There are plenty of problems with trying to sound an alarm. First, it better be right (a story as old as "The boy who cried wolf.") Second, there has to be somebody to warn (telling the last dinosaur he's going to go extinct does not count as a forecast). Third, the people being warned have to have the capacity to understand the warning. Fourth and perhaps most importantly of all, those being warned not only must know intuitively that it is true, they also must believe an action can be taken in response.
Preachers have been warning of hellfire and damnation for years, picking up a fairly consistent percentage of believers along the way, and global warming folks have slowly progressed from Chicken Little to grudging acceptance with every summer heat wave. A dominant theme in my life as young man -- nukes, as in both power plants and weapons -- barely registers at all with Generation X; predicting Armaggedon is like predicting a stock market crash. Predict one thing forever and inevitably you'll be proven correct if, by nothing else, sheer randomness and chaos.
True story: In the sense of the people who were actually writing the Bible, Armaggedon wasn't a concept but a place. It was where gladiator-style events was held. The modern equivalent would be to say the ultimate battle for good and evil will be held at Madison Square Garden (sign up for pay per view today).
In our age of commercial capitalism, nothing becomes really real until the big money gets into it (think of how the railroads went from a sort of scientific exercise to big business). Nowadays, money has trouble seeing beyond the next few quarters. That not only explains the recent dot-com boom and bust, it explains why alarms filtering from the scientific elite haven't caught Wall Street yet. A disaster 10 years down the road is not a disaster; it's a nine-year window to make fat stacks of cash.
***
People learned of the rapid pace of technological advancement in pocketbook ways; eight tracks and video discs and computers that became obsolete every two years. My personal epiphany on the power of technology came from the blow-dryer -- suddenly all the women I longed for could look like Farrah Fawcett.
Marshall's Third Law of Warnings -- the people being warned have to have the capacity to understand the warning -- makes me rely on 16 years of newspaper training and boil the nature of this particular warning into a quick 100 words.
Three areas of technology are poised to explode in the next 20 years (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) but this particular essay deals with a field known as moletronics -- molecular electronics.
Since all the switches drawn on computer chips keep getting smaller and smaller (which is why chips get faster and faster), at some point you run out of room -- you can't get any smaller because you start looking not at lines in silicon but individual silicon atoms.
That got chemists to thinking, because all those electrons flashing around carry electric charges, and it would just be a matter of looking at chemical formulas (all the things we forgot from high school) to turn those positive electrons and negative electrons into zeroes and ones. Some scientists have looked at ways to force molecules to line up and behave, others have used computer programming techniques to deal with the complexity of all this atomic and sub-atomic stuff flying around and still make it all work like something from Dell.
Now here's the news bulletin. This saltwater-hard-drive stuff, thanks to billions in government and private money, is getting ready for prime time -- and its potential is mind-boggling. As one researcher told Wired magazine, you may someday read that "some group of kids someplace has come up with a memory that's got a terabyte of capacity and cost less than 10 cents, and you can weave it into your shirt."
History shows that whenever some new and unbelievable technology becomes available, such as this new molecular memory, scientists will pile up tons of it (think of massive parallel computers) and see what happens. And what can happen here is clear enough. Machines will equal or exceed human thought.
Think of Ask Jeeves, except the Internet butler immediately knows of every word of human existence, and has a power of recall so phenomenal it can scan all of it in the same amount of time as it takes you to remember a friend's phone number. Mathematical formulas and algorithms will translate into human-style connections and insight -- Einstein meeting Newton and Buddha and some kid genius all at once.
Nietzche will be proven half-wrong. It's not that man invented God, and that thanks to science God is dead. Man invented God, but She was only a rough draft. We're on the threshold of creating an honest-to-God It.
And I wouldn't mind applying for the job.
***
The science fiction aspects of all this -- those machines turning on man -- are well-known to readers of that genre. Theodore Kaczynski, whom I'd admire if he hadn't had that pesky problem of killing people, predicted the machines would turn humans into domesticated animals.
I don't want to get sidetracked on those sort of summer blockbuster movie aspects because the intense ethical questions of the next decade can be boiled down into two questions.
--If it were possible to download your personality into electronics -- that you would be without physical presence but you would be able to learn and grow and think and just flat be immortal -- would you do it?
--If it were possible to download a personality into a virtual reality, an existence of nothing more than conscious, thinking zeroes and ones, as a society, should we make sure no such experiment ever takes place?
Bill Joy's article tells the whole story better than I can here. His credentials -- the Unix godfather who invented vi, the seminal Java and Jini scientist for Sun Microsystems -- are impeccable, and his article has been compared to Einstein's 1939 letter warning FDR of the possiibility of the atomic bomb. Fair use copyright law prevents me from quoting more than is absolutely necessary for the purpose of a review, so let's try this quote he cited from George Dyson's book "Darwin Among The Machines:"
"In the game of life and evolution, there are three players at the table; human beings, nature and machines. I am firmly on the side of nature. But nature, I suspect, is on the side of machines."
***
As baby boomers age, questions of spirituality, questions of the Big Picture and What It All Means, rise in number. While Bhutan may have its fabulous notion of Gross National Happiness, and while scattered numbers of Earth Firsters head off the grid in search of whole-grain happiness, the bulk of us live and work in Sprawl Mart and we wonder what it all means.
"What it all means" has for centuries pivoted on the question of pleasures of the flesh or pleasures of a greater good. If a human decides to go virtual, if a human decides to cross his species and join the machines, the first thought is that pleasures of the flesh are gone forever.
Considering the rapidity of our future, this may not be necessarily so. Memories, intense memories, are biochemical and bioelectric in nature, and the idea of downloadable experience, considering the speed of progress, is not so far-fetched. Think of the embedded memories in the flick "Total Recall", then think of what the history of Madison Avenue suggests. You wind up with what's an apparent oxymoron.
Go virtual. The sex is fabulous.
***
Could there be a more powerful pull for a human -- sex and immortality? Is the eventual -- dare we say inevitable -- evolution of man nothing more than the reducing of all our needs to the mere conversion of sunlight into electrical zeroes and ones?
Eliminate physical aging and suddenly voyages to the stars, voyages which could take hundreds or thousands or years, suddenly become possible. And the end result becomes, most likely, finding beings that evolved in different ways but came to the same zero-and-one conclusion as we did. A voyage of a millenium could end with a chat across an interstellar fence post -- "Nice solar breeze today, eh wot?" -- because everything else that needs to be said is already known. Instantly.
If the virtual me ever got downloaded into the electronic miasma, I'd do two things immediately. First, I'd splinter into a zillion still-connected packets to make it more difficult for me to be found (read attacked). Secondly, I'd work on securing an eternal, free source of electricity (which would send me in search of an orbiting satellite homebase). Some engineers could argue the next step would be to secure communication links as well, but I'm not so sure. I have this feeling that if I knew everything instantly, there would actually be very little I'd want to say.
Even with God-like powers, when it comes to communication, people either get it or they don't.
***
Asking the wrong question will usually generate the wrong answer, and sometime over the next decade you'll hear a call to limit our research into some of these areas (the same way ethicists have currently banned cloning on humans). The potential for something going terribly, terribly wrong is very high in the near term, and in the long-term, well Hell, in the long-term we all are dead.
Bill Joy's article, which alerts us to dangers in runaway advances in robotics, nanotechnology and genetics, notes that genetically engineered crops are made not for evolutionary reasons but commercial ones. This is a crucial thing to remember because these technologies proliferate with far more ease than nuclear weapons technologies. It could turn out that some pre-IPO startup just wants to create a better Ask Jeeves, and winds up creating God. Or the Devil.
With luck, and enough articles such as Mr. Joy's, we'll be able to know the difference.
***
G.L. Marshall has faith in the future because big-money elites would go broke if their customers were extinct.
