Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies -- and What It Means to Be Human

Book by Garreau Joel

Chapter One

Prologue

The Future of Human Nature

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.
–Henry Miller, Tropic of Capricorn

This book can’t begin with the tale of the telekinetic monkey.

That certainly comes as a surprise. After all, how often does someone writing nonfiction get to lead with a monkey who can move objects with her thoughts?

If you lunge at this opportunity, however, the story comes out all wrong. It sounds like science fiction, for one thing, even though the monkey–a cute little critter named Belle–is completely real and scampering at Duke University.

This gulf between what engineers are actually creating today and what ordinary readers might find believable is significant. It is the first challenge to making sense of this world unfolding before us, in which we face the biggest change in tens of thousands of years in what it means to be human.

This book aims at letting a general audience in on the vast changes that right now are reshaping our selves, our children and our relationships. Helping people recognize new patterns in their lives, however, is no small trick, as I’ve discovered over time.

For example, there’s the problem you encounter when asking people what they’d do if offered the chance to live for a very long time–150 years or more. Nine out of 10 boggle at this thought. Many actually recoil. You press on. Engineers are working on ways to allow you to spend all that time with great physical vitality–perhaps even comparable to that of today’s 35-year-olds. How would you react if that opportunity came to market? There’s a question that gets people thinking, but you can tell it is still quite a stretch.

We live in remarkable times. Who could have imagined at the end of the 20th century that a human augmentation substance that does what Viagra does would sponsor the NBC Nightly News?

Discussing this sort of change, however, can be hard. Take the United States Department of Defense program to create the “metabolically dominant soldier.” In one small part of that agenda, researchers hope to allow warriors to run at Olympic sprint speeds for 15 minutes on one breath of air. It might be indisputably true that human bodies process oxygen with great inefficiency, and this may be a solvable problem, and your taxpayer dollars unquestionably are being spent trying to remedy this oversight on the part of evolution. Nonetheless, it takes effort to hold some readers with this report. It just sounds too weird.

One fine spring evening, I found myself at a little table outside a San Francisco laundry, pondering how to bridge this divide between the real and the credible. The laundry, called Star Wash, is on a lovely but quite ordinary street. In the window there is an American flag and a sign that tastefully spells out “God Bless America” in red, white and blue lights. It is run by a woman named Olga, from Guatemala City. I was traveling, interviewing the people who are creating the vastly enhanced human abilities that Radical Evolution discusses, and was waiting for my shirts to be finished.

Most of the prospective readers of this book, it occurred to me, are probably like Olga. They don’t care about gee-whiz technology. Why should they? Neither do I, truth be told.

What they care about is what it means to be human, what it means to have relationships, what it means to live life, to have loves, or to tell lies. If you want to engage such people, you have to tell a story about culture and values–who we are, how we got that way, where we’re headed and what makes us tick. That’s what has always interested me; it’s what my reporting has always been about. The gee-whiz technology is just a window through which to gaze upon human nature.

Four interrelated, intertwining technologies are cranking up to modify human nature. Call them the GRIN technologies–the genetic, robotic, information and nano processes. These four advances are intermingling and feeding on one another, and they are collectively creating a curve of change unlike anything we humans have ever seen.

Already, enhanced people walk among us. You can see it most clearly wherever you find the keenest competition. Sport is a good example. “The current doping agony,” says John Hoberman, a University of Texas authority on performance drugs, “is a kind of very confused referendum on the future of human enhancement.” Extreme pharmacological sport did not begin or end with East Germany. Some athletes today look grotesque. Curt Schilling, the All-Star pitcher, in 2002 talked to Sports Illustrated about the major leagues. “Guys out there look like Mr. Potato Head, with a head and arms and six or seven body parts that just don’t look right.” Competitive bodybuilding is already divided into tested shows (i.e., drug free) versus untested shows (anything goes).That’s merely the beginning. Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania who created genetically modified “mighty mice” have been deluged by calls from athletes and coaches who want to try this technology themselves. These mice are shockingly large and muscular. They are built like steers, with massive haunches and necks wider than their heads. Could such gene doping work in humans–assuming it isn’t already? “Oh yeah, it’s easy,” H. Lee Sweeney, chairman of Penn’s Department of Physiology, told The New York Times. “Anyone who can clone a gene and work with cells could do it. It’s not a mystery....You could change the endurance of the muscle or modulate the speed–all the performance characteristics. All the biology is there. If someone said, ‘Here’s $10 million–I want you to do everything you can think of in terms of sports,’ you could get pretty imaginative.”

Then there’s the military. Remember the comic-book superheroes of the 1930s and 1940s, from Superman to Wonder Woman? Most of their superpowers right now either exist or are in engineering. If you can watch a car chase in Afghanistan with a Predator, you’ve effectively got telescopic vision. If you can figure out what’s inside a cave by peering into the earth with a seismic ground pinger, you’ve got X-ray vision. Want super strength? At the University of California at Berkeley, the U.S. Army has got a functioning prototype exoskeleton suit that allows a soldier to carry 180 pounds as if it were only 4.4 pounds. At Natick Labs in Massachusetts, the U.S. Army imagines that such an exoskeleton suit may ultimately allow soldiers to leap tall buildings with a single bound.

“My thesis is that in just 20 years the boundary between fantasy and reality will be rent asunder,” writes Rodney Brooks, director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Just five years from now that boundary will be breached in ways that are as unimaginable to most people today as daily use of the World Wide Web was 10 years ago.”

We are at an inflection point in history.

For all previous millennia, our technologies have been aimed outward, to control our environment. Starting with fire and clothes, we looked for ways to ward off the elements. With the development of agriculture we controlled our food supply. In cities we sought safety. Telephones and airplanes collapsed distance. Antibiotics kept death-dealing microbes at bay.

Now, however, we have started a wholesale process of aiming our technologies inward. Now our technologies have started to merge with our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, our progeny and perhaps our souls. Serious people have embarked on changing humans so much that they call it a new kind of engineered evolution– one that we direct for ourselves. “The next frontier,” says Gregory Stock, director of the Program on Medicine, Technology and Society at the UCLA School of Medicine, “is our own selves.”

The people you will meet in Radical Evolution are testing these fundamental hypotheses:

· We are riding a curve of exponential change.

· This change is unprecedented in human history.

· It is transforming no less than human nature.

This isn’t fiction. You can see the outlines of this reality in the headlines now. You’re going to see a lot more of it in just the next few years– certainly within your prospective lifetime. We have been attempting to transcend the limits of human nature for a very long time. We’ve tried Socratic reasoning and Buddhist enlightenment and Christian sanctification and Cartesian logic and the New Soviet Man. Our successes have ranged from mixed to limited, at best. Nonetheless, we are pressing forward, attempting once again to improve not just our world but our very selves. Who knows? Maybe this time we’ll get it right.

In 1913, U.S. government officials prosecuted Lee De Forest for telling investors that his company, RCA, would soon be able to transmit the human voice across the Atlantic Ocean. This claim was so preposterous, prosecutors asserted, that he was obviously swindling potential investors. He was ultimately released, but not before being lectured by the judge to stop making any more fraudulent claims.

With this legal reasoning in mind, flash forward a decade and a half from today. Look at the girl who today is your second-grade daughter. Fifteen years from now, she is just home for the holidays. You were so proud of her when she not only put herself through Ohio State but graduated summa cum laude. Now she has taken on her most formidable challenge yet, competing with her generation’s elite in her fancy new law school. Of course you want to hear all about it. It is her first time home in months. But the difference between this touching tableau and similar ones in the past is that in this scenario–factually grounded in technologies already in development in the early years of the 21st century– changes in human nature are readily available in the marketplace. She is competing with those with the will and wherewithal to adopt them.

“What are your classmates like, honey?” you ask innocently.

“They’re all really, really smart,” she says. But then she thinks of some of the students in contracts class–the challenging stuff of One L fame. And she stops.

How does she explain what the enhanced kids are like? she wonders. She knows her dear old parents have read in their newsmagazines about some of what’s available. But actually dealing with some of her new classmates is decidedly strange.*

· They have amazing thinking abilities. They’re not only faster and more creative than anybody she’s ever met, but faster and more creative than anybody she’s ever imagined.

· They have photographic memories and total recall. They can devour books in minutes._

· They’re beautiful, physically. Although they don’t put much of a premium on exercise, their bodies are remarkably ripped.

· They talk casually about living a very long time, perhaps being immortal. They’re always discussing their “next lives.” One fellow mentions how, after he makes his pile as a lawyer, he plans to be a glassblower, after which he wants to become a nanosurgeon.

· One of her new friends fell while jogging, opening up a nasty gash on her knee. Your daughter freaked, ready to rush her to the hospital. But her friend just stared at the gaping wound, focusing her mind on it. Within minutes, it simply stopped bleeding.

· This same friend has been vaccinated against pain. She never feels acute pain for long.

· These new friends are always connected to each other, sharing their thoughts no matter how far apart, with no apparent gear. They call it “silent messaging.” It almost seems like telepathy.

· They have this odd habit of cocking their head in a certain way whenever they want to access information they don’t yet have in their own skulls–as if waiting for a delivery to arrive wirelessly. Which it does.

· For a week or more at a time, they don’t sleep. They joke about getting rid of the beds in their cramped dorm rooms, since they use them so rarely.

Her new friends are polite when she can’t keep up with their conversations, as if she were handicapped. They can’t help but condescend to her, however, when she protests that embedded technology is not natural for humans.

That’s what they call her–“Natural.” In fact, that’s what they call all those who could be like them but choose not to, the way vegetarians choose to abstain from meat.

They call themselves “Enhanced.” And those who have neither the education nor the money to even consider keeping up with enhancement technology? These they dismiss as simply “The Rest.” The poor dears– they just keep falling farther and farther behind.

Everyone in your daughter’s law school takes it as a matter of course that the law they are studying is changing to match the new realities. The law will be upgraded, The Enhanced believe, just as they have new physical and mental upgrades installed every time they go home. The technology is moving that fast.

In fact, the paper your daughter is working on over the holidays concerns whether a Natural can really enter into an informed-consent relationship with an Enhanced–even for something like a date. How would a Natural understand what makes an Enhanced tick if she doesn’t understand how he is augmented?

The law is based on the Enlightenment principle that we hold a human nature in common.

Increasingly, the question is whether this still exists.

I call the scenario above “The Law of Unintended Consequences.” It is not a prediction–I have no crystal ball, alas. But this scenario is a faithful rendition of what our world could well be like if some of the engineering currently being funded turns out to work. “Forget fiction, read the newspaper,” notes Bill Joy, the former chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. Scenario planning is intended to prod people to think more broadly and view events with a new perspective. How did I arrive at this scenario? Let me give you some background.

In the late 1990s, when this book started, the rules of cause and effect seemed to have become unhinged. The problem was that the world was going through astounding change. First came the Internet, and then the World Wide Web. Cell phones the size of candy bars, palm computers the size of a deck of cards, and music players not much bigger than credit cards proliferated and merged in a primordial evolutionary silicon stew. A walk through a dark house in the middle of the night became an easy navigation. All the tiny lights marked the way in festive red or green, winking and shining from microwaves and clocks and phones and televisions and music players and video players and fax machines and laptops and printers and smoke detectors and docking stations and recharging stations and game players. Each signaled the presence of yet another microprocessor– part of that march in which the average American inexorably is becoming surrounded by more computers than she has lightbulbs, as is already the case in as utilitarian a vehicle as a Honda Accord.

The raging argument back then was whether this Cambrian explosion of intelligence marked the biggest thing since the printing press or th...