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Via GeekPress, Nick Bostrom has a fascinating essay at Technology Review in which he lays out his case for hoping that we don't find evidence that life ever existed on Mars or that it exists elsewhere in the universe. Why would we not want to find evidence of life?
According to Bostrom, the apparent silence of our galaxy -- the lack of even one civilization which has advanced to the galactic colonization stage, which we ought to know about if it ever happened, because they would be here -- is evidence either that there is no life out there or that life is in some way blocked from developing to that level. He talks in terms of a "great filter" that evolving life must pass through on the way to the galactic colonization stage. If life is evolving out there in the galaxy, and no aliens have ever shown up here, that suggests that no life anywhere has ever successfully made it through the filter. And if nobody else ever makes it through the filter, we have very little reason to hope that we ever will.
The filter could take many forms. It could be some stage in biological evolution that is just plain difficult to get through. For example, if life rarely makes it to the stage of producing multicellular organisms, and that's the reason nobody is out there, then we've already passed through the filter and it would seem that we are in the clear.
Woo hoo! Let's start colonizing the galaxy.
But not so fast. Maybe that's just a filter, not the filter. So we made it through the Cambrian Explosion and all -- good on us -- but the real trick is to develop a big brain and an opposable thumb. Or not to nuke or grey goo ourselves out of existence. Maybe the filter is time itself -- you just have to get to that colonizing level before an asteroid or cosmic ray blast or simply the lifecycle of your homeworld wipes you out. (Stephen Gordon blogged recently about some of these possibilities.)
Lots of possible body plans. So far so good. But are we in the clear
to start our own galactic empire?
And there, says Bostrom, lies the problem. Unlike developing flexible body plans or bigger brains, the nuke, grey goo, asteroid, and cosmic blast filters all (potentially) lie in our future. That means we haven't made it through the great filter yet and, seeing as nobody else has managed to do it, there's not much reason to expect that we will.
Say it with me:
Whoa, dude.
Bummer.
Sure, it's possible that others have made it through this filter and decided that they would rather stay home than colonize the galaxy, but what are the chances that everybody who reaches this stage makes that choice? Or maybe they're all out there hiding from us because they're guided by some kind of Prime Directive that protects us from exposure to their advanced awesomeness. But that one seems pretty unlikely. Plus, it's been argued that the Prime Directive is stupid and/or immoral.
So if life is out there, chances are it gets destroyed (or destroys itself) before ever making it to the galactic colonization stage.
Or maybe, just maybe, something else is going on. Let me offer up a few possibilities.
1. Colonizing the galaxy is a dumb idea.
Don't get me wrong. I personally think it would be the single coolest project ever, and hope to have literally billions of uploaded copies of my personality wending their way not just across the galaxy but the entire universe using those very Von Neumann probes that so far have not shown up here from anywhere else. But I have to admit that I come by this fondness for the idea from the standpoint of living in a civilization that is not quite ready to start the project. As we get closer to that goal, we might find that technology is opening up other possibilities for us that are in fact much more appealing. I don't know what those are. But then, let's face it -- I don't really know much. Maybe outlining a project that advanced civilizations must engage in -- if they exist at all -- would be a tad presumptuous on my part, seeing as I don't know what all the options are.
2. They're out there, but we can't see them.
Bostrom deals with this idea, but I want to take a slightly different angle. What if they aren't hiding or invisible, but just really, really small? Our own information technology has been heading in an exponentially smaller direction for some time now. And there are those who suggest that we are bound (sooner or later) to merge with that technology. Maybe by the time we get to the spacefaring stage, we won't be sending out Devil's-Tower-sized motherships, but very compact Von Neumann machines no bigger than a Snicker's bar. There could be millions of those orbiting our sun right now -- how would we ever know? The real population of the solar system might be in the trillions: a paltry six billion on earth and many, many more nano-colonists living lives we can't begin to imagine right here in our neighborhood.
3. Only would-be colonizers self-destruct.
There could be a correlation. Maybe civilizations that go in an information-technology-merger direction survive, but tend to stay more or less in one place, while those who would build the galactic empire inevitably destroy themselves. After all, what are the chances that, say, the Klingons ever would have made it out of hunter-gatherer stage, much less develop Warp Drive? Maybe colonizing the galaxy is a developmentally backward idea. (See possibility #1.) It would appeal to Klingons or to some humans at our current stage of development, but it's a dead end.
4. They stayed home.
Not because they have rejected technological development, but rather because the natural direction of development is in, not out. The miniaturization trend continues, and all the surviving advanced civilizations are now using femto-technology and basically working their way out of this universe altogether. As John Smart once explained it to me:
Fortunately, this perspective is quite falsifiable by future advances with SETI. If I'm right, in just a few more decades as the Moore's law-driven sensitivity of our sensor systems continues its exponential growth, we'll begin discovering "radio fossils" in the night sky, emissions of very weak electromagnetic signals (radio, TV, etc.) unintentionally emitted from the older intelligence-bearing planets whose past developmental record should already be detectable in our galaxy.
Once our antennas are powerful enough to detect unintentional EM emissions from the closest few million stars, something that Frank Drake tells me is almost possible now with the closest of our neighboring stars, we'll begin to discover these unmistakable signatures of nonrandom intelligence. We will also notice that every year, a small fraction (roughly 1/200th) of these radio fossils suddenly stop sending signals. Like us, these will be civilizations whose science invariably discovers that the developmental future of universal intelligence is not outer space, but inner space.
That's the destiny of species.
These possibilities are all variations on that same theme, I suppose. One thing we ought to keep in mind about advanced aliens is that (if they exist) they are advanced and they are alien. Both of these facts put us at something of a disadvantage when it comes to making definitive statements about where they should be, things they might have done, and decisions they must have made. (Cross-posted to The Speculist.)
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Some interesting comments from Speculist reader Nato Welch in the discussion thread of the most recent FastForward Radio:
Take by way of example California's recent law prohibiting
employers from requiring their employees to take RFID implants. If jobs
are scarce, and competition among workers necessitates taking on
modifications in order to compete effectively, then a form of
distributed //duress// (Dale's term) accomplishes an effective
circumvention of self-determination even where direct coercion may not.
So our commitment to morphological liberty, if it is to be
practical, demands a bit more than simply enjoining direct forms of
coercion, but also the creation and maintenance of societies where
relinquishment of technological interventions is not only permitted,
but actually practicable; not only allowed, but accommodated.
Excellent point. What Nato is describing as "morphological liberty" begins
with non-coercion; it can't end there. But where does market pressure
end and out-and-out coercion begin? This is a tricky question.
Let's step back from human augmentation and look at some more
mundane forms of technological adoption. On a recent Frontier Airlines
flight, I was surprised to hear the flight attendant announce that
Frontier Airlines "no longer accepts cash." Anyone wanting to use the
DirecTV service or purchase a cocktail now has to use a credit card.
Okay, granted, credit card "technology" is so ingrained in modern
commerce -- especially travel-related commerce -- that the expectation
that passengers on a commercial flight would have access to it seems
pretty reasonable. The number of passengers who purchase their tickets
via cash or check (is that even possible any more?) is no doubt
vanishingly rare.
But they are there.
And now, any customers who reject the idea of payment via plastic are
out of luck making purchases on an airplane, even though these are
face-to-face transactions which have traditionally been conducted via
cash. Are those who reject payment via plastic being coerced to adopt a
method of payment they don't want? Arguably, they are.
Another example: last year I helped my daughter register for
college. She attends a state university here in Colorado. We completed
a good deal of the registration process via her online account with the
school. I also use this account to track and pay her tuition bill. As
far as I know, there is no outright requirement that every
student have access to a computer -- although Internet access is a
given; it's piped right into the dormitories, where all first-year
students are required to reside -- but the assumption is made
many times over, in terms of how the university communicates with the
students, how classwork is assigned, how a student accesses the library
and other resources, and so on.
Would it be fair to say that students at the University of Northern
Colorado are being coerced into adopting computer technology? For the
vast majority, no. Many of them have been playing computer games since
before they could speak in complete sentences. But students who wish
not to adopt computer technology are put in a very difficult position.
Arguably, they are being coerced.
When we talk about accommodating the non-adoption of technology, the
classic example offered up is the Amish. On Sunday's show, my co-host Stephen Gordon
reiterated the point that no one is going to force human augmentation
on the Amish. This seems a reasonable projection, seeing as how we have
not forced credit cards or the Internet or air travel or state
university education on them. But without forcing them to
adopt these things, have we as a society used some subtle (or perhaps
less-than-subtle) forms of coercion on the Amish? Possibly. But if we
have, a number of them have shown themselves to be resistant to it.
But there is a distinct catch with the Amish example. The Amish have
rejected virtually all aspects of the industrialized world. There is a
clean break. They accept technological development from the plow to the
wheel to the axle to the bridle. Tractors? No thanks. They fasten their
clothing with hooks and eyes. Buttons, zippers, and velcro are all vain
and therefore verboten. (There are odd and growing exceptions to these restrictions, but maybe they are just evidence of coercion at work.) The Amish have carved out a well-defined plateau of technological
rejection. It's easy to recognize and therefore fairly easy to
accommodate. But once an individual or community starts up the slope of
technological development beginning with the industrial revolution, we
are much less accommodating to technological rejection. If somebody is
okay with having a telephone and electricity in their home, then surely
they have no problem with radio, TV, Internet, and so on. This is not
to suggest that any specific point of technological rejection is wrong
-- there could be any number of reasons to accept radio but not
television, or coax but not wi-fi -- but the assumption we have made as
a society is that if you're all right with any one example of
industrial or post-industrial technology, you need to either make your
peace with the rest of it or work out your own accommodation.
Don't like paying with plastic? Fine. Enjoy the complimentary ginger
ale and skip the pay-TV service. Don't like computers? Not our problem.
Go to the public library and try to piece together a do-it-yourself
higher education. But good luck finding any books without using the
computer; I think card catalogs are pretty much gone, now.
So can we create and maintain "societies where relinquishment of
technological interventions is not only permitted, but actually
practicable; not only allowed, but accommodated?" Apparently we are
willing or able to do so only where sharp lines of demarcation exist.
If you reject the continuum of industrial and post-industrial
technological development, you reject the whole thing. And if you
accept it, you accept the whole thing.
Which leads me to another reader comment, this one coming from
reader Julian Morrison in the comment thread for another bog post I wrote
entitled What Changes? What Remains the Same?
I know what I'd predict: a lot of broken conceptual boundaries
that people had lazily assumed were features of the universe. Life
blends into machine, computer into mind, information into matter. The
concept of species all but goes away; humanity itself becomes a
continuum. Gender smears out and becomes very subjective. Your
personality might be dispersed over several bodies or share one. Real
individual uniqueness (which we nowadays would call "freakish") becomes
the rule and not the exception.
I predict that the continuum Julian is describing will be the next
clearly defined area of rejection or acceptance. Human augmentation /
redefinition will be the new plateau of rejection. Ray Kurzweil
describes a world in which people who have opted not to undergo
augmentation -- or at least not significant levels thereof -- are a
distinct, recognized, and respected minority called MOSHes:
Mostly Original Substrate Humans. MOSHes will be the new Amish -- those
who have decided not to start up the slope of human augmentation.
So will we be able to preserve and accommodate the MOSH lifestyle in
the same way we have the Amish? It's difficult to make predictions
about how economics will work in aworld in which human augmentation has
become commonplace. Nato's example of a law preventing employers from
requiring RFID implants has less to do with human modification than it
does with recognized boundaries of individual liberty and a right to
privacy. What happens when modifications that don't necessarily raise
those issues come into play?
For example, suppose that synthetic blood with nanotech corpuscles
were to become available in the next few decades. By making much more
efficient use of oxygen, it has been suggested that this kind of blood
replacement could provide athletes with an incredible performance boost
-- running at sprinting speeds for a half hour or more, staying
underwater for two hours, etc. But let's put aside the implications for
sports. Imagine the implications of this technological development for,
say, commercial fishing.
My guess is that the commercial fishing industry would adopt this
technology whole-heartedly. The fishermen significantly reduce their
risk of death from drowning or hypothermia and -- as a non-trivial
bonus -- the job becomes a lot less physically taxing (which would
probably reduce other risks, as well.) Management would like it because
of the efficiency gains they would achieve with these "boosted"
fishermen, the reduced risk of liability for killed or injured
fishermen, and -- presumably -- the reduced need to source and train
new staff to replace those who have been killed or injured.
This is all assuming that nano-blood has been tested, approved, has
few negative side-effects, and is readily available for something
approaching a reasonable price. If so, it's great news to everyone except those
fishermen who don't want to adopt the new technology. Would they be
coerced into taking on an unwanted augmentation or risk losing their
job to an augmented replacement?
With the facts in play as described here, I would have to say yes. As with the RFID chips, a law could be
passed requiring fishing companies to hire non-augmented fishermen, but
there is ultimately a public policy issue of safety around putting such
a requirement in place. Not only is the non-augmented fisherman at
greater risk of death to drowning or hypothermia, his shipmates would
have a harder job to do -- picking up his non-augmented slack -- and
would arguably be at greater risk themselves.
This kind of scenario would play out in hundreds of different
occupations, with hundreds of different augmentations disrupting
standard definitions of expected performance levels and allowable
levels of risk. One factor that might mitigate this disruption -- if
"mitigate" is the right word -- would be the wholesale automation of
many of these occupations. An augmented human might provide better
performance and less risk than a non-augmented human, but a machine
could easily out-perform and under-risk either. If automation of labor
outpaces human augmentation (which has certainly been the case to
date), then both augmented and non-augmented humanity are faced with a
potential crisis of livelihood. If human augmentation begins to outpace
automation, then it will be non-augmented humanity that faces this
crisis first, followed by augmented humanity later.
Assuming the latter scenario, one possible way to avert the crisis
would be the establishment of a MOSH sub-economy. If MOSH fishermen
can't serve on a crew with augmented fishermen, surely they would be
able to band together and form their own crews. Their level of
productivity would make it difficult to compete in the open market, but
this might be addressed either through government subsidies or by the
establishment of a specialty market. People might decide to "buy MOSH"
the way they have in the past opted to "buy American" or the way many
currently choose to "buy organic." MOSHes would probably be inclined to
be as exclusively MOSH in their purchasing behavior as possible.
Meanwhile, augmented humans might see purchasing a certain amount of
MOSH goods as a socially responsible thing to do -- like recycling or
buying organic.
With these or similar accommodations in place, non-augmented
humanity would -- like the Amish -- be able to survive and even thrive
on their chosen plateau of rejection while the rest of humanity works
its way up to the next plateau.
Cross-posted to The Speculist.
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Well now how about this development:
Scientists in California carried out computer simulations that suggest Earth-like planets may be orbiting Alpha Centauri B.
At least some are likely to be in the so-called "habitable zone" at
just the right distance from their parent star to allow oceans, lakes
and rivers to form without freezing or boiling away. Such planets are
the best candidates for supporting life as we know it.
Anyone standing on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B would see two
"suns" in the sky, a bright "primary" sun and a "secondary" sun which
would be much weaker but still many times brighter than the full moon
as seen from Earth.
The astronomers hope to carry out intensive studies of the Alpha
Centauri system using the 1.5 metre telescope at the Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Over the next few years, we'll have new telescopes coming on line
that will give us a clear idea of what's really orbiting Alpha Centauri
B and other nearby stars. I don't expect we'll find unambiguous proof
of a technological civilizations out there anywhere -- eyeballing it
isn't really how you look for that -- but maybe we'll find a few planets showing some signs of life.
Any that show promise we can put on the itinerary for what I'm
calling my retirement cruise. It's Plan C for what I want to do with my
golden years, some 40-50 years from now. Here are all three plans in
order.
Plan A
Effective life extension technology kicks in and I just keep on
keeping on with whatever I happen to be doing by then. The Speculist
and FastForward Radio will probably not exist in their current form,
but that only means they will be replaced by something even more fun.
Plan B
The Singularity kicks in and I get uploaded into a posthuman state
of techno-nirvana of which I am literally incapable of providing an
adequate -- or even inadequate -- description. Some might recoil at
this techno-Utopian / techno- eschatological vision, but please note.
This is only Plan B.
Plan C
Still shy of the Singularity and adequate life extension, but living
in a world in which nanotechnology and computer technology have
continued to put more and more capability into the hands of the common
individual, at about age 90 some like-minded individuals and I set out
for interstellar space in a fusion-powered craft designed to accelerate
at about 1G, approaching -- but obviously not quite achieving -- the
speed of light. We cruise along for 10 years or so, elapsed ship time,
visiting a planet or two along the way. We then return to earth where,
depending on how much time we spent accelerating and decelerating,
hundreds or thousands of years will have passed.
(I suppose plan D would be death and cryonic suspension, but that doesn't really appeal to me.)
Anyhow, by the time I get back from my retirement cruise, the whole
life extension and / or Singularity thing should have happened, so I
can carry on with Plan A or B. Of course, as a living archaeological
relic, I will have a lot of catching up to do before I will have much
credibility as a Speculist.
But that's fine.
Give me a century or two and I'll be all caught up. Cross-posted to The Speculist.
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Rand Simberg does a nice job deconstructing of some rather nonsensical coverage emerging from the inevitable discussion of human cloning following the announcement of the ability to clone primates. There is no shortage of naive and, yes, hysterical ideas about human cloning out there. We've spent some time responding to these in the past and now, as a public service, here's a quick summary of responses to the three most egregious (and yet popular) ideas that people have about cloning. 1. Cloning is not a human photocopier. A clone is a genetic duplicate of an organism. It is an identical twin to the original, delivered at some later date (or else we'd just call it a twin, not a clone) and -- presumably -- by a different mother. So if your are cloned, you will share the same relationship with that individual that an identical twin shares with his or her sibling. As Rand points out, it's unclear what familial relationship you will legally share with the clone. The clone could be your child, your sibling, your cousin, or no (legal) relation whatsoever. It all depends on who is doing the cloning. Unless and until some radically new human gestation technology is developed (see point 2) any human clones who arrive in this world will do so the way everyone else does. They will be babies, born of mothers. Your clone will not be an adult duplicate of you with all your memories, but rather a baby with a predisposition to grow up looking, perhaps acting, and maybe thinking a lot like you. That's all. Human photocopier technology may be with us at some point. In fact, we spent an entire segment discussing the implications of such technology on the most recent FastForward Radio. But cloning is not it. 2. Cloning is not growing armies in vats. There is a popular idea that clones are synthesized or manufactured human beings. They are not. To quote myself: Reproductive cloning raises serious moral and ethical issues, but "cloned armies" is not one of them. The ability to produce armies would require not cloning, but a technique popular in (uninformed) science fiction movies that might properly be called Rapidly Growing Large Numbers of Sentient Adults in Vats. That I know of, no one is currently working on developing that technology...
For the time being, producing a human clone will require having a viable mother willing to carry the child to term. You'll need a mother for every child (just like you do now) and you'll need the full nine months. There are no shortcuts and no economies of scale with cloning. Should either RGLNSAV or the related but more modest RGLNBV (Rapidly Growing Large Numbers of Babies in Vats) come on line at some point, some serious issues may emerge. Of course, even just using sperm (plenty of that around) and eggs (harder, but by no means impossible, to get in large quantities) to produce your Insta-Army, both RGLNSAV or RGLNBV could cause plenty of mischief. But again, they don't exist and -- as far as I know -- no one is trying to develop them.  3. Clones are not slaves The slavery issue comes up in the "cloned army" scenario, also in nightmare scenarios such as The Island, wherein -- spoilers coming -- clones are created to provide replacement parts for evil rich people. At least The Island gets the legalities right -- clones are human beings, and human beings are protected by law in most jurisdictions from being held against their will or forced to sacrifice themselves by providing replacement parts for others. So any racket like in The Island would require operating underground. Cloned armies would also have to be created somewhere outside of most legal jurisdictions. Sharing the same genetic code with someone else does not erase or diminish one's humanity under law, or else we'd have special rules about how we treat identical twins. There was an episode in the second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation which managed to pull off a hat-trick where these three misconceptions are concerned. The Enterprise encounters a small society that reproduces only by cloning which needs an infusion of fresh blood, as it were. Things quickly get wacky... The Mariposans ask the Enterprise-D crew for a sample of their DNA, so they could create new clones. The crew refuses, so the Mariposans kidnap Commander William Riker and Doctor Katherine Pulaski to steal their DNA. When Riker and Pulaski find out, they visit the colony's cloning labs and destroy the new clones.
The clones that Riker and Pulaski kill are adults. They are still in vats, though, and I think they're bald. The basic idea here seems to be that Riker and Pulaski are perfectly entitled to murder these mostly formed adult human beings because they are -- Exact duplicates of Riker and Pulaski, and therefore in some sense a violation of their right to individuality. -- Not yet conscious. This is never explicitly stated, but the scene where they kill the clones would have been even harder to swallow had the clones opened their eyes and looked scared.
I believe the makers of this episode were attempting to draw some clumsy analogy to abortion. Unfortunately, due to the rapid maturation provided by the vat technology, the Riker and Pulaski clones looked to have been somewhere in the 100th and 120th trimesters, respectively. Either under Federation law, Roe v. Wade has been substantially expanded, or the presumption that one's clone is simply one's property to do with as one wishes is a firmly embedded legal principle of the 24th century. However, under the more primitive and restrictive laws of the 21st century, it's clear that killing your adult (or infant) clone would land you in jail for murder. And I have a feeling that the "I was protecting my individuality" defense would get you nowhere. Well, maybe you'd have a shot with a California jury, but otherwise... I'm hardly suggesting that there are no serious legal and ethical issues that must be considered where cloning is concerned. There are. But we can only deal with them seriously when we stop talking about all this nonsense. Cross-posted to The Speculist.
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George Dvorsky makes some pretty good arguments for giving up meat-eating, most of which would be hard to disagree with -- although #4 is a fairly obnoxious straw man argument. Unfortunately, that word "obnoxious" more or less sums up George's entire approach. I have very little use for sanctimonious self-righteousness applied to any other area of life, so it's not surprising that it leaves me cold when applied even to an issue with which I tend to agree.
Please note: this is no personal attack on George. We at The Speculist are big Dvorsky fans. We cite his work all the time. The terms "obnoxious," "sanctimonious," and "self-righteous" are applied strictly to Geroge's arguments. On a personal level, he's a swell (and very smart) guy. Unfortunately, when he calls all us meat-eaters "bad people," I'm not sure such a distinction can be made on our collective behalf. (However, I have no problem with being called "bitch." In the context presented, it seems more colloquial and affectionate than anything else. Kind of like being called "Dawg" or "Home Slice," only more emphatic.)
I've written more than once on my belief that the world will one day be a meatless -- although not necessarily vegetarian -- place. I agree that it's wrong to cause animals undue pain. I agree that our current industrialized livestock management practices are abhorrent. And, from a purely practical standpoint, I think we'll have a much stronger moral footing with our AI descendants if they see us treating weaker / arguably inferior life forms with as much kindness as possible. In short, I think I'm just about ready to be persuaded that I should give up eating dead animals altogether.
Unfortunately, George's piece has pushed me no closer to the brink. He divides his time between preening over the superiority of his position vis a vis his listeners and slamming them for not being as enlightened as he is. For crying out loud, the flushed, sweaty Bible-thumpers who blustered their way through the endless revival meetings I endured as kid in western Kentucky knew better than to take that approach.
Next week, the Boulder Futures Salon will be discussing the future of persuasion. I think I'll bring a copy of George's blog entry as an example of how little progress has been made in rhetorical technique. Here we have a world-class futurist taking an "I'm good; you're bad: be like ME" approach that even the most backward fundamentalists dropped decades ago. You see a lot of this kind of thing among "progressive" thinkers when dealing with the great unwashed who haven't yet achieved their level of enlightenment. (An example -- for whatever reason, atheists seem particularly prone to these excesses when arguing against belief in God. This could be a reverse application of the old adage that "converts are the worst." Which would also apply to George, I suppose, what with his five-year tenure as a morally superior being.)
Anyhow, here's hoping that George finds a means of making his case worthy of his subject. It deserves it. UPDATE: Dvorsky follows up:
Now, in regards to the accusation that I'm a 'bigot' or intolerant
of meat eaters, that's an interesting point. Bigotry, I suppose, is
relative. Let's imagine for a moment that I had written an article
titled 'Racists are bad people,' or 'Homophobes are bad people.' Do you
think I would have received the same kind of negative response? Hardly.
Aside from a few anachronistic and unenlightened perspectives I'd get a
slew of comments saying, 'right on, brother.'
But the fact that I didn't get these sorts of supportive comments,
aside from a small minority, indicates to me that our transition to a
mostly meat-free society is a process still in its infancy.
This is interesting. I accused George of making obnoxious arguments,
not being a bigot. But I doubt I would have much problem with obnoxious
behavior towards racists or other bigots. It's important to be aware of
where we are in the transition, and I tend to agree that we're in the
very early stages.
A century and a half ago, a proto-Dvorsky might have written a
self-righteous and obnoxious essay entitled "Why People Opposed to
Racially Mixed Marriages are Bad." From where I sit, that argument
could have been made as sanctimoniously as the essayist desired, and
I've got no problem. But a mixed-marriage fence-sitter (or even a
supporter of mixed marriages) from that era might have reasonably
argued that it's early days, and proto-Dvorsky is doing little to help
the cause.
Still, if he changed even a few minds, and more importantly, if he got people talking about the issue...
It's a tough call. Maybe in a world of screaming memes, obnoxious is the way to go. Cross-posted to The Speculist.
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In a recent post on The Speculist, my co-blogger Stephen Gordon remarked:
Our current level of technology and civilization is not just the product of our scientific, political, and religious heroes. Fools and villains had a role too. Without the advancements the U.S. had to make to wage World War II - and those of captured Nazi scientists - it would not have been possible for the United States to put a man on the Moon in 1969. We wouldn't even have tried except for our contest with the "evil empire."
I'm not suggesting that we celebrate bad people for the work they force from good people. But the human network is capable of surprising advancement in spite of stress - and sometimes because of stress. It proves the cliche' "That which does not kill us makes us stronger."
It's true. Whether acting as individuals, nations, or an entire species, the human imperative is to improve the human condition. The challenges we face are either thrust upon us by nature or created by us. Whenever we solve a problem, we tend to overcompensate -- the additional value created sometimes becomes a new problem that needs to be solved, and sometimes allows us to enjoy new benefits that we weren't even looking for. An example of the first type of overcompensation is built into us genetically -- our ability to store fat on our bodies. Human beings developed that ability as a means of not starving to death, but now in places where food is abundant, human health suffers significantly when we allow too much fat to develop on our bodies. So we have new problems and we begin developing new solutions.
Stephen's example of the birth of the space program fits into the latter category of overcompensation. The problem the US government was solving was one of making sure that not all the missile experts from Nazi Germany ended up helping the Soviets figure out how to blow us to smithereens. Sending a man to the moon was partly the resolution of a new struggle that emerged and partly a tremendous bonus we got as a result of solving the first problem.
Something about Stephen's analysis sounded very familiar, but I couldn't quite place it. For some reason, it reminded me of the interview I did with John Smart a few years ago. I started reading back through the interview, and then it hit me:
In my own research, there has never been a catastrophe in known universal history (supernova, KT-meteorite, plague, civilization collapse, nuclear detonation, reactor meltdown, computer virus, 9/11, you name it) that did not function to accelerate the average distributed complexity (ADC) of the computational network in which it was embedded. It is apparently this learning of our immune systems that keeps the universe on a smooth curve of continually accelerating change. If there's one rule that anyone who studies accelerating change in complex adaptive systems should realize, it is that immunity, interdependence, and intelligence always win. This is not necessarily so for the individual, who charts his or her own unique path to the future but is often breathtakingly wrong. But the observation holds consistently for the entire amorphous network.
So the adage that "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" does not apply just to humanity. If John Smart is right, there's a universal imperative which underpins the human imperative. The overcompensating that we do in the face of challenges isn't just an effective strategy; it's what sentient beings are bound to do in a universe driven by the Law of Accelerating Returns. Give the universe lemons, it makes lemonade. Being, as we are, a part of that same universe, human beings seem to have little choice but to do likewise.
I agree with Stephen that we shouldn't celebrate oppressors, even though fighting them may lead to more benefits than simply ending their oppression. Nor should we be happy when faced with problems like climate change or peak oil. But we should take comfort in the fact that any challenge we face is likely to result not only in a solution, but also in new, unanticipated value being added to the overall human equation -- along with new problems, allowing the cycle to begin again.
Lemonade, anyone?
(Cross-posted from The Speculist)
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It’s a fairly simple story, really. From the time we figured out that those oddly angled thumbs of ours prove useful when it comes to making stuff and doing stuff, our story – not necessarily the story of any particular people or nation, but the story of all of us – has been about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s what we wanted. That’s what we’ve been trying to get, even though we weren’t able to articulate that exact formula until the very recent past, and even then only a relative few of us have explicitly endorsed it.
Although we’ve always wanted these three things, we haven’t been particularly good at securing them for ourselves. In fact, there’s been a long pattern of some of us working against the rest of us – so we end up with a few achieving some measure of liberty and happiness by depriving others of their ability to enjoy these things, or by depriving them of their lives.
But we are only part of the problem. In seeking out life, liberty, and happiness, humanity has faced three formidable enemies:
Oppression
Poverty
Death
Oppression and poverty stand in the way of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Death seeks to deprive us of all the good things we strive for by removing the medium in which we might enjoy them: our lives.
Throughout most of our history, two of these three enemies would have dogged humanity no matter how nice we were to each other. Human beings can subject each other to poverty and to death, but death would still stalk us even if we didn’t stalk each other – and the world would still have failed to provide for all our needs (much less wants) even if the strong had never preyed upon the weak. Oppression, however, is a purely human affair. Oppression is entirely self-inflicted. The natural world might challenge us in many ways, but it’s shown no inclination towards enslaving us. It doesn’t imprison us for expressing our opinions, take our homes away in the name of the “common good,” or tell us whom we may marry. It doesn’t collect taxes from us. It doesn’t issue traffic citations, make us fill out forms, or forbid our eating trans-fats.
Our ability to eliminate oppression is entirely up to us. Today is the anniversary of a group of human beings deciding to throw off what seems now, in retrospect, a fairly mild form of oppression – mild, at least, compared to some of the horrors that our fellow human beings have suffered both before and since. In framing their explanation as to why they were doing what they were doing, the founders gave us the formulation of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” explaining that these are not just good things, they are fundamental rights. No individual, no nation, no philosophy that seeks to deprive us of these things – however mildly or however horribly – can ever be tolerated.
What they started 231 years ago today still goes on. Can humanity overcome oppression? Those of us who are celebrating today, and many who have since followed our example, are living proof that the answer is yes.
What, then, about the other two great enemies?
In fact, we have made significant gains against both over the same two centuries. People live much longer and healthier lives now than they ever have before, and they have access to more material goods and information than was even imaginable a short time ago (on the human scale.) And those of us who watch these areas closely know that our progress to date is only the beginning. In the near future, technology can provide us with lives free from any threat of disease or aging and with material abundance beyond what we have ever dared hope.
Yes, technology can provide those things; I don’t say that it will. Just as human beings can free themselves from oppression, though we may not all choose to. The capability is in our hands, or will be soon. What we need is the recognition of that capability, and the will to realize it.
So let’s take it from the top…
We hold these truths to be self-evident:
Oppression sucks
Poverty sucks
Death sucks
…and go from there.
(Cross-posted from The Speculist.)
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