[ContinUeD FRoM p. 112] are dismissed as “The Rest”; the poor dears, they seem to just keep falling farther and farther behind.

Everyone in your daughter’s law school takes it as a matter of course that the law they are studying is changing to match the new enhancements. The law will be upgraded, the Enhanceds believe, just as they get new physical and mental upgrades every time they go home. In fact, the paper your daughter is working on over the holidays concerns whether a Natural can truly enter into an informed relationship with an Enhanced, even for something as innocuous as a date.

We are at a turning point in human history. Today, for the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, our technologies are not only aimed outward at modifying our environment. Rather, the GRIN technologies—the genetic, robotic, information, and nano processes, all based on computing technologies evolving at the pace of Moore’s Law if not faster— increasingly aim inward at changing who we are and what we can be. Not in some distant future but right now, on our watch.

How might such radical evolution influence what it means to be human? Talk to those deploying the GRIN technologies and you hear three scenarios—Heaven, Hell, and Prevail.

In “Heaven,” we conquer pain, suffering, ignorance, stupidity—even death—in a perfection of the human condition. In it, traditional definitions of humanity are increasingly remote. There are few divisions like those in your daughter’s law school scenario because it’s so difficult to remember why anyone would want to cling to Version 1.0 humanity. Being a knowledge-based creature is far preferable to being what Ray Kurzweil calls “mostly original substrate humans.”

In “Hell,” pessimists see a mirror-image curve in which the power of the GRIN technologies inevitably gets into the hands of madmen or fools, leading to disaster for all. If conflict between different species of humans doesn’t get us, then the genetically engineered microbes carefully designed to be 100% fatal or the self-replicating energy-devouring nanobots will. The

even in the face
of unprecedented
threats, ‘Prevail’
reflects faith that
the ragged human
convoy of divergent
perceptions, piqued
honor, posturing,
insecurity, and
humor will wend
its way to glory.

outcomes are the same—annihilation of the human race within 20 years. Entirely too imaginable.

Both Heaven and Hell are tech-nodeterministic, assuming that our gear shapes history. In neither is your daughter able to do much to shape her generation’s future. The critical driver is the smooth curve of Moore’s Law, measuring progress by the number of transistors we get to talk to one another.

As a humanist, however, I root for “Prevail,” which is not some middle ground between Heaven and Hell. Way off in its own territory, it assumes what really matters is not how many transistors we connect but how many ornery, cussed, imaginative, unpredictable humans we connect. Its measure is not individuals bragging about their latest cognitive implants, leaving your daughter and others like her frightened and lonely, but something far larger, measured in group transformation.

How do we know which scenario we are entering? Heaven and Hell both have the virtue of being obvious. We see bellwethers in the headlines every day. But suppose you see second-order network effects—group effects. Could they be early warnings of Prevail? Suppose you’ve seen cellphones going from curiosity to commonplace in 30 years. There are now more than one of them for every two humans on earth—

the fastest uptake of any technology in history, including the polio vaccine. Suppose as a result you see some of the greatest economic and social transformations in some of the most unexpected places, from Bangladesh to Nigeria. I am, of course, describing the present.

If the harbingers of Prevail are the appearance of many collaborative, bottom-up, worldwide human solutions, what do they say about eBay? Not just the world’s biggest flea market but a network of millions of people producing highly complex solutions without leaders. Facebook causes us to reconsider the meaning of such a basic human institution as “friend.” YouTube recently helped shape the most interesting election in a lifetime. And what about Twitter?

Prevail embraces uncertainty. Even in the face of unprecedented threats, it reflects faith that the ragged human convoy of divergent perceptions, piqued honor, posturing, insecurity, and humor will wend its way to glory. The embedded assumption is that even if a smooth curve of exponential change describes the future of technology, it will not map onto the messy world of human fortunes.

Prevail is driven by faith in human cussedness, based on a hunch that you can count on humans to throw The Curve of exponential change a curve of their own. It is also a belief that transcendence resulting from humans taking control of their own evolution is unlikely to be part of any simple scheme.

The significance of all this can hardly be understated. Despite the billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, we cannot detect any other life in the universe. Why not? Perhaps every intelligent species eventually takes control of its own evolution. Maybe such radical evolution is the final exam. Maybe everyone else has already flunked.

Let’s not flunk, too.

 

Joel Garreau ( www.garreau.com) is the author of Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies—and What It Means to Be Human.

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