The Human Age (26 page)
It’s been suggested that we really have two selves now, the physical one and a second self that’s always present in our absence—an online self we also have to groom and maintain, a self people can respond to even when we’re not available. As a result everyone goes through two adolescences on the jagged and painfully exposed road to a sense of identity.
Surely we can inhabit both worlds with poise, dividing our time between the real and the virtual. Ideally, we won’t sacrifice one for the other. We’ll play outside and visit parks and wilds on foot, and also enjoy technological nature as a mental seasoning, turning to it for what it does best: illuminate all the hidden and mysterious facets of nature we can’t experience or fathom on our own.
A
t the Toronto Zoo, Matt offers Budi one of several musical apps—a piano keyboard—and Budi stretches four long fingers through the bars and knuckle-taps an atonal chord, then several more.
“There you go! That’s good!” Matt says encouragingly. “Do a couple more.” One prismatic chord follows another, as Budi knuckle-dances across the iPad.
I’m reminded of the YouTube video in which Panbanisha, a nineteen-year-old bonobo at the Language Research Center in Atlanta, is introduced to a full-size keyboard for the first time by the musician Peter Gabriel. Sitting on the piano bench, she considers the keyboard for a moment, then noodles around on it, discovers a note she likes, then finds the octave and picks out notes within it, creating a melody that floats above Gabriel’s improvised background. Especially wondrous is her sense of musical timing, the negative space between notes when, neither rushed nor dragged, each note hovers in the air like a diver at the arc of a dive, before falling into a shared pool of reverberating silence, from which, at a pleasing interval,
another note arises. After a while, she cuts loose and jams harmonies with his vocals.
“There was clear, sharp, musical intelligence at work,” Gabriel says. She was “tender and open and expressive.”
Her brother Kanzi came in next, and even though he’d never sat at a piano before, when he saw how much attention his sister was getting, “he threw down his blanket like James Brown discarding one of his cloaks,” Gabriel says, “and then does this, you know, fantastic sort of triplet improvisation.”
Gabriel finds orangutans the bluesmen of the ape world, “who always look a little sad but they’re amazingly soulful.”
At seven, Budi is still a kid, not a bluesman, and he enjoys playing memory and cognitive games on the iPad, or using the musical and drawing apps, but he’s most fascinated by YouTube videos of other orangutans.
Matt explains, tenderly, that he believes in offering orangutans a way to communicate nonverbally with other apes, including us. Keepers could always hand them things, but if the orangs “could tell anybody what they want, then their lives would get a lot more fulfilling.”
The most ambitious version of that desire is known as the Interspecies Internet. Matt has heard of it, and thinks it would be a cool thing to do, though the logistics might be tough. Ever since the 1980s, the cognitive psychologist Diana Reiss, who studies animal intelligence, has been teaching dolphins to use an underwater keyboard (soon to be replaced with a touchscreen) to ask for food, toys, or favorite activities. She and the World Wide Web pioneer (and Chief Internet Evangelist at Google) Vent Cerf, Peter Gabriel, and Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, are combining their wide-ranging talents to launch a touchscreen network for cockatoos, dolphins, octopuses, great apes, parrots, elephants, and other intelligent animals to communicate directly with humans and each other.
When the four introduced the idea to the world at a TED Talk,
Gabriel said: “Perhaps the most amazing tool man has created is the Internet. What would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces—visual, audio—to allow us to communicate with the remarkable beings we share the planet with?” He told of his great respect for the intelligence of apes, and how, growing up on a farm in England, he used to peer into the eyes of cattle and sheep and wonder what they were thinking.
In response to those who say, “The Internet is dehumanizing us. Why are we imposing it on animals?” Gabriel replied: “If you look at a lot of technology, you’ll find that the first wave dehumanizes. The second wave, if it’s got good feedback and smart designers, can superhumanize.” He’d love for any intelligent species that is interested to explore the Internet in the same way we do.
Cerf added that we shouldn’t restrict the Internet to one species. Other sentient species should be part of the network, too. And, in that spirit, the most important aspect of the project is learning how to communicate with species “who are not us but share a sensory environment.”
Gershenfeld said that when he saw the video clip of Panbanisha jamming with Gabriel, he was struck by the history of the Internet. “It started as the Internet of mostly middle-aged white men,” he said. “I realized that we humans had missed something—the rest of the planet.”
If the Interspecies Internet is the next logical step, what will it be a prelude to? Gershenfeld looks forward to “computers without keypads or mice,” controlled by reins of thought, prompted by waves of feelings and memories. It’s one thing to be able to translate our ideas into the physical environment, but a giant step for humankind to do that with thoughts alone. Telekinesis used to belong only to science fiction, but we’re well on our way to that ascendancy now, as paralyzed patients learn to wield prosthetic arms and propel exoskeleton legs via muscular thoughts. These possibilities change how we imagine the brain, no longer a skull-bound captive.
“Forty years ago,” Cerf said, “we wrote the script of the Internet. Thirty
years ago we turned it on. We thought we were building a system to connect computers together. But we quickly learned that it’s a system for connecting people.” Now we’re “figuring out how to communicate with something that’s not a person. You know where this is going,” Cerf continued. “These actions with other animals will teach us, ultimately, how we might interact with an alien species from another world. I can hardly wait.” Cerf is leading a NASA initiative to create an Interplanetary Internet, which can be used by crews on spacecraft between the planets. Who knows what spin-off Internets will follow.
Reiss pointed out that dolphins are mighty alien. “These are true
non
terrestrials.”
The Apps for Apes program is but one part of our postindustrial, nanotech, handcrafted, digitally stitched world in which luminous webs help us relate to friends, strangers, and other intelligent life forms, whether or not they have a brain.
YOUR PASSION FLOWER
IS SEXTING YOU
L
ife takes many forms, as does
intelligence
—plants may not possess a brain, but they can be diabolically clever, manipulative, and vicious. So it was only a matter of time. Plants have begun texting for help. Thanks to clever new digital devices, a dry philodendron, undernourished hibiscus, or sadly neglected wandering Jew can either text or tweet to its owner over the Internet. Humans like to feel appreciated, so a begonia may also send a simple “Thank you” text—when it’s
happy
, as gardeners like to say, meaning healthy and well tended. Picture your Boston fern home alone placing botani
calls
. But why should potted plants be the only ones to reassure their humans? Another company has found a way for crops to send a text message in unison, letting their farmer know if she’s doing a good enough job to deserve a robust harvest. Sensors lodged in the soil respond to moisture and send prerecorded messages customized by the owner. What is the sound of one hand of bananas clapping?
Plants texting humans may be new, but malcontent plants have always been chatting among themselves. When an elm tree is being
attacked by insects, it does the chemical equivalent of broadcasting
I’m hurt! You could be next!
alerting others in its grove to whip up some dandy poisons. World-class chemists, plants vie with Lucrezia Borgia dressed in green. If a human kills with poison, we label it a wicked and premeditated crime, one no plea of “self-defense” can excuse. But plants dish out their nastiest potions every day, and we wholeheartedly forgive them. They may lack a mind, or even a brain, but they do react to injury, fight to survive, act purposefully, enslave humans (through the likes of coffee, tobacco, opium), and gab endlessly among themselves.
Strawberry, bracken, clover, reeds, bamboo, ground elder, and lots more all grow their own social networks—delicate runners (really horizontal stems) linking a grove of individuals. If a caterpillar chews on a white clover leaf, the message races through the colony, which ramps up its chemical weaponry. Stress a walnut tree and it will brew its own caustic aspirin and warn its relatives to do the same. Remember Molly Ivins’s needle-witted quip about an old Texan congressman: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day”? She clearly misjudged the acumen of plants. Plants are not mild-mannered. Some can be murderous, seductive, deceitful, venomous, unscrupulous, sophisticated, and downright barbaric.
Since they can’t run after a mate, they go to phenomenal lengths to con animals into performing sex for them, using a vaudeville trunk full of costumes. For instance, some orchids disguise themselves as the sex organs of female bees so that male bees will try to mate with them and leave wearing pollen pantaloons. Since they can’t run from danger, they devise a pharmacopeia of poisons and an arsenal of simple weapons: hideous killers like strychnine and atropine; ghoulish blisterers like poison ivy and poison sumac; slashers like holly and thistle waving scalpel-sharp spines. Blackberries and roses wield belts of curved thorns. Each hair of a stinging nettle brandishes a tiny syringe full of formic acid and histamine to make us itch or run.
Just in case you’re tempted to cuddle your passion flower when you teach it to send text messages—resist the urge. Passion flowers
release cyanide if their cell walls are broken by a biting insect or a fumbling human. Of course, because nature is often an arms race, leaf-eating caterpillars have evolved an immunity to cyanide. Not us, alas. People have died from accidentally ingesting passion flower, daffodils, yew, autumn crocuses, monkshood, rhododendron, hyacinths, peace lilies, foxglove, oleander, English ivy, and the like. And one controversial theory about the Salem witch trials is that the whole shameful drama owes its origin to an especially wet winter when the rye crop was infected with ergot, an LSD-like hallucinogen that, perhaps breathed in by those grinding it into flour, caused women to act bewitched.
Today we’re of two minds about undisciplined plants just as we are about wild animals. We want them everywhere around us, but not roaming freely. We keep pet plants indoors or outside, provided they’re well behaved and don’t run riot. Weeds alarm us. And yet, as Patrick Blanc points out, “it is precisely this form of freedom of the plant world that most fascinates us.” Devious and dangerous as plants can be, they adorn every facet of our lives, from courtship to burial. They fill our rooms with piquant scents, dazzling tableaux, and gravity-defying aerial ballets and contortions as they unfold petals and climb toward the sun. Think of them as the original Cirque du Soleil. Many an African violet has given a human shrinking violet a much-needed interkingdom friendship.
Since they do demand looking after, and we do love our social networks, I expect texting will sweep the plant world, showering us with polite thank-yous and rude complaints. What’s next, a wisteria sexting every time it’s probed by a hummingbird? A bed of zinnias ranting to online followers as they go to seed?
Surely some playful wordsmiths need to dream up spirited texts for the botanicalling plants to send, telegrams of fulsome fawning or sarcastic taunt. Maybe a little soft soap: “You grow girl! Thanks for the TLC.” Or think how potent it would be, in the middle of a dinner date, to receive a text from your disgruntled poinsettia that reads: “With fronds like you who needs anemones?!”
WHEN ROBOTS WEEP,
WHO WILL COMFORT THEM?
I
t’s an Anthropocene magic trick, this extension of our digital selves over the Internet, far enough to reach other people, animals, plants, interplanetary crews, extraterrestrial visitors, the planet’s Google-mapped landscapes, and our habitats and possessions. If we can revive extinct life forms, create analog worlds, and weave new webs of communication—what about new webs of life? Why not synthetic life forms that can sense, feel, remember, and go through Darwinian evolution?
HOD LIPSON IS
the only man I know whose first name means “splendor” in Hebrew and a V-shaped wooden trough for carrying bricks over one shoulder in English. The paradox suits him physically and mentally. He looks strong and solid enough to carry a hod full of bricks, but he would be the first to suggest that the bricks might not resemble any you’ve ever known. They might even saunter, reinvent themselves, refuse to be stacked, devise their own mortar, fight back, explore, breed more of their kind, and boast a nimble
curiosity about the world. Splendor can be bricklike, if graced by complexity.
His lab building at Cornell University is home to many a skunkworks project in computer sciences or engineering, including some of DARPA’s famous design competitions (agile robots to clean up toxic disasters, superhero exoskeletons for soldiers, etc.). Nearby, two futuristic DARPA Challenge cars have been left like play-worn toys a few steps from a display case of antique engineering marvels and an elevator that’s old and slow as a butter churn.
On the second floor, a black spider-monkey-like robot clings to the top left corner of Lipson’s office door, intriguing but inscrutable, except to the inner circle for whom it’s a wry symbol and tradesman’s sign of the sort colonial shopkeepers used to hang out to identify their business: the apothecary’s mortar and pestle, the chandler’s candles, the cabinetmaker’s hickory-spindled armchair, the roboticist’s apprentice. Though in its prime the leggy bot drew the keen gaze of students, students come and go, as do the smart-bots they work on, which, coincidentally, seem to have a life span of about 3.5 years—how long it takes a student to finish a dissertation and graduate.