Except as noted for The Appendix An
Article by Bill Joy , this material is
Copyright © 2004 by Jay B. Gaskill
For permission to copy, publish,
distribute or print, contact:
Jay B. Gaskill, attorney at law,
via e mail: response@jaygaskill.com
The Bumper Sticker Mind
AVERTING THE NEXT DARK AGE
by
Jay B. Gaskill
Part One
Reflections From The Rear
Recently, while stuck in traffic, I paid close attention to all the bumper stickers on the car ahead of me. Slogans were extravagantly plastered all over the back of the car. Have you noticed that there are either just one or two bumper stickers on a car, or the shouting political wallpaper effect? I think political bumper stickers multiply like fruit flies.
On the same car I noted a sticker
promoting one of those strongly slanted media sources. In this instance, it was
a
When I noticed this perfect correlation between information source and slogans, between input and output, I realized I’d stumbled into a New Truth About The Human Condition.
That so called “
Our emerging circumstance is eerily reminiscent of medieval times, when church and state were the sole “media sources” and the common value arbiters for everyone. Of course in the Dark Ages, alien ideas and contrary opinion didn’t merely fail to “gain traction” (to use the modern description), they were virtually nonexistent. And we moderns are more diverse in our small mindedness. But those differences are trivial. Our culture is backsliding, heading into a “Dark Age Lite”, a high tech variation on the medieval model where people sort themselves into self-delusional cohorts.
How could this happen in the information age? The modern (and post-modern) media assaulted mind is numbed by a chaotic torrent of data, unevaluated raw information, and wildly competing claims. The minds most affected by this info-blizzard have begun to contract like snails in a bed of salt. Whole groups of people (of whom the bumper sticker crowd is just the most visible) have begun to self encapsulate, retreating into an information cocoon state, in effect withdrawing into virtual reality constructs, faux worlds that form intellectual and emotional refuges. Their self isolation is made possible by information filters that support a portable, closed system: Self-censored information input, local, group-enforced values, and common issue-position sets make a complete info-value loop. The unifying ideology need not be logical or coherent (and rarely is), just reducible to slogans.
For the first time in history, modern information technology has allowed large numbers of people to coexist and function in a socially interactive setting, exchanging goods and services and traveling great distances, while inhabiting sharply different info-realities. Increasingly we are acting like members of separate alien tour groups (each group sharing common info-cocoons) traveling about in the same territory.
Within the bumper sticker mind, the range of acceptable belief and behavior is actually very narrow. This is true whether the ethos is nominally tolerant or intolerant, since the ideology of tolerance tends to condemn all contrary value stances as intolerant. The people within the red and blue info-cocoon zones (a simplified model - there are other colors) can travel side by side, eat at the same restaurants, shop at the same stores and stay at the same hotels and live in the same neighborhoods. They can even witness or read about the same large scale events of history. But they are not seeing and understanding the same reality. The red and blue states are not geographical accidents; they are the aggregate outcomes of the tendency of info-cocoon cohorts to want to live together.
In extreme cases, the bumper sticker mind can cling to such radically unrealistic models of reality that to use the word delusional is not inappropriate. Unlike the fully deranged, most of the info-cocoon afflicted continue to function very well in the day-to-day survival sense.
Why are they so rarely shaken out of their cocoon states? Why are they locked in such intellectual isolation? How do they continue to function in day to day activities? How is it that they can cooperate on many levels with those who live outside the cocoon yet not able to be in authentic conversation with the same “outsiders” about whole areas of life? Is this a new development in the human condition or a reversion to a more primitive state?
Part of the answer to those questions is that human nature includes the capacity to erect internal emotional and psychological barriers, ranging from simple denial to profound dissociation. Part of the answer is that we all have the capacity under some conditions to revert to more primitive states. But the most general answer to these questions is that we are witnessing a form of technologically enhanced atavism. And we witnessing an innovation: The possible replacement of the nation state with encapsulated mental states.
The tendency of like minded info-cocoon people to gather and dominate an area reduces the chance that corrective mechanisms will emerge in those areas. In the extreme cases where strongly encapsulated self validating input is the norm, a fantasy based, highly distorted output is the consequence. Population shifts causing the in-migration of competing mindsets has replaced dialogue as a correction mechanism with increased social tension and slogan against counter slogan shouting.
In general we are missing the correction mechanisms that come into play when nearly everyone is linked by a common meta-normative structure that frames all the remaining differences among us, and allows for non-destructive, reality correcting discourse. The problem is, at root, the predictable consequence of the weakened normative infrastructure of civilization itself. This is the ugly legacy of cultural relativism, moral relativism, and the post-modern deconstruction of unifying values and the weakening authority of essential moral precepts. The normative incoherence among the intelligentsia and within the larger culture has led directly to the present growing social incoherence.
This is a large scale social pathology in the making. To reverse the trend, we must recover our moorings: the healthy intersection of religious insight and wisdom, the intersection of the deep classical tradition and the uniquely American version of the Enlightenment that animated our founders. Then we will also rediscover the virtues of civil discourse.
We need not descend into a new Dark Age. But until we are able to reanimate the authentic dialogue that takes place between people whose minds are open to new ideas and information because they are secure in the shared deeper verities, the trend is an ominous one.
Part
Two
Repairing The Media
The situation is not helped by the current state of the information media in this country. By now it should be patently evident to all discerning observers that the dominant, so called “mainstream” media, is shot though with an ideological bias that strongly filters the information (and the evaluation of information) fed to most Americans on broadcast television, newspapers and mass market magazines. Much has been said about the corrective effects of the new media, principally talk radio, the blogo-sphere, and the increased intellectual respectability of some special market print media.
But all this misses the underlying problem: We live in an info-swamp so extreme that filters of some kind are absolutely essential because our time is finite and the sheer volume of data seeking our attention is effectively infinite. Censorship in the old fashioned sense is no longer needed; mere data placement is enough to hide the truth from most people.
Consider the classic pyramid information array taught in classic journalism classes where the progression is from headline, to lead paragraph, and trailing paragraphs such that, as the story unfolds, the last lines and paragraphs can be safely cut without altering the essence of the story. In effect, the order is: (1) soundbite, (2) quick summary, (3) follow up information, and (3) trailing details of descending importance. In the hands of an ideologue, this technique is easily co-opted to bury non-conforming information and insights at the end of the story. In many cases the whole story is buried deep within the newspaper where few will read it at all. In extreme cases the story isn’t covered at all. Because most people still have time only for traditional media, the leakage of counter information is largely confined to radio broadcasts heard while driving or at work, or via “buzz” (i.e., gossip). People remain hungry for validated information sources and are for the most part ill equipped to surf the info-swamp without a guide.
The post modern ethos teaches that no objective journalism is possible. This is one of those malevolent quarter truths that validates the current trend toward self-encapsulation and the deterioration of the capacity for authentic dialogue about facts and their significance to the common human condition.
After all, journalism in the largest sense is about facts and relevance. The quest for more objective and balanced journalism is not only worthy, but necessary. It is grounded in two simple assessments:
(1) that there are events and facts in the world around us that are reasonably ascertainable and that can be described and communicated in a reasonably objective way;
(2) that there are deeper values common to the human condition and essential to the preservation of civilization.
Thus the essential quest for journalistic objectivity and balance invites us to return to fundamentals:
(A) The intelligent, conscientious separation of event reporting (while including necessary value and historical context) from agenda-driven opinion;
(B) The reintegration, as context, of the common meta-value structure of civilization (I see no contradiction here) into the event story;
(C) A standard of relevance that integrates common sense evidentiary standards, common values, and the large, emergent human issues that guide historians in connecting the dots between apparently disparate events. [More in Part Three.]
There are healthy, robust journalistic models. Here are my three favorites:
The sports page model.
Compare any reasonably competent sports page with PC infected reportage. It’s understood and accepted that the reporter will occasionally take sides, even blatantly, while recognizing and relating all the essential objective facts of the contest.
As a rule, sports reportage is grounded in three realities:
- There is a score.
- There is a standard of play.
- The audience/readership wants the truth in relevant and entertaining detail.
Sports stories don’t bury the other side’s good plays, and don’t fail to criticize an umpire’s bad call or a player’s screwup, all PC considerations notwithstanding.
The classic 1940’s and 50’s crime reporting model.
This is the origin of the detective genre and all the classic film noir crime stories. There were no concessions to PC, just the hard hitting, hard boiled facts thank you, without any concessions to moral ambiguity, even when the “bad guys” were glamorized. That old style crime reportage didn’t avoid the obvious moral judgments because the meta-value system on which it was based was robust: crime was a bad thing and warranted punishment. The stories weren’t sprinkled with the fairy dust words of pseudo-objectivity, revealed in the flagrant overuse of “alleged” and “suspected” and the avoidance of insensitive terms like “thug” and “predator.”
In a local newspaper Op Ed, I recently complained about PC fog. My piece was submitted in this form:
PC Fog
A
NEWS ACCOUNT:
“Three teenage boys stabbed and tried to
kidnap a man during a carjacking late Friday….Despite the stab wounds, (the
victim) was able to get out of his car and back to his three children… The
three suspects are described as two males, both approximately 14 years old, and
an older boy, possibly 16 years old…”
Contemporary
journalism has been infected with a special form of censorship driven by the
fear of identification with a politically incorrect position.
You’d
think that most street crime is committed by faceless males, whose identifying
marks and racial characteristics have been wiped away by some digital pixel
smear effect, like those television shows where the headshot of the crime
victim or informant is altered to obscure identity.
This is PC
Fog.
Illustration:
An ATM shooting of an elderly lady is witnessed by two bystanders. The robber
flees on foot. Police and EMT’s arrive minutes later.
The officers get detailed descriptions of the predator. A composite description
is broadcast over the police radio.
Police are
trained to compile descriptions as complete as can be gleaned, including gender,
approximate age, height, weight, build, head and facial hair, clothing, race,
distinguishing marks, direction and mode of flight-- everything that might help
officers in the field to stop and detain a suspect.
Over the
next crucial minutes, various officers are tasked to briefly detain any
suspects who seem to match the broadcast description, and to hold them for
further identification procedures.
Assume in
our example, the robber gets away.
What will
we probably learn from a PC media version of this incident? We’ll likely be treated to an incomplete
description, something like --”husky male, dressed in dark clothes.” The suspect’s race? Known but omitted. We’ve all seen the
pattern.
This is PC
journalism at work.
Assume
that, based on the description, one suspect is detained in the field, is
subdued after a struggle. But before the
suspect is hand cuffed, he manages to escape, leaving a pistol on the pavement.
When PC
reigns, the police will be criticized for “racial profiling” because the
suspect was stopped because he was a “minority.” Later, when ballistics match
bullet and discarded gun, the same officers will be accused of negligence for
letting the shooter get away.
PC Fog is
released to obscure uncomfortable truths.
We are expected to live in the fantasy world where things like physical
appearance are irrelevant, where minorities are to be protected by racial
anonymity if necessary, even if that hampers law enforcement and our need as citizens
to know what’s going on in our community.
What is
sometimes reflexively condemned as “profiling” represents a perfectly
reasonable conservation of scarce law enforcement resources.
Suppose
the victim were a frail 88 year old back lady at an ATM, while her mugger was a
head-shaved white male of 25? Or that the mugger was initially detained because
his presence in the parking lot of an all black church after hours seemed
suspicious? Would it matter if the victim were an elderly Chinese woman? Or that the mugger, a
bearded Hispanic male wearing sweats, was detained because his presence
in an all Chinese wedding party seemed suspicious?
Would we
have the police detain an artificially larger sample, including some young
black males and white females, just to avoid “profiling”? Does it make any sense in these examples to
alert the public to a mugger while omitting skin color and apparent ethnicity
from the description?
PC fog is
as dangerous as highway fog without headlights.
The piece ran without the news account, which was taken directly from the same paper, and my use of the word “predator” was editorially redacted. To the credit of this local paper, I noticed about two weeks later that actual, unredacted descriptions of unapprehended robbers had begun to creep into the crime stories.
PC fog has begun to lift in some places.
The
tabloid model.
One of contemporary journalism’s dirty little secrets is that some of the most effective reporting done in the last decade has run in the National Enquirer. With all their faults, their relentless pursuit of the lurid and prurient and their occasional three headed alien parodies, the tabloids embody two journalistic virtues that have been lost to most of the mainstream press:
(1) The tough minded, relentless investigation, as opposed to the spoon-fed pap that masquerades as authentic reporting in most print news sources. Most of what currently passes for investigative reporting is little more than a sexed up police report with a thinly disguised reportorial overlay, sometimes supplemented with a phone call for a “quote.”
(2) The absolutely fearless, take-no-prisoners exposé.
From all the available evidence, I see no realistic hope for reform in this country’s journalism schools especially in the near term. The remedy is serious competition, hence:
A
modest proposal for the print media.
- Fire most of your staff.
- Hire politically diverse replacements.
- Employ new criteria for the fresh blood:
· Ignore journalism degrees.
· Require instead a demonstrated proficiency in written English, supplemented by a 90 day crash course in fact gathering techniques. [This can be self-administered or farmed out to private investigators.]
· Recruit candidates with an underlying substantive degree in philosophy, science, history, economics or political science.
·
Require an internship doing sports writing,
crime reporting, and sordid scandal investigations for a tabloid.
Part Three
Recovery: Restoring The Value Consensus
The value consensus that animated journalism in its better days simply mirrored the value consensus that sustained the robust American brand of Western civilization.
On some level, that American consensus survives among a majority of the so-called “common” people, but it has been corrupted in the same sense that software can be corrupted by a virus.
The Original American Consensus
The original, uniquely American value consensus is still alive, though not well. Here are its five major elements:
- The notion that mainline criminal behavior, the kind that fills the nation’s jails and prisons (behavior like thievery, thuggery, exploitation of children, lying, cheating, raping and pillaging), warrants social condemnation and punishment.
- The recognition that honesty and veracity are the standard coinage of public information exchange, both in journalism and in (dare I say it?) politics.
- Scandals are wickedly entertaining because they are bad. Authentic scandals are to be relentlessly exposed regardless of whose ox is gored and whose sensibilities are offended.
- All possible points of view and opinions are not equal. In fact, some are truly delusional, malevolent misinformation, or simply pathological nonsense, as for example, the outrageous notion that 9-11 was a plot by the government, the “Jews” or both. Responsible journalism may report such things, when relevant to events, but has an obligation to identify and condemn lunacy and malevolent misinformation when it does so.
- American Exceptionalism. The affirmation of the core values on which this country was founded, including a respect for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and the supporting traditions: a rejection of social class barriers and royalism in all their forms, and the respect for the self-help, hard work achievement ethos. This value set is not only recognized as valid for Americans, but as simply valid for the human condition. These are the core, animating universals that still make the American experiment the fulcrum of an ongoing world revolution.
The Virus Attacks
Cultural relativism and its virulent cousin, moral relativism, have worked like a computer virus to disrupt and dismantle the American value consensus by promoting “value neutrality” in all things. This is why so many contemporary journalists fall into the trap of conflating “balance” with objectivity. To the mind infected by relativism, a commitment to “balance” means that all points of view are equal (leading to the uncritical inclusion of all possible voices, including the lunatics).
The post modern notion that objectivity is neither possible nor desirable has eaten away at the traditional hard-nosed realism that used to animate the journalist’s trade: the worldview where a lie is a lie, a crime is a crime, and a scandal is a scandal.
A related idea, critical theory, has been used by the enemies of Western civilization in general and the American consensus in particular. Critical theory (including critical race theory) is based on the silly but destructive notion that whole areas of human accomplishment, including law, the institutions that support civilization, the philosophical, scientific and cultural legacy of Greek civilization, among other things, can simply be dismissed on tribal, racial, or ethnic grounds, as (in one malign phrase) the mind-fossils of “dead white men”.
In the world of critical theory, there never ever be objective or balanced journalism.
Relevance Criteria
Not everything can “make the news.” Journalism is all about sorting information about events according to their significance.
Relevance and intrinsic entertainment value govern the final sort. Relevance depends on significance, which is a product of the connections between reported events, the human condition, and the specific concerns of the audience.
All this must be fit within the
common moral framework because that framework is necessary to assess
significance. Facts alone are partial truths, and in themselves, often uninteresting.
An underlying moral/normative framework supplies the essential context for
facts to acquire their meaning and relevance. For example, the threshold
relevance of all crime news stems from the anti-moral nature of crime. After
that, relevance is influenced by proximity in time, space and circumstance.
The fundamental nature of core morality does not change, but the times themselves do. Therefore journalism needs to re-educate itself constantly in order to assign relevance to the avalanche of facts that make up potential story material. We are now in a position to identify several developing large-scale shifts in the journalistic landscape of the 21st century.
To assess any event’s news relevance, journalism needs to be able to understand these emerging changes, place events in the larger context against the backdrop of the American value consensus, and to connect the dots to related events.
In this sense, journalism is multiple draft history writing, with one obvious handicap: No one knows how the story comes out in the end.
Some Developing Large-Scale Shifts
in the Journalistic Landscape of the 21st Century
1. Communism
is dead as a viable economic doctrine and is rapidly dying as a real world
military threat. But communism survives in other forms. It flourishes in the academy, where it
undermines American Exceptionalism. And it has
emerged in
2. A limited form of capitalism (the market guided control of of the means of production and distribution of goods and services) has become the dominant economic paradigm. But there are many capitalist / free market variations, involving varying degrees of political control over market forces, which will remain in vigorous mutual competition for some time.
3. The
value fragmentation and demographic suicide of Western Europeans and (to a
lesser degree of their descendants in the
4. A
wave pattern of repeated authoritarian challenges to Western civilization seems
to be emerging. The Nazi and communist challenges have been supplanted by militant,
authoritarian Islamist forces. The
unrecognized story is the deep connection between rapidly growing Muslim
immigration in
5.
The emerging techno-terror challenge. This trend was foretold by the
cyber-technologist, Bill Joy, inventor of JAVA software, in his now famous,
seminal article in the April 2000 issue of Wired,
“Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” The
thesis: nano-technology, computer technology, and
genetic engineering technology are rapidly converging to produce dramatic new
terrorist weapons whose availability will be aided by low development cost and
malevolent information sharing on the internet.
APPENDIX
ONE
Note this article is reproduced from
![[Animation Express]](bumberstickermind_files/image003.gif){kind=small}
WIRED – Issue
8.04 2000
And is separately copyrighted as
follows:
Copyright © 1993-2004 The Condé Nast Publications Inc. All
rights reserved.
Copyright © 1994-2003 Wired Digital, Inc. All rights
reserved.
Why The
Future Doesn’t Need Us.
Our most powerful
21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are
threatening to make humans an endangered species.
By
Bill Joy
From the moment I became
involved in the creation of new technologies, their ethical dimensions have
concerned me, but it was only in the autumn of 1998 that I became anxiously
aware of how great are the dangers facing us in the 21st century. I can date
the onset of my unease to the day I met Ray Kurzweil,
the deservedly famous inventor of the first reading machine for the blind and
many other amazing things.
Ray and I were both speakers
at George Gilder’s Telecosm conference, and I
encountered him by chance in the bar of the hotel after both our sessions were
over. I was sitting with John Searle, a
I had missed Ray’s talk and
the subsequent panel that Ray and John had been on, and they now picked right
up where they’d left off, with Ray saying that the rate of improvement of
technology was going to accelerate and that we were going to become robots or
fuse with robots or something like that, and John countering that this couldn’t
happen, because the robots couldn’t be conscious.
While I had heard such talk
before, I had always felt sentient robots were in the realm of science fiction.
But now, from someone I respected, I was hearing a strong argument that they
were a near-term possibility. I was taken aback, especially given Ray’s proven
ability to imagine and create the future. I already knew that new technologies
like genetic engineering and nanotechnology were giving us the power to remake
the world, but a realistic and imminent scenario for intelligent robots
surprised me.
It’s easy to get jaded about
such breakthroughs. We hear in the news almost every day of some kind of
technological or scientific advance. Yet this was no ordinary prediction. In
the hotel bar, Ray gave me a partial preprint of his then-forthcoming book The
Age of Spiritual Machines, which outlined a utopia he foresaw - one in which
humans gained near immortality by becoming one with robotic technology. On
reading it, my sense of unease only intensified; I felt sure he had to be
understating the dangers, understating the probability of a bad outcome along
this path.
I found myself most troubled
by a passage detailing a dystopian scenario:
THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE
First let us postulate that
the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do
all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all
work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort
will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be
permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else
human control over the machines might be retained.
If the machines are permitted
to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the
results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We
only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the
machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough
to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that
the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the
machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race
might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the
machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the
machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and
more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let
machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made
decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may
be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be
so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At
that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to
just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that
turning them off would amount to suicide.
On the other hand it is
possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the
average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as
his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines
will be in the hands of a tiny elite - just as it is
today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have
greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be
necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If
the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to
exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or
other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the
birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world
to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of
soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to
the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs
are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic
conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that
anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.”
Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically
or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process
or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered
human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not
be free.
They will have been reduced to
the status of domestic animals.1
In the book, you don’t
discover until you turn the page that the author of this passage is Theodore
Kaczynski - the Unabomber. I am no apologist for Kaczynski. His bombs killed
three people during a 17-year terror campaign and wounded many others. One of
his bombs gravely injured my friend David Gelernter, one of the most brilliant
and visionary computer scientists of our time. Like many of my colleagues, I
felt that I could easily have been the Unabomber’s next target.
Kaczynski’s actions were
murderous and, in my view, criminally insane. He is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his
argument; as difficult as it is for me to acknowledge, I saw some merit in the
reasoning in this single passage. I felt compelled to confront it.
Kaczynski’s dystopian vision describes unintended consequences, a
well-known problem with the design and use of technology, and one that is
clearly related to Murphy’s law - “Anything that can
go wrong, will.” (Actually, this is Finagle’s law,
which in itself shows that Finagle was right.) Our overuse of antibiotics has
led to what may be the biggest such problem so far: the emergence of
antibiotic-resistant and much more dangerous bacteria. Similar things happened
when attempts to eliminate malarial mosquitoes using DDT caused them to acquire
DDT resistance; malarial parasites likewise acquired multi-drug-resistant
genes.2
The cause of many such
surprises seems clear: The systems involved are complex, involving interaction
among and feedback between many parts. Any changes to such a system will
cascade in ways that are difficult to predict; this is especially true when
human actions are involved.
I started showing friends the
Kaczynski quote from The Age of Spiritual Machines; I would hand them Kurzweil’s book, let them read the quote, and then watch
their reaction as they discovered who had written it. At around the same time,
I found Hans Moravec’s book Robot: Mere Machine to
Transcendent Mind. Moravec is one of the leaders in
robotics research, and was a founder of the world’s largest robotics research
program, at
The Short Run (Early 2000s)
Biological species almost
never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten million years ago,
South and
In a completely free
marketplace, superior robots would surely affect humans as North American placentals affected South American marsupials (and as
humans have affected countless species). Robotic industries would compete
vigorously among themselves for matter, energy, and space, incidentally driving
their price beyond human reach. Unable to afford the necessities of life,
biological humans would be squeezed out of existence.
There is probably some
breathing room, because we do not live in a completely free marketplace.
Government coerces non market behavior, especially by collecting taxes.
Judiciously applied, governmental coercion could support human populations in
high style on the fruits of robot labor, perhaps for a long while.
A textbook dystopia
- and Moravec iss just getting wound up. He goes on to
discuss how our main job in the 21st century will be “ensuring continued
cooperation from the robot industries” by passing laws decreeing that they be
“nice,”3 and to describe how seriously dangerous a human can be “once
transformed into an unbounded super intelligent robot.” Moravec’s
view is that the robots will eventually succeed us - that humans clearly face
extinction.
I decided it was time to talk
to my friend Danny Hillis. Danny became famous as the
cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation, which built a very powerful
parallel supercomputer. Despite my current job title of Chief Scientist at Sun
Microsystems, I am more a computer architect than a scientist, and I respect
Danny’s knowledge of the information and physical sciences more than that of
any other single person I know. Danny is also a highly regarded futurist who
thinks long-term - four years ago he started the Long Now Foundation, which is
building a clock designed to last 10,000 years, in an attempt to draw attention
to the pitifully short attention span of our society. (See “Test of Time, ”Wired 8.03, page 78.)
So I flew to
But I guess I wasn’t totally
surprised. I had seen a quote from Danny in Kurzweil’s
book in which he said, “I’m as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200
with a body of silicon, I’ll take it.” It seemed that he was at peace with this
process and its attendant risks, while I was not.
While talking and thinking
about Kurzweil, Kaczynski, and Moravec,
I suddenly remembered a novel I had read almost 20 years ago -The White Plague,
by Frank Herbert - in which a molecular biologist is driven insane by the senseless
murder of his family. To seek revenge he constructs and disseminates a new and
highly contagious plague that kills widely but selectively. (We’re lucky
Kaczynski was a mathematician, not a molecular biologist.) I was also reminded
of the Borg ofStar Trek, a hive of partly biological,
partly robotic creatures with a strong destructive streak. Borg-like disasters
are a staple of science fiction, so why hadn’t I been more concerned about such
robotic dystopias earlier? Why weren’t other people
more concerned about these nightmarish scenarios?
Part of the answer certainly
lies in our attitude toward the new - in our bias toward instant familiarity
and unquestioning acceptance. Accustomed to living with almost routine
scientific breakthroughs, we have yet to come to terms with the fact that the
most compelling 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and
nanotechnology - pose a different threat than the technologies that have come
before. Specifically, robots, engineered organisms, and nanobots
share a dangerous amplifying factor: They can self-replicate. A bomb is blown
up only once - but one bot can become many, and
quickly get out of control.
Much of my work over the past
25 years has been on computer networking, where the sending and receiving of
messages creates the opportunity for out-of-control replication. But while
replication in a computer or a computer network can be a nuisance, at worst it
disables a machine or takes down a network or network service. Uncontrolled
self-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: a risk
of substantial damage in the physical world.
Each of these technologies
also offers untold promise: The vision of near immortality that Kurzweil sees in his robot dreams drives us forward; genetic
engineering may soon provide treatments, if not outright cures, for most
diseases; and nanotechnology and nanomedicine can
address yet more ills. Together they could significantly extend our average
life span and improve the quality of our lives. Yet, with each of these
technologies, a sequence of small, individually sensible advances leads to an
accumulation of great power and, concomitantly, great danger.
What was different in the 20th
century? Certainly, the technologies underlying the weapons of mass destruction
(WMD) - nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) - were powerful, and the
weapons an enormous threat. But building nuclear weapons required, at least for
a time, access to both rare - indeed, effectively unavailable - raw materials
and highly protected information; biological and chemical weapons programs also
tended to require large-scale activities.
The 21st-century technologies
- genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics ((GNR) - are so powerful that they can
spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the
first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of
individuals or small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw
materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.
Thus we have the possibility
not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass
destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of
self-replication.
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, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of
extreme individuals.
Nothing about the way I got
involved with computers suggested to me that I was going to be facing these
kinds of issues.
My life has been driven by a
deep need to ask questions and find answers. When I was 3, I was already
reading, so my father took me to the elementary school, where I sat on the
principal’s lap and read him a story. I started school early, later skipped a
grade, and escaped into books - I was incredibly motivated to learn. I asked
lots of questions, often driving adults to distraction.
As a teenager I was very
interested in science and technology. I wanted to be a ham radio operator but
didn’t have the money to buy the equipment. Ham radio was the Internet of its
time: very addictive, and quite solitary. Money issues
aside, my mother put her foot down - I was not to be a ham; I was antisocial
enough already.
I may not have had many close
friends, but I was awash in ideas. By high school, I had discovered the great
science fiction writers. I remember especially Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit Will
Travel and Asimov’s I, Robot, with its Three Laws of Robotics. I was enchanted
by the descriptions of space travel, and wanted to have a telescope to look at
the stars; since I had no money to buy or make one, I checked books on
telescope-making out of the library and read about making them instead. I
soared in my imagination.
Thursday nights my parents
went bowling, and we kids stayed home alone. It was the night of Gene
Roddenberry’s original Star Trek, and the program made a big impression on me.
I came to accept its notion that humans had a future in space, Western-style,
with big heroes and adventures. Roddenberry’s vision of the centuries to come
was one with strong moral values, embodied in codes like the Prime Directive:
to not interfere in the development of less technologically advanced
civilizations. This had an incredible appeal to me; ethical humans, not robots,
dominated this future, and I took Roddenberry’s dream as part of my own.
I excelled in mathematics in
high school, and when I went to the
I was lucky enough to get a
job programming early supercomputers and discovered the amazing power of large
machines to numerically simulate advanced designs. When I went to graduate
school at UC Berkeley in the mid-1970s, I started staying up late, often all
night, inventing new worlds inside the machines. Solving
problems. Writing the code that argued so strongly to
be written.
In The Agony and the Ecstasy,
Irving Stone’s biographical novel of Michelangelo, Stone described vividly how
Michelangelo released the statues from the stone, “breaking the marble spell,”
carving from the images in his mind.4 In my most ecstatic moments, the software
in the computer emerged in the same way. Once I had imagined it in my mind I
felt that it was already there in the machine, waiting to be released. Staying
up all night seemed a small price to pay to free it - to give the ideas
concrete form.
After a few years at Berkeley
I started to send out some of the software I had written - an instructional
Pascal system, Unix utilities, and a text editor called vi (which is still, to
my surprise, widely used more than 20 years later) - to others who had similar
small PDP-11 and VAX minicomputers. These adventures in software eventually
turned into the
Still, by the early 1980s, I
was drowning. The Unix releases were very successful,
and my little project of one soon had money and some staff, but the problem at
From all this, I trust it is
clear that I am not a Luddite. I have always, rather,
had a strong belief in the value of the scientific search for truth and in the
ability of great engineering to bring material progress. The Industrial
Revolution has immeasurably improved everyone’s life over the last couple
hundred years, and I always expected my career to involve the building of
worthwhile solutions to real problems, one problem at a time.
I have not been disappointed.
My work has had more impact than I had ever hoped for and has been more widely
used than I could have reasonably expected. I have spent the last 20 years
still trying to figure out how to make computers as reliable as I want them to
be (they are not nearly there yet) and how to make them simple to use (a goal
that has met with even less relative success). Despite some progress, the
problems that remain seem even more daunting.
But while I was aware of the
moral dilemmas surrounding technology’s consequences in fields like weapons
research, I did not expect that I would confront such issues in my own field,
or at least not so soon.
Perhaps it is always hard to
see the bigger impact while you are in the vortex of a change. Failing to
understand the consequences of our inventions while we are in the rapture of
discovery and innovation seems to be a common fault of scientists and
technologists; we have long been driven by the overarching desire to know that
is the nature of science’s quest, not stopping to notice that the progress to
newer and more powerful technologies can take on a life of its own.
I have long realized that the
big advances in information technology come not from the work of computer
scientists, computer architects, or electrical engineers, but from that of
physical scientists. The physicists Stephen Wolfram and Brosl
Hasslacher introduced me, in the early 1980s, to
chaos theory and nonlinear systems. In the 1990s, I learned about complex
systems from conversations with Danny Hillis, the
biologist Stuart Kauffman, the Nobel-laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann, and
others. Most recently, Hasslacher and the electrical
engineer and device physicist Mark Reed have been giving me insight into the
incredible possibilities of molecular electronics.
In my own work, as codesigner of three microprocessor architectures - SPARC, picoJava, and MAJC - and as the
designer of several implementations thereof, I’ve been afforded a deep and
firsthand acquaintance with
Until last year I believed
that the rate of advances predicted by
But because of the recent
rapid and radical progress in molecular electronics - where individual atoms
and molecules replace lithographically drawn transistors - and related nanoscale technologies, we should be able to meet or exceed
the
As this enormous computing
power is combined with the manipulative advances of the physical sciences and
the new, deep understandings in genetics, enormous transformative power is
being unleashed. These combinations open up the opportunity to completely
redesign the world, for better or worse: The replicating and evolving processes
that have been confined to the natural world are about to become realms of
human endeavor.
In designing software and
microprocessors, I have never had the feeling that I was designing an
intelligent machine. The software and hardware is so fragile and the capabilities of the machine to “think” so clearly absent that, even
as a possibility, this has always seemed very far in the future.
But now, with the prospect of
human-level computing power in about 30 years, a new idea suggests itself: that
I may be working to create tools which will enable the construction of the
technology that may replace our species. How do I feel about this? Very uncomfortable. Having struggled
my entire career to build reliable software systems, it seems to me more than
likely that this future will not work out as well as some people may imagine.
My personal experience suggests we tend to overestimate our design abilities.
Given the incredible power of
these new technologies, shouldn’t we be asking how we can best coexist with
them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our
technological development, shouldn’t we proceed with great caution?
The dream of robotics is,
first, that intelligent machines can do our work for us, allowing us lives of
leisure, restoring us to
How soon could such an
intelligent robot be built? The coming advances in computing power seem to make
it possible by 2030. And once an intelligent robot exists, it is only a small
step to a robot species - to an intelligent robot that can make evolved copies
of itself.
A second dream of robotics is
that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving
near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses; it is this process that
Danny Hillis thinks we will gradually get used to and
that Ray Kurzweil elegantly details inThe Age of Spiritual Machines. (We are beginning to see
intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human
body, as illustrated on thecover ofWired
8.02.)
But if we are downloaded into
our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or
even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not
be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in
no sense be our children, that on this path our
humanity may well be lost.
Genetic engineering promises
to revolutionize agriculture by increasing crop yields while reducing the use
of pesticides; to create tens of thousands of novel species of bacteria,
plants, viruses, and animals; to replace reproduction, or supplement it, with
cloning; to create cures for many diseases, increasing our life span and our
quality of life; and much, much more. We now know with certainty that these
profound changes in the biological sciences are imminent and will challenge all
our notions of what life is.
Technologies such as human
cloning have in particular raised our awareness of the profound ethical and
moral issues we face. If, for example, we were to reengineer ourselves into
several separate and unequal species using the power of genetic engineering,
then we would threaten the notion of equality that is the very cornerstone of
our democracy.
Given the incredible power of
genetic engineering, it’s no surprise that there are significant safety issues
in its use. My friend Amory Lovins recently cowrote, along with Hunter Lovins,
an editorial that provides an ecological view of some of these dangers. Among
their concerns: that “the new botany aligns the development of plants with
their economic, not evolutionary, success.” (See “A Tale of Two Botanies,” page
247.) Amory’s long career has been focused on energy and resource efficiency by
taking a whole-system view of human-made systems; such a whole-system view
often finds simple, smart solutions to otherwise seemingly difficult problems,
and is usefully applied here as well.
After reading the Lovins’ editorial, I saw an op-ed by Gregg Easterbrook inThe New York Times (November 19, 1999) about genetically
engineered crops, under the headline: “Food for the Future: Someday, rice will
have built-in vitamin A. Unless the Luddites win.”
Are Amory and Hunter Lovins Luddites? Certainly not. I believe we all would agree that golden
rice, with its built-in vitamin A, is probably a good thing, if developed with
proper care and respect for the likely dangers in moving genes across species
boundaries.
Awareness of the dangers
inherent in genetic engineering is beginning to grow, as reflected in the Lovins’ editorial. The general public is aware of, and
uneasy about, genetically modified foods, and seems to be rejecting the notion
that such foods should be permitted to be unlabeled.
But genetic engineering
technology is already very far along. As the Lovins
note, the USDA has already approved about 50 genetically engineered crops for
unlimited release; more than half of the world’s soybeans and a third of its
corn now contain genes spliced
in
from other forms of life.
While there are many important
issues here, my own major concern with genetic engineering is narrower: that it
gives the power - whether militarily, accidentally, or in a deliberate
terrorist act - to create a White Plague.
The many wonders of
nanotechnology were first imagined by the Nobel-laureate physicist Richard
Feynman in a speech he gave in 1959, subsequently published under the title
“There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” The book that made a big impression on
me, in the mid-’80s, was Eric Drexler’s Engines of
Creation, in which he described beautifully how manipulation of matter at the
atomic level could create a utopian future of abundance, where just about
everything could be made cheaply, and almost any imaginable disease or physical
problem could be solved using nanotechnology and artificial intelligences.
A subsequent book, Unbounding the Future: The
Nanotechnology Revolution, which Drexler co-wrote,
imagines some of the changes that might take place in a world where we had
molecular-level “assemblers.” Assemblers could make possible incredibly
low-cost solar power, cures for cancer and the common cold by augmentation of
the human immune system, essentially complete cleanup of the environment,
incredibly inexpensive pocket supercomputers - in fact, any product would be manufacturable by assemblers at a cost no greater than that
of wood - spaceflight more accessible than transoceanic travel today, and
restoration of extinct species.
I remember feeling good about
nanotechnology after reading Engines of Creation. As a technologist, it gave me
a sense of calm - that is, nanotechnology showed us that incredible progress
was possible, and indeed perhaps inevitable. If nanotechnology was our future,
then I didn’t feel pressed to solve so many problems in the present. I would
get to Drexler’s utopian future in due time; I might
as well enjoy life more in the here and now. It didn’t make sense, given his
vision, to stay up all night, all the time.
Drexler’s
vision also led to a lot of good fun. I would occasionally get to describe the
wonders of nanotechnology to others who had not heard of it. After teasing them
with all the things Drexler described I would give a
homework assignment of my own: “Use nanotechnology to create a vampire; for
extra credit create an antidote.”
With these wonders came clear
dangers, of which I was acutely aware. As I said at a nanotechnology conference
in 1989, “We can’t simply do our science and not worry about these ethical
issues.”5 But my subsequent conversations with physicists convinced me that
nanotechnology might not even work - or, at least, it wouldn’t work anytime
soon. Shortly thereafter I moved to
Then, last summer, Brosl Hasslacher told me that nanoscale molecular electronics was now practical. This was
new news, at least to me, and I think to many people -
and it radically changed my opinion about nanotechnology. It sent me back to
Engines of Creation. Rereading Drexler’s work after
more than 10 years, I was dismayed to realize how little I had remembered of
its lengthy section called “Dangers and Hopes,” including a discussion of how
nanotechnologies can become “engines of destruction.” Indeed, in my rereading
of this cautionary material today, I am struck by how naive some of Drexler’s safeguard proposals seem, and how much greater I
judge the dangers to be now than even he seemed to then. (Having anticipated
and described many technical and political problems with nanotechnology, Drexler started the Foresight Institute in the late 1980s
“to help prepare society for anticipated advanced technologies” - most
important, nanotechnology.)
The enabling breakthrough to
assemblers seems quite likely within the next 20 years. Molecular electronics -
the new subfield of nanotechnology where individual molecules are circuit elements
- should mature quickly and become enormouusly lucrative within this decade,
causing a large incremental investment in all nanotechnologies.
Unfortunately, as with nuclear
technology, it is far easier to create destructive uses for nanotechnology than
constructive ones. Nanotechnology has clear military and terrorist uses, and
you need not be suicidal to release a massively destructive nanotechnological
device - such devices can be built to be selectively destructive, affecting,
for example, only a certain geographical area or a group of people who are
genetically distinct.
An immediate
consequence of the Faustian bargain in obtaining the great power of
nanotechnology is that we run a grave risk - the risk that we might destroy the
biosphere on which all life depends.
As Drexler
explained: