“What about airplanes that can land on autopilot? Or the self-driving cars Google invented? They got the first driverless license in the country right here in Nevada a couple years ago. Or Israel’s Iron Dome? Or other missile defense systems that identify missiles without humans in the loop? The only link in the chain that’s missing is a weapons system that fires at a human target without human authorization. Besides, we already depend on autonomous decisions by machines for our livelihood.”
“How’s that?”
“On the stock market. We let them do our trading for us. It’s all done through algorithms humans plug into computers. The firm with the best algorithms and the fastest computer wins. It’s not even free trade, it’s hardly capitalism since people aren’t using capital to trade but are entrusting their money to computers. And it’s impossible to regulate because you can tell everyone to only trade at a certain speed, but you can’t regulate that. You can only encourage it. It’s too late. You can’t undo what we’ve done. The only hope would be to set up limits not at the source but at the destination.”
“The actual stock exchange itself.”
“Yes. Somehow find a way to regulate the speed at which transactions of any one computer or computer system can trade. But no one’s even suggesting that. It’s not a matter of if machines will have a meltdown sell-off like they did in 2008, it’s when it’ll happen again.”
I’m not excited about the fact that he’s making some pretty valid points. “I think we’re getting a little off track here. Get back to transhumanism.”
He digs through a file cabinet, and I’m not sure how he could possibly know what he’s looking for, but he comes up with a file of papers and spreads it out on the table.
“How do you keep this stuff organized anyhow?”
He taps his head. “A steel trap.”
“With a little rust. I mean, that comes naturally with age.”
“A touch, perhaps.”
He walks directly to a stack of papers beside his bed and shuffles through them. “Right now we’re seeing exponential technological breakthroughs in bioengineering, gene therapy, synthetic biology, medicine, and nanotechnology. According to Moore’s Law, which is a way of understanding the exponential growth in technology, the performance will continue to go up even as the price plummets — which has held true for the last forty years…”
He’s flipping through the pages. “Even as some scientists are working at reverse engineering the human brain — which will happen within the next twenty years — other scientists are developing never-before-imagined nanotechnology applications and virtual reality interfaces. Within a few decades we’ll be able to upload information directly to the human brain.”
“Is that transhumanism?”
“Partly, yes. We’re already merging more and more with nonbiological intelligence through neural implants and brain-to-machine interfaces. Eventually there’ll be no going back.”
“So we’re going to become cyborgs?”
He’s quiet for a moment.
“That’s not seriously what you’re telling me here.”
“It’s already happening — cochlear implants, bionic eyes, artificial limbs, synthetic organs, deep-brain stimulation, the next generation of brain-imaging technology—”
“Okay, okay.” I hold up my hands. “I hear you. So, The Singularity is when humans are able to do what? Upload their consciousness onto a computer?”
“If desired.”
“I’m still not sure I get the transhumanism part.”
“The more we augment or enhance humans, at a certain point we may be more machine than biological entity, and even the biological part will be enhanced by gene therapy and genetic manipulation.”
He reflects on that for a moment. “The big question at this point is really where you draw the line between augmentation and enhancement — or even if you should draw any line at all. For example, having glasses to augment your seeing, or wearing a hearing aid, or maybe having an artificial leg. That’s all acceptable.”
“And you’re saying transhumanists want to take things further?”
“Exactly. From augmentation to enhancement. We use binoculars to see infrared, why not just give people the ability to do so? We use cars to travel at higher speeds than we can on our own, why not just merge people with Segways that let them do so themselves while preserving the planet’s limited supply of fossil fuels? Through xenotransplantation we can—” He catches himself and explains before I have to ask him what that means: “The transfer of genetic or organic material between members of different species.”
“Splicing genes of other species into humans?”
“Yeah, it’s coming.”
Though I don’t doubt this aspect of what he’s saying, it still unnerves me. It brings up images of the grisly experiments on the fictional island of Dr. Moreau.
Maybe it isn’t so fictional after all.
He goes on, “There isn’t even consensus today among biologists about what specifically constitutes Homo sapiens. Some scientists think we should drop the whole concept and see ourselves not as different or unique within the biological world, but simply a fluid moment in the ongoing evolutionary process. Xenotransplantation is going to blur the lines about what it means to be human even further — how much augmentation is acceptable. I mean, right now you’ve already got a debate going about cyberorganisms, synthetic biology, cloning, animal and android rights — so when computers reach strong AI, what kinds of rights should they have? Are they living, even though they’re not biological? Do we have to redefine what it even means to be alive?”
“Android rights?”
“An android is a robot that looks human, a cyborg is a human that is part robot.”
“Okay. And they have rights?”
“Well, that’s what’s being debated — if self-aware machines deserve the right to life, the right to never be unplugged or destroyed.”
This is all a little more than I’m ready to process at the moment. I take out my Morgan Dollar and start flipping it through my fingers, something I tend to do when I’m deep in thought. “And you honestly think the government is doing this? Is developing these autonomous weapons, or is maybe wanting to enhance soldiers like this?”
“They’ve already admitted that they are.”
“Not publicly, though, right?”
He scratches his chin as if he’s trying to figure out where to start. “Okay,” he mumbles. “‘Technology Horizons.’”
He goes to the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet, yanks it open, and within seconds locates what he’s looking for. He reads the title: “‘Technology Horizons: A Vision for Air Force Science & Technology 2010–2030. Air Force document, AF/ST-TR-10-01-PR.’ It was released back in May of 2010.” He shoves the printout across the table toward me. It’s several hundred pages thick. “You take this one. See what you can figure out.”
I look at it unenthusiastically. “We need to be at the Arête by one.”
He pulls up a report of his own, a printout called “Losing Humanity: The Case against Killer Robots” from a 2012 Human Rights Watch proposal, evidently to ban robots that could fire without humans in the loop.
“Well then”—he picks up a highlighter from a pencil holder on the countertop—“we better get started.”
Lipstick
Roger Yarborough woke up in his hotel room, groggy and feeling a little heavy all over, as if he were on a planet where everything weighs twice what it does on earth. His sheets were a mess. He was dressed only in a pair of underwear.