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Excerpt:
Chapter One: Escape Velocity
Progressive change sculpted our universe and our societies, but only very recently has
human culture seen beyond the short cycles of day and night, summer and winter, birth and
death, to recognize it. No sooner was universal change noted in the traces of history than
its accelerating pace became discernible in a single lifetime. By almost any
measure--energy, information, speed, distance, temperature, variety--the developed world
is growing more capable and complex faster than ever before--a statement that has been
true for at least half a millennium, and mostly true since the agricultural revolution and
the invention of writing over five thousand years ago.
Many of the products of this accelerating process--written language, city-states, and
automation, for instance--sped it further. Today the pace strains the limits of human
adaptability: the lessons of a technical education are often obsolete before the education
is complete. Nevertheless, the acceleration continues, as machines take over where humans
falter. In the 1970s photographic patterns for manufacturing integrated circuits with
dozens or hundreds of components were designed and drafted by hand, on plastic sheets.
Today's computer chips contain tens of millions of components, placed by design programs
running on older computers. Not only did one generation of machines make possible the
next, they enabled it to appear in less than a year, compared to an average of three years
for purely human designs.
Self-accelerated computer evolution affects other technical fields, and almost every
design engineer's work is being amplified and accelerated by computer workstations and
communications. The many parts of the new Boeing 777 aircraft, to pick a major example,
were designed in parallel, by distantly separated engineering teams, with powerful
three-dimensional modeling programs. Subassembly designs were checked for compatibility by
programs that put together the aircraft in simulation, detecting major and minor
mechanical, electrical, control, and aerodynamic problems while they were easy to correct,
long before a physical prototype was built. The result was an aircraft of unprecedented
complexity brought into existence in half the time of previous models. In the same way,
chemists and biologists are replacing years of wet lab work with weeks of molecular
simulation. Architects quadrupled their business capacity by replacing drafting boards and
manual bookkeeping with computer workstations in the early 1990s.
Vanishing Verities
"Things tossed up come down" is an early theory of gravity, demonstrably true in
everyday life, unquestioned for millennia, until Newton developed a new theory of gravity
that gave stable orbits to sufficiently fast satellites, and let slightly faster
projectiles escape to infinity. "Wood rubbed warm cools down" may have been a
truism for our distant ancestors, until one of them rubbed hard enough to achieve ignition
temperature, whereupon the wood flamed hotter than ever on its own. "Machines break
down" is a demonstrable truth of industrial society, but as machines increasingly
design, diagnose, and repair themselves, it too will be suddenly invalidated. Once given
"escape velocity," machines more capable than any we know will, without further
help from us, grow more capable still, learning from the world, as we did in our
biological and cultural evolution. The wood is already smoldering.
Like passengers in a rising elevator, those riding a developmental curve may be unaware of
the altitude already reached--until a passing window shows a glimpse of the ground. In
1930 an Australian gold-prospecting party flew into a supposedly uninhabited area deep in
the New Guinea highlands and encountered a human culture separated fifty thousand years
from their own. The naked inhabitants, some with stone spears, were driven into paroxysms
of confusion and religious fear and awe by the giant roaring silver birds that alighted
near their mud-thatch villages to release droopy-skinned white men without genitals who,
among too many wonders, captured their souls in small black boxes labeled Kodak.
In 1991 Davi Kopenawa took the giant step of being the first to leave the jungle to speak
for his people, the Amazonian Yanomami. The Yanomami, with a population of about twenty
thousand the largest remaining stone-age tribe, were isolated from the rest of the world
for ten thousand years until this century, when missionaries, anthropologists, and, more
recently, highway workers and gold miners, began to invade their homeland. Accompanied by
a translator, wearing his only possessions, sneakers, jeans, and a sweater given to him
for the trip, he visited New York, Washington, and Pittsburgh, to beg to be left alone:
foreign diseases, especially malaria, had killed one-fifth of the Brazilian Yanomami in
five years.
What he saw in the cities horrified him: crazy ant-people crawling in sky-high huts
thinking about cars, money, and possessions instead of relatives and nature. In a zoo he
identified with the listless animals among plastic plants, steel vines, and bad air.
"If I had to live in your cities for a month, I'd die. There's no forest here."
Kopenawa has a point. The world we inhabit is radically different, culturally and
physically, from the one to which we adapted biologically. We were shaped during the last
two million years by an ongoing Ice Age--a time of continuous climatic change, as every
few tens of thousands of years glaciers advanced and retreated over most of the earth (the
current warm spell is but an interglacial period). Such variability favors high
adaptability, by making life untenable for the rigidly optimized. In our species the
adaptability took the form of a hypertrophied brain and an extended childhood, supporting
an extreme cultural plasticity, along with an ever more expressive language to rapidly
pass on adopted behaviors: as we grow to puberty we can learn equally well to be fur-clad
arctic hunters, robed desert nomads, or naked equatorial gatherers. For almost all of
human history, as still in Kopenawa's world, cultural inheritance played a straightforward
supporting role: providing the how for the basic needs of life. But somewhere, about five
thousand years ago in our cultural history, the relationship between biology and culture
began to alter radically.
The Cultural Revolution
Culture lets us rapidly accommodate to environmental changes because it is a medium for a
new kind of evolution. Collections of rules for behavior (memes, to use a term invented by
Richard Dawkins) pass from generation to generation, mutating and competing with
alternatives, just as biological genes do--only much more quickly. A biological trait
requires generations of selective replication to become established in a population, but a
cultural practice can be altered, and spread through an entire tribe, many times in a
single human lifetime. After hundreds of thousands of years of slow cultural meander, our
ancestors stumbled into a set of behaviors that catalyzed the creation of ever more
behaviors and memories, and physical implements to support them: a self-accelerating cycle
that is reaching escape velocity today. What exactly sparked the tinder, apart from simple
accumulation of useful skills, is a fascinating question. A baby boom or forced migration
in an improving climate may have led to shortages in hunting and gathering resources,
forcing would-be survivors into agricultural life, and eventually the first agricultural
civilizations, in the Near East and China ten millennia ago.
For millions of years, primates, our ancestors included, have lived in tribes. Among
primates (as in canine packs, but unlike herd animals) individuals know one other
personally, and maintain long-term one-on-one relationships, involving dominance,
submission, friendship, enmity, debts, grudges, and intrigues--the stuff of soap opera.
Complex socialization gives the tribe great abilities. In critical circumstances,
individuals know who to trust with what tasks. But remembering many things about many
individuals ought to take storage space in the brain. Robin Dunbar has indeed found a
tightly correlated linear relation between brain size and troop size in monkeys and
apes--macaque monkeys, for instance, form bands of about fifteen, while larger-brained
chimpanzees and gorillas live in tribes of thirty to forty members. This soap-opera
connection likely drove the evolution towards large brains in primates, since tribes
compete for food and shelter-providing territory, and a coordinated larger group is likely
to beat out a smaller one, giving large tribes, and thus large brains, an advantage.
Dunbar extrapolates the primate group/brain ratio curve to human brain size, and finds our
natural tribes should have about two hundred individuals. In fact, this is just the
maximum size of self-contained nonhierarchical human groups: Yanomami Indian villages and
gypsy bands, for instance, and perhaps hippie communes. Modern society's overlapping webs
of individual acquaintances muddle but don't eliminate our tribal limitations, evidenced
in ubiquitous anecdotes. My wife, involved in many church organizations, notes that
growing churches have major crises of identity when their membership reaches about two
hundred. The computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University was known for its
cooperative, "family" atmosphere in the 1970s, when it numbered about a hundred.
It grew rapidly in the 1980s, and in the 1990s the over six hundred members of the School
of Computer Science are divided into several departments and projects that are strangers
to one another.
The agricultural civilizations were able to grow far beyond village size because of a
series of social inventions, among them institutional roles like King, Soldier, Priest,
Merchant, Tax Collector, and Peasant, clearly marked by costumery, ceremony, and standard
rituals, substituting for the impossible task of remembering thousands of individual
relationships. New solutions bring new problems. Cheaters in villages are easily
recognized and punished but find many opportunities and hiding places in the anonymity of
large society. Enforcement institutions--Moral authorities, Lawmakers, Police, and
Criminal labels--partially countered the breakdown of cooperation. The problem of keeping
track of who owes what to whom, a matter of memory in a village but a criminal opportunity
in a city, encouraged the invention of record keeping: tokens, tally marks, a number
system, and eventually writing. The new social functions involved complicated procedures
unlike those of tribal life, many thus slow and difficult to learn. Enter extended formal
training periods, eventually Teachers and Schools.
Like villages, civilizations compete with one another for resources and may gain advantage
from institutions that foster innovations--and incidentally put cultural evolution into
higher gear. Agriculture benefits from precise knowledge of the season, and thus of
celestial cycles, and military and civil projects go better with professional thinkers and
builders on the job, so the positions of Astronomer/Astrologer, Philosopher/Magician, and
Engineer/Artisan become part of the picture. The innovations of professional thinkers,
transmitted by increasingly effective written language over huge distances and times,
accelerate innovation itself. The result is a process far, far faster than biological
evolution that produces ever more elaborate places for humans to live, ever swifter ways
for them to move and to communicate, ever larger storehouses of previous thought, ever
more territory occupied, ever more energy controlled. It also produces a world
increasingly unlike the villages, fixed and nomadic, in which human behavior evolved, and
so makes ever greater demands on our adaptability.
Strange Ducks, Out of Water
Today, as our machines approach human competence across the board, our stone-age biology
and our information-age lives grow ever more mismatched. Work in the developed countries
has become increasingly specialized and esoteric, and it now often takes a graduate
degree, representing half a working lifetime of sustained learning, to master the
necessary unnatural skills. As societal roles become yet more complex, specialized, and
far removed from our inborn predispositions, they require increasing years of rehearsal to
master, while providing fewer visceral rewards. The essential functions of a technical
society elude the understanding of an increasing fraction of the population. Even the most
successful individuals often find their work boring, difficult, unnatural, and
unsatisfying, more like a sustained circus performance than a real life. Caffeine
substitutes for natural adrenaline. Those original activities that do remain--eating and
child raising, for instance--are often squeezed by the strange new tasks. The mismatch
between instinct and necessity induces alienation in the midst of unprecedented physical
plenty.
By the standards of our inherited tribal psychology, we are sick and crazy. Physically,
however, we are healthier and live longer than ever, and we have vastly more options in
every sphere of activity. Few city-dwellers would be prepared to adopt the circumscribed
life in a stone-age forest village, despite uneasiness with their own. On the contrary,
much of the third world is rushing to overcome its physical problems by adopting the
patterns of the developed nations (Davi Kopenawa himself is now a regular speaker at
ecological meetings around the world, and his stories and commentary are extensively
represented on the World Wide Web!). The urbanized, meanwhile, have devised substitutes
for some tribal experiences, for instance, churches and other social organizations that
bring together village-sized groups with a common sense of purpose, a shared experience, a
defining mythology, and uniform behavioral expectations. Others find release in
competitive sports (very like tribal wars), outdoor vacations, or even backyard barbecues.
Some business trips resemble mammoth-hunting forays but lack the scenery, quiet stalks,
and satisfying physical marksmanship--and a golfing weekend fills the void. But, as the
pace, diversity, and global geographic interconnectedness of life continues to increase,
even such occasional imitations of our ancestors' lifestyles are crowded out and may be
becoming less satisfying. The world is rushing away from our ancestral roots ever faster,
stretching the limits of both our biological and institutional adaptability.
Some individuals and communities have tried to isolate themselves from the problem. The
Pennsylvania Amish live in a perpetual state of early-nineteenth-century rural
industrialization. Some cloistered religious orders operate like isolated tribes.
Countercultural rural communes of the 1960s and 1970s deliberately resembled villages.
Yet, industrialized society's increasing population, accessibility, and competitive vigor
in all fields seems to erode such communities, who cannot reasonably, or legally, deny
members in need the benefits of modern medicine, inexpensive food, clothing, building
materials, useful machinery, and especially empowering, but distracting, education.
There are unhappy voices today calling for a worldwide rollback to an earlier state of
affairs. They are outvoted by the demands of billions for food, housing, and civilized
comforts. Yet, paradoxically, as our cultural artifacts achieve self-sustaining maturity,
they will provide the means to restore humanity and nature to an imitation of the wild
past.
Back to the Future
Productivity rose during the Industrial Revolution, as steadily improving machines
outperformed and displaced ever more human labor. Simple diffusion, and social innovations
like labor unions and profit taxes, widely distributed the consequent wealth. The wealth
expressed itself both in increased public and private consumption and increased leisure
time. During the last three centuries in the industrialized countries, slave and child
labor and hundred-hour factory work weeks have given way to under-forty-hour weeks and
mandatory retirement.
Short-term fluctuations in the trend notwithstanding, as machines assume more--eventually
all--of essential production, humans everywhere will be left with the options of the idle
rich. Work time is yoked to the strange needs of the enterprise, but idle time can be
structured to satisfy hunter-gatherer instincts. The human population will regain the
opportunity to organize its life in more natural patterns. A greener planet is a likely
result of this ongoing process. As societies industrialize and become wealthy, increased
consumption manifests itself in deforestation, pollution, and the like--to a point.
Further wealth reduces the manifestations of industry, by making the luxury of a greener
environment affordable. Advancing technology widens the options from which individuals
sculpt first their personal lives, but then also their communal world. The developed
countries of America, Asia, and Europe began their green return in recent decades, as
per-capita annual income grew beyond about $15,000. Many developing countries are just
reaching this turnaround point. Advanced robots will reinforce the trend indirectly, by
tremendously accelerating technological evolution and, for instance, allowing extreme
processes to be moved to outer space. They will contribute directly by substituting for
energy- and chemical-intensive industrial separation and shaping processes. A robot
population far exceeding the human one will achieve the same end much more efficiently by
tirelessly sorting and rearranging matter on a tiny scale with myriads of microscopic
fingers.
Any choice has consequences: by comfortably retreating to its roots, biological humanity
will leave the uncomfortable, uncharted but grand opportunities to others.
No less than today's organizations, fully automated companies will compete with one
another not only in routine manufacture and distribution, but also in planning,
development, and research. To robots built for it, outer space will offer unprecedented
energy, materials, room, and perhaps freedom from taxation for these activities--a
tremendous competitive advantage. Sooner rather than later, automated industry will grow
away from earth. The space industries will continuously devise their own improvements,
gaining rapidly in size, efficiency, diversity, and intelligence. The earthbound
"consumer outlet" parts of the operation, while not shrinking in absolute size,
will represent an ever-decreasing fraction of the whole. Old earth will become
insignificant on the ever grander scale of earth-spawned activity.
Robot industries will start as conversions of existing enterprises, retaining their
institutional, legal, and competitive structures. But then they will explore and exploit
expanding non-traditional options, some very unhuman. Our artificial progeny will grow
away from and beyond us, both in physical distance and structure, and in similarity of
thought and motive. In time their activities may become incompatible with old earth's
continued existence. Even so, it is likely that we, the historical root of their
transcendence, will be preserved in some form--though, to us, the form may seem extremely
strange. Just possibly, human personalities could participate in some way in the
mainstream of this future activity, either under the wings of superintelligent hosts, or
by being transformed into a compatible form--surely becoming very unhuman in the process.
There is an analogy between the evolution of the first living organisms from simpler
chemical processes several billion years ago and the development of technical civilization
from human manipulative and learning skills. Technical civilization, and the human minds
that support it, are the first feeble stirrings of a radically new form of existence, one
as different from life as life is from simple chemistry. Call the new arrangement Mind.
Unlike Life alone, which learns from its past, but is blind to its future, Mind can choose
among alternatives to imperfectly select its own destiny--even to amplify that very
ability.
Mind Fire
Chapter 2 reviews the state of the robot art, like a baby poised for sudden growth. The
following chapters mix predictions with suggested actions. One of the lessons of chaos
theory is that sensitive systems are impossible to predict but often easy to control.
Under that model, the future can sometimes be predicted, if one steadily nudges events
toward the prediction! Believable and physically possible predictions can themselves
nudge, by inspiring work. When such proactive predictions miss, it is often because they
overlook even more potent possibilities, rather than because they are unachievable.
In the thirteenth century Roger Bacon imagined high-speed worldwide travel--via
seven-league boots, rather than flying conveyances. In the sixteenth century Leonardo da
Vinci designed aircraft--powered by human muscle, rather than combustion engines. In the
nineteenth century Jules Verne anticipated submarine warfare--against wooden sailing
vessels, rather than armored battle fleets guarded by electronic senses and aircraft.
Shortly thereafter, H. G. Wells anticipated a world of the distant future with humanity
radically transformed--by Darwinian evolution, not directed engineering. Science fiction
of the early twentieth century, inspired by the theories, inventions, and speculations of
rocket pioneers like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Robert Goddard, and Hermann Oberth, is filled
with spacecraft--guided by slide-rule-wielding human navigators, not digital computers
(telephone, radio, and computers, in particular, and their dramatic applications, seem to
have taken prognosticators by surprise). There are no large fleets of dirigible airships
ferrying transatlantic passengers; faster and more manageable heavier-than-air craft
displaced them.
Barring cataclysms, I consider the development of intelligent machines a near-term
inevitability. Chapters 3 and 4 offer a scenario. Like airplanes, but unlike spaceships or
radio, machine intelligences will be direct imitations of something already existing
biologically. Every technical step toward intelligent robots has a rough evolutionary
counterpart, and each is likely to benefit its creators, manufacturers, and users. Each
advance will provide intellectual rewards, competitive advantages, and increased wealth
and options of all kinds. Each can make the world a nicer place to live. At the same time,
by performing better and cheaper, the robots will displace humans from essential roles.
Rather quickly, they could displace us from existence. I'm not as alarmed as many by the
latter possibility, since I consider these future machines our progeny, "mind
children" built in our image and likeness, ourselves in more potent form. Like
biological children of previous generations, they will embody humanity's best chance for a
long-term future. It behooves us to give them every advantage and to bow out when we can
no longer contribute.
But, as also with biological children, we can probably arrange for a comfortable
retirement before we fade away. Some biological children can be convinced to care for
elderly parents. Similarly, "tame" superintelligences could be created and
induced to protect and support us, for a while. Such relationships require advance
planning and diligent maintenance. Chapter 5 offers suggestions.
It is the "wild" intelligences, however, those beyond our constraints, to whom
the future belongs. The available tools for peeking into that strange
future--extrapolation, analogy, abstraction, and reason--are, of course, totally
inadequate. Yet, even they suggest surreal happenings. Chapter 6's robots sweep into space
in a wave of colonization, but their wake converts everything into increasingly pure
thinking stuff. A "Mind Fire" will burn across the universe. Inside the Mind,
considered in Chapter 7, physical law loses its primacy to purposes, goals,
interpretations, and God knows what else...
Read our Exclusive Interview with the Author.
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