CAN WE STILL SAVE OURSELVES?: Technology's race to prevent a New Dark Age

     Dr. Gaia Demitrius, a neuropathologist and geriatric specialist who also happens to have a Ph.D. in physics, knows more about dementia than anyone else in the world. In her research, she is pursuing cures and preventive measures for dementia that involve genetic engineering and someday, perhaps, nanotechnology. She believes that, with the help of powerful computer algorithms, she and her team will soon find the fundamental genetic causes of dementia, and that prevention and cure will not be far behind.

      Dr. Demitrius hopes this happens very soon. Both her mother and her father developed dementia in their sixties. Dr. Demitrius is 52. She is the world’s best hope for a cure. For her, the race is on: Will she find a cure before dementia plunges the doctor herself into darkness?

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     Okay, actually, I invented Dr. Demitrius. Sorry if you got all excited. As the more observant among you will have noticed, her name is rather ham-handedly symbolic: “Gaia” as in “Earth” and “Demitrius” as in “lover of the earth.” I created Dr. Demitrius as a symbol of what’s happening on our planet today.

     Dr. Demitrius’s situation—will she cure the disease before she gets it?—is pretty closely analogous to the plight of Planet Earth.

     I’ve been reading Bill McKibben’s alarming book Eaarth recently. His premise is this: We’ve let global warming get so far out of hand that it’s too late to stop it or reverse it, even if we built a million windmills and made everybody drive an electric car tomorrow. The planet is now forever changed (hence its new name: Eaarth), and it’s now up to us to adapt to the change. His book offers a prescription for how we must adapt. Basically: think smaller.

Bill McKibben, environmentalist

     The world McKibben foresees will have melting glaciers, thawing Siberian permafrost, bigger hurricanes, more flooding, shrinking beaches, retreating rain forests, expanding deserts, more terrifying diseases, larger forest fires, and more acidic oceans, where fish and coral will die en masse. Oil will run out. Farms will be less productive. People will drown, starve, and thirst to death. There will be wars over water and grain. Actually, this is not the world he foresees. It’s the world he sees already. Not a pretty picture.

      McKibben means to be an alarmist, and his tone is a bit off-puttingly condescending. But his book is full of facts and footnotes and is pretty persuasive.

Melting permafrost will release methane, making global warming worse

      In McKibben’s view, Dr. Demitrius already has dementia, and it’s too late to stop it. Now she needs to figure out how to live with it. There will be no cure.

      But there is, of course, another view:  the view of the technophiles. These are folks who believe that whatever problems humanity faces will be solved by science and technology, and that we are being childish to so preoccupy ourselves with as trivial a concern as global warming. You’ll find among this group people like the “extropians” and “transhumanists”—interesting thinkers who believe, among other things, that humankind will “transcend” its natural limitations through technologies like genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. They are not only unafraid of science and technology; they relish it. They foresee children with genetically enhanced IQ’s and genetic embellishments that allow them, for example, to fly with their own wings. They foresee computers with spectacular intelligence and true consciousness, which are millions of times smarter than humans and can create computers a hundred times smarter than themselves, within months. They foresee nanobots that patrol our bloodstreams, killing cancer cells, and nanomachines that turn dirt into sweet potatoes, instantly. They foresee an end to death.

Winged humans? Fine with the transhumanists.

     The technophiles think the Terminator movies have it all wrong. Science and technology, they say, will not threaten us, it will save us. Indeed, it will raise us to astonishing realms of joy and enlightenment. It will take us beyond the stars. All this might even happen in the next thirty years.

     The technophiles think Dr. Demitrius, with the help of computers and genetic engineering and nanotechnology, will not only cure dementia before she gets it but soon find herself and all humankind the immortal envy of the universe.

     I find the technophiles also persuasive.

     Interestingly, the last book of McKibben’s that I read was called Enough. In it he lays out his views of genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. You can guess his position: he doesn’t trust them. They’re too promising, he says. In fact, he really believes they will give us everything, including immortality, and so he wants us to put an end to all research in genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. He thinks they’ve gone far enough (hence, his book’s title). These technologies are, he says, a threat to the very idea of what it means to be human and to have meaning as a human being. He doesn’t like the idea of anyone living forever.

     The extropians say, Nonsense. They say if our grandchildren are half-machine, a million times smarter than us, can breathe under water, and never die—well, great!

Half human, half machine: the look of our grandchildren?

     I find this discourse fascinating, and I will state my position on these matters now: I believe we are in the position of Dr. Demitrius. If we don’t cure the disease before we get it, we will plunge into darkness and it will be too late. But it’s just as likely we will use technology to save ourselves before that happens.

     In other words, if science and technology don’t save us soon, one hundred years from now we may find ourselves well into a New Dark Age of war, famine, disease, and ignorance, hiding behind walls in the futuristic version of feudal villages. This is what McKibben warns us about. On the other hand, perhaps the technophiles are right, and we are about to enter a world of scientific advancement so extraordinary that it deserves the name of “singularity”: a point in time beyond which the world will be so different, so technologically advanced, and advancing so exponentially faster, that even the best science-fiction writers can’t imagine it.

Ray Kurzweil, futurist and AI expert

   

Max More, Extropian

   Some technophiles like Ray Kurzweil and Max More seem to point to the year 2030 as a time when machines might achieve superhuman intelligence, and maybe even consciousness, and when genetic engineering will be able to utterly transform what a human being is, and nanotechnology will enable us to manipulate the very makings of matter to create whatever we want, now. 

    I’m going to try to make it to 2030. I’ll be 84 years old then. I hope that, before that time, the darkness will not have fallen upon me. Upon all of us.