Survivors from Earth

© Laurence B. Winn

Sep 1, 2000

Someday you may answer a knock at the door to find waiting there a nice man from the Government who will offer you a choice. In reality, the nice man would be no man at all, but an android or a cyborg, and the choice you will be asked to make will involve, at the very least, your spiritual death. You see, the Government will have decided that it no longer needs citizens.

The mistake you made? Was it not voting for that anti-technology candidate ten years ago? Watching too much Star Trek? Believing in the false religion called Science?

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Surely this is a science fiction. Right? Right?

In "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era", Vernor Vinge of the Department of Mathematical Sciences at San Diego State University predicts that humans could be supplanted by superhuman intelligence of their own creation within thirty years. The paper saw daylight at a symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute in March of 1993. At that time it may have seemed a wild fantasy, even reckless technophobia. But that was before the human genome had been unraveled and cloning had been demonstrated, before the gigaflop, massively parallel computing and neural networks became commonplace.

That which, in the fifties, we thought might happen in a million years some, like Vinge, think will happen within the twenty-first century. Specifically, one of several outcomes:

(1) A super-humanly intelligent machine, one which can invent even more intelligent machines, will initiate a technological explosion that we will not be able to control. This suddenness, a jump from here to there without transition, is what Vinge thinks it is fair to call a singularity, The Singularity. The major changes would be over in a matter of hours.

(2) Computer networks "awaken" overnight, perhaps incorporating human minds in the matrix.

(3) Computer/human interfaces, implants perhaps, create a man/machine hybrid, a cybernetic organism with superhuman qualities, a Cyborg, Borg (if you're a Trekker).

(4) Genetic engineering provides a way to produce a superhuman intellect biologically.

Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and its chief scientist, sees the need to "rein in" certain technologies in order to keep them out of the hands of "crazy people". In particular, he is afraid of nanotechnology, genetic engineering and robotics. Probable developments in these areas, he argues, would give individuals the means to make anything they can imagine. What if they imagine new diseases they can build on their home computers?

This is certainly not the first apocalyptic vision of the future to give us the frights. Some of these same issues are explored in "Mars Waits". Central to the problem of survival is that human beings cannot simply stop changing and growing, because to do so would be to die. Other visions, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World and Brave New World Revisited, like those of Joy and Vinge, fail to allow for the existence of isolated colonies with alternative approaches to technology issues. It is the nature of social evolution to select among various possibilities by which brands of insanity produce success and which produce extinction. It is one of the principle lessons of Frontier Theory that only territorial expansion provides the opportunity for social evolution to proceed. Only one choice offers a safe path for the species as a whole, and that choice involves travel.

If we do not create a viable frontier, we are toast anyway. If we do, we may find that different societies' use of machines on earth, on the moon, Mars, free space and on the moons of Jupiter will vary widely, that some societies will embrace a symbiotic relationship with thinking machines and others will reject some aspects of technology, as Bill Joy would have us do. Frontier Theory does not inform us which approaches will work and which will fail. It does assure us, however, that if the zeroth commandment is obeyed, there will be survivors from earth.