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[Reviewed in THE FUTURIST, November-December 2005]
Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies--and What It Means to Be Human by Joel Garreau. Doubleday. 2005. 384 pages. $26. Buy book.
Humanity's Near Future: Heaven, Hell, or Just Hanging On?
Optimists and pessimists duke it out over humanity's technological future. Extremely horrific futures may prove the most likely scenario, suggests Joel Garreau in Radical Evolution.
Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau's latest book Radical Evolution explores practically every wild extreme of future possibility imaginable. Sadly, as Garreau presents them, such extreme possibilities seem to be the most likely future.
This is not entirely the author's fault. As a conscientious reporter, Garreau generally keeps his personal opinions in the background. He devotes most of his 380-plus pages to carefully documented direct quotations and concise summaries of the views held by leading scientists and academics. The trouble is, the disagreements that divide these experts are so great that they leave little room to those who hope for gradual and sustainable human progress.
Optimists such as master inventor Ray Kurzweil, genetic engineer Gregory Stock, and nanotech guru K. Eric Drexler see humanity today on the verge of turning age-old dreams to everyday reality.
Kurzweil sees computers melding with humans to make flesh and blood an optional (though not necessarily optimal) choice for truly intelligent life. Stock believes inheritable genetic enhancements will boost human memory, strength, and life span to produce a super race, perhaps within the present generation. Drexler envisions tiny machines capable of building any molecule to order one atom at a time, making it easy to produce any substance on demand. These machines might manufacture table-ready food to feed the hungry, turn water to wine, or change lead into gold. Collectively, such visionaries foresee the present headlong rush of new discoveries and technologies creating a "heaven" of affluence for all humankind.
On the other hand, techno-pessimists such as Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy, political historian Francis Fukuyama, and Britain's Astronomer Royal Sir Martin Rees see these same developments leading the world straight to Hell.
Joy argues that, once computer intelligence exceeds that of humans, our machines will rule us, reducing us in status to mere pets, curiosities, or irrelevant (and expendable) nuisances. Fukuyama worries that the piecemeal introduction of genetic enhancement procedures--sure to be technically complex and expensive at first--will not only widen the existing gap between earth's haves and have-nots, but also make it permanently unbridgeable, producing violent conflict or eliminating universal human traits like sympathy and fellow feeling. Rees warns there is a whole range of technological disasters in the making--either by design or accident. Sooner or later, he seems to believe, swarms of self-replicating nanomachines are sure to run amok and devour everything on earth unless our physicists' reckless experiments with high-energy particle collisions disrupt the fabric of space-time first, setting off a catastrophe that would spread outward "at the speed of light to engulf the entire universe."
Yet, Garreau does talk with some who believe technology need not be either slave or master to humanity. One such moderate is Jaron Lanier, the father of "virtual reality" computer graphics. Emerging from a troubled and lonely childhood, Lanier found in computers a marvelous way to extend and deepen connections between human beings. The ease and excitement with which children take to computer gaming--and particularly interactive, online role-playing games--Garreau regards as clear evidence that computer-mediated contact is every bit as natural to humans as speech itself and should be encouraged.
Rather than seeing our old familiar world of mixed joys and woes suddenly transformed into pure Hell or perfect Heaven, Lanier conceives the future as a game, without fixed rules or any predetermined winner-take-all ending. He is confident that deeper understanding among individuals and groups can be achieved through more direct multisensory forms of machine-mediated communication. The resulting increases in empathy and cooperation, will, he believes, enable us to cope in innovative and effective ways with sudden threats and to capitalize on unforeseen opportunities arising from new scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.
This appealing argument certainly wins Garreau's approval. But it fails to solve one problem that techno-boosters and techno-pessimists alike agree on: the chance that exponential increases in human knowledge or environmental stress may abruptly reach a "singularity," beyond which none of our accumulated knowledge or sophisticated tools will be able to control or even positively influence the new circumstances shaping our existence.
The few suggestions offered for slowing the pace of change are unconvincing. For example, asking research scientists to voluntarily stop work in "dangerous" fields seems hopelessly naive, particularly when fame and fortune so frequently reward those who are first to publish and then patent their results. Laws that national governments impose to limit or ban certain types of research seem likely to merely shift cutting edge of work in the disputed field from one nation to another.
Overall, the message Radical Evolution conveys is that ever-expanding scientific research and experimentation are pretty much unstoppable, and that humanity's best chances to survive and flourish probably lie in anticipating how to deal with many possible but unpredictable impacts of new science and technology, rather than trying to postpone or stop drastic changes from occurring.
Things may all turn out well. More likely, they will lead to some large-scale disasters in one or more forms. But, like it or not, there seems little that ordinary citizens can do, individually or collectively, but stay alert and wait till something happens they can react to.
Well-documented, with index, extensive source notes, and a 32-page annotated recommended-reading list, Radical Evolution is a troubling yet stimulating read that unashamedly raises far more questions than it answers.
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