being close,” and also traces of an alien technology would remain preserved over long periods of time. Since there is no erosion on the moon, treadmarks left by aliens would still be visible (in the same way that footprints left by our astronauts in the 1970s could, in principle, last for billions of years).

One problem is that the von Neumann probe might be very small. Nanoprobes
use molecular machines and MEMs, and hence it might be only as big as a bread box, he said to me, or even smaller. (In fact, if such a probe landed on Earth in someone’s backyard, the owner might not even notice.)

This method, however, represents the most efficient way of colonizing the galaxy, using the exponential growth of self-replicating von Neumann probes. (This is also the way in which a virus infects our body. Starting with a handful of viruses, they land on our cells, hijack the reproductive machinery, and convert our cells into factories to create more viruses. Within two weeks, a single virus can infect trillions of cells, and we eventually sneeze.)

If this scenario is correct, it means that our own moon is the most likely place for an alien visitation. This is also the basis of the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey
, which even today represents the most plausible encounter with an extraterrestrial civilization. In the movie, a probe was placed on our moon millions of years ago, mainly to observe the evolution of life on Earth. At times, it interferes in our evolution and gives us an added boost. This information is then sent to Jupiter, which is a relay station, before heading to the home planet of this ancient alien civilization.

From the point of view of this advanced civilization, which can simultaneously scan billions of star systems, we can see that they have a considerable choice in what planetary systems to colonize. Given the sheer enormity of the galaxy, they can collect data and then best choose which planets or moons would yield the best resources. From their perspective, they might not find Earth very appealing.

The empires of the future will be empires of the mind.

—WINSTON CHURCHILL

If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

—GENERAL OMAR BRADLEY

15
CONCLUDING REMARKS

In 2000, a raging controversy erupted in the scientific community. One of the founders of Sun Computers, Bill Joy, wrote an inflammatory article denouncing the mortal threat we face from advanced technology.
In an article in
Wired
magazine with the provocative title “The Future Does Not Need Us,” he wrote, “Our most powerful 21st century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech—are threatening to make humans an endangered species.” That incendiary article questioned the very morality of hundreds of dedicated scientists toiling in their labs on the cutting edge of science. He challenged the very core of their research, stating that the benefits of these technologies were vastly overshadowed by the enormous threats they posed to humanity.

He described a macabre dystopia in which all our technologies conspire to destroy civilization. Three of our key creations will eventually turn on us, he warned:

•  One day, bioengineered germs may escape from the laboratory and wreak havoc on the world. Since you cannot recapture these life-forms, they might proliferate wildly and unleash a fatal plague on the planet
worse than those of the Middle Ages. Biotechnology may even alter human evolution, creating “
several separate and unequal species … that would threaten the notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of our democracy.”

•  One day, nanobots may go berserk and spew out unlimited quantities of “gray goo,” which will blanket Earth, smothering all life. Since these nanobots “digest” ordinary matter and create new forms of matter, malfunctioning nanobots could run amok and digest much of Earth. “Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident. Oops,” he wrote.

•  One day, the robots will take over and replace humanity. They will become so intelligent that they will simply push humanity aside. We will be left as an evolutionary footnote. “The robots would in no sense be our children.… On this path our humanity may well be lost,” he wrote.

Joy claimed that the dangers unleashed by these three technologies dwarfed the dangers posed by the atomic bomb in the 1940s. Back then, Einstein warned of the power of nuclear technology to destroy civilization: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” But the atomic bomb was built by a huge government program that could be tightly regulated, while these technologies are being developed by private companies that are lightly regulated, if at all, Joy pointed out.

Sure, he conceded, these technologies may alleviate some suffering in the short term. But in the long term, the benefits are overwhelmed by the fact that they may unleash a scientific Armageddon that may doom the human race.

Joy even accused scientists of being selfish and naïve as they try to create a better society. He wrote, “A traditional utopia is a good society and a good life. A good life involves other people.
This techno utopia is all about ‘I don’t get diseases; I don’t die; I get to have better eyesight and be smarter’ and all this. If you described this to Socrates or Plato, they would laugh at you.”

He concluded by stating, “I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states.…”

The conclusion to all this? “Something like extinction,” he warned.

As expected, the article sparked a firestorm of controversy.

That article was written over a decade ago. In terms of high technology, that is a lifetime. It is now possible to view certain of its predictions with some hindsight. Looking back at the article and putting his warnings into perspective, we can easily see that Bill Joy exaggerated many of the threats coming from these technologies, but he also spurred scientists to face up to the ethical, moral, and societal consequences of their work, which is always a good thing.

And his article opened up a discussion about who we are. In unraveling the molecular, genetic, and neural secrets of the brain, haven’t we in some sense dehumanized humanity, reducing it to a bucket of atoms and neurons? If we completely map every neuron of the brain and trace every neural pathway, doesn’t that remove the mystery and magic of who we are?

A RESPONSE TO BILL JOY

In retrospect, the threats from robotics and nanotechnology are more distant than Bill Joy thought, and I would argue that with enough warning, we can take a variety of countermeasures, such as banning certain avenues of research if they lead to uncontrollable robots, placing chips in them to shut them off if they become dangerous, and creating fail-safe devices to immobilize all of them in an emergency.

More immediate is the threat from biotechnology, where there is the realistic danger of biogerms that might escape the laboratory. In fact, Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy jointly wrote an article criticizing the publication of the complete genome of the 1918 Spanish flu virus, one of the most lethal germs in modern history, which killed more people than World War I. Scientists were able to reassemble the long-dead virus by examining the corpses and blood of its victims and sequencing its genes, and then they published it on the web.

Safeguards already exist against the release of such a dangerous virus, but steps must be taken to further strengthen them and add new layers of security. In particular, if a new virus suddenly erupts in some distant place on Earth, scientists must strengthen rapid-response teams that can isolate the virus in the wild, sequence its genes, and then quickly prepare a vaccine to prevent its spread.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE OF THE MIND

This debate also has a direct impact on the future of the mind. At present, neuroscience is still rather primitive. Scientists can read and videotape simple thoughts from the living brain, record a few memories, connect the brain to mechanical arms, enable locked-in patients to control machines around them, silence specific regions of the brain via magnetism, and identify the regions of the brain that malfunction in mental illness.

In the coming decades, however, the power of neuroscience may become explosive. Current research is on the threshold of new scientific discoveries that will likely leave us breathless. One day, we might routinely control objects around us with the power of the mind, download memories, cure mental illness, enhance our intelligence, understand the brain neuron by neuron, create backup copies of the brain, and communicate with one another telepathically. The world of the future will be the world of the mind.

Bill Joy did not dispute the potential of this technology to relieve human suffering and pain. But what made him look on it with horror was the prospect of enhanced individuals who might cause the human species to split apart. In the article, he painted a dismal dystopia in which only a tiny elite have their intelligence and mental processes enhanced, while the masses of people live in ignorance and poverty. He worried that the human race would fission in two, or perhaps cease to be human at all.

But as we have pointed out, almost all technologies when they are first introduced are expensive and hence exclusively for the well-off. Because of mass production, the falling cost of computers, competition, and cheaper shipping, technologies inevitably filter down to the poor as well. This was also the trajectory taken by phonographs, radio, TV, PCs, laptops, and cell phones.

Far from creating a world of haves and have-nots, science has been the engine of prosperity. Of all the tools that humanity has harnessed since the dawn of time, by far the most powerful and productive has been science. The incredible wealth we see all around us is directly due to science. To appreciate how technology reduces, rather than accentuates, societal fault lines, consider the lives of our ancestors around 1900. Life expectancy in the United States back then was forty-nine years. Many children died in infancy.
Communicating with a neighbor involved yelling out the window. The mail was delivered by horse, if it came at all. Medicine was largely snake oil. The only treatments that actually worked were amputations (without anesthetics) and morphine to deaden the pain. Food rotted within days. Plumbing was nonexistent. Disease was a constant threat. And the economy could support only a handful of the rich and a tiny middle class.