The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (115 page)

10
. Martine Rothblatt,“Biocyberethics: Should We Stop a Company from Unplugging an Intelligent Computer?” September 28, 2003,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0594.html
(includes links to a Webcast and transcripts).

11
. Jaron Lanier, “One Half of a Manifesto,”
Edge
,
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier/lanier_index.html
; see also Jaron Lanier, “One-Half of a Manifesto,”
Wired News
, December 2000,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.12/lanier.html
.

12
. Ibid.

13
. Norbert Wiener,
Cybernetics: or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1948).

14
. “How Do You Persist When Your Molecules Don’t?”
Science and Consciousness Review
1.1 (June 2004),
http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html
.

15
. David J.Chalmers, “Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness,”
Journal of Consciousness Studies
2.3 (1995): 200–219,
http://jamaica.u.arizona.edu/~chalmers/papers/facing.html
.

16
. Huston Smith,
The Sacred Unconscious
, videotape (The Wisdom Foundation, 2001), available for sale at
http://www.fonsvitae.com/sacredhuston.html
.

17
. Jerry A. Fodor,
RePresentations: Philosophical Essays on the Foundations of Cognitive Science
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

Chapter Eight: The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of GNR

1
. Bill McKibben, “How Much Is Enough? The Environmental Movement as a Pivot Point in Human History,” Harvard Seminar on Environmental Values, October 18, 2000.

2
. In the 1960s, the U.S. government conducted an experiment in which it asked three recently graduated physics students to build a nuclear weapon using only publicly available information. The result was successful; the three students built one in about three years (
http://www.pimall.com/nais/nl/n.nukes.html
). Plans for how to build an atomic bomb are available on the Internet and have been published in book form by a national laboratory. In 2002, the British Ministry of Defence released measurements, diagrams, and precise details on bomb building to the Public Record Office, since removed (
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1932702.stm
). Note that these links do not contain actual plans to build atomic weapons.

3
. “The John Stossel Special: You Can’t Say That!” ABC News, March 23, 2000.

4
. There is extensive information on the Web, including military manuals, on how to build bombs, weapons, and explosives. Some of this information is erroneous, but accurate information on these topics continues to be accessible despite efforts to remove it.Congress passed an amendment (the Feinstein Amendment, SP 419) to a Defense Department appropriations bill in June 1997, banning the dissemination of instructions on building bombs. See Anne Marie Helmenstine, “How to Build a Bomb,” February 10, 2003,
http://chemistry.about.com/library/weekly/aa021003a.htm
. Information on toxic industrial chemicals is widely available on the Web and in libraries, as are information and tools for cultivating bacteria and viruses and techniques for creating computer viruses and hacking into computers and networks. Note that I do not provide specific examples of such information, since it might be helpful to destructive individuals and groups. I realize that even stating the availability of such information has this potential, but I feel that the benefit of open dialogue about this issue outweighs this concern. Moreover, the availability of this type of information has been widely discussed in the media and other venues.

5
. Ray Kurzweil,
The Age of Intelligent Machines
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).

6
. Ken Alibek,
Biohazard
(New York: Random House, 1999).

7
. Ray Kurzweil,
The Age of Spiritual Machines
(New York: Viking, 1999).

8
. Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,”
Wired
, April 2000,
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html
.

9
. Handbooks on gene splicing (such as A. J. Harwood, ed.,
Basic DNA and RNA Protocols
[Totowa, N.J.: Humana Press, 1996]) along with reagents and kits that enable gene splicing are generally available. Even if access to these materials were limited in the West, there are a large number of Russian companies that could provide equivalent materials.

10
. For a detailed summary site of the “Dark Winter” simulation, see “DARK WINTER: A Bioterrorism Exercise June 2001”:
http://www.biohazardnews.net/scen_smallpox.shtml
. For a brief summary, see:
http://www.homelandsecurity.org/darkwinter/index.cfm
.

11
. Richard Preston, “The Specter of a New and Deadlier Smallpox,”
New York Times
, October 14, 2002, available at
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/specterdeadliersmallpox.html
.

12
. Alfred W.Crosby,
America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

13
. “Power from Blood Could Lead to ‘Human Batteries,’ ”
Sydney Morning Herald
, August 4, 2003,
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/08/03/1059849278131.html
. See note 129 in chapter 5. See also S.C. Barton, J. Gallaway, and P. Atanassov, “Enzymatic Biofuel Cells for Implantable and Microscale Devices,”
Chemical Reviews
104.10 (October 2004): 4867–86.

14
. J. M. Hunt has calculated that there are 1.55 10
¹⁹
kilograms (10
²²
grams) of organic carbon on Earth. Based on this figure, and assuming that all “organic carbon” is contained in the biomass (note that the biomass is not clearly defined, so we are taking a conservatively broad approach), we can compute the approximate number of carbon atoms as follows:

Average atomic weight of carbon (adjusting for isotope ratios) = 12.011.Carbon in the biomass = 1.55 10
²²
grams/12.011 = 1.3 10
²¹
mols. 1.3 10
²¹
6.02 10
²³
(Avogadro’s number) = 7.8 10
⁴⁴
carbon atoms.

J. M. Hunt,
Petroleum Geochemistry and Geology
(San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1979).

15
. Robert A. Freitas Jr., “The Gray Goo Problem,” March 20, 2001,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/articles/art0142.html
.

16
. “Gray Goo Is a Small Issue,” Briefing Document, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, December 14, 2003,
http://crnano.org/BD-Goo.htm
; Chris Phoenix and Mike Treder, “Safe Utilization of Advanced Nanotechnology,” Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, January 2003,
http://crnano.org/safe.htm
; K. Eric Drexler,
Engines of Creation
, chapter 11,“Engines of Destruction” (New York: Anchor Books, 1986), pp. 171–90,
http://www.foresight.org/EOC/EOC_Chapter_11.html
; Robert A. Freitas Jr. and Ralph C. Merkle,
Kinematic Self-Replicating Machines
, section 5.11, “Replicators and Public Safety” (Georgetown, Tex.: Landes Bioscience, 2004),
pp. 196–99,
http://www.MolecularAssembler.com/KSRM/5.11.htm
, and section 6.3.1,“Molecular Assemblers Are Too Dangerous,” pp. 204–6,
http://www.MolecularAssembler.com/KSRM/6.3.1.htm
; Foresight Institute, “Molecular Nanotechnology Guidelines: Draft Version 3.7,” June 4, 2000,
http://www.foresight.org/guidelines/
.

17
. Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Gray Goo Problem” and “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations,” Zyvex preprint, April 2000, section 8.4 “Malicious Ecophagy” and section 6.0 “Ecophagic Thermal Pollution Limits (ETPL),”
http://www.foresight.org/NanoRev/Ecophagy.html
.

18
. Nick D. Bostrom, “Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards,” May 29, 2001,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0194.html
.

19
. Robert Kennedy,
13 Days
(London: Macmillan, 1968), p. 110.

20
. In H. Putnam, “The Place of Facts in a World of Values,” in D. Huff and O. Prewitt, eds.,
The Nature of the Physical Universe
(New York: John Wiley, 1979), p. 114.

21
. Graham Allison,
Nuclear Terrorism
(New York: Times Books, 2004).

22
. Martin I. Meltzer, “Multiple Contact Dates and SARS Incubation Periods,”
Emerging Infectious Diseases
10.2 (February 2004),
http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol10no2/03-0426-G1.htm
.

23
. Robert A. Freitas Jr., “Microbivores: Artificial Mechanical Phagocytes Using Digest and Discharge Protocol,” Zyvex preprint, March 2001,
http://www.rfreitas.com/Nano/Microbivores.htm
, and “Microbivores: Artificial Mechanical Phagocytes,”
Foresight Update
no. 44, March 31, 2001, pp. 11–13,
http://www.imm.org/Reports/Rep025.html
.

24
. Max More, “The Proactionary Principle,” May 2004,
http://www.maxmore.com/proactionary.htm
and
http://www.extropy.org/proactionaryprinciple.htm
. More summarizes the proactionary principle as follows:

1. People’s freedom to innovate technologically is valuable to humanity. The burden of proof therefore belongs to those who propose restrictive measures. All proposed measures should be closely scrutinized.
   
2. Evaluate risk according to available science, not popular perception, and allow for common reasoning biases.
   
3. Give precedence to ameliorating known and proven threats to human health and environmental quality over acting against hypothetical risks.
   
4. Treat technological risks on the same basis as natural risks; avoid underweighting natural risks and overweighting human-technological risks. Fully account for the benefits of technological advances.
   
5. Estimate the lost opportunities of abandoning a technology, and take into account the costs and risks of substituting other credible options, carefully considering widely distributed effects and follow-on effects.
   
6. Consider
   restrictive measures only if the potential impact of an activity has both significant probability and severity. In such cases, if the activity also generates benefits, discount the impacts according to the feasibility of adapting to the adverse effects. If measures to limit technological advance do appear justified, ensure that the extent of those measures is proportionate to the extent of the probable effects.
   
7. When choosing among measures to restrict technological innovation, prioritize decision criteria as follows: Give priority to risks to human and other intelligent life over risks to other species; give non-lethal threats to human health priority over threats limited to the environment (within reasonable limits); give priority to immediate threats over distant threats; prefer the measure with the highest expectation value by giving priority to more certain over less certain threats, and to irreversible or persistent impacts over transient impacts.
   

25
. Martin Rees,
Our Final Hour: A Scientist’s Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind’s Future in This Century
—
on Earth and Beyond
(New York: Basic Books, 2003).

26
. Scott Shane,
Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994); see also the review by James A. Dorn at
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj16n2-7.html
.

27
. See George DeWan, “Diary of a Colonial Housewife,”
Newsday
, 2005, for one account of the difficulty of human life a couple of centuries ago:
http://www.newsday.com/community/guide/lihistory/ny-history-hs331a,0,6101197.story
.

28
. Jim Oeppen and James W. Vaupel, “Broken Limits to Life Expectancy,”
Science
296.5570 (May 10, 2002): 1029–31.

29
. Steve Bowman and Helit Barel,
Weapons of Mass Destruction: The Terrorist Threat
, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, December 8, 1999,
http://www.cnie.org/nle/crsreports/international/inter-75.pdf
.

30
. Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, “Creating Friendly AI 1.0, The Analysis and Design of Benevolent Goal Architectures” (2001), The Singularity Institute,
http://www.singinst.org/CFAI/
; Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, “What Is Friendly AI?” May 3, 2001,
http://www.KurzweilAI.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0172.html
.