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 Berkeley philosopher who studies consciousness. While we were
talking, Ray approached and a conversation began, the subject of which haunts me to this
day.
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
Carnegie Mellon University. Robot gave me more material to try out on my
friends—material surprisingly supportive of Kaczynski's argument. For example:
The Short Run (Early 2000s)
Biological species almost never survive encounters with superior competitors. Ten
million years ago, South and North America were separated by a sunken Panama isthmus.
South America, like Australia today, was populated by marsupial mammals, including
pouched equivalents of rats, deers, and tigers. When the isthmus connecting North and
South America rose, it took only a few thousand years for the northern placental
species, with slightly more effective metabolisms and reproductive and nervous systems,
to displace and eliminate almost all the southern marsupials.
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 nonmarket 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 is 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," and to describe how seriously
dangerous a human can be "once transformed into an unbounded superintelligent robot."^3
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 Los Angeles for the express purpose of having dinner with Danny and his
wife, Pati. I went through my now-familiar routine, trotting out the ideas and passages
that I found so disturbing. Danny's answer—directed specifically at Kurzweil's scenario
of humans merging with robots—came swiftly, and quite surprised me. He said, simply,
that the changes would come gradually, and that we would get used to them.
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 University of Michigan
as an undergraduate engineering student I took the advanced curriculum of the
mathematics majors. Solving math problems was an exciting challenge, but when I
discovered computers I found something much more interesting: a machine into which you
could put a program that attempted to solve a problem, after which the machine quickly
checked the solution. The computer had a clear notion of correct and incorrect, true and
false. Were my ideas correct? The machine could tell me. This was very seductive.
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 Berkeley version of the Unix operating system, which became a personal
"success disaster"—so many people wanted it that I never finished my PhD. Instead I got
a job working for Darpa putting Berkeley Unix on the Internet and fixing it to be
reliable and to run large research applications well. This was all great fun and very
rewarding. And, frankly, I saw no robots here, or anywhere near.
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 Berkeley was
always office space rather than money—there wasn't room for the help the project needed,
so when the other founders of Sun Microsystems showed up I jumped at the chance to join
them. At Sun, the long hours continued into the early days of workstations and personal
computers, and I have enjoyed participating in the creation of advanced microprocessor
technologies and Internet technologies such as Java and Jini.
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 Moore's law. For decades, Moore's law has correctly
predicted the exponential rate of improvement of semiconductor technology. Until last
year I believed that the rate of advances predicted by Moore's law might continue only
until roughly 2010, when some physical limits would begin to be reached. It was not
obvious to me that a new technology would arrive in time to keep performance advancing
smoothly.
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 Moore's law rate of
progress for another 30 years. By 2030, we are likely to be able to build machines, in
quantity, a million times as powerful as the personal computers of today—sufficient to
implement the dreams of Kurzweil and Moravec.
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 Eden. Yet in his history of such ideas,
Darwin Among the Machines, George Dyson warns: "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 the machines." As we have seen,
Moravec agrees, believing we may well not survive the encounter with the superior robot
species.
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 in The 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
the cover of Wired 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 in The 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
cowrote, 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 Colorado, to a skunk works I had set up, and the focus of
my work shifted to software for the Internet, specifically on ideas that became Java and
Jini.
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 enormously 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:
"Plants" with "leaves" no more efficient than today's solar cells could out-compete real
plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous "bacteria"
could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate
swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators
could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop—at least if we make no
preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has become known as the "gray goo
problem." Though masses of uncontrolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term
"gray goo" emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less inspiring
than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superior in an evolutionary sense, but
this need not make them valuable.
The gray goo threat makes one thing perfectly clear: We cannot afford certain kinds of
accidents with replicating assemblers.
Gray goo would surely be a depressing ending to our human adventure on Earth, far worse
than mere fire or ice, and one that could stem from a simple laboratory accident.^6
Oops.
It is most of all the power of destructive self-replication in genetics, nanotechnology,
and robotics (GNR) that should give us pause. Self-replication is the modus operandi of
genetic engineering, which uses the machinery of the cell to replicate its designs, and
the prime danger underlying gray goo in nanotechnology. Stories of run-amok robots like
the Borg, replicating or mutating to escape from the ethical constraints imposed on them
by their creators, are well established in our science fiction books and movies. It is
even possible that self-replication may be more fundamental than we thought, and hence
harder—or even impossible—to control. A recent article by Stuart Kauffman in Nature
titled "Self-Replication: Even Peptides Do It" discusses the discovery that a
32-amino-acid peptide can "autocatalyse its own synthesis." We don't know how widespread
this ability is, but Kauffman notes that it may hint at "a route to self-reproducing
molecular systems on a basis far wider than Watson-Crick base-pairing."^7
In truth, we have had in hand for years clear warnings of the dangers inherent in
widespread knowledge of GNR technologies—of the possibility of knowledge alone enabling
mass destruction. But these warnings haven't been widely publicized; the public
discussions have been clearly inadequate. There is no profit in publicizing the dangers.
The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in 20th-century weapons of
mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in government laboratories. In
sharp contrast, the 21st-century GNR technologies have clear commercial uses and are
being developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant
commercialism, technology—with science as its handmaiden—is delivering a series of
almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are
aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged
system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive
pressures.
This is the first moment in the history of our planet when any species, by its own
voluntary actions, has become a danger to itself—as well as to vast numbers of others.
It might be a familiar progression, transpiring on many worlds—a planet, newly formed,
placidly revolves around its star; life slowly forms; a kaleidoscopic procession of
creatures evolves; intelligence emerges which, at least up to a point, confers enormous
survival value; and then technology is invented. It dawns on them that there are such
things as laws of Nature, that these laws can be revealed by experiment, and that
knowledge of these laws can be made both to save and to take lives, both on
unprecedented scales. Science, they recognize, grants immense powers. In a flash, they
create world-altering contrivances. Some planetary civilizations see their way through,
place limits on what may and what must not be done, and safely pass through the time of
perils. Others, not so lucky or so prudent, perish.
That is Carl Sagan, writing in 1994, in Pale Blue Dot, a book describing his vision of
the human future in space. I am only now realizing how deep his insight was, and how
sorely I miss, and will miss, his voice. For all its eloquence, Sagan's contribution was
not least that of simple common sense—an attribute that, along with humility, many of
the leading advocates of the 21st-century technologies seem to lack.
I remember from my childhood that my grandmother was strongly against the overuse of
antibiotics. She had worked since before the first World War as a nurse and had a
commonsense attitude that taking antibiotics, unless they were absolutely necessary, was
bad for you.
It is not that she was an enemy of progress. She saw much progress in an almost 70-year
nursing career; my grandfather, a diabetic, benefited greatly from the improved
treatments that became available in his lifetime. But she, like many levelheaded people,
would probably think it greatly arrogant for us, now, to be designing a robotic
"replacement species," when we obviously have so much trouble making relatively simple
things work, and so much trouble managing—or even understanding—ourselves.
I realize now that she had an awareness of the nature of the order of life, and of the
necessity of living with and respecting that order. With this respect comes a necessary
humility that we, with our early-21st-century chutzpah, lack at our peril. The
commonsense view, grounded in this respect, is often right, in advance of the scientific
evidence. The clear fragility and inefficiencies of the human-made systems we have built
should give us all pause; the fragility of the systems I have worked on certainly
humbles me.
We should have learned a lesson from the making of the first atomic bomb and the
resulting arms race. We didn't do well then, and the parallels to our current situation
are troubling.
The effort to build the first atomic bomb was led by the brilliant physicist J. Robert
Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer was not naturally interested in politics but became painfully
aware of what he perceived as the grave threat to Western civilization from the Third
Reich, a threat surely grave because of the possibility that Hitler might obtain nuclear
weapons. Energized by this concern, he brought his strong intellect, passion for
physics, and charismatic leadership skills to Los Alamos and led a rapid and successful
effort by an incredible collection of great minds to quickly invent the bomb.
What is striking is how this effort continued so naturally after the initial impetus was
removed. In a meeting shortly after V-E Day with some physicists who felt that perhaps
the effort should stop, Oppenheimer argued to continue. His stated reason seems a bit
strange: not because of the fear of large casualties from an invasion of Japan, but
because the United Nations, which was soon to be formed, should have foreknowledge of
atomic weapons. A more likely reason the project continued is the momentum that had
built up—the first atomic test, Trinity, was nearly at hand.
We know that in preparing this first atomic test the physicists proceeded despite a
large number of possible dangers. They were initially worried, based on a calculation by
Edward Teller, that an atomic explosion might set fire to the atmosphere. A revised
calculation reduced the danger of destroying the world to a three-in-a-million chance.
(Teller says he was later able to dismiss the prospect of atmospheric ignition
entirely.) Oppenheimer, though, was sufficiently concerned about the result of Trinity
that he arranged for a possible evacuation of the southwest part of the state of New
Mexico. And, of course, there was the clear danger of starting a nuclear arms race.
Within a month of that first, successful test, two atomic bombs destroyed Hiroshima and
Nagasaki. Some scientists had suggested that the bomb simply be demonstrated, rather
than dropped on Japanese cities—saying that this would greatly improve the chances for
arms control after the war—but to no avail. With the tragedy of Pearl Harbor still fresh
in Americans' minds, it would have been very difficult for President Truman to order a
demonstration of the weapons rather than use them as he did—the desire to quickly end
the war and save the lives that would have been lost in any invasion of Japan was very
strong. Yet the overriding truth was probably very simple: As the physicist Freeman
Dyson later said, "The reason that it was dropped was just that nobody had the courage
or the foresight to say no."
It's important to realize how shocked the physicists were in the aftermath of the
bombing of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945. They describe a series of waves of emotion:
first, a sense of fulfillment that the bomb worked, then horror at all the people that
had been killed, and then a convincing feeling that on no account should another bomb be
dropped. Yet of course another bomb was dropped, on Nagasaki, only three days after the
bombing of Hiroshima.
In November 1945, three months after the atomic bombings, Oppenheimer stood firmly
behind the scientific attitude, saying, "It is not possible to be a scientist unless you
believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing
which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread
of knowledge and are willing to take the consequences."
Oppenheimer went on to work, with others, on the Acheson-Lilienthal report, which, as
Richard Rhodes says in his recent book Visions of Technology, "found a way to prevent a
clandestine nuclear arms race without resorting to armed world government"; their
suggestion was a form of relinquishment of nuclear weapons work by nation-states to an
international agency.
This proposal led to the Baruch Plan, which was submitted to the United Nations in June
1946 but never adopted (perhaps because, as Rhodes suggests, Bernard Baruch had
"insisted on burdening the plan with conventional sanctions," thereby inevitably dooming
it, even though it would "almost certainly have been rejected by Stalinist Russia
anyway"). Other efforts to promote sensible steps toward internationalizing nuclear
power to prevent an arms race ran afoul either of US politics and internal distrust, or
distrust by the Soviets. The opportunity to avoid the arms race was lost, and very
quickly.
Two years later, in 1948, Oppenheimer seemed to have reached another stage in his
thinking, saying, "In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no
overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a
knowledge they cannot lose."
In 1949, the Soviets exploded an atom bomb. By 1955, both the US and the Soviet Union
had tested hydrogen bombs suitable for delivery by aircraft. And so the nuclear arms
race began.
Nearly 20 years ago, in the documentary The Day After Trinity, Freeman Dyson summarized
the scientific attitudes that brought us to the nuclear precipice:
"I have felt it myself. The glitter of nuclear weapons. It is irresistible if you come
to them as a scientist. To feel it's there in your hands, to release this energy that
fuels the stars, to let it do your bidding. To perform these miracles, to lift a million
tons of rock into the sky. It is something that gives people an illusion of illimitable
power, and it is, in some ways, responsible for all our troubles—this, what you might
call technical arrogance, that overcomes people when they see what they can do with
their minds."^8
Now, as then, we are creators of new technologies and stars of the imagined future,
driven—this time by great financial rewards and global competition—despite the clear
dangers, hardly evaluating what it may be like to try to live in a world that is the
realistic outcome of what we are creating and imagining.
In 1947, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists began putting a Doomsday Clock on its
cover. For more than 50 years, it has shown an estimate of the relative nuclear danger
we have faced, reflecting the changing international conditions. The hands on the clock
have moved 15 times and today, standing at nine minutes to midnight, reflect continuing
and real danger from nuclear weapons. The recent addition of India and Pakistan to the
list of nuclear powers has increased the threat of failure of the nonproliferation goal,
and this danger was reflected by moving the hands closer to midnight in 1998.
In our time, how much danger do we face, not just from nuclear weapons, but from all of
these technologies? How high are the extinction risks?
The philosopher John Leslie has studied this question and concluded that the risk of
human extinction is at least 30 percent, while Ray Kurzweil believes we have "a better
than even chance of making it through," with the caveat that he has "always been accused
of being an optimist."^9 Not only are these estimates not encouraging, but they do not
include the probability of many horrid outcomes that lie short of extinction.
Faced with such assessments, some serious people are already suggesting that we simply
move beyond Earth as quickly as possible. We would colonize the galaxy using von Neumann
probes, which hop from star system to star system, replicating as they go. This step
will almost certainly be necessary 5 billion years from now (or sooner if our solar
system is disastrously impacted by the impending collision of our galaxy with the
Andromeda galaxy within the next 3 billion years), but if we take Kurzweil and Moravec
at their word it might be necessary by the middle of this century.
What are the moral implications here? If we must move beyond Earth this quickly in order
for the species to survive, who accepts the responsibility for the fate of those (most
of us, after all) who are left behind? And even if we scatter to the stars, isn't it
likely that we may take our problems with us or find, later, that they have followed us?
The fate of our species on Earth and our fate in the galaxy seem inextricably linked.
Another idea is to erect a series of shields to defend against each of the dangerous
technologies. The Strategic Defense Initiative, proposed by the Reagan administration,
was an attempt to design such a shield against the threat of a nuclear attack from the
Soviet Union. But as Arthur C. Clarke, who was privy to discussions about the project,
observed: "Though it might be possible, at vast expense, to construct local defense
systems that would 'only' let through a few percent of ballistic missiles, the much
touted idea of a national umbrella was nonsense. Luis Alvarez, perhaps the greatest
experimental physicist of this century, remarked to me that the advocates of such
schemes were 'very bright guys with no common sense.'"
Clarke continued: "Looking into my often cloudy crystal ball, I suspect that a total
defense might indeed be possible in a century or so. But the technology involved would
produce, as a by-product, weapons so terrible that no one would bother with anything as
primitive as ballistic missiles."^10
In Engines of Creation, Eric Drexler proposed that we build an active nanotechnological
shield—a form of immune system for the biosphere—to defend against dangerous replicators
of all kinds that might escape from laboratories or otherwise be maliciously created.
But the shield he proposed would itself be extremely dangerous—nothing could prevent it
from developing autoimmune problems and attacking the biosphere itself.^11
Similar difficulties apply to the construction of shields against robotics and genetic
engineering. These technologies are too powerful to be shielded against in the time
frame of interest; even if it were possible to implement defensive shields, the side
effects of their development would be at least as dangerous as the technologies we are
trying to protect against.
These possibilities are all thus either undesirable or unachievable or both. 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.
Yes, I know, knowledge is good, as is the search for new truths. We have been seeking
knowledge since ancient times. Aristotle opened his Metaphysics with the simple
statement: "All men by nature desire to know." We have, as a bedrock value in our
society, long agreed on the value of open access to information, and recognize the
problems that arise with attempts to restrict access to and development of knowledge. In
recent times, we have come to revere scientific knowledge.
But despite the strong historical precedents, if open access to and unlimited
development of knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then
common sense demands that we reexamine even these basic, long-held beliefs.
It was Nietzsche who warned us, at the end of the 19th century, not only that God is
dead but that "faith in science, which after all exists undeniably, cannot owe its
origin to a calculus of utility; it must have originated in spite of the fact that the
disutility and dangerousness of the 'will to truth,' of 'truth at any price' is proved
to it constantly." It is this further danger that we now fully face—the consequences of
our truth-seeking. The truth that science seeks can certainly be considered a dangerous
substitute for God if it is likely to lead to our extinction.
If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we
would make our future much less dangerous—then we might understand what we can and
should relinquish. Otherwise, we can easily imagine an arms race developing over GNR
technologies, as it did with the NBC technologies in the 20th century. This is perhaps
the greatest risk, for once such a race begins, it's very hard to end it. This
time—unlike during the Manhattan Project—we aren't in a war, facing an implacable enemy
that is threatening our civilization; we are driven, instead, by our habits, our
desires, our economic system, and our competitive need to know.
I believe that we all wish our course could be determined by our collective values,
ethics, and morals. If we had gained more collective wisdom over the past few thousand
years, then a dialogue to this end would be more practical, and the incredible powers we
are about to unleash would not be nearly so troubling.
One would think we might be driven to such a dialogue by our instinct for
self-preservation. Individuals clearly have this desire, yet as a species our behavior
seems to be not in our favor. In dealing with the nuclear threat, we often spoke
dishonestly to ourselves and to each other, thereby greatly increasing the risks.
Whether this was politically motivated, or because we chose not to think ahead, or
because when faced with such grave threats we acted irrationally out of fear, I do not
know, but it does not bode well.
The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet
we seem hardly to have noticed. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or
plutonium, they don't need to be mined and refined, and they can be freely copied. Once
they are out, they are out. Churchill remarked, in a famous left-handed compliment, that
the American people and their leaders "invariably do the right thing, after they have
examined every other alternative." In this case, however, we must act more presciently,
as to do the right thing only at last may be to lose the chance to do it at all.
As Thoreau said, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; and this is what we
must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive
our technologies?
We are being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no brakes. Have
we already gone too far down the path to alter course? I don't believe so, but we aren't
trying yet, and the last chance to assert control—the fail-safe point—is rapidly
approaching. We have our first pet robots, as well as commercially available genetic
engineering techniques, and our nanoscale techniques are advancing rapidly. While the
development of these technologies proceeds through a number of steps, it isn't
necessarily the case—as happened in the Manhattan Project and the Trinity test—that the
last step in proving a technology is large and hard. The breakthrough to wild
self-replication in robotics, genetic engineering, or nanotechnology could come
suddenly, reprising the surprise we felt when we learned of the cloning of a mammal.
And yet I believe we do have a strong and solid basis for hope. Our attempts to deal
with weapons of mass destruction in the last century provide a shining example of
relinquishment for us to consider: the unilateral US abandonment, without preconditions,
of the development of biological weapons. This relinquishment stemmed from the
realization that while it would take an enormous effort to create these terrible
weapons, they could from then on easily be duplicated and fall into the hands of rogue
nations or terrorist groups.
The clear conclusion was that we would create additional threats to ourselves by
pursuing these weapons, and that we would be more secure if we did not pursue them. We
have embodied our relinquishment of biological and chemical weapons in the 1972
Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) and the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC).^12
As for the continuing sizable threat from nuclear weapons, which we have lived with now
for more than 50 years, the US Senate's recent rejection of the Comprehensive Test Ban
Treaty makes it clear relinquishing nuclear weapons will not be politically easy. But we
have a unique opportunity, with the end of the Cold War, to avert a multipolar arms
race. Building on the BWC and CWC relinquishments, successful abolition of nuclear
weapons could help us build toward a habit of relinquishing dangerous technologies.
(Actually, by getting rid of all but 100 nuclear weapons worldwide—roughly the total
destructive power of World War II and a considerably easier task—we could eliminate this
extinction threat.^13
Verifying relinquishment will be a difficult problem, but not an unsolvable one. We are
fortunate to have already done a lot of relevant work in the context of the BWC and
other treaties. Our major task will be to apply this to technologies that are naturally
much more commercial than military. The substantial need here is for transparency, as
difficulty of verification is directly proportional to the difficulty of distinguishing
relinquished from legitimate activities.
I frankly believe that the situation in 1945 was simpler than the one we now face: The
nuclear technologies were reasonably separable into commercial and military uses, and
monitoring was aided by the nature of atomic tests and the ease with which radioactivity
could be measured. Research on military applications could be performed at national
laboratories such as Los Alamos, with the results kept secret as long as possible.
The GNR technologies do not divide clearly into commercial and military uses; given
their potential in the market, it's hard to imagine pursuing them only in national
laboratories. With their widespread commercial pursuit, enforcing relinquishment will
require a verification regime similar to that for biological weapons, but on an
unprecedented scale. This, inevitably, will raise tensions between our individual
privacy and desire for proprietary information, and the need for verification to protect
us all. We will undoubtedly encounter strong resistance to this loss of privacy and
freedom of action.
Verifying the relinquishment of certain GNR technologies will have to occur in
cyberspace as well as at physical facilities. The critical issue will be to make the
necessary transparency acceptable in a world of proprietary information, presumably by
providing new forms of protection for intellectual property.
Verifying compliance will also require that scientists and engineers adopt a strong code
of ethical conduct, resembling the Hippocratic oath, and that they have the courage to
whistleblow as necessary, even at high personal cost. This would answer the call—50
years after Hiroshima—by the Nobel laureate Hans Bethe, one of the most senior of the
surviving members of the Manhattan Project, that all scientists "cease and desist from
work creating, developing, improving, and manufacturing nuclear weapons and other
weapons of potential mass destruction."^14 In the 21st century, this requires vigilance
and personal responsibility by those who would work on both NBC and GNR technologies to
avoid implementing weapons of mass destruction and knowledge-enabled mass destruction.
Thoreau also said that we will be "rich in proportion to the number of things which we
can afford to let alone." We each seek to be happy, but it would seem worthwhile to
question whether we need to take such a high risk of total destruction to gain yet more
knowledge and yet more things; common sense says that there is a limit to our material
needs—and that certain knowledge is too dangerous and is best forgone.
Neither should we pursue near immortality without considering the costs, without
considering the commensurate increase in the risk of extinction. Immortality, while
perhaps the original, is certainly not the only possible utopian dream.
I recently had the good fortune to meet the distinguished author and scholar Jacques
Attali, whose book Lignes d'horizons ( Millennium, in the English translation) helped
inspire the Java and Jini approach to the coming age of pervasive computing, as
previously described in this magazine. In his new book Fraternités, Attali describes how
our dreams of utopia have changed over time:
"At the dawn of societies, men saw their passage on Earth as nothing more than a
labyrinth of pain, at the end of which stood a door leading, via their death, to the
company of gods and to Eternity. With the Hebrews and then the Greeks, some men dared
free themselves from theological demands and dream of an ideal City where Liberty would
flourish. Others, noting the evolution of the market society, understood that the
liberty of some would entail the alienation of others, and they sought Equality."
Jacques helped me understand how these three different utopian goals exist in tension in
our society today. He goes on to describe a fourth utopia, Fraternity, whose foundation
is altruism. Fraternity alone associates individual happiness with the happiness of
others, affording the promise of self-sustainment.
This crystallized for me my problem with Kurzweil's dream. A technological approach to
Eternity—near immortality through robotics—may not be the most desirable utopia, and its
pursuit brings clear dangers. Maybe we should rethink our utopian choices.
Where can we look for a new ethical basis to set our course? I have found the ideas in
the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, to be very helpful. As is
perhaps well known but little heeded, the Dalai Lama argues that the most important
thing is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and that our
societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our
interdependency; he proposes a standard of positive ethical conduct for individuals and
societies that seems consonant with Attali's Fraternity utopia.
The Dalai Lama further argues that we must understand what it is that makes people
happy, and acknowledge the strong evidence that neither material progress nor the
pursuit of the power of knowledge is the key—that there are limits to what science and
the scientific pursuit alone can do.
Our Western notion of happiness seems to come from the Greeks, who defined it as "the
exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence in a life affording them scope."^15
Clearly, we need to find meaningful challenges and sufficient scope in our lives if we
are to be happy in whatever is to come. But I believe we must find alternative outlets
for our creative forces, beyond the culture of perpetual economic growth; this growth
has largely been a blessing for several hundred years, but it has not brought us
unalloyed happiness, and we must now choose between the pursuit of unrestricted and
undirected growth through science and technology and the clear accompanying dangers.
It is now more than a year since my first encounter with Ray Kurzweil and John Searle. I
see around me cause for hope in the voices for caution and relinquishment and in those
people I have discovered who are as concerned as I am about our current predicament. I
feel, too, a deepened sense of personal responsibility—not for the work I have already
done, but for the work that I might yet do, at the confluence of the sciences.
But many other people who know about the dangers still seem strangely silent. When
pressed, they trot out the "this is nothing new" riposte—as if awareness of what could
happen is response enough. They tell me, There are universities filled with bioethicists
who study this stuff all day long. They say, All this has been written about before, and
by experts. They complain, Your worries and your arguments are already old hat.
I don't know where these people hide their fear. As an architect of complex systems I
enter this arena as a generalist. But should this diminish my concerns? I am aware of
how much has been written about, talked about, and lectured about so authoritatively.
But does this mean it has reached people? Does this mean we can discount the dangers
before us?
Knowing is not a rationale for not acting. Can we doubt that knowledge has become a
weapon we wield against ourselves?
The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need to take personal
responsibility, the danger that things will move too fast, and the way in which a
process can take on a life of its own. We can, as they did, create insurmountable
problems in almost no time flat. We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be
similarly surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions.
My continuing professional work is on improving the reliability of software. Software is
a tool, and as a toolbuilder I must struggle with the uses to which the tools I make are
put. I have always believed that making software more reliable, given its many uses,
will make the world a safer and better place; if I were to come to believe the opposite,
then I would be morally obligated to stop this work. I can now imagine such a day may
come.
This all leaves me not angry but at least a bit melancholic. Henceforth, for me,
progress will be somewhat bittersweet.
Do you remember the beautiful penultimate scene in Manhattan where Woody Allen is lying
on his couch and talking into a tape recorder? He is writing a short story about people
who are creating unnecessary, neurotic problems for themselves, because it keeps them
from dealing with more unsolvable, terrifying problems about the universe.
He leads himself to the question, "Why is life worth living?" and to consider what makes
it worthwhile for him: Groucho Marx, Willie Mays, the second movement of the Jupiter
Symphony, Louis Armstrong's recording of "Potato Head Blues," Swedish movies, Flaubert's
Sentimental Education, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, the apples and pears by Cézanne,
the crabs at Sam Wo's, and, finally, the showstopper: his love Tracy's face.
Each of us has our precious things, and as we care for them we locate the essence of our
humanity. In the end, it is because of our great capacity for caring that I remain
optimistic we will confront the dangerous issues now before us.
My immediate hope is to participate in a much larger discussion of the issues raised
here, with people from many different backgrounds, in settings not predisposed to fear
or favor technology for its own sake.
As a start, I have twice raised many of these issues at events sponsored by the Aspen
Institute and have separately proposed that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
take them up as an extension of its work with the Pugwash Conferences. (These have been
held since 1957 to discuss arms control, especially of nuclear weapons, and to formulate
workable policies.)
It's unfortunate that the Pugwash meetings started only well after the nuclear genie was
out of the bottle—roughly 15 years too late. We are also getting a belated start on
seriously addressing the issues around 21st-century technologies—the prevention of
knowledge-enabled mass destruction—and further delay seems unacceptable.
So I'm still searching; there are many more things to learn. Whether we are to succeed
or fail, to survive or fall victim to these technologies, is not yet decided. I'm up
late again—it's almost 6 am. I'm trying to imagine some better answers, to break the
spell and free them from the stone.
___________________________________________________________________________________
^1 The passage Kurzweil quotes is from Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto, which was
published jointly, under duress, by The New York Times and The Washington Post to
attempt to bring his campaign of terror to an end. I agree with David Gelernter, who
said about their decision:
"It was a tough call for the newspapers. To say yes would be giving in to terrorism, and
for all they knew he was lying anyway. On the other hand, to say yes might stop the
killing. There was also a chance that someone would read the tract and get a hunch about
the author; and that is exactly what happened. The suspect's brother read it, and it
rang a bell.
"I would have told them not to publish. I'm glad they didn't ask me. I guess."
( Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber. Free Press, 1997: 120.)
^2 Garrett, Laurie. The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of
Balance. Penguin, 1994: 47-52, 414, 419, 452.
^3 Isaac Asimov described what became the most famous view of ethical rules for robot
behavior in his book I, Robot in 1950, in his Three Laws of Robotics: 1. A robot may not
injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A
robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would
conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such
protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4 Michelangelo wrote a sonnet that begins:
*
Non ha l' ottimo artista alcun concetto *
Ch' un marmo solo in sè non circonscriva
Col suo soverchio; e solo a quello arriva
La man che ubbidisce all' intelleto.
Stone translates this as:
*
The best of artists hath no thought to show *
which the rough stone in its superfluous shell
doth not include; to break the marble spell
is all the hand that serves the brain can do.
Stone describes the process: "He was not working from his drawings or clay models; they
had all been put away. He was carving from the images in his mind. His eyes and hands
knew where every line, curve, mass must emerge, and at what depth in the heart of the
stone to create the low relief."
(The Agony and the Ecstasy. Doubleday, 1961: 6, 144.)
^5 First Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology in October 1989, a talk titled "The
Future of Computation." Published in Crandall, B. C. and James Lewis, editors.
Nanotechnology: Research and Perspectives. MIT Press, 1992: 269. See also
www.foresight.org/Conferences/MNT01/Nano1.html.
^6 In his 1963 novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut imagined a gray-goo-like accident where
a form of ice called ice-nine, which becomes solid at a much higher temperature, freezes
the oceans.
^7 Kauffman, Stuart. "Self-replication: Even Peptides Do It." Nature, 382, August 8,
1996: 496. See www.santafe.edu/sfi/People/kauffman/sak-peptides.html.
^8 Else, Jon. The Day After Trinity: J. Robert Oppenheimer and The Atomic Bomb
(available at www.pyramiddirect.com).
^9 This estimate is in Leslie's book The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of
Human Extinction, where he notes that the probability of extinction is substantially
higher if we accept Brandon Carter's Doomsday Argument, which is, briefly, that "we
ought to have some reluctance to believe that we are very exceptionally early, for
instance in the earliest 0.001 percent, among all humans who will ever have lived. This
would be some reason for thinking that humankind will not survive for many more
centuries, let alone colonize the galaxy. Carter's doomsday argument doesn't generate
any risk estimates just by itself. It is an argument for revising the estimates which we
generate when we consider various possible dangers." (Routledge, 1996: 1, 3, 145.)
^10 Clarke, Arthur C. "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids." Science, June 5, 1998.
Reprinted as "Science and Society" in Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays,
1934-1998. St. Martin's Press, 1999: 526.
^11 And, as David Forrest suggests in his paper "[DEL: Regulating :DEL] Nanotechnology
Development," available at www.foresight.org/NanoRev/Forrest1989.html, "If we used
strict liability as an alternative to regulation it would be impossible for any
developer to internalize the cost of the risk (destruction of the biosphere), so
theoretically the activity of developing nanotechnology should never be undertaken."
Forrest's analysis leaves us with only government regulation to protect us—not a
comforting thought.
^12 Meselson, Matthew. "The Problem of Biological Weapons." Presentation to the 1,818th
Stated Meeting of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, January 13, 1999.
(minerva.amacad.org/archive/bulletin4.htm)
^13 Doty, Paul. "The Forgotten Menace: Nuclear Weapons Stockpiles Still Represent the
Biggest Threat to Civilization." Nature, 402, December 9, 1999: 583.
^14 See also Hans Bethe's 1997 letter to President Clinton, at www.fas.org/bethecr.htm.
^15 Hamilton, Edith. The Greek Way. W. W. Norton & Co., 1942: 35.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Bill Joy, cofounder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, was cochair of the
presidential commission on the future of IT research, and is coauthor of The Java
Language Specification. His work on the Jini pervasive computing technology was featured
in Wired 6.08.
