Another potential failure mode is deliberate or accidental misuse of science.
Take nanotech. Way back in the 1960s, Richard Feynman predicted great things might be accomplished by building small. Visionaries like Drexler, Peterson, and Bear foretold molecular-scale machines erecting perfect crystals, superstrong materials, or ultra-sophisticated circuits-anything desired-built atom by atom.
Today, the latest computers, plenats, and designer drugs all depend upon such tools. So do modern sewage and recycling systems. Soon, smart nanobots may cruise your bloodstream, removing a lifetime’s accumulated dross, even pushing back the clock of years. Some envision nanos cleansing polluted aquifers, rebalancing sterile swathes of ocean, or sucking carbon from the air.
Ah, but what if micromachines escape their programming, reproducing outside factory brood-tanks? Might hordes evolve, adapting to utilize the natural world? Lurid sci-fi tales warn of replicators eating the biosphere, outcompeting their creators.
Or this tech may be perverted for man’s oldest pastime. Picture an arms race between suspicious nations or globalsynds, each fearing others are developing nano-weapons in secret. When danger comes packaged so small, can we ever know for sure?
– Pandora’s Cornucopia
12.
The man behind the desk passed a stone paperweight from hand to hand.
“Naturally, Miss Povlov, we feel our project is misunderstood.”
Naturally, Tor thought, careful not to subvocalize. No use having sarcasm appear in her transcript. Everyone is misunderstood. Especially folks who are trying to correct faults in human nature.
Dr. Akinobu Sato tilted back in his chair. “Here at the Atkins Center, we’re not pushing some grand design for Homo sapiens. We view our role as expanding the range of options for our kin and posterity. Are we then any different from others who pushed back the darkness?”
The words so closely matched her own thoughts, just seconds before, that Tor had to blink. It’s probably coincidence. I’m not the first to raise this question.
Still… modern sensors could detect a single neuron flash across a room. Monitors in a wall might track gross emotions, or even be taught to respond to a homeowner’s mental commands. And there were always creepy tattle-rumors about the next big step, reading actual thoughts. Surely just tall tales.
Still, these Atkins meddlers might be the very ones to make that leap. During a tour, before arriving in Sato’s office, she had seen-
– quadriplegics who moved about gracefully, controlling their robotic legs without wire shunts through the skull.
– a preteen girl commanding up to twenty hovering ai-craft at once, by combining muscle twitches, tooth-clicks, and subvocal grunts. Apparently a record.
– an accident victim who had lost an entire cerebral hemisphere and would never again speak, but whose fingertips sketched VR pictures in the air. Watching without specs, you might think him crazed, capering and pointing at nothing. But tuned to the right overlayer, she saw images erupt from those waggling fingertips so detailed and compelling that-well-who needed words?
Then there were the ones generating so much excitement and controversy-victims of the Autism Plague who had been sent here from all over the world by parents seeking hope. The Atkins specialized in “savants,” so Tor had come expecting feats of mathematical legerdemain and total recall. And there were a few impressive demos-mentally calculating long-ago dates and guessing correctly the number of beads in a jar-stunts that were old news. Dr. Sato wanted to show off more recent accomplishments-less flashy. More significant.
Tor watched as boys and girls, long mentally isolated from close human contact, now held normal-looking conversations, even collaborating in a game. After going on a while about eye-contact rates and Empathy Quotients, Sato made his point.
“We start by stimulating brain regions that ‘mirror’ the body movements we see other people perform. Also manipulating the parieto-occipital junction, to provoke what was called an out-of-body experience. These mental states once carried a lot of freight among religious types. But we now trigger outward-empathy or self-introspection, on demand.”
Tor had commented that some of the faithful might find this offensive. One more grab by science at territory once reserved for belief. But Sato shrugged as if to ask, What else is new?
“Call it a technologization of compassion, or induction of insight.
“The next question is, can we do all this, awakening other-awareness and self-appraisal in some autistics, without sacrificing their savant skills? Or the wild alertness that sometimes makes them seem more natural and feral than the rest of us?
“And then…,” Sato had mused, with an eager glint in his eyes. “… if we can manage that, will it be it possible to go the other way? Give savant-level mental powers to normal people?”
Conversing with some patients, Tor came to realize something that distressed her as a reporter-there’d be little useful video from this tour. The Atkins patients, once crippled by a deep mental handicap, some of them effectively disconnected from the world, now seemed talkative, cogent, not so much hopelessly detached as… well… nerdy.
She did have shots of some beaming parents, visiting from faraway cities, calling the work here miraculous. But I can get some balance from the demonstrators outside, Tor recalled. Activists who posed a pointed question.
Who are we-who is anybody-to define what it means to be human? To “cure” a condition that might simply be closer to innocence or nature? Closer to the Earth?
Or-perhaps-closer to a onetime state of grace?
Now, ensconced in a plush chair with her stalk-cam panning across Sato’s office, she hurried back on topic. “You say you just offer options, Doctor. But folks in Carolina didn’t want those choices. And those here in Albuquerque range from ambivalent to hostile. Is it a case of too much too soon? Or something deeper?”
“I think you know the answer, Miss Tor,” Sato replied, placing both hands on the desk. “If we were merely helping some types of borderline autistic children to behave more normally, to be more empathic and communicative, to get jobs and raise families, then few would complain. Just a few diversity fetishists who think nature is always better than civilization and animals are wiser than people. But anyone can see our work will have implications, far beyond helping a few kids to fit in.”
Tor nodded. “Hm, yes. We’ll get to all that. But first, let me ask, after being forced to leave Charleston, why didn’t you resettle in one of the high-water townships along the coast where you’d fit in? Just another merry band of would-be godmakers, no more offensive than your local biotinker.”
Sato frowned, a deep furrow creasing his youthful-looking brow above soft, almond eyes. He had seemed about forty, but Tor now guessed higher. Triggered by attention cues, her aiware sifted, finding the professor’s latest sculpt, last month, at Madame Fascio’s Facelifts. So? Scientists aren’t immune to vanity.
“We dislike the term… ‘godmaker’…, It implies something elitist, even domineering. Our goal is the opposite. A general empowerment, across the board.”