Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100 (22 page)

Some science fiction writers have relished the idea that we will all become detached from our bodies and exist as immortal beings of pure intelligence living inside some computer, contemplating deep thoughts. But who would want to live like that? Perhaps our descendants will not want to solve differential equations describing a black hole. In the future, people may want to spend more time listening to rock music the old-fashioned way than calculate the motions of subatomic particles while living inside a computer.

Greg Stock of UCLA goes further and finds there are few advantages to having our brains hooked up to a supercomputer. He said, “When I try to think of what I might gain by having a working link between my brain and a supercomputer, I am stymied if I insist on two criteria: that the benefits could not be as easily achieved through some other, noninvasive procedure, and that the benefits must be worth the discomforts of brain surgery.”

So although there are many possible options for the future, I personally believe that the most likely path is that we will build robots to be benevolent and friendly, enhance our own abilities to a degree, but follow the Cave Man Principle. We will embrace the idea of temporarily living the life of a superrobot via surrogates but will be resistant to the idea of permanently living out our lives inside a computer or altering our body until it becomes unrecognizable.

No one knows when robots may become as smart as humans. But personally, I would put the date close to the end of the century for several reasons.

First, the dazzling advances in computer technology have been due to Moore’s law. These advances will begin to slow down and might even stop around 2020–25, so it is not clear if we can reliably calculate the speed of computers beyond that. (See
Chapter 4
for more on the post-silicon era.) In this book, I have assumed that computer power will continue to grow, but at a slower rate.

Second, even if a computer can calculate at fantastic speeds like 10
¹⁶
calculations per second, this does not necessarily mean that it is smarter than us. For example, Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing machine, could analyze 200 million positions per second, beating the world champion. But Deep Blue, for all its speed and raw computing power, cannot do anything else. True intelligence, we learned, is much more than calculating chess positions.

For example, autistic savants can perform miraculous feats of memorization and calculation. But they have difficulty tying their shoelaces, getting a job, or functioning in society. The late Kim Peek, who was so remarkable that the movie
Rain Man
was based on his extraordinary life, memorized every word in 12,000 books and could perform calculations that only a computer could check. Yet he had an IQ of 73, had difficulty holding a conversation, and needed constant help to survive. Without his father’s assistance, he was largely helpless. In other words, the superfast computers of the future will be like autistic savants, able to memorize vast amounts of information, but not much more, unable to survive in the real world on their own.

Even if computers begin to match the computing speed of the brain, they will still lack the necessary software and programming to make everything work. Matching the computing speed of the brain is just the humble beginning.

Third, even if intelligent robots are possible, it is not clear if a robot can make a copy of itself that is smarter than the original. The mathematics behind self-replicating robots was first developed by the mathematician John von Neumann, who invented game theory and helped to develop the electronic computer. He pioneered the question of determining the minimum number of assumptions before a machine could create a copy of itself. However, he never addressed the question of whether a robot can make a copy of itself that is smarter than it. In fact, the very definition of “smart” is problematic, since there is no universally accepted definition of “smart.”

Certainly, a robot might be able to create a copy of itself with more memory and processing ability by simply upgrading and adding more chips. But does this mean the copy is smarter, or just faster? For example, an adding machine is millions of times faster than a human, with much more memory and processing speed, but it is certainly not smarter. So intelligence is more than just memory and speed.

Fourth, although hardware may progress exponentially, software may not. While hardware has grown by the ability to etch smaller and smaller transistors onto a wafer, software is totally different; it requires a human to sit down with a pencil and paper and write code. That is the bottleneck: the human.

Software, like all human creative activity, progresses in fits and starts, with brilliant insights and long stretches of drudgery and stagnation. Unlike simply etching more transistors onto silicon, which has grown like clockwork, software depends on the unpredictable nature of human creativity and whim. Therefore all predictions of a steady, exponential growth in computer power have to be qualified. A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and the weakest link is software and programming done by humans.

Engineering progress often grows exponentially, especially when it is a simple matter of achieving greater efficiency, such as etching more and more transistors onto a silicon wafer. But when it comes to basic research, which requires luck, skill, and unexpected strokes of genius, progress is more like “punctuated equilibrium,” with long stretches of time when not much happens, with sudden breakthroughs that change the entire terrain. If we look at the history of basic research, from Newton to Einstein to the present day, we see that punctuated equilibrium more accurately describes the way in which progress is made.

Fifth, as we have seen in the research for reverse engineering the brain, the staggering cost and sheer size of the project will probably delay it into the middle of this century. And then making sense of all this data may take many more decades, pushing the final reverse engineering of the brain to late in this century.

Sixth, there probably won’t be a “big bang,” when machines suddenly become conscious. As before, if we define consciousness as including the ability to make plans for the future by running simulations of the future, then there is a spectrum of consciousness. Machines will slowly climb up this scale, giving us plenty of time to prepare. This will happen toward the end of this century, I believe, so there is ample time to discuss various options available to us. Also, consciousness in machines will probably have its own peculiarities. So a form of “silicon consciousness” rather than pure human consciousness will develop first.

But this raises another question. Although there are mechanical ways to enhance our bodies, there are also biological ways. In fact, the whole thrust of evolution is the selection of better genes, so why not shortcut millions of years of evolution and take control of our genetic destiny?

No one really has the guts to say it, but if we could make better human beings by knowing how to add genes, why shouldn’t we?
—JAMES WATSON, NOBEL LAUREATE

I don’t really think our bodies are going to have any secrets left within this century. And so, anything that we can manage to think about will probably have a reality.
—DAVID BALTIMORE, NOBEL LAUREATE

I don’t think the time is quite right, but it’s close. I’m afraid, unfortunately, that I’m in the last generation to die.
—GERALD SUSSMAN

The gods of mythology possessed the ultimate power: the power over life and death, the ability to heal the sick and prolong life. Foremost in our prayers to the gods was deliverance from disease and illness.

In Greek and Roman mythology, there is the tale of Eos, the beautiful goddess of the dawn. One day, she fell deeply in love with a handsome mortal, Tithonus. She had a perfect body and was immortal, but Tithonus would eventually age, wither away, and perish. Determined to save her lover from this dismal fate, she beseeched Zeus, the father of the gods, to grant Tithonus the gift of immortality so that they could spend eternity together. Taking pity on these lovers, he granted Eos her wish.

But Eos, in her haste, forgot to ask for eternal youth for him. So Tithonus became immortal, but his body aged. Unable to die, he became more and more decrepit and decayed, living an eternity with pain and suffering.

So that is the challenge facing the science of the twenty-first century. Scientists are now reading the book of life, which includes the complete human genome, and which promises us miraculous advances in understanding aging. But life extension without health and vigor can be an eternal punishment, as Tithonus tragically found out.

By the end of this century, we too shall have much of this mythical power over life and death. And this power won’t be limited to healing the sick but will be used to enhance the human body and even create new life-forms. It won’t be through prayers and incantations, however, but through the miracle of biotechnology.

One of the scientists who is unlocking the secrets of life is Robert Lanza, a man in a hurry. He is a new breed of biologist, young, energetic, and full of fresh ideas—so many breakthroughs to be made and so little time. Lanza is riding the crest of the biotech revolution. Like a kid in a candy store, he delights in delving into uncharted territory, making breakthroughs in a wide range of hot-button topics.

A generation or two ago, the pace was much different. You might find biologists leisurely examining obscure worms and bugs, patiently studying their detailed anatomy and agonizing over what Latin names to give them.

Not Lanza.

I met him one day at a radio studio for an interview and was immediately impressed by his youth and boundless creativity. He was, as usual, rushing between experiments. He told me he got his start in this fast-moving field in the most unusual way. He came from a modest working-class family south of Boston, where few went to college. But while in high school, he heard the astonishing news about the unraveling of DNA. He was hooked. He decided on a science project: cloning a chicken in his room. His bewildered parents did not know what he was doing, but they gave him their blessing.

Determined to get his project off the ground, he went to Harvard to get advice. Not knowing anyone, he asked a man he thought was a janitor for some directions. Intrigued, the janitor took him to his office. Lanza found out later that the janitor was actually one of the senior researchers at the lab. Impressed by the sheer audacity of this brash young high school student, he introduced Lanza to other scientists there, including many Nobel-caliber researchers, who would change his life. Lanza compares himself to Matt Damon’s character in the movie
Good Will Hunting,
where a scruffy, street-smart working-class kid astonishes the professors at MIT, dazzling them with his mathematical genius.

Today, Lanza is chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology, with hundreds of papers and inventions to his credit. In 2003, he made headlines when the San Diego Zoo asked him to clone a banteng, an endangered species of wild ox, from the body of one that had died twenty-five years before. Lanza successfully extracted usable cells from the carcass, processed them, and sent them to a farm in Utah. There, the fertilized cell was implanted into a female cow. Ten months later he got news that his latest creation had just been born. On another day, he might be working on “tissue engineering,” which may eventually create a human body shop from which we can order new organs, grown from our own cells, to replace organs that are diseased or have worn out. Another day, he could be working on cloning human embryo cells. He was part of the historic team that cloned the world’s first human embryo for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells.

Lanza is riding a tidal wave of discovery, created by unleashing the knowledge hidden within our DNA. Historically, medicine has gone through at least three major stages. In the first, which lasted for tens of thousands of years, medicine was dominated by superstition, witchcraft, and hearsay. With most babies dying at birth, the average life expectancy hovered around eighteen to twenty years. Some useful medicinal herbs and chemicals were discovered during this period, like aspirin, but for the most part there was no systematic way of finding new therapies. Unfortunately, any remedies that actually worked were closely guarded secrets. The “doctor” earned his income by pleasing wealthy patients and had a vested interest in keeping his potions and chants secret.

During this period, one of the founders of the Mayo Clinic kept a private diary when he made the rounds of his patients. He candidly wrote in his diary that there were only two active ingredients in his black bag that actually worked: a hacksaw and morphine. The hacksaw was used to cut off diseased limbs, and the morphine was used to deaden the pain of the amputation. They worked every time. Everything else in his black bag was snake oil and a fake, he lamented sadly.

The second stage of medicine began in the nineteenth century, with the coming of the germ theory and better sanitation. Life expectancy in the United States in 1900 rose to forty-nine years. When tens of thousands of soldiers were dying on the European battlefields of World War I, there was an urgent need for doctors to conduct real experiments, with reproducible results, which were then published in medical journals. The kings of Europe, horrified that their best and brightest were being slaughtered, demanded real results, not hocus-pocus. Doctors, instead of trying to please wealthy patrons, now fought for legitimacy and fame by publishing papers in peer-reviewed journals. This set the stage for advances in antibiotics and vaccines that increased life expectancy to seventy years and beyond.