Be Afraid Source: The Atlantic Monthly Group April 6, 2000
If the digital revolution is soon to produce what Bill
Joy -- one of the world's leading technologists -- fears is a
dystopian nightmare, the only hope for humanity may be the end of
capitalism as we know it. Try selling that in an election year
"This is the first moment in the history of our planet
when any species, by its own involuntary actions, has become a danger
to itself -- as well as to vast numbers of others." In the projectable future robots will replace
"biological humans" as economic actors. Unable to compete in the
marketplace with their super-intelligent creations, human beings won't
be able to afford what they need to live and will "be squeezed out of
existence." That is the
dystopian vision of robotics. The utopian vision is that humans will
attain immortality by "downloading" themselves into the undying
electronic being of robots.
Genetic engineering will give evil new life, putting the
power to loose new plagues on humanity into the hands of terrorists,
madmen, and despots. Genetic engineering will soon allow our
descendants to end hunger, to create myriad new species with myriad
scientific and economic possibilities, to increase our life-span, and
to improve our quality of life in dimensions beyond our present means
to calculate (in the future we can all be blondes!).
Nanotechnology -- manufacturing at a molecular level --
will create plants that will "outcompete real plants," surrounding us
with an inedible jungle and spawning "omnivorous bacteria" that, wind
borne, will spread a self-replicating pollen that "could reduce the
biosphere to dust in a matter of days." Nanotechnology promises to
achieve huge results through the manipulation of the infinitesimal.
Molecular-level "assemblers" engineered by nanotechnology will allow a
grateful humanity to cure cancer, to abandon the use of fossil fuels
before they render the planet uninhabitable (replacing them with
cost-effective, environmentally salubrious solar power), and to
compact all knowledge into a wristwatch.
These clashing vistas of the possible are taken from a
horizon-widening 20,000 word article in the April issue of Wired by
Bill Joy, the "Chief Scientist" and cofounder of Sun Microsystems. The
Chief Scientist is afraid of science. The twenty-first-century
technologies of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics (GNR) could
give us "knowledge-enabled mass destruction" to supplement existing
arsenals of twentieth-century triumphs of mass destruction like
nuclear bombs and germ warfare. Not since Jonathan Schell's 1982
vision of nuclear devastation, The Fate of the Earth, has one seen a
preview of apocalypse to compare with this passage:
I think it is no exaggeration to say that 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. Humankind's only method of escape
from a future so terrible as to drive us off the planet is
"relinquishment: to limit development of the technologies that are too
dangerous, by limiting our pursuit of
certain kinds of knowledge" -- a dread step contemplated by scientists
Joy respects.
Relinquishment will require a degree of monitoring and
verification that only a government with near-dictatorial powers could
enforce -- and remember, this is the good news. Government has no
monopoly on GNR technologies, as it does on NBC -- nuclear,
biological, and chemical -- weapons of mass destruction. The GNR
revolution is being led by the private sector, meaning that, to
achieve relinquishment, private businesses will have to significantly
evolve into semi-public
entities under the total scrutiny of thought-police. This is
incompatible with capitalism as we know it. In history's bitterest
irony, the "knowledge economy" will be the end of Western man's
Faustian drive to know at any cost.
To ponder questions of this heft in an election year,
when no candidate in his right mind will ask any member of the
electorate to sacrifice anything, is to despair of democracy. If two
dollars a gallon for gasoline has the voters in an uproar, imagine
their reaction to Joy's thought police! Politics is more and more
about disguising problems than about bringing important issues to the
fore. The politics of candor can't seem to get traction against the
politics of escape. Increasingly, candidates who identify problems so
as to make issues of them -- Bill Bradley making universal health
insurance
the justification of his candidacy; John McCain running against
systemic corruption -- get penalized for ruffling the national
complacency. Politics needs to be made safe for bad news before issues
like global warming, much less the relinquishment of dangerous
technology, can get a serious hearing.
Joy thinks our "great capacity of caring" for the things
we love about existence will somehow see us through the end of
capitalism and of knowledge as we know it, but this closing flourish
of optimism is at dramatic variance with the inventory of horribles he
parades in an article comfortlessly titled, "Why the future doesn't
need us."
Jack Beatty is a senior editor at The Atlantic Monthly
and the author of The World According to Peter Drucker (1997) and The
Rascal King: The Life and Times of James Michael Curley (1992).
by Jack Beatty
All material copyright © 2000 All rights reserved.
--Carl Sagan