Chapter 11: Faking Life
This chapter reminds me of an old Sunday school lesson.
It was back in the fifties, but I can still smell the lemon oil on the wooden desks and see the glow of morning sun on the stained-glass windows. I can hear the wooden floors creak and the strains of the choir singing in the next room. A picture of Jesus hangs on the wall, one with lambs and children. Crayon-colored Josephs and King Davids adorn the corkboard. It was St. Paul’s United Methodist Church in the rural village of Sykesville . . . a scene from a bygone era.
Our Sunday school lesson sounded like something from a bygone era too. It highlighted an obscure passage in Genesis 6:4 – 5: “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days — and also afterward — when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown. The LORD saw how great man’s wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time.”
Our Sunday school teacher explained that when the daughters of men married the “sons of God” — the Nephilim — they produced offspring who were inhuman. Different. Strange. Offspring not of the human race. My teacher further explained that this may have been one of the main reasons God wiped humans off the face of the earth with the Great Flood; it was the only way to ensure that this strange, aberrant race of quasi-humans would be eradicated. It seemed logical to me, for Genesis 6:6 – 7 went on to say, “The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth.’ ”
God didn’t destroy everyone, however. “The LORD then said to Noah, ‘Come into the ark, you and your whole family, because I have found you righteous in this generation. . . . Seven days from now I will send rain on the earth forty days and forty nights, and I will wipe from the face of the earth every living creature I have made’ ” (Genesis 7:1, 4). God rescued that which he created, animals and humans. Real humans.
I completely forgot about that Sunday school lesson until a year ago when I traveled to a Midwest college campus to attend a conference called “What Does It Mean to Be Human?” The lecturers presented shocking material. Each presenter showed graphs, photos, and quotes underscoring that researchers are now manipulating atoms in a whole new area of science called nanotechnology. Soon, these designer atoms will seamlessly weave their way into the brains and muscles of a select group of people. They will be a breed apart from most humans, advanced in intellect and excelling in health, strength, and longevity. In the not-too-distant future we will live alongside what the lecturers called transhumans.
Or perhaps . . . Nephilim.
JONI
“If a monkey is hungry but has his arms pinned, there’s not much he can do about it. Unless that monkey can control a nearby robotic arm with his brain. And that’s exactly what the monkey in Andrew Schwartz’s neurology lab at the University of Pittsburgh can do, feeding himself using a prosthetic arm controlled solely by his thoughts.” So David Cohn in Wired magazine reports on the latest developments in connecting the brain and machines powered by brainwaves.
But connections between brains and machines have not been confined to monkeys. Kevin Warwick, author of I, Cyborg, claims to be the world’s first “cybernetic organism” and has been busy experimenting on himself — and on his wife. According to a recent report in the New Zealand Herald, “When Kevin Warwick lifted his finger, his wife Irena felt as if a bolt of lighting ran down her palm and into her own finger. In what they billed as the first direct link between nervous systems, the couple had electrodes surgically implanted in their arms and linked by radio signals to a computer.”
We began by noting that the biggest issue confronting the human race in this new century is the need to treat people like people, and things like things. God made us in his image to rule over other creatures, and we must do so responsibly as his stewards. Others made in his image, whatever their age, however healthy or diseased they may be, whether religious or not, of all nations and tribes — everyone is made with dignity given by God, and that is how we must treat them.
The final stage in our tour of the threats to human dignity comes from a different source. So far, we have been talking about biology, and especially about the dangers of turning the body, or parts of it, into “commodities.” We have focused on how close we are to designing our babies, and using genetic engineering to change human nature itself by adding “enhancements” and in the process turning ourselves into things we have made. We laid out the threefold challenge of bioethics, starting with the taking of life (abortion, euthanasia) and the making of life (genetics, cloning). Now we come to the third: the faking of life, in which machines are used to “enhance” our human nature and change it into something else.
We’ve all seen the movies. How can we forget Robin Williams’s charm in Bicentennial Man, as the robot who asks to be accepted as a human being, and finally chooses to die since it is the human thing to do? Or Spielberg’s AI, in which “orga” and “mecha” — the organic and the mechanical — come together as a robot sibling seeks his “mother’s” love, only to be despised by the real son?
This is not completely new. The blurring of human and machine is an old story; Frankenstein was a manmade monster. What is new is a combination of new technology (some of these options could soon work), and the charm offensive. Can anyone be less like Frankenstein than Robin Williams? (How would Bicentennial Man have scored at the box office had Williams’s part been played by old-time horror actor Vincent Price?) Or to shift gears, has there been a children’s toy less threatening than a Tamagochi — the feed-me, hold-me, computer pets of the nineties?
Yet all is not sweetness and light. Science fiction is fast becoming science fact. Is that also true here? And if so, how should we view it?
BILL JOY’S CHALLENGE
Bill Joy, cofounder and chief technologist for Sun Microsystems, has said that our computing power may increase by a factor of one million in the next thirty years. If that proves true, or even only partly true (what would a merely thousand times more powerful PC be able to do?), it means we must begin to think ahead very seriously. Because “artificial intelligence” (“AI” as it is known) is on the march, and no one suggests that computers will get less powerful.
Experts already are seriously debating whether AI will ever rival human intelligence. Some say yes and welcome it, others answer yes and fear it, and still others say no. Whichever group is right, every year brings us machines more capable of approximating human responses. Voice-recognition programs already give us voice dialing on our cell phones and in the telephone answering systems of credit card companies and airlines. Things are moving fast.
Selmer Bringsjord is a leading thinker on artificial intelligence and a strong proponent of the view that AI will never be able to take the place of human intelligence. “I’ll happily wager the value of my retirement savings in, say, 2030, that what I will be able to accomplish then on an average workday will be utterly beyond the smartest computing machine available that year. . . . To sit down with a pen before a blank piece of paper and produce a play like Hamlet involves doing something that no computer, however fast, can pull off.”
Bill Joy’s warning appeared in a famous article published in Wired, the techie magazine. It is one of the most strident statements yet made about the threats to human nature posed by technology. And while statements of that kind have been made many times by environmentalists and other activists, to have their concerns echoed by one of the gurus of the technological age was remarkable.
Bill Joy’s article had the arresting title “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.” He began by listing three great threats to human existence in the twentieth century: chemical, biological, and nuclear warfare. By contrast, he argued, in the twenty-first century, the threats will become far more sophisticated: genetics, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. These technologies will likely have one of two outcomes, says Joy. Either through some terrible mistake they will destroy humankind. Or, alternatively, they will “destroy” us in another way, by blending human and machine and ultimately superseding human nature with a machine nature that uses some combination of these technologies. So through a disaster or a series of bad choices, we will end up saying goodbye to human nature.
Side by side with the question of AI machines is that of the development of connections between AI machines and human beings. The word cyborg describes the result: a cybernetic organism, or cyb-org. In many ways, this is more troubling. The idea that the human brain could be connected with machine implants that would alter its functioning is very disturbing. And lest we think such a scenario remains far off, we must realize that experiments aiming at this very thing are going on right now.
ROBOTS AND US
This chapter cannot give more than a summary of some of the issues that we shall soon have to face. For, alongside genetics, the “cyborg” future of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology will put the unique dignity of a human being under growing pressure.
It ought to disturb us that some key thinkers in this field very candidly declare their goals: to eradicate the distinction between the human and the mechanical — the “mecha” and “orga” of Spielberg’s film AI: Artificial Intelligence — and develop what they have called the “singularity,” in which organic and mechanical become one. We need to grasp what is happening, and then begin to reflect deeply on a Christian response.
They Say We Are “Human-Racists”
What’s our goal? The bioLuddites and human-racists are already in place. They control the bully pulpit of the President’s Council on Bioethics, and they have their mediagenic talking heads, their think tanks, foundation grants, journals, and lobbyists. They are organizing conferences for devout Christians, radical Greens, and suburban soccer moms. They have filled the media with alarmist rhetoric.
JAMES HUGHES, TRANSHUMANIST
Let’s look at the big picture. We know that much of what we do can be done equally well or better by machines. In fact, the whole idea of technology, from primitive tools onward, is the story of our making things that enable us to do more than we could without them. So it’s no great surprise that clever machines have been devised that copy what we do and even do it better.
Those of us old enough to have used both typewriters and computers have discovered that word processing is much more like longhand writing than typing is. Typing places words into instant, permanent form. (Some of us remember the agonies of erasing type, especially when we had five carbon copies in the typewriter.) Writing by hand on paper, you can scribble and scratch and constantly make small and large changes — just like we can on a computer. Technology really can develop intuitive applications, some of which made this book much easier to write.
The idea of the “robot” is just the same: making a machine that aids us in doing what we do anyway, doing it quicker or more accurately or cheaper. We’ve all seen pictures of robot vacuum cleaners, though they have yet to become a commercial success, because cleaning a house is rather complicated. We have seen the industrial robots used to put cars and other complex machines together. None of this worries us, even though at every point these machines are copying and often perfecting what we normally do ourselves.
The advent of the computer has raised the stakes in the debate about humans and technology. Now we have attached a “brain” to the mechanical devices that, though complicated, essentially have been spades and hammers and paintbrushes on poles. What are the implications for human dignity if these “machines” prove able to do everything that we do?
This raises three sets of issues.
First, the technology debate: what can be done, and what do the experts think will soon be possible? Surprise! They disagree. Some believe we will be able to duplicate everything humans can do, all the way to creating works of art — and even do it better. Others think that that will never be possible, and that merely having faster computers does not mean the ability to replicate the human mind.
Can We “Improve” on Being Human?
The National Science Foundation’s 2002 report on Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance — concerned with nanotechnology and its “convergence” with biotechnology, information technology, and cognitive science — flirts with the transhumanist agenda.
They offer examples of research goals and anticipated results: “en hancing individual sensory and cognitive capacities . . . improving both individual and group creativity . . . communication techniques including brain-to-brain interaction, perfecting human-machine interfaces including neuromorphic engineering” (p. ix). They ask, “How can we develop a transforming national strategy to enhance individual capacities and overall societal outcomes? What should be done to achieve the best results over the next 10 to 20 years?” And, at the end of one list of long-term implications, they designate “Human evolution, including individual and cultural evolution” (p. 4). “Technological convergence could become the framework for human convergence. The twenty-first century could end in world peace, universal prosperity, and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment” (p. 6). “[I]t may be that humanity would become like a single, distributed and interconnected ‘brain’ based in new core pathways of society” (p. 6).
Second, what are some people trying to accomplish? What are the goals of those either working with these clever machines, or cheering them on and discussing what they are doing? We’ve already mentioned words like transhumanist. These people believe that these technologies will enable us to add to human powers and, eventually, replace human nature itself with something better. We start with memory chips for our brains, and end up in the famous sci-fi scenario in which our conscious essence gets “uploaded” into computers and we continue life without the disadvantages inherent in a biological species. This, at the moment, is a fringe movement, comprised mainly of philosophers who like to theorize about it. But some engineers and scientists are eager to “improve” on human nature, piece by piece.
Third, we have the question: what does this matter to us? Christians believe that one can’t “improve” on human nature, because we bear God’s image. That does not mean, of course, that we don’t need medicine; and every effort at enabling sick and handicapped people to enjoy a fuller experience of being human is wonderful. But if it goes beyond that and breaks out of “being human” into some other kind of being, human technology has run far out of control.
Lines will not be easy to draw.
Someone whose brain has been damaged by a fall should, perhaps, have the benefit of a microchip that gives him or her back a normal, functioning human brain. But the same chip, implanted in someone who has not had a fall, in theory could give the person “superhuman” brain function. If you want to ace your SATs, should you be able to buy a chip that will do the trick and avoid all that revision? If you want to pass the bar exam, or qualify as a pharmacist, should you be able to buy a chip? Those options may sound shocking and subhuman, not superhuman.
IS GENE DOPING OUR FUTURE?
We may find the best illustration of this problem in doping and sports. Most people agree that doping doesn’t make athletes better athletes, into supermen and superwomen. It means they cease to be athletes at all; they become subhuman. It isn’t simply that sports will be over if doping can’t be controlled (and if it can’t, it will become a competition between teams of chemists), but human nature will be over. When you get strong muscles by popping steroids rather than working out, you have begun to trade your human dignity for the dignity of a machine.
The most worrying development, which shows how fast the technology is moving, lies in the prospect of using genetic engineering for “doping.” The Boston Globe recently reported that a monkey researcher had accidentally discovered how to make a “supermonkey.” Dr. Jim Wilson of the University of Pennsylvania inserted into monkey muscle cells a gene that boosts levels of a hormone that manufactures red blood cells. “In less than two weeks, many of Wilson’s rhesus monkeys had red-cell counts greater than those of world-class runners who train at high altitude.” Wilson’s monkeys all died — a warning of the hazards of genetics — and it was Wilson whose experiments on humans later led to the death of eighteen-year-old Jesse Gelsinger in a clinical trial that tried a genetics cure for his liver condition.
Asking the question, “Will athletes go for the ultimate high?” Christen Brownlee in Science News notes that H. Lee Sweeney, a pioneering researcher on mouse muscle enhancement, has been deluged with calls. “Soon, the calls and e-mails started flowing in, first as a trickle, then as if from a fire hose. . . . Some people beg him to reverse their muscle degeneration caused by disease or aging. However, around half of the calls and e-mails come from healthy individuals — professional power lifters, sprinters, and weekend wannabe athletes of all stripes. They want bigger, higher-performing muscles. One caller offered him $100,000 for muscle enhancement, and a high school football coach asked Sweeney to treat his whole team.”
But what if you are a pastor, and a chip comes out that would mean you had the whole of the Bible immediately available to your memory? What about when Christian publishers make their latest titles available in paper, CD, and brain chip versions? It will be hard to say no to some of these options, for the same reason that it is always hard to resist temptation! Temptation is always attractive. And the temptation to do one better than God — to become superhuman by adding computer chips and using genetic engineering to enhance the species — may be the hardest temptation we sinners ever have to face.
Sometimes in those twilight hours when I can’t sleep, or occasionally in my more ethereal moments, I wonder what will happen. I wonder when the patience of God will come to an end.
I can’t say. We eat, drink, marry, and raise families, all with barely a nano-thought as to how nanotechnology will affect our world. It still seems like science fiction. We have loan applications to fill out, kids to drive to karate, birthday gifts to buy, retirements to plan, and grandchildren to make scrapbooks for. But then I read verses like Matthew 24:37 – 40, “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark; and they knew nothing about what would happen until the flood came and took them all away. That is how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”
Wait a minute. How will it be at the coming of the Son of Man? The time when we finally cross the line of God’s patience? It will be as in the days of Noah. As in the days of those strange, abnormal people, the Nephilim.
It’s just a wild guess and I really don’t care to go down that dark, grim path. I would rather relegate the dismantling of our world to, well . . . a bygone era. Rather than plow ahead into the brash, bizarre world of transhumans, I would prefer to stave off the end of the age by easing back on the edge of God’s patience. I want to — and I believe you want to —season our culture with the salt of truth and light. We dare not become cynical, uninvolved, or indifferent. As someone has said, “The salt of the earth does not mock rotting meat. Where it can, it saves and seasons. And where it can’t, it weeps. And the light of the world does not withdraw, saying ‘Good riddance’ to godless darkness. It labors to illuminate.”
It’ll make us extremely unpopular if we follow that advice. Then again, Jesus warned us in Matthew 10:22, “All men will hate you because of me, but he who stands firm to the end will be saved.” Dr. John Piper has observed, “Being Christian exiles [in a technological culture] does not end our influence, it takes the swagger out of it. We don’t get cranky that our country has been taken away. We don’t whine about the triumphs of evil. We are not hardened with anger. We understand. This is not new. This was the way it was in the beginning — Antioch, Corinth, Athens, Rome . . . It never occurred to those early exiles that they should rant about the ubiquity of secular humanism. They simply saw it as a time for influence, not with huffing and puffing, but with tears and persuasion and perseverance.”
We must not allow ourselves to be intimidated by an intellectual elite who insists on “progress” at the expense of the human race. To be a Christian in this brave new world, we have to shine light, shake salt, serve with longsuffering mercy, tell the truth, and keep pointing people to Jesus Christ.
After all, he is the One who is fully human.
Shaping the Future:
Christians Lead the Technosapiens Discussion
At the end of 2004, a group of approximately eighty men and women met in Washington, DC, to discuss questions that will dominate the twenty-first century. The press was not much interested, and plenty of people chose to do something else. But the audience contained a smattering of people from the federal government and various think tanks, as well as academics and lobbyists. I was privileged to chair the meeting. Our discussions proved illuminating, and their subject matter will be the theme of our children’s and grandchildren’s generation.
The topic was not simply the future of the human race, as we generally understand that phrase; but whether the human race has a future. Because the technologies that have given rise to discoveries in genetics, the cloning of animals, and the development of tiny particles and machines (nanotechnology) may soon be in a position to transform human nature itself.
The conference was called Technosapiens? The main sponsor of the Technosapiens process was the Center for Bioethics and Culture (thecbc. org), which brought together leading lights from science, policy, and philosophy. Some were Christians, some secularists. Some were conservatives, some progressives. Some — such as Nick Bostrom, founder of the World Transhumanist Association — argued that it was wonderful that these new technologies could remake human nature. Others — such as Leon Kass, chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics — took the opposite view. And, in a manner that is becoming normal, we found feminists and environmentalists side by side with conservative Christians, making the case for the integrity of human nature.
The word Technosapiens has been made up to underline the challenge that technology poses to human nature — Homo sapiens, “wise humankind” — since the logic of the latest technology is to seek to “enhance” human nature in a manner that ultimately, if it works and is not stopped, will efface the distinction between human nature and the machines humans can make.
Not many Christians are alert to these issues. Yet many of us believe that they will dominate the twenty-first century, and how we decide them will determine the kind of beings we become. Of course, only the extremists will say out loud, “We want to remake human nature.” Most of those who favor unrestricted development of technology simply say it is inevitable, or it will produce cures for diseases, or it will give us incremental improvements that we can use to help others. There are dozens of “good” arguments: we have seen some of them deployed, disingenuously but effectively, in the debates about embryo stem cell research and cloning. The problem is that nowhere has the saying been truer that the road to hell is paved with good intentions (or, at least, arguments that sound well intended).
So what do we do? We need to note two key principles. First, let’s understand the issues. Use the resources that some of us have produced so you can get up to speed, in your homes and schools and churches. We must be the best-informed people around.
Second, we need to get into debate. We will find strange bedfellows, and let’s welcome their help. We will find ourselves opposing articulate exponents of the idea that we can remake human nature. The Technosapi-ens conferences have opened up the biggest questions of the century, in ways that are informed and gracious. How this debate concludes — what will happen to Homo sapiens in the years ahead — is in God’s hands . . . and in those of his servants.
NIGEL CAMERON
JONI