The Future of Human Nature, Part 2

Radical Evolution
by Joel Garreau

(Page 2 of 2)

In fact, the paper your daughter is working on over the holidays concerns whether a Natural can really enter into an informed-consent relationship with an Enhanced — even for something like a date. How would a Natural understand what makes an Enhanced tick if she doesn't understand how he is augmented?

The law is based on the Enlightenment principle that we hold a human nature in common.

Increasingly, the question is whether this still exists.

I call the scenario above "The Law of Unintended Consequences." It is not a prediction — I have no crystal ball, alas. But this scenario is a faithful rendition of what our world could well be like if some of the engineering currently being funded turns out to work. "Forget fiction, read the newspaper," notes Bill Joy, the former chief scientist at Sun Microsystems. Scenario planning is intended to prod people to think more broadly and view events with a new perspective. How did I arrive at this scenario? Let me give you some background.

In the late 1990s, when this book started, the rules of cause and effect seemed to have become unhinged. The problem was that the world was going through astounding change. First came the Internet, and then the World Wide Web. Cell phones the size of candy bars, palm computers the size of a deck of cards, and music players not much bigger than credit cards proliferated and merged in a primordial evolutionary silicon stew. A walk through a dark house in the middle of the night became an easy navigation. All the tiny lights marked the way in festive red or green, winking and shining from microwaves and clocks and phones and televisions and music players and video players and fax machines and laptops and printers and smoke detectors and docking stations and recharging stations and game players. Each signaled the presence of yet another microprocessor — part of that march in which the average American inexorably is becoming surrounded by more computers than she has lightbulbs, as is already the case in as utilitarian a vehicle as a Honda Accord.

The raging argument back then was whether this Cambrian explosion of intelligence marked the biggest thing since the printing press or the biggest thing since fire. And yet socially, the decade was a snooze. From my perch as an editor and reporter at The Washington Post, it seemed like the headlines, such as they were, involved little except peace, prosperity and Monica.

How could this be? I asked myself. Where is the social impact of all this change? Where is the Reformation? Who are the new Marxists? After all, human organization is always influenced by the technology of the time. "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us," as Churchill put it.

During the Agrarian Age, for example, the family was the fundamental economic and social unit. Commercial enterprises were basically family-run, even the big ones in Renaissance Venice. Governments descended through family in the case of kingdoms. The French army or the Spanish navy was quite literally a band of blood brothers. Nations were defined by people of genetic kinship.

All this changed, however, with the rise of the telegraph and the railroad in the mid-1800s. Suddenly vast swaths of time and distance had to be managed. Entire continents and oceans had to be spanned. To handle the challenge, new kinds of organizations were forced to emerge. The Ford Motor Company, for example, ripped the planet's very dirt for its iron ore at one end of its operations. At the other end it sold finished Model T's. Such a globally complex enterprise was impossible to run as a mere family enterprise. How could you produce enough trusted cousins? Thus the Industrial Revolution created fertile ground for steeply hierarchical corporations to blossom. It changed us. By the 1950s an employee of one of those corporations thought of himself as "The Organization Man" and "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" — cogs in the machine. The Industrial Age's contradictions also created a reaction to it — Marxism. Indeed, the entire 20th century can be described as an era of ideological, economic and military warfare over how to handle the great social upheavals created by this shift in technology and social affairs.

Ahem. So, okay? This technological change in the nineties is supposed to be the biggest thing since fire, and the best we can do for headlines is a tawdry Oval Office sex scandal? You can see the reason for my confusion. Where was this social upheaval that history taught us to expect?

As it happens, this is not the first time I've found myself covering worlds that do not seem to add up. In fact, I've come to welcome such assignments. They allow us to examine what's going on really. My previous books on what makes our world tick — The Nine Nations of North America and Edge City: Life on the New Frontier, which identified realities already in play that were not yet obvious to everyone — were similarly preceded by bouts of unsettling perplexity.

This time, two "aha" moments occurred in the course of my reporting. The first was the reminder that innovation arrives more rapidly than does change in culture and values. Perhaps, it occurred to me, the nineties were like the fifties. The fifties were a period of great technological upheaval — missiles with nuclear warheads, mass-produced suburban housing, mainframe computers. From television to Sputnik, the list was endless. And yet the fifties were the boring Eisenhower decade. The cultural upheaval of sex, drugs and rock and roll — enabled by The Pill, synthetic psychedelics and the transistor — did not occur until the sixties. You see similar upheaval in the earlier half of the century with the dawning of the age of automobiles, refrigeration, radio and telephones. The twenties, too, were a frivolous decade, promptly followed by the social upheaval of the thirties.

Perhaps that is the way history works. Perhaps because culture and values lag technology, when upheaval occurs, it is often of seismic proportions. If that is so now, then the cultural revolution for which we are due is just beginning to emerge. That's how tracing the outlines of that transformation became my beat during the early years of the 21st century.

The second "aha" moment was more formidable. I remember it as being like the scene in Jaws where the captain finally glimpses the shark. He responds, famously: "We're gonna need a bigger boat."

Such a moment came as I realized that this story was not about computers. This cultural revolution in which we are immersed is no more a tale of bits and bytes than the story of Galileo is about paired lenses. In the Renaissance, the big deal was not telescopes. It was about realizing that the Earth is a minor planet revolving around an unexceptional star in an unfashionable part of the universe. Today, the story is no less attitude-adjusting. It is about the defining cultural, social and political issue of our age. It is about human transformation.

The inflection point at which we have arrived is one in which we are increasingly seizing the keys to all creation, as astounding as that might seem. It's about what parents will do when offered ways to increase their child's SAT score by 200 points. It's about what athletes will do when encouraged by big-buck leagues to put together medical pit crews. What fat people will do when offered a gadget that will monitor and alter their metabolisms. What the aging will do when offered memory enhancers. What fading baby boomers will do when it becomes obvious that Viagra and Botox are just the beginning of the sex-appeal industry. Imagine that technology allows us to transcend seemingly impossible physical and mental barriers, not only for ourselves but, exponentially, for our children. What happens as we muck around with the most fundamental aspects of our identity? What if the only thing that is truly inevitable is taxes? This is the transcendence of human nature we're talking about here. What wisdom does transhuman power demand?

It's been a long time since the earth has seen more than one kind of human walking around at the same time. About 25,000 years if you believe that Cro-Magnons were critters significantly different from "behaviorally modern" Homo sapiens. About 50,000 years if your reading of the fossil evidence suggests you have to go back to the Neanderthals with their beetle brows and big teeth to discover an upright ape really different from us. The challenge of this book is that we may be heading into such a period again, in which we will start seeing creatures walk the Earth who are enhanced beyond recognition as traditional members of our species. We are beginning to see the outlines of such a divergence now. In 2003, President Bush signed a $3.7 billion bill to fund research that could lead to medical robots traveling the human bloodstream to gobble up cancer or fat cells, for those who can afford the procedures. At the University of Pennsylvania, male mouse cells are being transformed into egg cells. If this science works in humans, it opens the way for two gay males to make a baby, each contributing 50 percent of his genetic material — and blurring the standard model of parenthood.

As you get further into these pages, you will meet real people with real names and faces working today toward just such modifications of what it means to be human. The powerful driver of this roller coaster is the continuing curve of exponential change. Evolution is accelerating so fast, some claim, that the last twenty years are not a guide to the next twenty years, but at best a guide to the next eight. By the same arithmetic, the last fifty years perhaps are not a guide to the next fifty years. They are, some guess, a guide to the next fourteen. As I type this, the evening news is airing yet another report describing some advance as "science fiction coming close to reality." Remember that phrase. You're going to be hearing it a lot in the coming years. When that occurs, I would like you to remember this book.

At least three alternative futures flow from this accelerated change, according to knowledgeable people who have thought about all this, as you will see in ensuing chapters. The first scenario is one in which, in the next two generations, humanity is rapidly replaced by something far more grand than its motley self. Call that The Heaven Scenario. The second is the one in which in the next 25 years or so, humanity meets a catastrophic end. Call it The Hell Scenario. You will find chapters on each, because both scenarios are plausible, and either would lead to the end of human history as we know it, and soon. The third scenario is more complex. It is the one we might call The Prevail Scenario. In this scenario, the future is not predetermined. It is full of hiccups and reverses and loops, all of which are the product of human beings coming to grips with their own destinies. In this world, our values can and do shape our future. We do have choices; we are not at the mercy of large forces. We can prevail.

I approach these three scenarios with an open mind, but critically. I try not to advocate any of them — I report them. Nor am I aiming this book at the 90-percent-male alpha-geek population who devours Wired magazine, that talisman of the digitally hip. If they find merit in my work, I am honored. But I hope for a broader audience. I try to speak to some very bright people I know — my mother, my daughters — who care far more about humans than they do machines. Me too.

If my interest in that third scenario — Prevail — marks me as an optimist, so be it. Heaven and Hell each might make a good summer blockbuster movie, featuring amazing special effects. But they tend toward the same story line: We are in for revolutionary change; there's not much we can do about it; hang on tight; the end. The Prevail Scenario, if nothing else, has better literary qualities. It is a story of struggle and action and decision. In that way, it is also more faithful to history, which can be read as a remarkably effective paean to the power of humans to muddle through extraordinary circumstances.

Scenario work shows that the future is usually a combination of all the stories you can construct to anticipate it. So I have done my best to present entertaining but accurate depictions of people who hold wildly different views. These are important thinkers and pioneers who deserve to be taken seriously. Most of them. Some are in there because I just couldn't resist telling their tales.

I hope this book serves as a road map and a guide to what we'll all be living through, pointing out significant landmarks along the way, as well as the turns and forks we can expect in the road. At the very least, however, I hope Radical Evolution ends up saying something about the present. George Orwell's most renowned work was entitled 1984 because he was really writing about 1948. Scenarios are always about the present, really. The fact that they exist today teaches us something about who we are, how we got that way, what makes us tick and, most of all, where we're headed.

There's one thing that I've already learned writing this book.

If you have a choice between starting your story with a telekinetic monkey or an attractive teenager in a wheelchair whose life might be changed by the technology the monkey represents, you have to lead with the bright young woman every time. For that's what people care about. And that's why the focus of this book is not on engineering — it is on the future of human nature.

Copyright © 2005 by Joel Garreau. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Joel Garreau is a student of culture, values and change. The author of the bestselling Edge City: Life on the New Frontier and The Nine Nations of North America, he is a reporter and editor at The Washington Post, a member of the scenario-planning organization Global Business Network, and has served as a senior fellow at George Mason University and the University of California at Berkeley. He has appeared on such national media as Good Morning America, Today, The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, NBC Nightly News, ABC's World News Tonight, and NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered. He lives in Broad Run, Virginia.