“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that men may become robots.”
Erich Fromm
No realm of AI research hits closer to home than transhumanism, which aims to marry us with machines; to create customized, bionic creatures called cyborgs.
“By 2029, computers will have human-level intelligence,” predicts the legendary computer scientist Ray Kurzweil. “That leads to . . . our putting them inside our brains, connecting them to the cloud, expanding who we are.”505
Transhumanists are motivated in part by a fear that if we don’t find ways to bolster our own abilities, we will be left behind—or worse, subjugated or even decimated—by the super-smart, super-fast, super-strong robots we are creating.
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” warned the late astrophysicist Stephen Hawking. “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever-increasing rate. Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn’t compete, and would be superseded.”506
Transhumanists are also motivated by the understandable excitement of possibly transforming us into a superhuman species. “The central goal of transhumanism,” explains James J. Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a pro-transhumanist think tank, “is to give everybody access to safe and effective human enhancement technologies that extend health, ability, longevity, cognitive capacity, and reproductive control.”507
Transhumanism calls to mind the fictional astronaut Steve Austin in the 1970s hit TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, played by Lee Majors. After Austin crashes an experimental aircraft and barely survives, the government spends six million dollars to rebuild his body— replacing his two legs, right arm, and left eye with nuclear-powered robotic parts. As a cyborg, Austin is able to run as fast as a Cheetah, see in the dark, see twenty times farther than an ordinary person, and wield the power of a bulldozer.508
Yuval Noah Harari, an historian at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, predicts real-life Steve Austins—cyborgs he calls homo dei (god men)— will proliferate and ultimately vanquish us garden-variety humans. “It is very likely, within a century or two, Homo sapiens . . . will disappear,” he says. “Not because, like in some Hollywood science fiction movie, the robots will come and kill us, but rather because we will use technology to upgrade ourselves—or at least some of us—into something different; something which is far more different from us than we are different from Neanderthals.”509
Cyborgs make me think of automobiles loaded with extras—everything from Bluetooth and cruise control to leather seats and roof racks. It appears that, one day, we too will be like that: creatures whose basic, God-given minds and bodies are enhanced with all manner of extras.
“We’re already cyborgs, in a sense,” observes Mark O’Connell, author of the book To Be a Machine. “Your phone is a cyborg technology, in a way. It’s not physically internalized—but the phone is like an extra limb or an extrasensory device.”510
Yuval Harari expects by 2050 your smartphone will be internalized. “It will be embedded in your body via biometric sensors, and it will monitor your heart rate, your blood pressure, and your brain activity twenty-four hours a day.” For what reason? So it can “know your desires, likes, and dislikes even better than you.”511
It’ll be like having an Amazon Echo living inside you. Instead of being voice-activated, Alexa will respond to your thoughts, because she is plugged directly into your cerebral cortex.
Brain Implants
For that to happen, scientists will need to learn how to safely and successfully tap into the human brain. “I consider this to be the most important thing we could be working on in the human race,” says entrepreneur Bryan Johnson. He recently founded Kernel, a Los Angeles-based neurotech company that envisions attaching computer chips onto and into the brain to make us superhuman.512
Facebook, the US Department of Defense, and Elon Musk’s Neura-link are all trying to do something similar. By finding ways to connect the human brain directly to a computer, they will make it possible for us to browse the internet with our thoughts, rather than our eyes, fingers, or voice—to make us One with cyberspace and one another.
“Over the next decade, our species . . . will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other,” forecasts author Dan Brown, giving rise to a “global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine.” He adds, “Our need for the exterior God that sits up there and judges us . . . will diminish and eventually disappear.”513
Brown’s speculation is shared by Dogbert, Dilbert’s talking pet dog— both of them creations of cartoonist Scott Adams. “Simple molecules combine to make powerful chemicals. Simple cells combine to make powerful life-forms. Simple electronics combine to make powerful computers. Logically, all things are created by a combination of simpler, less capable components,” muses Dogbert. “Therefore, a supreme being must be in our future, not our origin. What if ‘God’ is the consciousness that will be created when enough of us are connected by the Internet?!!”514
Scientists at Harvard University and elsewhere are already advancing toward this science-fiction scenario, by creating neural laces and testing them on mice’s brains.515 A neural lace—picture a very fine, electronic hair net—fits into a medical syringe and is squirted into the brain cavity, whereupon it expands like a well-tossed fisherman’s net and is gradually absorbed into the cerebral tissue. Once interwoven with our brain cells, neural laces could allow us to surf the web and control computers entirely with our minds. Also, neural laces could one day make it possible for computers to install apps directly into our brains—for example, to teach us a foreign language instantly.516
“Creating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines,” says Musk.517
Eye Implants
Scientists are working feverishly to upgrade other parts of us as well. Some of the most exciting breakthroughs are happening in labs creating bionic body parts for people who’ve lost limbs or are impaired somehow. [See ROBOT: MEMORY LANE.]
One such person is Fran Fulton. Fifteen years ago, she was blinded by retinitis pigmentosa, a congenital disease that ravaged her retinas. Second Sight, a California-based company, fitted Fran with Argus II bionic eyes.
Here’s how they work. A pair of eyeglasses tricked out with a miniature video camera live streams moving images to Fulton’s artificial retinas, tiny patches of sixty electrodes each that lay atop her damaged retinas—like throw rugs over stains on the floor. Her artificial retinas, in turn, send electrical signals via the optic nerve to her brain—and voila, sight! The images are very blurry but definitely better than nothing.518
“When they turned me on, so to speak, it was absolutely the most breathtaking experience,” Fran says. “I was just so overwhelmed and so excited, my heart started beating so fast I had to put my hand on my chest because I thought it was going to pop.”519
“I was able to spot things on the wall and see people come in the room,” she enthuses. “It’s hard to tell a garbage can from someone sitting on the sidewalk, but I can go around it. I can now make decisions and maintain my independence.”520
Second Sight is currently testing its next-generation bionic eyes— Orion I—on five completely blind people. Instead of masking damaged retinas, Orion’s electrodes connect directly to the brain’s visual cortex.
“With the Orion, we’re essentially replacing the eye and the optic nerve completely,” says Robert Greenberg, the company’s chairman of the board, who admits to being inspired by The Six Million Dollar Man TV series. The new procedure is decidedly more invasive than Argus II— requiring doctors to remove a small piece of skull to get at the brain— but, Greenberg explains, it means “anyone who had vision but has lost it from almost any cause could potentially be helped by the Orion technology.”
Getting the brain to decipher electrical signals coming not from real eyes but directly from a manmade camera won’t be easy. In late 2016 Second Sight did a preliminary test of the Orion technology on a thirty-year-old blind man who reported seeing only tiny spots of light, not any discernable images.521
When and if scientists successfully marry camera and brain, the possibilities for healthy people will be endless. Imagine for a moment being able to connect our brains to a telescopic camera that can observe a faraway galaxy; or a microscopic camera that can zoom into the realm of microbes; or cameras that can see different wavelengths of light—infrared, ultraviolet, even x-rays, just like Superman. Will seeing the world through different eyes—literally—change us? If so, in what ways?
Skin Implants
A category of AI technology already ending life as we know it is microchipping. It’s the practice of injecting a computer chip typically the size of a rice grain under the skin.
In August 2017, Three Square Market—a Wisconsin-based company that makes self-service minimarkets for employee break areas—made headlines for microchipping its workers.522 “It is really convenient having the chip in your hand with all the things it can do,” gushes CEO Todd Westby.
The company’s tiny, $300 chip implanted between thumb and forefinger acts like a door key, password, and credit card. Simply by waving their chipped hands in front of strategically placed sensors, employees can get into the main building, log onto their computers, and pay for snacks purchased in the company’s minimarket.523
Of the company’s eighty employees, fully fifty of them readily agreed to be chipped. “The people that did decide to do it,” says Westby, “really were looking forward to a lot of the conveniences that it does bring to the everyday life.”
Convenience.
But at what cost?
In techno-speak, the microchip used by Three Market Square is a radio frequency identification device, or RFID. It’s a chip that broadcasts information—in this case, about an employee—to any nearby chip reader.
Westby claims employees’ information will be used only for the seemingly harmless purposes of letting them gain access to buildings, computers, and vending machines. And that might very well be true. But what kind of future does microchipping portend?
I’m reminded of Neil Armstrong’s immortal pronouncement, when he first set foot onto the moon’s lifeless grey surface: “That’s one small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind.” If we continue in the direction we’re heading, an implanted chip could one day broadcast, say, a person’s passport number, travel preferences, and medical history.524
Indeed, Westby confesses his company is already upgrading its microchipping plans. “We are developing a chip that we’ll be able to use as a GPS device,” he says.525 Presumably, such a chip would enable Three Square Market to track its employees’ whereabouts at all times.
How convenient.
How scary.
It isn’t hard to explain why we wish to enhance—to completely remake—ourselves with AI technology. “The human race, after all, is a pretty sorry mess, with our stubborn diseases, physical limitations, and short lives,” says Francis Fukuyama, the renowned American political philosopher. “Throw in humanity’s jealousies, violence, and constant anxieties, and the transhumanist project begins to look downright reasonable. If it were technologically possible, why wouldn’t we want to transcend our current species?”526
Despite everything, however, Fukuyama opposes transhumanism.
“The seeming reasonableness of the project, particularly when considered in small increments, is part of its danger,” he says. “Society is unlikely to fall suddenly under the spell of the transhumanist world-view. But it is very possible that we will nibble at biotechnology’s tempting offerings without realizing that they come at a frightful moral cost.”527
Small increments.
Like those seemingly innocuous Three Market Square microchips.
I agree completely with Fukuyama: transhumanism is oh so tempting. Its extravagant promises to make us better people and the planet a better place are hard to resist, especially in the face of so much daily suffering in the world.
“We’re going to get more neocortex, we’re going to be funnier, we’re going to be better at music. We’re going to be sexier,” promises Ray Kurzweil, transhumanist extraordinaire. “Ultimately, it will affect everything.”528
Kurzweil’s hyperbolic imagination calls to mind Friedrich Nietzsche’s own chilling, transhumanist vision in Thus Spake Zarathustra. “Man is something that is to be surpassed,” he declares. “What have ye done to surpass man? Lo, I teach you the Superman!”
But Nietzsche’s Superman—his Übermensch, supposedly superior to a human being—is actually scarier than a normal person, defects and all. Among other things, Nietzsche’s Superman has inspired generations of eugenicists and genocidal atrocities that beggar the imagination. [See EYE OF THE BEHOLDER.]
“Transhumanism’s advocates think they understand what constitutes a good human being,” says Fukuyama, “and they are happy to leave behind the limited, mortal, natural beings they see around them in favor of something better.”529 But that supposedly better creature has the real potential of being far worse than what we are now.
Finally, I have one other serious concern about transhumanism.
For the foreseeable future, the cyborg enhancements promising to make us smarter, faster, stronger, and closer to immortal will be affordable only to the very wealthy. “Those unable to afford the new miracle treatments—the vast majority of people—will be beside themselves with rage,” warns historian Yuval Harari. “Throughout history, the poor and oppressed comforted themselves with the thought that at least death is even-handed—that the rich and powerful will also die. The poor will not be comfortable with the thought that they have to die, while the rich will remain young and beautiful forever.”530
Major inequities between rich and poor already exist, of course—for instance, Second Sight’s bionic eyes cost about $100,000. But as I’m about to explain, the growing, technology-driven rift between the world’s haves and have-nots is heading toward an unprecedented extreme.
At the end of R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots—the hit 1920 play I discussed at the start of this section—robots revolt against us and take over the world, reinventing it in their own image. Such apocalyptic revolts are so common in science-fiction literature that in 1942 Isaac Asimov published three commandments intended to prevent them in real life. They are:
• Law #1: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.”
• Law #2: “A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”
• Law #3: “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.”
Later, Asimov added another commandment, which trumps all the others:
• Zeroth Law: “A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.”531
Asimov’s laws are interesting; but honestly, hell-raising robots aren’t my top concern. Given AI threatening people’s livelihoods and thereby threatening to exacerbate class disparities and envy, I fear humans will revolt against robots.
“I don’t want to really scare you,” says James Rodman Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era. “But it was alarming how many people I talked to [while researching my book] who are highly placed people in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug-out’ houses, to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.”532
One of those “highly placed people” is Antonio García Martinez, a former Facebook executive who recently fled to Orcas Island in northwestern Washington state. As I reported in an earlier chapter, Martínez believes “It could get ugly. There could be a revolution.” [See MASS EXTINCTION 2.0?]
How ugly could it get? “There are 300 million guns in this country,” he notes, “one for every man, woman and child; and they’re mostly in the hands of those who are getting economically displaced.”533
Martinez appears in a BBC-Two documentary called “Secrets of Silicon Valley,” hosted by Jamie Bartlett, director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media. “The tech gods are selling us all a better future,” Bartlett warns, “but Silicon Valley’s promise to build a better world relies on tearing up the world as it is . . . and it’s leaving some of the poorest people in society behind.”534
In this section, I’ve given you glimpses of the “better world” being promised by the tech gods. It’s a world marked by an inhuman level of efficiency; the invasion of a massive, robotic labor force; economic disruption and income inequality; and an oligarchy of fantastically wealthy, dangerously powerful hi-tech gurus—the so-called new masters of the universe.535 A world of super-intelligent, super-strong, super-fast machines; bionic personal assistants; cybernetic sex slaves; and superhuman enhancements for the well-heeled. A world that clashes with traditional human values and beliefs as never before.
“Despite all the talk of radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is— Silicon Valley,” remarks the Israeli historian Yuval Harari. “That’s where hi-tech gurus are brewing for us brave new religions that have little to do with God, and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes—happiness, peace, prosperity and even eternal life—but here on earth with the help of technology, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings.”536
How much of this brave new world will actually come to pass? Some expert observers counsel skepticism. “We’re in a hype cycle,” cautions Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “The hype and the expectations in some cases are far beyond the technical reality.”537
Others see it differently.
“Humanity is about to face perhaps its greatest challenge ever,” says Moshe Vardi, a highly respected computer scientist at Rice University, “which is finding meaning in life after the end of ‘In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.’”
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence,” advises Elon Musk. “If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. I mean, with artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.”538
So, forget about Asimov’s laws and rebellious robots. In the years to come, I believe, the supreme challenge will be: How can we keep people from revolting?
“I think ultimately we will have to have some kind of universal basic income,” claims Musk, “I don’t think we are going to have a choice.”539
Sam Altman, president of Y Combinator, arguably the world’s most influential startup incubator, agrees. “I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale.”
Altman has launched the Basic Income Project, which in 2018 plans to run a free hand-out experiment in two states. One thousand people will receive $1,000 per month for up to five years. Another two thousand will receive only $50 per month.540
“By comparing a group of people who receive a basic income to an otherwise identical group of people who do not,” says Elizabeth Rhodes, the project’s research director, “we can isolate and quantify the effects of a basic income.”541
Michael Tubbs, mayor of Stockton, California, is also experimenting with universal basic income (UBI). Starting in 2018, the city will give $500 per month to several families for a year. “I feel that as mayor,” Tubbs says, “it’s my responsibility to do all I could to begin figuring out what’s the best way to make sure that folks in our community have a real economic floor.”542
Altman, Tubbs, and others make UBI sound like a new idea, but of course it is nothing more than old-school socialism in disguise. And that’s my concern.
Given socialism’s many spectacular failures, I see the UBI as just another shady promise of a better world by the tech gods. Research on the long history of failed welfare programs—including Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty—clearly shows people do not flourish when given handouts.543
Tragically, many of them sink into crushing despair and grow dependent on the government, oftentimes for multiple generations. As explained in the excellent documentary “Work & Happiness: The Human Cost of Welfare,” people are happiest when they can earn a living for themselves.544
On top of that, the UBI smacks of noblesse oblige—of a phenomenally affluent ruling class in Silicon Valley and elsewhere lobbying for the government to throw crumbs at the disenfranchised masses. Or worse, to subsidize a permanent underclass.
Either way you look at it, a UBI is not likely to keep people from revolting. For, far from being a serious-minded solution to the potential problem of AI causing ruinous levels of unemployment, it is a tacit confession that such a fate is precisely what awaits us.