A Road Soon to Be Traveled
Not long ago I had a conversation with one of Africa's most accomplished scholars. He asserted, "We want your technology, not your culture." I could only reply, "Sorry, they come as a package deal. You don't get the one without the other." Technology may not be the entire story, but to a large extent, our technology is our culture. Change that technology just a little and everything changes. And if you think we're having a hard time
adjusting to simple technologies like agricultural mechanization, you've not seen anything yet.
In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the gene, an immense contribution to our understanding of how life works. Of course, we could hardly resist the temptation to tinker and tinker we have. McKibben's Enough examines the social and ethical implications of this tinkering in the now related fields of genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnologies. His purpose is to spark public debate before we go further down a road we will surely come to wish we had never traveled.
Genetic engineering falls into two types. One seeks to encourage an
individual to produce more of this type of protein or less of that. It
resembles other forms of drug therapy, and the alterations aren't
inheritable. Germline engineering, however, seeks to modify the individual
before conception, and these changes are inheritable. Germline engineering
has the potential to eliminate many horrid genetic diseases but also to
modify the individual's athletic, musical, or intellectual proclivities. Or
his proclivity to see in the dark or fly off into the sunset.
Humans have long dreamed of having little slave robots, but so far we've
not produced anything impressive. Prospects for robots change, however,
when they are integrated with computer and nanotechnologies. Nanotechnologies, in case you missed it, are manufacturing processes that involve moving single atoms around in a structure, hence changing common things into precious things. The first precious thing to make is a chemical computer, an assembler, that can
duplicate itself and make all the precious things, say pink blobs, we want. Cheap and easy. A problem might arise if the assembler takes a mind
to just keep making pink blobs. We'd soon be living on a planet full of
pink blobs.
In fact, as the sci-fi literature has demonstrated in detail, a lot could
go wrong with any of these technologies. McKibben reviews these potentials
for catastrophe, but the catastrophes aren't what he's really concerned
about. Rather, he asks, what if there are no catastrophes? What if
everything goes right?
His answer is that we are tinkering with technologies that will change the
very definition of what it is to be human and to do human things. At the
simplest level, what meaning will a sport have if the players are
genetically engineered to play it? At a more complex level, we are on the
edge of creating two classes, those whose parents could afford to engineer
them genetically, and the rest of us, the 'naturals', who only have what
God gave us. Or multiple classes: the 'naturals' and those who were
engineered to be bright, or artistic, or athletic. Those of us engineered
to unfold our wings and fly away will certainly disdain the inferior
'naturals'. What do we become when our robots render all human labor
irrelevant? We go home and do irrelevant creative and artistic things.
Like leather work or writing bad poetry. The things, mostly, we can do now
and don't want to.
McKibben is optimistic. He thinks we have the maturity to conduct a public
debate and set limits, that we have the will to say, enough is enough. Of
course, if he weren't optimistic, there would be no point in writing this
book.
Dream on. I'm unconvinced and I think McKibben is too. The first problem
is the speed of these technological developments. The ability to learn the
gender of a prenatal baby coupled with abortion has already caused a
holocaust among Asia's baby girls. In this game, girls win about once in
every 8,000 plays, and the ability to select gender before conception is
just around the corner. Technologies that have been declared possible but
a millennium in the future have appeared in the market ten days later.
And that is the second problem, the market. These technologies are largely
in the hands of private sector investors, and they're not an eleemosynary
bunch. McKibben quotes widely from them, and what those quotes reveal is a
disdain for humans, a flawed and failed experiment, and a demented craving
for immediate profits. If the entrepreneur can produce it, it will be sold
in the market, the black one if necessary. The entrepreneur, not our
elected political representatives, will decide how and when we go down this
road.
Last, McKibben's quotes are largely from American entrepreneurs. 'We',
seemingly meaning Americans, have important decisions to make. But 'we'
have no monopoly. The French, Swiss, Japanese and Germans are all at the
cutting edge, too, and God knows what the Chinese are capable of. Our
graduate schools are awash with students from India and China, Sri Lanka
and Turkey, and they're not studying advanced music appreciation. They are
deep into genetics, computers, mathematics and robotics. 'We' may make a
'responsible' decision while scientists in Calcutta may think very
differently. When the Cambodians or the Haitians threaten to breed marines
with built-in night vision, the boys in Congress and the White House who so
fervently oppose stem-cell research on moral, ethical or religious grounds
will start humming a different tune, that's for sure. This stuff is going
to make containing nuclear weapons seem simple.
While I disagree with McKibben's optimism, he has, nonetheless, produced a
disturbingly good read on a disturbing topic. It is well worth the time
for anyone with any interest in science, technology and ethics, or anyone
interested in what our future holds. It is a road soon to be traveled.
— 6 May 2003
