The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (72 page)

M
OLLY
2004:
All right, but I asked whether you believed in God
.

R
AY
:
Again, “God” is a word by which people mean different things. For the sake of your question, we can consider God to be the universe, and I said that I believe in the existence of the universe
.

M
OLLY
2004:
God is just the universe?

R
AY
:
Just? It’s a pretty big thing to apply the word “just” to. If we are to believe what science tells us—and I said that I do—it’s about as big a phenomenon as we could imagine
.

M
OLLY
2004:
Actually, many physicists now consider our universe to be just one bubble among a vast number of other universes. But I meant that people usually mean something more by the word “God” than “just” the material world. Some people do associate God with everything that exists, but they still consider God to be conscious. So you believe in a God that’s not conscious?

R
AY
:
The universe is not conscious—yet. But it will be. Strictly speaking, we should say that very little of it is conscious today. But that will change and soon. I expect that the universe will become sublimely intelligent and will wake up in Epoch Six. The only belief I am positing here is that the universe exists. If we make that leap of faith, the expectation that it will wake up is not so much a belief as an informed understanding, based on the same science that says there is a universe
.

M
OLLY
2004:
Interesting. You know, that’s essentially the opposite of the view that there was a conscious creator who got everything started and then kind of bowed out. You’re basically saying that a conscious universe will “bow in” during Epoch Six
.

R
AY
:
Yes, that’s the essence of Epoch Six
.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of GNR

We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. . . . The only realistic alternative I see is relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge.

                   —B
ILL
J
OY
, “W
HY THE
F
UTURE
D
OESN’T
N
EED
U
S
”

Environmentalists must now grapple squarely with the idea of a world that has enough wealth and enough technological capability, and should not pursue more.

                   —B
ILL
M
C
K
IBBEN, ENVIRONMENTALIST WHO FIRST WROTE ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
¹

Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.

                   —O
GDEN
N
ASH
(1902–1971)

In the late 1960s I was transformed into a radical environmental activist. A rag-tag group of activists and I sailed a leaky old halibut boat across the North Pacific to block the last hydrogen bomb tests under President Nixon. In the process I co-founded Greenpeace. . . . Environmentalists were often able to produce arguments that sounded reasonable, while doing good deeds like saving whales and making the air and water cleaner. But now the chickens have come home to roost. The environmentalists’ campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has clearly exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy. By adopting a zero tolerance policy toward a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they . . . have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals, and internationalists. It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position.

                   —P
ATRICK
M
OORE

I think that . . . flight from and hatred of technology is self-defeating. The Buddha rests quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer and the gears of a cycle transmission as he does at the top of a mountain or in the petals of a flower. To think otherwise is to demean the Buddha—which is to demean oneself.

                   —R
OBERT
M. P
IRSIG
,
Z
EN AND THE
A
RT OF
M
OTORCYCLE
M
AINTENANCE

C
onsider these articles we’d rather not see available on the Web:

Impress Your Enemies: How to Build Your Own Atomic Bomb from Readily Available Materials
²

How to Modify the Influenza Virus in Your College Laboratory to Release Snake Venom

Ten Easy Modifications to the
E. coli
Virus

How to Modify Smallpox to Counteract the Smallpox Vaccine

Build Your Own Chemical Weapons from Materials Available on the Internet

How to Build a Pilotless, Self-Guiding, Low-Flying Airplane Using a Low-Cost Aircraft, GPS, and a Notebook Computer

Or, how about the following:

The Genomes of Ten Leading Pathogens

The Floor Plans of Leading Skyscrapers

The Layout of U.S. Nuclear Reactors

The Hundred Top Vulnerabilities of Modern Society

The Top Ten Vulnerabilities of the Internet

Personal Health Information on One Hundred Million Americans

The Customer Lists of Top Pornography Sites

Anyone posting the first item above is almost certain to get a quick visit from the FBI, as did Nate Ciccolo, a fifteen-year-old high school student, in March 2000. For a school science project he built a papier-mâché model of an
atomic bomb that turned out to be disturbingly accurate. In the ensuing media storm Ciccolo told ABC News, “Someone just sort of mentioned, you know, you can go on the Internet now and get information. And I, sort of, wasn’t exactly up to date on things. Try it. I went on there and a couple of clicks and I was right there.”
³

Of course Ciccolo didn’t possess the key ingredient, plutonium, nor did he have any intention of acquiring it, but the report created shock waves in the media, not to mention among the authorities who worry about nuclear proliferation. Ciccolo had reported finding 563 Web pages on atomic-bomb designs, and the publicity resulted in an urgent effort to remove them. Unfortunately, trying to get rid of information on the Internet is akin to trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom. Some of the sites continue to be easily accessible today. I won’t provide any URLs in this book, but they are not hard to find.

Although the article titles above are fictitious, one can find extensive information on the Internet about all of these topics.
⁴
The Web is an extraordinary research tool. In my own experience, research that used to require a half day at the library can now be accomplished typically in a couple of minutes or less. This has enormous and obvious benefits for advancing beneficial technologies, but it can also empower those whose values are inimical to the mainstream of society. So are we in danger? The answer is clearly yes. How much danger, and what to do about it, are the subjects of this chapter.

My urgent concern with this issue dates back at least a couple of decades. When I wrote
The Age of Intelligent Machines
in the mid-1980s, I was deeply concerned with the ability of then-emerging genetic engineering to enable those skilled in the art and with access to fairly widely available equipment to modify bacterial and viral pathogens to create new diseases.
⁵
In destructive or merely careless hands these engineered pathogens could potentially combine a high degree of communicability, stealthiness, and destructiveness.

Such efforts were not easy to carry out in the 1980s but were nonetheless feasible. We now know that bioweapons programs in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were doing exactly this.
⁶
At the time I made a conscious decision to not talk about this specter in my book, feeling that I did not want to give the wrong people any destructive ideas. I didn’t want to turn on the radio one day and hear about a disaster, with the perpetrators saying that they got the idea from Ray Kurzweil.

Partly as a result of this decision I faced some reasonable criticism that the book emphasized the benefits of future technology while ignoring its pitfalls. When I wrote
The Age of Spiritual Machines
in 1997–1998, therefore, I attempted to account for both promise and peril.
⁷
There had been sufficient
public attention by that time (for example, the 1995 movie
Outbreak
, which portrays the terror and panic from the release of a new viral pathogen) that I felt comfortable to begin to address the issue publicly.

In September 1998, having just completed the manuscript, I ran into Bill Joy, an esteemed and longtime colleague in the high-technology world, in a bar in Lake Tahoe. Although I had long admired Joy for his work in pioneering the leading software language for interactive Web systems (Java) and having cofounded Sun Microsystems, my focus at this brief get-together was not on Joy but rather on the third person sitting in our small booth, John Searle. Searle, the eminent philosopher from the University of California at Berkeley, had built a career of defending the deep mysteries of human consciousness from apparent attack by materialists such as Ray Kurzweil (a characterization I reject in the next chapter).

Searle and I had just finished debating the issue of whether a machine could be conscious during the closing session of George Gilder’s Telecosm conference. The session was entitled “Spiritual Machines” and was devoted to a discussion of the philosophical implications of my upcoming book. I had given Joy a preliminary manuscript and tried to bring him up to speed on the debate about consciousness that Searle and I were having.

As it turned out, Joy was interested in a completely different issue, specifically the impending dangers to human civilization from three emerging technologies I had presented in the book: genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR, as discussed earlier). My discussion of the downsides of future technology alarmed Joy, as he would later relate in his now-famous cover story for
Wired
, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”
⁸
In the article Joy describes how he asked his friends in the scientific and technology community whether the projections I was making were credible and was dismayed to discover how close these capabilities were to realization.

Joy’s article focused entirely on the downside scenarios and created a firestorm. Here was one of the technology world’s leading figures addressing new and dire emerging dangers from future technology. It was reminiscent of the attention that George Soros, the currency arbitrageur and archcapitalist, received when he made vaguely critical comments about the excesses of unrestrained capitalism, although the Joy controversy became far more intense. The
New York Times
reported there were about ten thousand articles commenting on and discussing Joy’s article, more than any other in the history of commentary on technology issues. My attempt to relax in a Lake Tahoe lounge thus ended up fostering two long-term debates, as my dialogue with John Searle has also continued to this day.

Despite my being the origin of Joy’s concern, my reputation as a “technology optimist” has remained intact, and Joy and I have been invited to a variety of forums to debate the peril and promise, respectively, of future technologies. Although I am expected to take up the “promise” side of the debate, I often end up spending most of my time defending his position on the feasibility of these dangers.

Many people have interpreted Joy’s article as an advocacy of broad relinquishment, not of all technological developments, but of the “dangerous ones” like nanotechnology. Joy, who is now working as a venture capitalist with the legendary Silicon Valley firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, investing in technologies such as nanotechnology applied to renewable energy and other natural resources, says that broad relinquishment is a misinterpretation of his position and was never his intent. In a recent private e-mail communication, he says the emphasis should be on his call to “limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous” (see the epigraph at the beginning of this chapter), not on complete prohibition. He suggests, for example, a prohibition against self-replicating nanotechnology, which is similar to the guidelines advocated by the Foresight Institute, founded by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler and Christine Peterson. Overall, this is a reasonable guideline, although I believe there will need to be two exceptions, which I discuss below (see
p. 411
).