To argue for this project that it lies with the grain is not to say, "Hey, come here and watch Fate make us immortal!" Nothing is inevitable, or if it is, it shows itself so by enlisting the energies of people who act as if it depended on them.
I can think of many possible futures for mankind that are at least as likely as the one I have raised -- most of them grim. Perhaps the very kindest of the alternatives is that in twenty or thirty years our space ships will turn up another solar system with a habitable planet in it -- but frail, earthbound flesh will be unable to make the crossing. It shows lack of planning.
Were only an embarrassment at stake, we could afford it. What should really concern us is that we don't have forever in which to make mistakes. All the good futures -- all the bearable ones, even -- are fast slipping through our fingers. Some kinds of future can not be lost and then unearthed again like buried treasure; the opportunity exists but once, and then is gone. Miss it, and another future uses up the chance.
All things considered, our most likely future is just what it became in 1945: nuclear annihilation. We have put this one out of our minds, lately, having survived twenty-five years without the bang we all awaited. That's a long time to maintain one's faith in anything. Diplomatic crises have come and gone, dusty footpaths have been worn on all available brinks, more tons of bombs have been dropped than in World War II. The curse of omnipotence has even spread to Unauthorized Hands. Still no bang -- not the kind we were expecting.
Be that as it may, it is still our most likely future. Getting through twenty-five years doesn't prove much when eternity holds so many more to be gotten through. What are the chances that nuclear weapons will be forever brandished, and never used? How long until the object of contention between two nuclear-armed powers is perceived by both to be a "vital interest"? How long before some cool rogue probes for an opening once too often? How long before some nation's nuclear bluff is called in a way that admits only one response? How long before one of the nuclear powers is carried away by some ideological phantasy -- one that sees intolerable reproach in the existence of nonbelievers? How long before plain irrationality gets its finger on the button? (Can we watch the growing fascination with diabolism, here and abroad, and make no connection?)
Yet the bomb can't be disinvented. It exists, it is a mode of warfare that men can use, and in the extremities of human affairs, they will threaten to use it. Eventually some will be compelled to make good their threats. We might get a stay of execution -- at the price of world-wide slavery -- if some one power could overwhelm all the others and establish a monopoly. All of history predicts that that, too, would pass -- every social system carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. As for voluntary control, forget it! Even if that were anywhere on the horizon -- which it isn't --, it would offer no permanent assurance. Treaties come and go, while the future we have placed in jeopardy is forever and ever.
If we do manage to stave off nuclear disaster for a century or so, another nightmare future may have the pleasure of doing us in: exhaustion of resources. (That's another law of history: every generation uses up all the resources it can in its own time.) This is a sneaky future; it will steal upon us gradually, and we'll only be half aware that it's happening.
More and more things will be made of plastic; the air will get fouler and fouler; water will get harder and harder to purify. Land will be ever more crowded; pleasures we had taken for granted will become expensive luxuries; everyone will work harder and be rewarded less. (Measured in money, of course, we may get richer and richer as we get poorer and poorer.)
As life gets leaner, deferment of consumption will be harder, and interest rates will climb. Capital will lose its advantage; it will become advantageous to use more labor, less equipment -- and at that, more unskilled labor, less skilled. When we are all fully employed as coolies, it may finally dawn on us that all along, China and India, not the U.S.A., represented the endpoint of "development."
Meanwhile, as the environment deteriorates, we will learn again to scrabble for the mean objects that our ancestors scrabbled for, and for the same reason: civilization is a luxury. Our attitudes will coarsen; what had once seemed brutal will again seem natural. All this with The Bomb in our hands. Perhaps it will be a mercy if it does go off.
Well, then, shall we all don white robes and go wait for the end on a mountaintop? If you like to wear white robes and rap with other people in white robes on a mountaintop, go ahead, but I think I have a more effectual suggestion. You guessed it: I think we can build intelligent robots and transplant human beings into the robots.
This, if we can achieve it, will solve two problems at once. First, it will alter what we need out of the environment, and thus what can be considered "resources." That's tantamount to a vast windfall of new resources. Secondly, it will enable us to take advantage of the space program and put some physical distance between human population centers. Therein lies the only reliable guarantee against nuclear annihilation. When the bystanders are out of reach, then and only then will there be a good chance that somebody or other always survives a nuclear war. That, and not sentiment, is what we must pin our hopes upon.
One of the insidious effects of resource exhaustion is that it is self-accelerating. The poorer a society feels, the less it can spare for investments which would make it richer. In particular, it lacks mad money for ventures like the space program and robot research. But the less it ventures, the less it gains; bad goes to worse.
All of which brings us to the "Isabella Question": should the Queen pawn her jewels? All your life you've read that Isabella did so to finance Columbus(14), but perhaps only now, only in this time of debate over "priorities," can you fully appreciate her decision.
Isabella, after all, was a Catholic monarch. If there was anything she prided herself upon, it was that see was especially known as The Catholic. And what was a Catholic monarch supposed to do with public funds? Good works. Charity. Think of all the orphans that could have been provided for out of the money Isabella risked on that madman, Columbus!
In retrospect, we can see that the New World opened up vast opportunities for all the orphans of Spain. Eventually it was a haven for all the destitute of Europe.(15) But what consolation was that to the orphans of Isabella's time? Only Pizarro was able to cash in -- and he was already past his childhood when Columbus sailed.
There's a long-winded moral to this tale: "(1) You can't be kind to present poor people and future ones out of the same funds. (2) A project that promises a big jump in public wealth is a concerned project. (3) Of course, you have to win your bets." This is a confusing moral, at a time when self-styled "progressives" want to spend billions on band-aids, while the arch-reactionary spokesman of the day wants to reach Mars.
To put the matter plainly, we need our space program, and we need an equally intensive robot program that will lend it the meaning I have ascribed. Those who agitate against the space program on grounds of "humanism" are anti-human. They may mean well, but they have utterly misjudged the needs of man. They want to satisfy human wants, but they don't know beans about means.
More than once, in discussions with concerned people, I have been asked, "But what's the good of that? It doesn't solve anything -- Man will just go and have wars all over the universe. We should solve our problems on Earth, before we spread ourselves into space." That's a funny way to love humanity: to be afraid that Man will contaminate the stars! "Shape up according to my specifications," it says, "or stew in your own juice until you do."
It's a matter of probabilities. What in all of history suggests that we can "solve our problems here on earth" for any length of time? The problems are many, they are intractable, and solving one begets another. Unforeseeable events introduce still more. Society is not infinitely malleable, and hardly at all malleable by intention. Not all problems are traceable to social arrangements that could in principle be altered. When they are, the very process of altering social arrangements presents some of the worst hazards. The worst social ill of all is common to all societies: posterity is represented only by a sort of Native Advisory Council.
Meanwhile, we possess the means to put Earth out of business as a place to have problems on, let alone to solve them; and our resources relentlessly wind down. Can a "concerned" person really be unconcerned about that part of the total effort which seeks safety in dispersal, and provision in new resources?
I am not decrying concern with the here and now. Obviously, it is necessary to hold Earth together for a while, and desirable to do so indefinitely. I am only saying that at best, our efforts buy time; it is urgent to work from that perspective, and to bring something in view to buy time for.
I only say, whatever your outrage at certain obscenities committed in the name of science (deadlier anthrax, stickier napalm, etc.), don't take it out on the space program, which has redeeming social importance. Do launch a robot program, which holds our future. The wherewithal for both, and for health, education, and welfare besides, should be trimmed from the budget for Punitive Expeditions and Improved (Human) Pesticides. There is plenty where that is going.
The question could be given a different cast by shifting the stress: "Should the Queen pawn her jewels?" Or should we look to private funds? (In the days of monarchy, royal jewels bordered on the nature of public funds.) At bottom, my attitude is, "Public funds, private funds, who cares? Let's get the thing done!" The aura of controversy which hangs over the present part of the discussion, however, suggests one reason why private funds would be preferable. Particularly in the early stages, it is not wise to politicize such a speculative venture.
Public funds rest upon taxation; they take the bread out of people's mouths, willing or no. Every public expenditure requires the vociferous support of some minority, and the silent acquiescence of the majority. Having to convince the majority is no position for a speculative venture to get itself into. There aren't many people who would begrudge the price of space exploration and robot development if they really expected the benefits I have pictured -- but how many are going to? There aren't even many who would object, in retrospect, to having been forced, provided the thing turned out right. Meanwhile, though, there is always the chance of failure; should it be taken at public risk?
There is the chance that public patience won't last, and premature discouragement may turn vindictive. There is a chance that the very arguments which sell the public today may count as a reproach tomorrow. There is the likelihood that when successes do occur along the way, mediocre politicians will claim a credit which sours the whole project for their opponents. All these things have befallen the space program, and should make scientists wary of rushing to the government trough.
Fortunately, what needs to be done at the present stage of the game is well within the means of private capital. Consider the position of a manager who is put in charge of an "Immortality Project" in, say, 1971. He is told to develop intelligent robots and means for transplanting human beings into them, posthaste. Once he has gotten over feeling foolish, certain wily reflections are likely to occur.
As I have pointed out, important pieces of the groundwork are being laid by the computer industry, in the ordinary line of commercial development. The pieces won't fall together of their own accord, but on the other hand, our hypothetical manager sees no need to fund them himself. It suffices to set an idea afoot, so that those working in the field will overlook no connections. It suffices to keep abreast of developments and extract what's useful. It suffices that somebody be trying continually to fit things into the desired context.
From these and other researchers, the manager can expect a great deal of volunteer effort. Nobody need be paid for a chance at immortality. Even if success is not expected within our lifetime, the manager can pay people in glory. There is more glory in this project than in any single thing man has ever done.
The manager can effect further economies if he uses his own head, and not the judgment of academic lobbyists, as to what is relevant research. He should not be taken in by the foppish cult of "pure" research. He should consider work "interesting" not because it is general (though void of applications), but because it is applicable to his magnificent obsession (though perhaps to nothing else).
Available boodle, meanwhile, should be deployed to encourage progress in the areas that are lagging. At the present juncture, the manager would find "situations" requiring his attention in three departments:
1) The miniaturization of mechanical components. In this day of electronic circuits that fit on microscopic chips, mechanical parts are surprisingly gross. Existing robot projects spend an inordinate amount of their effort getting around the crudities of moving parts. The effort is begrudged, and indeed is a sore point in getting funds, because the mechanical expedients which are adopted are "uninteresting" to the academic community. If a robot is to show the finesse of a snail, let alone of a man, its basic building blocks must be an order of magnitude smaller and more flexible than those now available.
2) The reading out and interpretation of signals from the human nervous system. This is perhaps the weakest link in the whole chain of reasoning that leads from "artificial intelligence" to "immortality for man." What does it mean to "read out" the personality of a man from flesh to robot, in such a way that he actually experiences transplantation and survival? We are so far from having an understanding of this, that we haven't as yet read out a single message that we could interpret.(16)
If you have an ear to the ground for such things, you do hear from time to time of interesting plans by researchers in the field of prosthetics. The idea keeps recurring of building artificial limbs that can be controlled by signals from the patient's nervous system. Though the interest has been serious, this has remained so far in the realm of big talk. The problem is one of instrumentation: once again, we are balked by the microscopic sizes involved.
3) The understanding of the human cerebrum: the physical media in which it stores information, the encoding, and the logical design for placement and retrieval. Work in this area is more extensive than in the other lagging departments I have mentioned, and more conscious of its own potential. It lags, however, in comparison with computer developments; the manager of Project Immortality would want to even things up.
Now, there's what's required. Where is Isabella?
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BACKTALK from readers regarding issue #6 |
| The Columbus Question: Which Nut Has the Winning Suggestion? |
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