Ken, I just finally got my NY Times access set up. Here is the article you wanted. Have been so damn busy!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 27, 2005
Human Beings 2.0
By JOHN TIERNEY
A newspaper's most important function is to comfort troubled readers with horror stories from far away. Every day we strive to remind you: Hey, things could always be worse.
This solace isn't easy to offer after two hurricanes. But consider the gray goo problem.
Imagine that the Gulf Coast was inundated not with water but with a swarm of nanobots. These would be microscopic machines designed to break down substances like cancer cells in a body or pests in a farm field.
But what if scientists accidentally created some superorganism that outcompeted all other life and wiped out everything on the Gulf Coast - then spread like pollen around the world. What if they engineered nanobots that kept replicating and evolving until they broke down the substance of every living thing, leaving the planet covered in gray goo?
This is part of what Joel Garreau calls the Hell scenario in "Radical Evolution," his book analyzing the new forms of life - including "transhumans" and "posthumans" - coming to your neighborhood soon. A man has already used his thoughts to send e-mail and control a robotic arm. And in three years, there could be memory-enhanced humans who take pills to banish senior moments and raise their SAT scores by 200 points.
Then, within a decade or two, there may come an "inflection point in history" comparable to the rise of humans from apes. People will use drugs, genetic tinkering and computer implants to make themselves and their children smarter than anyone today - and this new breed will go on creating improved models of themselves at a breakneck pace.
Unless, of course, they're all dead. The prophets of the Hell scenario warn of engineered viruses that are genocidal. Even if accidents or terrorism don't wipe out everyone, there's still the danger that the new species will eliminate the old-fashioned humans. Who needs those sickly slow-witted creatures anymore?
My first impulse was to dismiss these apocalyptic visions along with all the previous ones. The population bomb, nuclear meltdowns, the energy crisis, cancer epidemics, global warming - for decades I've been debunking prophecies of doom as either imaginary or wildly exaggerated. I know many scientists consider the gray-goo doomsday to be impossible. If nothing else, the nanobots would probably suffer a Windows crash long before eating the planet.
Still, the Hell scenario gives me pause because its promoters aren't just the usual technophobes. Bill Joy, the former Sun Microsystems scientist who's been called the Edison of the Internet, is one of the prophets of doom calling for restraints on researchers. But no one has any practical suggestions for how to stop this work. Banning human cloning in America won't stop it from occurring somewhere else, like South Korea, because the potential benefits of these new technologies are irresistible.
Some perfectly respectable scientists believe in what Garreau calls the Heaven scenario: a world without pain, privation, disease or death. Everyone will have instant access to any information; people will trade thoughts with one another. They'll be so networked that they may be considered one giant organism.
To skeptics, this Heaven scenario is also known as "the Rapture of the nerds." The more likely outcome is a scenario that Garreau calls Prevail. The new technologies will cause problems, but humans will muddle through, work together to find solutions and emerge better off, just as they always have.
Garreau argues that the new breed of interconnected people will be collectively wiser than ever before - he actually makes a persuasive case that cellphones and e-mail are a force for social good. (If you doubt this, read "Radical Evolution" and join the discussion of it at my book club at nytimes.com/tierney.)
Stepping up the evolutionary ladder sounds so appealing that I'm glad to risk even the gray goo problem, but it wouldn't hurt to have a fallback plan. The best insurance I can imagine against a global plague would be to keep some humans cloistered from the global network, like the Irish monasteries that kept learning alive during the Dark Ages, or the grapevines in California that were taken back to France after its vines were wiped out.
We might encourage some of the prophets of doom to practice their philosophy by withdrawing to a remote island and giving up their Internet connections, but the ideal refuge would be Mars. If officials hope to get money for NASA's new program of manned exploration, I suggest they go to Capitol Hill with a two-word sales pitch: gray goo.
For Further Reading
Read more about "Radical Evolution" and join the book club at www.nytimes.com/tierney.
Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies — and What it Means to Be Human by Joel Garreau. Doubleday, 400 pp., May 2005.
"Why The Future Doesn't Need Us" by Bill Joy. Wired magazine, April 2000.
"The Future Needs Us!" by Freeman J. Dyson
