The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (73 page)

As another example, Joy advocates not publishing the gene sequences of pathogens on the Internet, which I also agree with. He would like to see scientists adopt regulations along these lines voluntarily and internationally, and he points out that “if we wait until after a catastrophe, we may end up with more severe and damaging regulations.” He says he hopes that “we will do such regulation lightly, so that we can get most of the benefits.”

Others, such as Bill McKibben, the environmentalist who was one of the first to warn against global warming, have advocated relinquishment of broad areas such as biotechnology and nanotechnology, or even of all technology. As I discuss in greater detail below (see
p. 410
), relinquishing broad fields would be impossible to achieve without essentially relinquishing all technical development. That in turn would require a
Brave New World
style of totalitarian government, banning all technology development. Not only would such a solution be inconsistent with our democratic values, but it would actually make the dangers worse by driving the technology underground, where only the least responsible practitioners (for example, rogue states) would have most of the expertise.

Intertwined Benefits
. . .

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.

                   —C
HARLES
D
ICKENS
,
A T
ALE OF
T
WO
C
ITIES

It’s like arguing in favor of the plough. You know some people are going to argue against it, but you also know it’s going to exist.

                   —J
AMES
H
UGHES, SECRETARY OF THE
T
RANSHUMANIST
A
SSOCIATION AND SOCIOLOGIST AT
T
RINITY
C
OLLEGE, IN A DEBATE
, “S
HOULD
H
UMANS
W
ELCOME OR
R
ESIST
B
ECOMING
P
OSTHUMAN?
”

Technology has always been a mixed blessing, bringing us benefits such as longer and healthier lifespans, freedom from physical and mental drudgery, and many novel creative possibilities on the one hand, while introducing new dangers. Technology empowers both our creative and destructive natures.

Substantial portions of our species have already experienced alleviation of the poverty, disease, hard labor, and misfortune that have characterized much of human history. Many of us now have the opportunity to gain satisfaction and meaning from our work, rather than merely toiling to survive. We have ever more powerful tools to express ourselves. With the Web now reaching deeply into less developed regions of the world, we will see major strides in the availability of high-quality education and medical knowledge. We can share culture, art, and humankind’s exponentially expanding knowledge base worldwide. I mentioned the World Bank’s report on the worldwide reduction in poverty in
chapter 2
and discuss that further in the next chapter.

We’ve gone from about twenty democracies in the world after World War II to more than one hundred today largely through the influence of decentralized electronic communication. The biggest wave of democratization, including the fall of the Iron Curtain, occurred during the 1990s with the growth of the Internet and related technologies. There is, of course, a great deal more to accomplish in each of these areas.

Bioengineering is in the early stages of making enormous strides in reversing disease and aging processes. Ubiquitous N and R are two to three decades away and will continue an exponential expansion of these benefits. As I reviewed in earlier chapters, these technologies will create extraordinary wealth,
thereby overcoming poverty and enabling us to provide for all of our material needs by transforming inexpensive raw materials and information into any type of product.

We will spend increasing portions of our time in virtual environments and will be able to have any type of desired experience with anyone, real or simulated, in virtual reality. Nanotechnology will bring a similar ability to morph the physical world to our needs and desires. Lingering problems from our waning industrial age will be overcome. We will be able to reverse remaining environmental destruction. Nanoengineered fuel cells and solar cells will provide clean energy. Nanobots in our physical bodies will destroy pathogens, remove debris such as misformed proteins and protofibrils, repair DNA, and reverse aging. We will be able to redesign all of the systems in our bodies and brains to be far more capable and durable.

Most significant will be the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, although nonbiological intelligence will quickly come to predominate. There will be a vast expansion of the concept of what it means to be human. We will greatly enhance our ability to create and appreciate all forms of knowledge from science to the arts, while extending our ability to relate to our environment and one another.

On the other hand . . .

. . .
and Dangers

“Plants” with “leaves” no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous “bacteria” could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicated swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop—at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.

                   —E
RIC
D
REXLER

As well as its many remarkable accomplishments, the twentieth century saw technology’s awesome ability to amplify our destructive nature, from Stalin’s tanks to Hitler’s trains. The tragic event of September 11, 2001, is another example of technologies (jets and buildings) taken over by people with agendas of destruction. We still live today with a sufficient number of nuclear weapons (not all of which are accounted for) to end all mammalian life on the planet.

Since the 1980s the means and knowledge have existed in a routine college
bioengineering lab to create unfriendly pathogens potentially more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
⁹
In a war-game simulation conducted at Johns Hopkins University called “Dark Winter,” it was estimated that an intentional introduction of conventional smallpox in three U.S. cities could result in one million deaths. If the virus were bioengineered to defeat the existing smallpox vaccine, the results could be far worse.
¹⁰
The reality of this specter was made clear by a 2001 experiment in Australia in which the mousepox virus was inadvertently modified with genes that altered the immune-system response. The mousepox vaccine was powerless to stop this altered virus.
¹¹
These dangers resonate in our historical memories. Bubonic plague killed one third of the European population. More recently the 1918 flu killed twenty million people worldwide.
¹²

Will such threats prevent the ongoing acceleration of the power, efficiency, and intelligence of complex systems (such as humans and our technology)? The past record of complexity increase on this planet has shown a smooth acceleration, even through a long history of catastrophes, both internally generated and externally imposed. This is true of both biological evolution (which faced calamities such as encounters with large asteroids and meteors) and human history (which has been punctuated by an ongoing series of major wars).

However, I believe we can take some encouragement from the effectiveness of the world’s response to the SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) virus. Although the possibility of an even more virulent return of SARS remains uncertain as of the writing of this book, it appears that containment measures have been relatively successful and have prevented this tragic outbreak from becoming a true catastrophe. Part of the response involved ancient, low-tech tools such as quarantine and face masks.

However, this approach would not have worked without advanced tools that have only recently become available. Researchers were able to sequence the DNA of the SARS virus within thirty-one days of the outbreak—compared to fifteen years for HIV. That enabled the rapid development of an effective test so that carriers could quickly be identified. Moreover, instantaneous global communication facilitated a coordinated response worldwide, a feat not possible when viruses ravaged the world in ancient times.

As technology accelerates toward the full realization of GNR, we will see the same intertwined potentials: a feast of creativity resulting from human intelligence expanded manyfold, combined with many grave new dangers. A quintessential concern that has received considerable attention is unrestrained nanobot replication. Nanobot technology requires trillions of such intelligently designed
devices to be useful. To scale up to such levels it will be necessary to enable them to self-replicate, essentially the same approach used in the biological world (that’s how one fertilized egg cell becomes the trillions of cells in a human). And in the same way that biological self-replication gone awry (that is, cancer) results in biological destruction, a defect in the mechanism curtailing nanobot self-replication—the so-called gray-goo scenario—would endanger all physical entities, biological or otherwise.

Living creatures—including humans—would be the primary victims of an exponentially spreading nanobot attack. The principal designs for nanobot construction use carbon as a primary building block. Because of carbon’s unique ability to form four-way bonds, it is an ideal building block for molecular assemblies. Carbon molecules can form straight chains, zigzags, rings, nanotubes (hexagonal arrays formed in tubes), sheets, buckyballs (arrays of hexagons and pentagons formed into spheres), and a variety of other shapes. Because biology has made the same use of carbon, pathological nanobots would find the Earth’s biomass an ideal source of this primary ingredient. Biological entities can also provide stored energy in the form of glucose and ATP.
¹³
Useful trace elements such as oxygen, sulfur, iron, calcium, and others are also available in the biomass.

How long would it take an out-of-control replicating nanobot to destroy the Earth’s biomass? The biomass has on the order of 10
⁴⁵
carbon atoms.
¹⁴
A reasonable estimate of the number of carbon atoms in a single replicating nanobot is about 10
⁶
. (Note that this analysis is not very sensitive to the accuracy of these figures, only to the approximate order of magnitude.) This malevolent nanobot would need to create on the order of 10
³⁹
copies of itself to replace the biomass, which could be accomplished with 130 replications (each of which would potentially double the destroyed biomass). Rob Freitas has estimated a minimum replication time of approximately one hundred seconds, so 130 replication cycles would require about three and a half hours.
¹⁵
However, the actual rate of destruction would be slower because biomass is not “efficiently” laid out. The limiting factor would be the actual movement of the front of destruction. Nanobots cannot travel very quickly because of their small size. It’s likely to take weeks for such a destructive process to circle the globe.

Based on this observation we can envision a more insidious possibility. In a two-phased attack, the nanobots take several weeks to spread throughout the biomass but use up an insignificant portion of the carbon atoms, say one out of every thousand trillion (10
¹⁵
). At this extremely low level of concentration the nanobots would be as stealthy as possible. Then, at an “optimal” point, the second phase would begin with the seed nanobots expanding rapidly in place to
destroy the biomass. For each seed nanobot to multiply itself a thousand trillionfold would require only about fifty binary replications, or about ninety minutes. With the nanobots having already spread out in position throughout the biomass, movement of the destructive wave front would no longer be a limiting factor.

The point is that without defenses, the available biomass could be destroyed by gray goo very rapidly. As I discuss below (see
p. 417
), we will clearly need a nanotechnology immune system in place before these scenarios become a possibility. This immune system would have to be capable of contending not just with obvious destruction but with any potentially dangerous (stealthy) replication, even at very low concentrations.

Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix—executive director and director of research of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, respectively—Eric Drexler, Robert Freitas, Ralph Merkle, and others have pointed out that future MNT manufacturing devices can be created with safeguards that would prevent the creation of self-replicating nanodevices.
¹⁶
I discuss some of these strategies below. However, this observation, although important, does not eliminate the specter of gray goo. There are other reasons (beyond manufacturing) that self-replicating nanobots will need to be created. The nanotechnology immune system mentioned above, for example, will ultimately require self-replication; otherwise it would be unable to defend us. Self-replication will also be necessary for nanobots to rapidly expand intelligence beyond the Earth, as I discussed in
chapter 6
. It is also likely to find extensive military applications. Moreover, safeguards against unwanted self-replication, such as the broadcast architecture described below (see
p. 412
), can be defeated by a determined adversary or terrorist.