PROLOGUE: THE VOICE OF EXPERIENCE
Yes, I was what you might call an early adopter when it came to living with nanites, and that’s why my memories of the world before and after are still so vivid these many years later—I got prosthetic memory even before you could get the software to edit it. It was like being a kid in a candy shop, and with a big allowance to boot. Not everybody was as willing to experiment as I was, of course, but you more or less found your own level, finding people who were chasing the same kind of dream, at least at the moment you were both chasing it. Not that there weren’t already some problems between those of us pushing the envelope and those who thought the world needed more boundaries given all the new possibilities. Old-style democracy was still around at that point, and there was some political pushing and shoving as well as some rioting and sundry nastiness on both sides. But it never worried me much at that stage. I was convinced I knew where things were going; those of us who took the plunge were better off—hell just plain better—for having done so, and if it was going to come down to any kind of competition I was confident we would carry the day.
And of course I was right about that. I saw the end coming when the people who wanted to limit or reject the new nano-world started to defend themselves using the same “let us do our own thing” principle that we had used to defend transformation! By that time we were perfectly happy to leave them alone as they were pretty much irrelevant anyway. But I admit that I was surprised that that victory was not the end of our problems. Actually, it was more like the beginning. We thought the end of the old society, politics, and economics would free us to be wonderful in whatever ways we wanted. Not exactly. There was a saying in the old world, “when nothing is true, everything is permitted.” I don’t know about that, but with just a small change it sure works the other way: when everything is permitted, nobody is true. You just could not count on people from one day to the next, or sometimes one moment to the next. There were no serious costs to picking up and going somewhere else, to becoming someone else, even to escaping altogether by getting yourself frozen. Responsibility proved to be pretty rare. It also became perfectly clear that bad guys don’t become any less bad when they have more stuff and more power; we tried to deal with that by using “white-hat nanites” to fight “black-hat nanites.” That worked okay when the people who invented them stuck to the job, but like I just told you they didn’t always. And how could the rest of us blame them? Meanwhile, we also rediscovered that letting everybody do his own thing was not the end of conflict; one person’s fondest desire might be exactly what another person most wants to avoid.
So there was even more reason for the like-minded to stick together, cutting themselves off as much as possible from anybody who didn’t see it their way. We all told ourselves that we’d still be free to do our own thing because we could join any group whenever we wanted. It wasn’t long before there were enough instances of people who joined in bad faith and other kinds of organizational sabotage to bring that phase to an end. By that time the white-hat nanites were being developed by artificial intelligence so we thought we’d be pretty well shielded from outsider lifestyle choices. Yet once the AI systems understood the logic of what they were being asked to do they realized the benefits of defense in depth and started taking what sure looked like offensive measures—only against the bad guys of course. Or at least the ones who looked bad to us.
So yeah it is a pretty tough world out there just now, but there never was a technology that didn’t have some kind of downside, right? Maybe when nano really takes off it’ll be different. In the meantime you sprouts may not be quite living the dream but . . . sorry, which siren was that? Another Level Seven incursion? Ok kids, you know where to go. With any luck we can finish this later.
FOR TRANSHUMANISTS, nanotechnology opens all kinds of doors. For starters, it will bring great material and economic benefits. “By making it possible to rearrange atoms effectively,” writes the transhumanist philosopher-activist Nick Bostrom, nanotechnology “will enable us to transform coal into diamonds, sand into supercomputers, and to remove pollution from the air and tumors from healthy tissue.”1 Simon Young, another cheerleader for transhumanism, adds that “Eventually, through nanotechnology, vast armies of miniature robot workers manufacturing goods at the molecular level will bring productivity levels through the roof, bringing an end to scarcity and want, poverty, and hunger.”2
But such changes to the world we inhabit may seem minor when compared to the changes in store for who and what we are. Nanotechnology will be one of the main routes to “the redesign of the human organism,” Bostrom writes, suggesting dryly that “once there is both nanotechnology and superintelligence, a very wide range of special applications will follow swiftly.” Still, “If we have a choice it seems preferable that superintelligence be developed before advanced nanotechnology, as superintelligence could help reduce the risks of nanotechnology but not vice versa.”3 Meanwhile, the prominent transhumanist Ray Kurzweil points to a specific possibility in the way of building new bodies: smart dust. “In the late twenty-first century, the ‘real’ world will take on many of the characteristics of the virtual world through the means of nanotechnology swarms,” trillions of intelligent networked nanobots that will be able to form into shaped clouds that will simulate anything, including a human body.4 When we go out, “we will have to select our body, our personality, our environment—so many difficult decisions to make! But don’t worry—we’ll have intelligent swarms of machines to guide us.”5 (Note how readily Kurzweil slides from using this technology to express our choices to using it to guide our choices.)
The actual definition of the term nanotechnology is somewhat controversial, so it may be safest to begin with the basics. The “nano-” in “nanotechnology” is a prefix used in the metric system, much as a “millimeter” is one thousandth of a meter and a “kilometer” is one thousand meters. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, and nanotechnology usually refers to manipulating matter at the scale of around one to a hundred nanometers—that is, at the level of molecules and atoms. It is very hard to imagine things this small. For the sake of comparison, a human hair is about 60,000 to 120,000 nanometers wide; a human red blood cell is about 6,000 to 8,000 nanometers in diameter; a DNA molecule is 2 to 12 nanometers in diameter. If every nanometer in the diameter of a CD or a DVD were expanded to the size of the more familiar millimeter, the disc would be 74 miles across.
For the time being, much mainstream nanotechnology research in universities and corporations is focused on finding uses for “nanoparticles”—very fine particles of some existing material—or experimenting with novel molecular structures. At this very tiny scale, substances can have properties that are not present at larger sizes. Adding nanoparticles to other materials can in turn give those materials new properties. At the moment, applications for nanoparticles are relatively prosaic; one can find them in items like sunscreens, disinfectants, and car parts.6 These nanoparticles and nanomaterials will surely have many uses in the years ahead, but they are hardly revolutionary. Indeed, there is reason to believe that they have a long history: some materials used in the ancient world, like Damascus steel and some kinds of Roman glass, had special properties that today’s scientists attribute to nanoparticles.
But experts are confident that potentially revolutionary applications of nanotechnology are not far off. Mihail Roco, founding director of the U.S. government’s National Nanotechnology Initiative, foresees future generations of nanotechnology that go well beyond today’s “passive” efforts. Already researchers are developing a “second generation,” with active devices such as nanoscale motors that could power nanodevices.7 According to Roco, third-generation systems of nanodevices could, for example, consist of systems of nanowires in the brain to sense or direct the activity of neurons. Or they could be networked nanoscale robotic devices that assemble themselves into dynamic three-dimensional images for highly realistic telecommunication or virtual realities. A fourth generation of nanotechnology could be, like biological systems, self-assembling, blurring the distinction between living and non-living systems.8
By the time we get to the third and fourth generations of nanotechnology, which Roco expects to come into existence over the next two decades, nanotechnology begins to look a great deal like what Nick Bostrom, Simon Young, Ray Kurzweil, and other transhumanists have described. This shared vision of the more advanced possibilities for nanotechnology can be traced back to the work of K. Eric Drexler, whose groundbreaking and influential 1986 book Engines of Creation remains one of the most thoughtful treatments of the risks and benefits of such great power.
Drexler, born in Alameda, California in 1955, was as a young man intensely interested in the possibility of establishing colonies in space. He started thinking about nanotechnology in 1976, during his time as an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and over the next decade he developed and refined his ideas, presenting them in a scientific journal in 19819 and then bringing them before the wider public in Engines of Creation. In that book, Drexler imagined the nanotechnology future in terms of “nanomachines” designed to manipulate matter at the molecular scale.10 These nanomachines, he thought, could be used to manufacture all kinds of goods, including themselves—that is, they would be self-replicating. One nanomachine could first build another, and those two could replicate in turn, until millions or billions were available to assemble molecule by molecule whatever additional product they were designed to produce. As Drexler originally envisioned nanomachines, they could manufacture anything—food, rocket engines, human organs, any consumer product—by building it from the bottom up.11 * The necessary raw materials could be provided by having other nanomachines sort and disassemble recycled goods, or by using natural resources.12
With nanomachines programmed to produce just about anything we could imagine, something like the “replicator” in Star Trek becomes possible; Drexler said it “might aptly be called a ‘genie machine.’”13 Nanomachines, he expected, would help in the conquest of space, and natural resources from outer space will provide cheap raw materials and hence “a future of great material abundance.”14 They would circulate in our bloodstreams, looking for signs of disease or decay, forming an artificial immune system.15 They would repair living cells and even redesign them, for there is plenty of room in a human cell for a nanodevice to set up shop. If atoms were the size of marbles, Drexler writes, a single human cell would be a kilometer across. He estimates that a device useful for doing repairs in the cell would at this scale be about the size of a three-story house, guided by a nanoscale-computer system about the size of a building with a footprint the size of a football field, thirty stories tall.16 Such repair abilities would open the door to revival after cryonic suspension—the ability to freeze a recently deceased or still-living body to preserve it until technologies are developed to cure or revive the patient. This life-extending technology is the single advance Drexler spends the most time considering in Engines of Creation.17 The central problem of cryonic suspension is that the freezing designed to preserve living or recently deceased tissue actually causes serious damage to cells and tissues. With nanotechnology, people sick or dying or recently dead from illnesses that medicine cannot cure could be frozen, put into what would amount to suspended animation, and thawed out as cures became available. Drexler notes that cryonics need not be limited to the sick: the same freezing and thawing approach could be used by anyone who wants to “time travel” into the future.18
Drexler’s book sparked the public interest in nanotechnology and inspired many scientists to begin working in the field.19 But Drexler is a prophet accorded only limited honor in the discipline he did so much to develop and popularize; the U.S. National Nanotechnology Initiative makes no mention of him in its “Nanotechnology Timeline” nor in any of its other official materials.20 His ideas have been subject to controversy at least since the publication of Engines of Creation. The book’s strong focus on cryonic suspension and reviving the dead put Drexler in suspect company, and the book’s frequent use of the term “imagine” (as in “imagine if . . .”) is also not the sort of thing that many scientists and engineers are likely to be comfortable with, particularly when there is an ongoing and spirited debate about the very possibility of the nanomachines he described.21 There is also among his critics a sense that his early speculations about the promise, and even more the peril, of nanotechnology had an unhealthy effect on public perceptions, raising hopes and fears in relation to things that might never even come to pass.22
Yet his pioneering work remains important whatever the misgivings of his critics. Even if it turns out he did not envision the details of self-replicating nanotechnology correctly, the big-picture issues he raises concerning it remain relevant. For what is he thinking about in Engines of Creation? First of all, he is considering the consequences of continued progress in miniaturization in a world where what has already been achieved has had huge impact. Second, he is thinking about the significance of an improved ability to develop useful new materials and customize old materials. Third, he is talking about increasingly fine-grained control over natural processes, the productivity gains that could result from this manipulation, and the results of increasing resource availability. Finally, he is thinking about what all these capacities together might do for our ability to cure or prevent disease—or indeed, to do harm to people—and for our ability to choose freely among a widening set of lifestyle possibilities. In and of themselves, none of these trends he claims to see is controversial. Who does not expect the future to hold more miniaturization, more synthetic materials, more control over nature, more ability to help or harm human health?
So even if it turns out that Drexler was wrong about some specifics of nanotechnology back in 1986, he still identified a trajectory of technological development that can be taken seriously. He certainly is not alone in thinking that nanotechnology will change everything. But it could be said that he has thought out its perils as well as its promise more than most. He offers a carefully articulated quasi-philosophy of cosmic history that suggests the necessity of developing nanotechnology—a framework that is both useful for transhumanists and contains familiar elements from the eclipse of man. He offers a theory of human personality as well—and it is attractive to transhumanists, too, for it provides a justification for not worrying too much about using nanotechnology to transform our minds and bodies. And he offers a vision of what a world remade by nanotechnology ought to look like. All that makes Engines of Creation an unusually comprehensive effort to think about the consequences of a new technology even before it exists. The discussion that follows will not take up the technical challenges to Drexler’s vision that have been raised, but will simply accept that something like what he described in Engines of Creation could indeed be possible. At the very worst, Drexler’s discussion of nanotechnology becomes an imaginative case study for trying to think through the consequences of accelerating technological change, and the discontinuities that it might produce in what it means to be human.
DANGER AND DIVERSITY
Drexler suggests with some justice that his book is not so much advocating nanotechnology as promoting “understanding of nanotechnology and its consequences.”23 For all the benefits that he expects to result from his nanomachine “engines of creation,” which he calls replicators, he warns they could also readily be “engines of destruction.”24 “Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop,” he says. That possibility “has become known as the ‘gray goo problem,’” in which uncontrolled replicators literally consume the entire earth in an orgy of exponential growth.25 (This warning is one of the main reasons Drexler is looked at unfavorably; he is accused of raising implausible frightening scenarios before we know that the nanomachines he describes are even possible.26) There are other dangerous possibilities, too. Advanced artificial intelligence (AI), Drexler argues, will facilitate and be facilitated by nanotechnology, and will be able to do in seconds what it would take hundreds of years of human engineering to do. States could achieve “destabilizing breakthroughs” with the ability to mass-produce better versions of existing weapons, or “programmable germs and other nasty novelties.”27 “A bomb can only blast things, but nanomachines and AI systems could be used to infiltrate, seize, change and govern a territory or a world.”28 Under these circumstances, no traditional “balance of power” is enough in international relations; advances could be made in a day that would destabilize any status quo.29 Domestically, totalitarian states could use nanomachines to infiltrate bodies and minds so as to dominate their populations even more ruthlessly, and to make it yet easier to treat their human subjects as disposable.30
For such reasons Drexler acknowledges that “it seems we must guide the technology race or die”; clearly “guide” means direct or channel rather than restrain, since “the force of technological evolution makes a mockery of anti-technology movements: democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world’s democracies, not the world as a whole.”31 It does not follow from this skepticism about local restraint that Drexler is in favor of world government. It would take a global totalitarian government to stop advanced nanotechnology from being developed; the elimination of liberty would be, he believes, too high a price to pay for safety.
How then are we to maximize the desired outcomes and minimize the dangers? Drexler spends a good deal of time discussing engineering techniques that could be used to reduce risks. Beyond design features, however, Drexler calls for serious efforts at “foresight,” which involves asking “three questions. What is possible, what is achievable, and what is desirable?”32 Laws of nature set limits to the possible, and Drexler makes the bold claim that nanotechnology will allow our power over nature to approach rapidly the limits of the possible.33 Drexler is aware in principle that as the achievable begins to reach the limits of the possible, foresight will have to focus on decisions about what is desirable. That is clearly a moral or ethical question—how people should use this amazing expansion of human power.
We are left with a dilemma: “Our differing dreams spur a quest for a future with room for diversity, while our shared fears spur a quest for a future of safety.”34 People’s desires for our world and themselves diverge wildly, and so, as Drexler develops the argument, it becomes clear that he believes liberty and diversity go hand in hand. But liberty and safety do not necessarily go together. Leave people free to do as they wish and they may end up hurting each other; the more you want to keep them safe from each other the more you may need to restrict their liberty. Political philosophy has long had to deal with this dilemma. But in Drexler’s case, this already serious problem is made yet more difficult by the underlying logic that he thinks will drive nanotechnology development, which strongly constrains the foresight question of what is desirable, even as it extends the concept of diversity well beyond anything that we are familiar with today. First we will examine that logic, and see its ultimate consequences for what diversity means to Drexler, and then turn to how he believes that radical new diversity can be dealt with.
COMPETITIVE PRESSURE
To understand the logic behind the development of nanotechnology, it is important to see that Drexler is not content to argue for nanotechnology on the grounds of its possibility and desirability alone. He also wants to suggest that because of competitive pressure we—understood in some sense as a national “we” and in some sense as a human “we”—have no choice but to develop it. The most immediate reason is international competition; whichever country is the “leading force” in nanotechnology will gain a huge economic and military advantage over everyone else.35 That means there is every incentive for somebody to develop it, and to his credit, Drexler, writing toward the close of the Cold War, clearly prefers that it be the United States.
Competitive pressure allows Drexler to place his nanomachines within a broad sweep of evolutionary development. The philosophy of cosmic history that he offers is reminiscent of the way Winwood Reade expanded on and adapted Darwin’s ideas in The Martyrdom of Man (discussed in Chapter One). Drexler follows Richard Dawkins, the neo-Darwinian evolutionary biologist, in arguing that evolution is all about the “variation and selection of replicators.”36 The earliest simple replicators based on RNA and DNA evolved into a bewildering variety of forms—giving us life as we observe it. Eventually, the story goes, a kind of replicator we call human beings came along, capable of developing technology. This technology in turn undergoes the same process of evolutionary selection, as do the ideas (“memes”) that are part and parcel of its development. Nanomachines are just the latest form of replicator, brought about by human replicators.
We must expect, then, that “deep-rooted principles of evolutionary change will shape the development of nanotechnology, even as the distinction between hardware and life begins to blur.”37 Competitive pressure will drive the evolution of these new replicators as it drives all others; “the global technology race has been accelerating for billions of years. The earthworm’s blindness could not block the development of sharp-eyed birds.”38 Unlike natural selection, which depends on randomness, the variation and selection of nanomachines can be directed by the proper application of foresight to serve the ends of intelligence. Yet because competition makes the development of nanotechnology necessary, the question of desirability cannot really be a question of “nanotechnology or not” but must rather be a question of what kind and how. Indeed, Drexler argues that foresight must help us select against ideas and ways of thinking that stand in the way of accepting this new form of replicator.
By lumping together many different biological, physical, and mental phenomena under the broad category of “replicators,” Drexler assimilates the whole history of technology into the history of life, which in turn makes two kinds of evolution possible: one based on chance and the other guided by intelligence. (This distinction is an important point of contact between Drexler’s argument and the arguments of the transhumanists, as we will see in the next chapter.) So when we consider the future of nanotechnology, we are seeing a new stage in an old story. Drexler’s proof of concept for self-replicating nanomachines is the existence of the self-replicating organic “protein machines” that are so well established in the biological realm already—that is, all the parts that make up cells and organisms.39 With nanotechnology, we are just developing a new form of a common phenomenon.
Yet there will still be significant discontinuity in the shape of life to come. Nanomachines may lead to the eclipse of man, and into realms of achievement we cannot now comprehend. Drexler envisions “revolutions”: remaking our bodies, melding mind and machine, spreading life into space.40 The range of these possibilities suggests that the “diversity” Drexler discusses will have a very wide scope. Still, he is plainly aware that some people will be troubled by the convergence of minds and machines, with all that it implies about what we are and what we may become: “some feel uncomfortable with the idea that machines underlie our own thinking.”41 To make such people less uncomfortable, Drexler attempts to shift their understanding of “machine” away from just the sort of “picture of gross, clanking metal” that Bernal presented in his crustacean-like brain housing. Drexler would rather we imagine “signals flickering through a shifting weave of neural fibers. . . . The brain’s really machinelike machines are of molecular size.”42 But the further implications of this view of what a machine can look like raises its own issues. Signals passing through fibers could describe either human intelligence or artificial intelligence—another idea that Drexler understands people resist. Yet if the brain is already understood as a machine, opposition to artificial intelligence becomes merely “biochauvinist prejudice.”43 Drexler is drawing out the consequences of scientific materialism’s view of human beings as sophisticated machines. From this point of view, a new transhuman or posthuman model of humanity is no big deal.
The supposed need to overcome biochauvinist prejudice tells us how Drexler’s idea of diversity includes dehumanization as a core element of the nanotechnology future. We see another in his discussion of one of the great payoffs he expects from nanomachines: indefinitely extended life. (Like Condorcet, Drexler is careful not to say immortality.) The argument begins with relatively conventional goals for nanomachines: we will use them to cure disease, detect and repair cellular damage, replace old parts with new. However, should there be anything wrong with the body that nanomachines can’t fix, they can still make possible revival after cryonic suspension. Echoing Bernal, the only human part that Drexler really believes needs to be frozen is the brain—since the patterns of the information stored in the molecular machines that are our brains define the meaning of the “I” in the phrase “I will live far longer.” To make this case, Drexler takes advantage of the real uncertainty we have about the basis for our personal identity and selfhood. Is it the body? Yet the body changes over time, and the very stuff of the body is in constant flux and not at all what it was not that long ago. So where does it reside? As a materialist, Drexler does not want to believe in a soul—but he comes close. The “I” is a pattern of information, a pattern residing in the brain.
“Nature draws no line between living and nonliving,” Drexler writes.44 Matter is matter, but it can be patterned in different ways, and these patterns make a huge difference; “one simple sum of our parts would resemble hamburger, lacking both mind and life.”45 With regard to that brain, however, Drexler turns out to be something of a dualist:
A mind and the tissue of its brain are like a novel and the paper of its book. Spilled ink or flood damage may harm the book, making the novel difficult to read. Book repair machines could nonetheless restore physical ‘health’ by removing the foreign ink or drying and repairing the damaged paper fibers. Such treatments would do nothing for the book’s content, however, which in a real sense is nonphysical. If the book were a cheap romance with a moldy plot and empty characters, repairs are needed not on the ink and paper, but on the novel.46
We know that the nonphysical information of the book, the novel, can have any variety of physical embodiments and remain the same with respect to the information it contains, whether the book be hardcover, paperback, e-book, or audiobook. Of course, the resurrected patterns of information that reside in the brain could be housed in a familiar body—perhaps even a body that resembles the brain’s original body. But why stop there? Why not an unfamiliar body, or any body at all? Indeed, once the pattern in the brain becomes the key thing, even the brain itself becomes disposable. In a sense, Drexler allows the argument to advance a step beyond Bernal, for whom already the body was a mere tool of the brain. Why should the pattern of information that truly is each of us reside in a biological brain at all? And why must that pattern reside in only one location at a time?
Drexler’s presentation of individual identity as a pattern of information is a symptom of the relatively precarious way that consciousness and our sense of self are situated in scientific materialism.47 In Engines of Creation Drexler does not explore in depth all the implications of the ability to “remake our bodies.”48 While he mentions in passing the possibility of “bizarre” modifications of the body, for the most part he is content with letting his readers assume that a resurrected brain will be placed in something like a familiar body, and that one will lead a familiar life with resurrected friends and family—a scene that provided some inspiration for the prologue to this chapter.49 The implications are nevertheless clear enough, and suggest another respect in which nano-based diversity will produce inhumanity. Information can be stored, copied, manipulated, and transmitted in all kinds of ways. The idea that “I” am just a pattern abstracts not just from bodily particulars, but from how bodies are embedded in the larger world; or, perhaps more precisely, it assumes that we live in our own heads, and we don’t even need to stay there. It wipes away much of how we experience and understand ourselves and our world. (In the next chapter we will see how transhumanists take advantage of the potentially radical consequences that pattern identity has for detaching people from “biochauvinist prejudice.”)
NANOPOLITICS AND HUMAN IMPERFECTION
Drexler does his best to argue that the kind of diversity he has in mind—where people can choose to live on starships, to colonize alien worlds, to communicate telepathically, to redesign their bodies, to “time-travel” with cryonics, or even to live the way we do today—is in keeping with the kind of wide, free choice that is considered desirable in liberal democracies and capitalist economies.50 As remarkable as those examples may appear, Drexler seems to suggest that they fall under the rubric of the “pursuit of Happiness” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence. But will people with such diverse desires be able to live together? Drexler is smart enough to understand that we cannot simply assume that giving people more power to choose individually or collectively how to live will make them more tolerant of those who choose a different way of life; it might make them more insular and less tolerant. So it is at least not self-evidently a good idea to seek a future where more people will have larger differences and more power to fight about them, a world in which people believe themselves even more entitled to do as they please than in many parts of the world today. We might hope that such power would be a recipe for leaving each other alone, for doing as we would be done by, but that is not the lesson of experience.
So what is to be done to make sure that nanotechnology is used responsibly—to govern its use in such a way that the gray goo scenario, for example, never comes to pass? Political, legal, or moral restraints that will help us to make the right decisions about the development of nanotechnology do not have to “start from scratch,” Drexler writes.51 There are many elements of liberal democratic society and politics that can provide the necessary foundations. “The principles of representative government, free speech, due process, the rule of law, and protection of human rights will remain crucial,” as will “such diffuse and lively institutions as the free press, the research community, and activist networks.”52 Further, such things as “personal restraint, local action, selective delay, international agreement, unilateral strength, and international cooperation” will all be useful for avoiding fearsome scenarios.53
However, such institutions and modes of restraint are only useful in a specific context: when they go along with what Drexler calls “active shields.” Active shields are defensive, automated nanotechnologies that act as an immune system, seeking out and destroying hostile nanomachines.54 In other words, the best defense against bad nanomachines in the wrong hands is for nanotechnology in the right hands always to be one step ahead. If we look more closely at the kinds of measures Drexler advocates for guiding the development of nanotechnology, we can understand why in the end Drexler must place a huge amount of weight on active shields.
Political solutions are at least as imperfect with respect to nanotechnology as they are generally; in particular they are not complete answers to the existence of “power, evil, incompetence, and sloth.”55 Drexler acknowledges that democracies can commit “atrocities” and that they contain evil people.56 The potential for evil is balanced by the fact that democratic “leaders gain power largely by appearing to uphold conventional ideas of good.”57 He never makes clear just what constitutes “good” or “evil,” a fact that suggests that he does not have a lot of hope that some “ethics of nanotechnology” will be very useful as a restraint. That power and evil are relatively intractable problems already suggests why active shields will be necessary.
Sloth and incompetence seem to be more tractable problems, although still not easy to eliminate because “we human beings are by nature stupid and ignorant.”58 But in this area as in so many others, Drexler does not think we have to be content with nature. Indeed, we already know how to cooperate on technical matters to “gain reliability through redundancy.”59 Incompetence can thus be weeded out. He also provides suggestions to “improve our institutions for judging important technical facts.”60 One of these ideas is to create “fact forums” (sometimes also called “science courts”), which would put technical disputes within a quasi-judicial framework of due process, so that clear statements of what is agreed upon, and the parameters of disagreements, can emerge. Drexler does not envision them as policymaking bodies; they seem designed largely to lay out the merits of technical disputes for the public and decision-makers.61
Even if foresight can be improved by improved competence, sloth is another matter. It may well be that not everyone will be willing to “meet great challenges with great effort.”62 But it is not necessary that everyone be on board from the start. “It will require only that a growing community of people strive to develop, publicize, and implement workable solutions—and that they have a good and growing measure of success,” Drexler writes. “Sloth will not snare everyone’s effort. Deadly pseudo-solutions (such as blocking research) will lose the battle of ideas if enough people debunk them. And though we face a great challenge, success will make possible the fulfillment of great dreams.”63
SHIELDS AND LIMITS
While Drexler suggests that incompetence can be minimized and sloth may be made irrelevant under the right conditions, he wisely does not claim to have a complete solution to the two other problems he names: evil and the abuse of or hunger for power. These are facts of life, and no set of beliefs or framework of laws and institutions can restrain them perfectly. But the great power conferred by nanotechnology, power that Drexler himself suggests could change everything in a day, makes evil and the lust for power particularly dangerous. So moral, legal, institutional, and political restraints are likely to mean little unless they go along with active shields. Moreover, moral, legal, institutional, and political restraints are likely to be in tension with the goals of liberty and diversity in a way that active shields are not. The arguments that Drexler uses against efforts to prohibit nanotechnology generally—local restraint alone is ineffective, global restraint totalitarian—would apply just as much to any effort to restrain some particular form or use of nanotechnology. So moral, political, and legal restraints are either ineffective when non-uniform or dangerous to liberty and diversity when uniform. This dilemma may help explain why Drexler is not very interested in exploring terms like “evil” or conventional understandings of what is good. As different ways of life develop around different uses of nanomachines, the meaning of these terms will be contested. If active shields work as Drexler intends, he can think of them as guarantors of libertarian cultural relativism; it will not matter to one protected enclave what is going on in another.
Now, any society, even one that values liberty, needs some kinds of “active shields” like police, private security, or military forces because moral, political, and legal restraints cannot enforce themselves and not everyone will be equally restrained by them. In a society that loves liberty, these human active shields are there to make sure that (to use the familiar phrase) the liberty of your fist ends just prior to my nose. In a civilized society these old-fashioned active shields are the ultimate line of defense; they come into play when all other restraints on behavior fail. These systems are imperfect, so crime and conflict are not always prevented. But the intensity of crime and conflict is limited not just by our active shields, but by some degree of unity, even if limited temporally or geographically, on normative beliefs that restrain conflict, and on the relative difficulty of acquiring tools that would be capable of larger- rather than smaller-scale destruction. So although it is relatively easy to get guns in the United States, for example, most people are not going to use them to commit crimes, and the few that have criminal inclinations will find it progressively harder to get progressively more dangerous weapons.
The future world that Drexler invites us to imagine is one with greater diversity than the one we live in, less normative consensus, and easier access to more dangerous tools. Thus, his active shields are not the last line of defense, they are the precondition for creating a “stable, durable peace” while maintaining diversity and liberty in a world where human power increases but human goodness may not.64 Indeed, to the extent that the active shields work, it might appear that the question of goodness has reduced significance. Ensconced behind an active shield, we can safely follow our own vision of the good without having to worry about anyone else’s.
Drexler’s willingness in some fashion to confront the problem of evil justifies his claim that he rejects standard utopian fare, which “all too often [has] been impossible and the attempt to achieve it has been disastrous.”65 He wants to present us with “useful dreams”; as we will see shortly, neither we’re running out of resources tomorrow nor we can do anything we want forever is a useful dream.66 Likewise, it is not useful to think that we need to plan today for everything the future might hold; the “great task of our time” is not so much to build this world of diverse dreams as to guide “life and civilization through this transition” to it.67
UTOPIAN ANTI-UTOPIANISM
We have already seen some of Drexler’s recommendations for making the nanotech future safer despite the presence of power and evil, and for reducing, or at least minimizing the effects of, incompetence and sloth. While he claims these suggestions can build on existing institutions and ideas, will our system of politics survive in a recognizable way? The future Drexler describes seems likely to fundamentally challenge liberal democracy, which is predicated on checks and balances that allow the interests and ambitions of some, running along their well-established lines, to counter the interests and ambitions of others. What happens when those lines can be extended to the limits of the possible? Certainly the liberal democratic “pursuit of Happiness” is not predicated on the degree of human malleability and the consequent radical range of choice that Drexler presents, and the same would be true of rights generally and indeed of any of the hitherto existing “conventional ideas of good.”68
This discontinuity should be understood carefully. There is ample historical precedent for expanding the sphere of moral concern and political protection to formerly excluded classes of human beings and considering it progress. The future could simply hold more of the more-or-less same. At the very least, our conception of the human (as in human rights) would have to expand, or our understanding of rights-bearers would have to shift from human beings to some other category, such as sentient beings. (The already out-of-favor yet foundational idea of “natural rights” will have even less approval in a world bent on reconstructing nature itself.) But even under these “optimistic” circumstances, Drexler’s “useful dreams” are of a world that remains extremely dangerous precisely because of his hope for maximizing choice and minimizing restraint. The libertarian world he looks forward to seems unlikely to make people less assertive about their desires and perceived interests given the increasingly unimaginable benefits of nanotechnology, particularly when, for the “I” that is coming to understand itself as a “pattern” capable of diverse embodiments, the act of choosing becomes the locus of identity. The sphere of moral concern would have to be expanded to encompass all possible definitions of its appropriate scope.
In light of the diversity that Drexler envisions, one might ask, “If people can choose to do as they please, why should they concern themselves if others are choosing differently?” One could think even more creatively, and imagine that out of the settlement of alien worlds will spring a plethora of new nanotechnology-enabled species, alien beings who will have little interest in each other. But Drexler has already admitted that there are two flies in this ointment. The first is the existence of ongoing scarcity. This is a subject on which his position is nuanced, if not somewhat obscure. Drexler’s original interest in space and then in nanotechnology grew out of a reaction to the doomsaying projections made famous in the Club of Rome’s 1972 report The Limits to Growth,69 which he first read as a young man.70 In Engines of Creation, he utterly rejects the report’s projections that we are quickly running out of resources; nanotechnology and human expansion into space will put greater resources under human control.71 But fundamental laws of nature still create limits under which people will have to live. For example, nature dictates that the expansion of humanity into the galaxy will be limited by the speed of light (at best). That natural limit means that if our population grows exponentially, we will not be able to spread rapidly enough to obtain the resources we need. So while “the spread of life and civilization faces no fixed bound,” Drexler writes, “unchecked population growth, with or without long life, would overrun available resources in one or two thousand years at most.”72 Drexler, in other words, believes that Malthus was essentially correct. So scarcity will remain an issue, even if only a cosmic-scale matter of living space, and competition among worlds will not disappear.73
The second reason that radical diversity will challenge peaceful coexistence and live-and-let-live values becomes clear in an admission that Drexler makes: “Unless your dreams demand that you dominate everyone else. . . .”74 Such dreams are hardly unknown, but it is not clear Drexler has fully confronted their significance. As Aristotle knew, people do not turn to crime simply “through being cold or hungry” or become tyrants solely “to get in out of the cold.”75 However much we may prefer a world where there is plenty of heat to one where there is not, from the point of view of Aristotle’s realism, the abundance that Drexler imagines may encourage desires “beyond the necessary things” or for “enjoyment that comes with pleasures unaccompanied by pains. . . . The greatest injustices are committed out of excess.”76 Excess almost seems to be the point of the nanotechnology that Drexler describes in Engines of Creation.
Because some people have dreams of domination, others will need protection from them. Even if greater choice and less scarcity reduces conflict, there will still be reason for conflict so long as there is ordinary crime and so long as diversity includes those (call them evil if you wish) who find reason to dissent from the orthodoxy of diversity itself. If even only a few want more than they can get, or even a few concern themselves with martial glory or the love of honor, or even a few exhibit pathological evil, the diffident and tolerant many will need to be able to protect themselves, and their best defense may be a good offense.
Since Drexler gives us reason to think that active and competent evil will continue to exist in the future, then while he would like to think that active shields are purely defensive and hence non-threatening, they are a threat to anyone who has reason to worry about what is going on behind them. And such concerns arise not only so long as the possibility of evil exists. They will arise also out of the very fact that diverse visions of the good will often lead to divergent understandings of what kinds of behaviors are “safe” or “risky” in the first place.77 Drexler ignores the complication that in his world of choice among such visions, one group’s benefit may be another’s risk. Unless “worlds” can be completely isolated one from another, the competitive pressures Drexler counts on to produce progress in developing nanotechnology will not disappear even as the power to impose on others will increase, even as wild diversity decreases the sense of solidarity. Even those who might choose to “opt out” of the lifestyles nanotechnology makes possible will still be dependent on it: for example, if almost everybody is willing to let me raise my child without nanotechnology, I will still need an active shield against unrestrained deviants who find my behavior to be child abuse. In general, then, it appears that active shields will have to be very active indeed.
Which raises a vital question. Who will develop and maintain the active shields? Not all of the lifestyle choices Drexler speculates about, or that we might imagine, would in and of themselves point to interest in or competence at this important task, particularly to the extent that they share the desire for ease and comfort that Bernal spoke of as “Melanesian” aspirations. But somebody is going to have to mind the store. One wonders whether Bernal did not see more clearly than Drexler the likely outcome of this dilemma: utter dependence of the many on those relative few (perhaps the committed and non-slothful?) who develop and manage the technology the many depend upon. Diversity must be built on uniformity of technological capacity, freedom on dependence on those guardians who develop and maintain active shields. The shield guardians will not always share the values of those they protect because their focus will have to be on the non-diverse technical demands of their job.
Or perhaps—as indeed seems likely—these shield guardians will not be human at all but precisely those advanced artificial intelligences that Drexler counts on to push so rapidly the achievable to the limits of the possible. Indeed, it is hard to imagine how such an artificial intelligence could even begin to be under mere human control, given that its main strategic and tactical advantage over human development, design, and deployment would be the speed at which it would operate. Either human beings would have to be enhanced to catch up to it, or it would have to have been securely programmed (or otherwise convinced) to be well inclined to those it nominally served. The old question of who will guard the guardians was hard enough to answer in light of the old worldly wisdom that man is a wolf to man. It is far from clear that handing over power to artificial intelligences will represent a solution to this problem.
Drexler is aware that diversity and conflicting values go together. He knows also that there will be “genuine opposition to an open future, based on differing (and often unstated) values and goals.”78 He expects it will be opposed by “the power-hungry, the intolerant idealists, and a handful of sheer people-haters.”79 But despite the conflicts that Malthusian scarcity and Darwinian competition would suggest follow from such diversity, he does what he can to avoid dealing fully with the implications of divergent visions of the good. He holds that such disagreements will be far less important than those related to “differing beliefs regarding matters of fact.”80 Just as successful nanomachines reduce the problem of sloth, so too in the form of active shields are they the key to getting around value disputes.
Unless Drexler believes that there is an objective basis upon which to distinguish among visions of the good, then clarity about the facts will never be enough to settle such disputes. Rather, it seems that Drexler believes that in the present, the force of necessity allows foresight to slight the question of what is desirable, as if the might of technological possibility makes right. In the future, he hopes that active shields will make it unnecessary for there to be any common answers to that question. Yet the significance he gives to competition and scarcity make it implausible that what happens within active shields will not have consequences for relations among the shielded groups, and therefore on the way they are organized internally to meet this challenge. It is all very well to let a thousand flowers bloom, until you discover that some of them are invasive weeds. If it is impossible to isolate the worlds created by nanotechnological diversity from one another, we cannot overlook the significance of conflicting visions of the good among them.
WHAT SHOULD BE DONE?
This matter that Drexler seems not to address fully—the issue of conflict based on divergent ideas of the good—is at the core of Neal Stephenson’s portrayal of a nanotechnology future in his dazzling novel The Diamond Age (1995). Stephenson builds his story on broadly Drexlerian assumptions about the future of technology, and indeed, Drexler himself has endorsed the novel.81 But Stephenson is far more interested than Drexler in the question of how diverse visions of a good life might be organized internally in a nanotech future, and how such organized groups will be influenced by their competitive, external relations with those groups that have differing values. This question of relations between inner and outer arises throughout The Diamond Age, relevant not just to the way nanotech-based cultures interact, but also to how people interact as individuals.
The world of The Diamond Age is, by our present-day standards, pretty magical. A bird’s-eye view would note the following: a worldwide computer network (called “the Net,” recognizable as roughly equivalent to our Internet) was responsible for the downfall of the nation-state; once the Net made possible secure financial transactions that could not be traced by governments, people stopped paying their taxes.82 Nanotechnology produces goods plentifully; nanomachines disassemble matter at the molecular level and, normally for a price, programmable “matter compilers” (Drexler’s genie machines) can reassemble it into anything that is wanted.83 This world, Stephenson says, is one in which “nearly anything” has become possible.84 But the observation that makes Stephenson’s book so insightful is stated early on; for as nearly anything has become possible, the “cultural role in deciding what should be done with it had become far more important than imagining what could be done with it.”85
In the absence of the nation-state, answers to the question “What should be done?” are provided by a host of culturally distinct tribes, or “phyles.” But all phyles are not equally successful, and those inequalities matter a great deal. The largest and perhaps most powerful are New Atlantis, Nippon, Han, and Hindustan. The major phyles have obvious geographic antecedents and still control territory, including islands they fabricated using nanoconstruction off the coast of China and elsewhere. The story of The Diamond Age is largely centered on one such island, called New Chusan. It serves as real estate occupied by members of the New Atlantis phyle, which has self-consciously replicated Victorian norms as the best way to deal with the promises and perils of this new world. New Chusan is also the intake processor for the molecular stocks—the raw materials sorted largely out of the atmosphere and seawater—that are passed to the matter compilers through a network of feeder lines (the Feed).86 Territory on the island’s lowland periphery is leased to other less powerful phyles and to “thetes,” who belong to no phyle or to small “synthetic” phyles.87 The thetes constitute a relatively lawless underclass, living for the most part off the limited selection of free goods provided by the matter compilers.
The Diamond Age is by no stretch of the imagination a utopia.88 Nanotechnology makes it a frighteningly dangerous place, where thugs install “skull guns” in their foreheads that shoot nanoprojectiles capable of turning a body to mush from the inside out. Successful phyles have extensive security measures to protect them from hostile nanotechnology; these Drexlerian active shields consist of things like tiny hunter-killer airborne nanomachines, whose immune-system-like battles with intruding nanotechnology can turn the air gray with dead “mites.”89 New Atlantans also revive Victorian customs useful for self-defense: reception parlors in their homes serve to scan all visitors for hostile nanomachines, and women wear nanotech veils to fight off the same.90 The whole New Atlantis enclave is surrounded by a grid of floating security pods.91
Yet despite all the advances in nanotechnology, the action of the story develops from the fact that in this new world, people (mostly) remain people. Parents want to do well by their children, who remain difficult to raise.92 Businesses want to make a profit. Society remains “an elongated state of low-intensity warfare,” and high-intensity warfare can break out among competing phyles.93 The Diamond Age pictures a world of prejudice, inequality, exploitation, competition, and crime—but also a world of nobility, self-sacrifice, self-discipline, and virtue. In other words, in its moral fundamentals it is a world very much like ours. Although Stephenson is not blind to the potential for the progress of dehumanization inherent in Drexler’s promises, his achievement is to think through the impact of nanotechnology and other new technologies in relation to perennial human possibilities.
Stephenson observes how nanomachines, by opening up all the diverse choices that Drexler anticipates, challenge the ability of human associations to perpetuate themselves without altering the fundamental need for associations to do so, given the existence of competing groups with different ideas of what should be done. As a result, Stephenson must go deeper than Drexler into the question of how the “inward” side of nano-constructed lives, be they understood as the cultures behind the active shields or the lives of individuals within them, mold and are molded by the “outward” side: relations with other cultures and individuals.
We will explore various factors that create this situation, but competition and scarcity are key elements that Stephenson draws from Drexler’s account. In a world of ongoing competition and still-limited (even if amazing) resources, how a given group answers the question of what should be done will be a factor in their success or failure vis-à-vis other groups with different answers. Stephenson also identifies factors other than scarcity and competition that mold the deployment and development of nanotechnology, and these round out Drexler’s rather abstract picture of human things. In The Diamond Age, even when people try to make the kinds of fact-based rational decisions that Drexler would have us aim at, they still run up against the consequences of imperfect information and the misapprehensions it creates. And in Stephenson’s fictional world, as in ours, people are powerfully moved by the love of their own, a love that eventually points to certain mysteries of the human heart.
OUR STORY THUS FAR
A very spare plot summary can only hint at the Trollopian, if not Dickensian, richness in character and incident of The Diamond Age. It is largely the story of Nell (short for Nellodee), an abused thete child, who at the age of five or six receives from her delinquent brother Harv (short for Harvard) a stolen copy of an extraordinary interactive, educational book/computer/game of immense power, The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. Harv stole it from its designer, a talented nano-engineer named John Percival Hackworth, who intended it as a gift for his daughter Fiona. But Hackworth’s copy is in turn a bootlegged version of the original, which he had designed for Alexander Chung-Sik Finkle-McGraw, one of the “duke-level Equity Lords” in New Atlantis.94 Lord Finkle-McGraw intends it as a gift for his granddaughter Elizabeth, a gift he hopes will subvert her conventional New Atlantis education so that she can lead an “interesting” life; as one of the founders of New Atlantis, he finds his own children painfully dull and complacent.
Bootlegging the Primer requires that Hackworth use the facilities of Dr. X, a Mandarin working on three projects that move the plot: to free China from foreign influence, to rescue abandoned female babies from the ecologically collapsing Chinese interior, and to replace the centralized Feed of raw materials with “Seed” technology, decentralized nanotech manufacturing. Dr. X believes that the Seed will allow the Celestial Kingdom to become a true Confucian regime. Under Dr. X’s power, Hackworth is enlisted more or less against his will to create the Seed.
The Primer, while an impressive example of artificial intelligence, still requires a human voice to interact with Nell as it tells her a host of compelling and didactic adventure-puzzle stories about a character who shares the name Nell.95 The human voice is supplied by Miranda Redpath, a “ractor” (interactive actor) who comes to think of herself as educating and raising Nell, with whom she shares a background of abuse. (Even though Miranda has no idea who or even where Nell is, the Primer closely monitors and draws on the circumstances of Nell’s real life, so Miranda can infer a great deal about what is happening to the real Nell from the lines she is given to read for stories involving the fictional Nell.) The net result of the Primer’s education is that Nell turns into a formidable, self-reliant child who can escape her dead-end thete world when her life is threatened by one of her mother’s abusive boyfriends. She has behind-the-scenes help from Finkle-McGraw, who pays the fees for Miranda’s racting. He later supports Nell as well as Hackworth’s daughter Fiona at Miss Matheson’s Academy of the Three Graces, the posh neo-Victorian finishing school that his own granddaughter Elizabeth attends. While each of the three girls was educated by the Primer as the heroine of her own story, it is Nell who turns into the most impressive and unusual young lady. In fact, by the end of The Diamond Age she is a Queen of her own phyle, just like the character Nell in the Primer’s didactic fairytale. Her real-life subjects are the abandoned girls saved by Dr. X. These hundreds of thousands of girls were also educated by pirated copies of the Primer that Dr. X and Hackworth supplied; these girls’ experiences with the Primer have turned them into a real-world equivalent of the “Mouse Army” in Nell’s Primer’s story, an army that is entirely loyal to Nell.
While Hackworth’s daughter Fiona and Nell are growing up, Hackworth spends ten years involuntarily (it would seem) immersed in the world of the Drummers, a strange underwater phyle whose members constitute a “Wet Net” in which individuals lose all self-consciousness in a quasi-telepathic linkage. Each becomes a node for processing information through intensive exchange of nanomachines in bodily fluids. Rescued once, Hackworth is drawn back to the Drummers for a second attempt to complete the Seed calculations in the midst of the Confucian uprising Dr. X has arranged. But while the last foreigners are expelled from China, many of their lives saved by Queen Nell and her real-world Mouse Army, Hackworth is again prevented from finishing the Seed calculations. For Miranda, having joined the Drummers in hopes that she could use their group mind to find Nell, was to be the sacrificial repository for this second attempt at Seed design. With the help of Carl Hollywood, Miranda’s onetime producer, Nell locates and saves the woman whom the Primer itself has helped her understand as the loving human presence behind her book.
CONTINUING SCARCITY AND COMPETITIVE PRESSURES
Competition and conflict drive the plot of The Diamond Age, as China yet again seeks to get out from under foreign domination. Technology makes new forms of exploitation possible, but those new forms of exploitation mimic in their effects and results familiar stories from history. As Drexler seems to expect, individuals can find a social world into which they fit with least conflict by having choices with respect to phyle membership (if the desired phyle will have them, which is far from a foregone conclusion). However, as Drexler does not expect, the competing notions of a good life represented by the different phyles continue to be the basis for conflict among them in part because (as we will see) nanotechnology has not ended scarcity.
Competition among phyles has contrasting consequences; it usually, but not always, promotes Drexlerian diversity. In some instances it leads to an emulation of successful models and a certain homogenization. We learn, for instance, from Madame Ping, the proprietress of a brothel, that men “from all tribes” want “to be like Victorian gentlemen,” so their sexual fantasies turn toward neo-Victorian scenarios.96
Competition among phyles means that they cannot in their internal organizations be blind to the qualities that will allow them to compete successfully. Observing the diversity of ways of life in her world, the teacher Miss Matheson notes as if speaking to Drexler himself: “It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no use without that foundation—we learned that in the late twentieth century, when it became unfashionable to teach these things.”97 Elsewhere in the book we learn more of this history: the New Atlantis phyle arose as a reaction against the moral relativism and mindless egalitarianism of the late twentieth century, just as the original Victorians turned against the excesses of the Regency era. Lord Finkle-McGraw grew up in Iowa (more or less in our present) and as a young man he
had some measure of the infuriating trait that causes a young man to be a nonconformist for its own sake and found that the surest way to shock most people, in those days, was to believe that some kinds of behavior were bad and others good, and that it was reasonable to live one’s life accordingly. . . . Finkle-McGraw began to develop an opinion that was to shape his political views in later years, namely, that while people were not genetically different, they were culturally as different as they could possibly be,98 and that some cultures were simply better than others. This was not a subjective value judgment, merely an observation that some cultures thrived and expanded while others failed. It was a view implicitly shared by nearly everyone but, in those days, never voiced.99
The fashionable egalitarian relativism out of which New Atlantis sprang amounts to the belief (implicit also in Drexler) that one way of life is as good as any other. In the world of The Diamond Age, thetes continue to act on the basis of this mistaken belief, and we can see its ruinous effects. Nell’s mother breaks up with her most promising boyfriend because he is a blacksmith in a tribe of artisans; they produce handmade goods for the neo-Victorians. She “didn’t like craftsmen, she said, because they were too much like actual Victorians, always spouting all kinds of crap about how one thing was better than another thing, which eventually led, she explained, to the belief that some people were better than others.”100 From all we see of the thetes in the Leased Territories, we have no reason to believe her views are anything but typical. Certainly Nell’s life as a thete, governed by violence, and the life of her thuggish father Bud, whom we see at the beginning of the book, represent a broader consequence of holding this belief, which is exploitation of the weak by the strong. The “logical conclusion” of the thete lifestyle is to be “homeless, addicted, hounded by debtors, or on the run from the law or abusive members of their own families.”101
So despite nanotechnology’s potential to greatly reduce material scarcity—no one need go hungry ever again, since public matter compilers make such things as food and first-aid supplies freely available102—inequality and relative poverty still exist.103 Yet the failure of the lives lived on thete assumptions is not entirely a product of their own moral failings; it is also a consequence of those failings in connection with their external circumstances, over which they have little control. The lowland territories where the thete underclass lives provide a useful buffer zone against nano attack for the highland-dwelling Atlantans, even at the cost of chronic lung disease for its residents.104 The thetes inadvertently are a sort of human layer in an active shield, a result of New Atlantis protecting its own interests. Nanotechnology is a big, powerful business that makes New Atlantis big and powerful. The Feed infrastructure was developed by and is owned and run by people made wealthy and powerful by its success; New Chusan is in effect Finkle-McGraw’s ducal estate.105 The interests that brought about this new world do not simply vanish when it is created, but continue to shape it. New Atlantis, in short, has no interest in giving all possible goods away for free; to some extent the Atlantans must manufacture scarcity along with everything else.
LOVE OF ONE’S OWN
It should not be news that people tend to protect their own interests; it is a manifestation of the love of one’s own that is pervasive in The Diamond Age. Hackworth goes outside the law to give his daughter a leg up, yet repeatedly also expresses loyalty to his phyle; Harv severely beats and perhaps kills his mother’s boyfriend, who has abused Nell; Finkle-McGraw wants the Primer to improve the life of his granddaughter and advance the interests of his phyle.106 Carl Hollywood looks out for Miranda, his employee and perhaps romantic interest; Miranda comes to think of Nell as her daughter; the Mouse Army will do anything for their Queen Nell.107 As these examples suggest, while love of one’s own forms a basis for phyles that protects them from outsiders, it can also threaten their internal organization. This perennial tension inherent in voluntary human associations is not changed by technological development. Hackworth is loyal to his phyle in relation to outside phyles; he is loyal to his family inside the phyle; his wife might claim he is loyal to his own love of engineering problem-solving, putting his family on the outside. It is all the more a challenge to reconcile inner and outer when the definitions of each can shift in this way. The multiple layers of the love of one’s own make relevant a variety of moral qualities that contain it or direct its expression, virtues like loyalty, honor, courage. Having been well instructed throughout the book in how phyles take care of their own, we are hardly surprised when a grandmother blows herself up to save her fleeing cohort from oncoming Celestial Kingdom troops.108
Sometimes the love of one’s own directs violence against outsiders, sometimes it contains it in relation to those inside the group. It may involve competition among phyles, but there is also competition within phyles that must be dealt with. People in whom the moral qualities that discipline, train, and direct love of one’s own are missing become dangerous; here again the thetes are instructive. Nell’s mother and father have very limited attachments to anything beyond themselves. One of the reasons Bud is sentenced to death for a mugging is that he is not aware that his girlfriend Tequila has given birth to Nell; hence, the judge is confident that Bud’s departure will not be a loss to his children.109 While young neo-Victorian ladies are taught to think of late-twentieth-century urban America as a historical low point,110 the thete lives we see are pretty nasty and Bud’s is also literally poor, brutish, solitary, and short. Given their nearly unmediated selfishness, being spared the perils of starvation and other kinds of gross material deprivation by the free goods offered by the matter compilers only seems to liberate thetes to be more self-indulgent, irresponsible, and depraved.
But if thetes have little concern for anything outside of their own gratification, the other extreme is represented by the Drummers. In this tribe, individuals become parts in a “gestalt society,” which is to say they share thoughts without being aware they are doing so.111 By their appearance, behavior, and tunnel-dwelling lifestyle, the Drummers rather remind one of naked mole rats. So far as an outsider can tell they lack any sign of inner life, consciousness, self-consciousness or individual volition; it is hard to see how there would be any competition among them. (The few we see escaping the Drummers seem to do so only with outside assistance.) The mechanisms of their physical survival in this state—like what and how they eat—are largely left unexplained.
The ultimate purpose of their common life is similarly mysterious. Carl Hollywood concludes that by directly linking computing technology with the human mind, which “didn’t work like a digital computer and was capable of doing some funny things,” they have gained the capacity to break the encryption codes upon which the security of the Net depends—a development with disastrous potential for the status quo.112 They have no “obvious way” or no desire to take advantage of their ability.113 Yet we know they are willing to be used to create Seed technology, a tool equally subversive of the status quo. In losing a self-conscious identity, a core sense of being individuals, it seems the Drummers have succeeded either in transforming themselves into tools, the means to someone else’s ends, or into an organization whose purposes are not comprehensible to those human beings who have not taken the Drummers’ evolutionary leap to inhumanity.114
In different senses, then, both extreme love of one’s own (as in the case of the thetes) and extreme abandonment of it (as in the case of the Drummers) are dehumanizing. It is the middle ground that brings us to the question of perpetuation: how a regime strives to contain and employ love of one’s own to continue its institutions, fundamental ideas, and mores. For Miss Matheson, managing the tensions inherent in the love of one’s own is a key element of perpetuation. Her work of “propagation” in her school is predicated on the belief that since it is a dangerous world, special care must be taken that, for “educated Westerners,” the love of their own be properly constrained and directed to the group by what amounts to propaganda disguised as education and by inculcating the intensive discipline necessary to adhere to the powerful social norms of the neo-Victorians.115 While Miss Matheson appreciates that for some outstanding individuals (such as Nell) more is possible, she would seem to be content if most of her students turn out to be relatively uninteresting because of their thoughtless acceptance of the norms of their world. She wants them to love New Atlantis because it is theirs.
Lord Finkle-McGraw, on the other hand, hopes the Primer will promote an education subversive of the complacency inherent in Miss Matheson’s method, so that those who get it will come to love New Atlantis because they understand it is “the best of all possible tribes.”116 (Miss Matheson, in contrast, thinks it is only “as good as any other—better than most, really.”117) Both Miss Matheson and Finkle-McGraw are dealing with the problem of perpetuation for a small portion of the ruling class of New Atlantis. Finkle-McGraw thinks that, for some part of this class, perpetuation is best achieved by a subversive education that will allow those who get it to maintain a sufficiently critical distance from their society—based on having the capabilities to live an “interesting life”—to allow them to choose it as best. For Miss Matheson, perpetuation is best achieved for most of this class by discipline and indoctrination. The ideas of both are consistent with the broad character of their New Atlantis phyle. Miss Matheson’s school prepares its female charges for the phyle’s complex internal norms of self-discipline and social interaction, ruthlessly enforced by peer pressure. Finkle-McGraw is evidently looking to what is required when commercial and technological competition and innovation are crucial to keeping the phyle on top. Their positions could be reconciled, of course, by discrimination between those who would be best served by each kind of upbringing.
Dealing properly with love of one’s own is necessarily a difficult proposition. Thetes seemingly solve the problem by caring for nothing beyond themselves, with the consequent dangerous atomism. Drummers seemingly solve the problem by becoming an aggregation whose parts are unaware of having inner or outer lives. Stephenson acknowledges that nano and net technology could combine to liberate love of one’s own entirely or destroy it, but that these are both dehumanizing choices. Between them rests the challenge of perpetuation, where moral qualities make the difference between success or failure at the difficult task of reconciling inner social and personal character with the outward circumstances of a competitive world.
THE INERTIA OF BEING HUMAN
The Diamond Age presents a world that is exactly like our world in that what is going on in one culture may not be comprehensible when viewed from the outside by another. A good deal of misunderstanding can be generated on this basis. But the same is true for one human being observing another; for all its technology, in Stephenson’s world some mystery remains in the human heart. At one point in the story, Miranda is told by a certain Mr. Beck that it may be possible for her to locate Nell despite all the security built into the Net because that security is based on physical laws. But perhaps, he says, there is another dimension “invisible to those laws of physics, describing the same things with different rules, and those rules are written in our hearts, in a deep place where we cannot go and read them except in our dreams.”118 Beck, we find out, is a CryptNet agent, probably recruiting for the Drummers, who will use Miranda, perhaps precisely because of her connection to Nell and through Nell to Hackworth—or at least so we might speculate.119 His appeal may not be disinterested, but it could still be true; after all, in the end Nell and Miranda are united. Yet while the Drummers are able, it seems, to manipulate dreams and perhaps therefore hearts, they are not so attuned to the mysteries thereof that they can forestall the rescue of Miranda.
Mysteries of the heart come together with competition and love of one’s own in a second shadowy conflict that moves much of the action of the book: the battle between New Atlantis and CryptNet. The New Atlantan view that there is a legitimate “cultural role in deciding what should be done” is challenged by the members of the CryptNet phyle, who believe, as Hackworth explains, “that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward—and lacking any moral code, they confuse inevitability with Right.”120 Like Drexler, and reflecting many of the advocates of the eclipse of man, CryptNet apparently feels that changes brought by technology are both inevitable and the basis for “a more highly evolved society.”121 But, at least in Stephenson’s vision, technological development does not so much lead to “higher” social forms as it shifts the shape of the constellation in which perennial characteristics of human life show themselves. Hackworth’s own metaphor reminds us of the perennial wisdom in the book of Job: “man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”122
The CryptNet view—the idea that technological advancement equals inevitable social improvement—fails to appreciate what seems to be a key lesson of The Diamond Age: the complexly mixed human motivations that produce a given world-altering technological development do not vanish as that development works its changes upon the world. Born of desires for independence and control, of curiosity and mastery, the Seed technology that China and CryptNet desire for essentially contradictory reasons will not supersede or nullify such motives. Rather, its use will be conditioned by them, and by the myriad other sources of human action that come into play as a result of its employment by real people.
HUMAN NATURE, RESPONSIBILITY, AND TECHNOLOGY
The Diamond Age illustrates how the deeper and more nuanced one’s understanding of human things, the more it makes sense to imagine technological change within the framework of historical or cultural continuity, and the less the discontinuities promised by the eclipse of man seem desirable. Stephenson does not deny that technology could usher in vast changes in the ways in which people live, even changes which may fundamentally alter our humanity. The kind of world depicted in The Diamond Age could represent an unstable, transitory, or intermediate phase of developments that will work themselves out in the victory of more radical possibilities. That outcome seems to be acknowledged in the book by the fact that none of the fundamental issues that move the plot is resolved. China, for example, is freed of foreigners, but its independence is by no means assured since it faces accelerated ecological collapse in its interior without either Feed or Seed.
Nevertheless, Stephenson imagines more convincingly than Drexler how deliberate choices with respect to what ought to be done with technology remain possible, and indeed how, given the enduring characteristics of human life, the increased power given by new technology will require greater care with making those choices if societies are to thrive. Stephenson goes beyond Drexler’s acknowledgment of human failings to think about a future where a full measure of human motivations, noble and ignoble, continue to exist. Our frailties are not problems to be solved but are built into what we are and how we are placed in relation to each other, guaranteeing that perpetuation will remain a challenge. The Diamond Age begins and ends with the sounds of the bells of St. Mark’s Cathedral in New Chusan—perhaps a reminder that godlike powers will not make us gods, let alone God.
Drexler’s abstract understanding of humanity as “pattern plus stuff” in Engines of Creation—an understanding that makes our bodies, for example, somehow accidental to who we are—makes it easy for him to downplay the significance of the complex passions and interests out of which any real world of nanotechnology is likely to be built, even though he is not blind to them. The net result is his belief that nanotechnology will not only solve many of the problems of our world today, but that nanotechnology will solve nearly all the problems created by nanotechnology. In and of itself that prospect seems very unlikely—unless, as Drexler only suggests, it would result from competition among various ways of life effectively ceasing when human power reaches the limits of the possible. But in fact, so long as humans remain flawed in ways Drexler acknowledges, and in others he does not, as the realm of choice widens we will only have more reason to think about responsible choice—choice made with an eye to the technical facts, but also all the messy complications of individual and collective moral life.
Drexler is no Bernal or Haldane; his advocacy of dehumanization is considerably less overt. But there are surely more than hints of it in disembodied brains, in the bizarre experiments that nanotechnology will make possible, in mind emerging in machines, in the promise of remaking our bodies, and in all the essential premises of his argument. Stephenson seems to be suggesting that the inertia of human things will and ought to be a challenge to most of the radical achievements Drexler looks forward to. One could accept that analysis, and conclude: so much the worse for human things if they stand in the way of Drexlerian imagination.
With that thought in mind, we turn next to a more detailed examination of the transhumanists, to see what the eclipse of man has come to look like today.
* It should be noted that Drexler subsequently abandoned this specific route to nanomanufacturing, has expressed his dislike of the terms “nanobots” and “nanites” that many writers have used to popularize this concept, and has disavowed the notion of “tiny, swarming, intelligent, socializing, conniving things” without making fully clear that this description sounds a good deal like what he once expected, or at least resembles the way he described it. However, the alternative course of technological development that he has laid out in works more recent than Engines of Creation does not make a substantial difference in reference to the ultimate promise he sees in nanotechnology. (See Eric Drexler, “Why I Hate Nanobots,” March 7, 2009, Metamodern [blog], http://metamodern.com/2009/03/07/i-hate-“nanobots”/.)