As a so-called high‑tech society, on the brink of both a fantastic future and self‑annihilation, we suffer from that old Chinese curse:  "May you live in interesting times." But precepts handed down from thousands of years ago could never anticipate today's awesome challenges: the genetic engineering of life forms, the creation of synthetic minds, the use of nuclear power.  The genie is out of its lamp and we cannot put it back.  Our salvation requires a modern wisdom, based on both our current understanding and our heritage.

As far back as I can remember I have been preoccupied by a single question:  "What is really going on here?" Of course, depending on where 'here' is, asking the question may be all I can hope for. 

Ø     As a computer scientist, my professional curiosity involves artificial intelligence and software engineering. 

Ø     As a philosophy of science buff, the question begs me to ponder our relationship to the universe at large. 

Ø     As a futurist, it compels me to project observable trends forward in time. 

Ø     And as a humble human being, I am driven to the timeless mysteries of mortality, morality, and God.

Why bother speculating about such deep, unanswerable questions?  Isn't your favourite church the place for this?  Indeed, every culture, past and present, is chock-a-block with religious soothsayers. It's ironic how credulous we can be when self‑serving mortals glibly ply us with their diverse yet dogmatic theologies, yet be so oblivious to the hymns constantly sung by our self‑less, immortal universe. Nature's secrets, when unlocked, bear directly on questions that are vital to both our civilizations and our souls.

Epistemology, biology, cosmology, futurology, sociology, theology – big words, heavy subjects.  What is really going on here?  These topics probably seem hopelessly obscure and unrelated, even a foolish waste of time.  But for over thirty years now, I have been struck by what appears to be a sublime coherence among them, a theme that is the genesis of this talk.

My purpose is twofold:

1.     First, to share in simple terms the excitement of where we seem to be going based on where we have come from. Four nascent disciplines – thermonuclear fusion, artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and social engineering – are destined to endow mankind with the power to evoke the most profound events since the origin of life itself. We stand on the brink of an infinite number of possible futures. We must perceive their possibilities, including the many ways to self-destruct, and make rational choices.  Ignorance is not bliss.  Fatalism is worse.  If we shrink from our task of converting chaos into knowledge, chaos must reign.

2.     My second purpose is more subtle: To suggest that a rational approach to essentially theological issues can be far more satisfying than blind faith. Beyond mere satisfaction, beliefs based on informed speculation, constrained by existing evidence and accepted scientific understanding are vital for shaping our culture's goals and priorities.

I encourage everyone to participate vigorously.  If we are ever to take charge of our own destinies, all shackles on rational thought must be broken. As with certain TV shows, I should caution you: this material may offend believers in the supernatural. So hang onto your hats as we prepare to explore well beyond the anthropocentric, or human‑centred world‑view.

I have a fool’s audacity to try to answer a central question: what is likely to become of life as we know it? My preferred answer pivots on the premise that in the next few centuries this corner of the universe may achieve the pre‑conditions for a radically new form of evolution. To provide leverage for my fulcrum we begin with:

Our Cosmic Roots. Consider this perspective on the current scientific consensus of how we came to be.  From the beginning of time until now, our corner of the universe has undergone the first three steps in the evolutionary staircase to destiny – cosmic, chemical, and biological.

Cosmic evolution began some 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. In a nutshell, so to speak, our tiny universe contained only a stupendously hot, dense plasma, briefly inflating much faster than light. About 300,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe had cooled enough that the two lightest elements, hydrogen and helium, condensed directly out of the plasma. Soon after, gravity collapsed some of the hydrogen and helium into the first stars, a process that continues even now.

Stars are the universe’s power houses. The fantastic gravitational pressures deep inside force lighter nuclei to fuse together, thus forming heavier elements. For elements up to iron, excess energy is released in the fusion process, so those elements form in all stars. But to fuse elements beyond iron requires so much energy, they can only be created during the collapse of the massive stars we call novas and supernovas.  

Many generations of novas, whose lives are much shorter than normal stars, had to come and go before enough star dust – literally the ashes of stellar explosions – could perfuse the cosmos to the point where later generations of stars and their planets would evolve the proportions of elements that we see here on Earth. What’s important to realize is that only after cosmic evolution had achieved a certain level of complexity could a fundamentally new kind of evolution begin: chemistry.

Chemical evolution operates by wholly different rules. Fusion bonds nucleons together. Chemistry bonds atoms together, with no new elements produced. Chemistry cannot occur inside stars; it requires the kind of stability that planets provide. Whereas there are just over 100 elements, the number of possible chemical compounds is infinite. The potential for complexity and diversity is far beyond anything that cosmic evolution can produce. Yet there is a similarity here. Both forms of evolution result in the accumulation of larger, more complex yet persistent structures.

Laboratory experiments reveal amino acids and other organic precursors of life forming spontaneously under conditions like the early Earth. While many details remain unsettled, scientists have no doubt that natural self-organizing principles, operating randomly on inanimate organic compounds, eventually resulted in a structure that could replicate. Given an environment rich in that structure’s building blocks – also known as food – it’s easy to guess what happened next. Notice again that only after chemical evolution had achieved a certain level of complexity could a fundamentally new kind of evolution begin: biology.

And again, biological evolution operates by wholly different rules; to be specific, they operate upon replicating systems whose variations differentially affect their success in the face of Nature’s tendency towards breakdown, chaos – aka the Second Law of Thermodynamics. And so the Earth has born witness to 4 billion years of gradually increasing complexity, from microscopic single cells to the prodigious diversity of life we see today.

Despite huge differences in the rules by which these three evolutionary modes operate, they share a common theme.  Each type of evolution enables a successor that is capable of yielding stable structures of much greater diversity and behavioural complexity. The complexity of any organism, for example, dwarfs that of all chemical compounds being synthesized by non-living processes. This pattern implies that we human beings are still far from the destiny of Creation. We have resulted from just the third step in a possibly endless evolutionary staircase.

Today, we stand At The Brink, poised between self‑destructive and fantastic futures. The secret of our collective survival lies in the relationship between order and chaos.  Theorists such as Stuart Kauffman, a luminary of the Santa Fe Institute and recipient of a McArthur “Genius” Award, have shown that sufficiently complex systems spontaneously evolve toward the boundary between order and chaos. This is good news and bad news.  

The good news is that life is most interesting and novel in and around that boundary. Unfortunately, the ever more potent powers we unlock allow ever larger excursions from that boundary. This means risky behaviours can ever more easily trip our entire planet into a chaos from which we cannot recover. Manmade global warming, for example, may trigger a runaway greenhouse effect that causes the oceans to boil – a Venus-like fate. On the other hand, it will also become easier and easier for powerful vested interests to spawn a rigidity that stymies our collective ability to respond to catastrophic threats, e.g., a large asteroid impact. Too much order or too much chaos, either can be globally lethal.

If we are to have any hope of getting to the next evolutionary rung, our first order of business must be to better manage the risks we run – technology is not neutral in its potential for benefit or harm. For every constructive application there are many malevolent ones, not to mention the law of unintended “oops” effects. As Sun Microsystems’s Bill Joy said in his famous Wired Magazine[1] article, “we must take seriously the fact that it is becoming easier and easier for the hackers and otherwise deranged of this world to trigger globally destructive effects,” such as virulent pathogens engineered to resist all treatments

And our dilemma is by no means unique to this nook of the universe.  Perhaps very few civilizations in the cosmos succeed in avoiding self‑annihilation to climb the next evolutionary rung. This is consistent with SETI’s (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) total lack of results, despite more than 40 years of searching. An utterly objective “morality” exists in which civilizations that are unable to constructively apply knowledge must self‑destruct, while those with the requisite wisdom can climb the staircase to destiny: perhaps unlocking the secrets of this universe that could lead ultimately to the power of its creation.

Indeed, social engineering will entail altering our genetic makeup and our social rules to the point where behaviour such as terrorism that increasingly afflicts society on a planetary scale, ceases to be possible in practice, if not in theory. The trick will be to do all this without foreclosing on innovation and risk taking.

Let’s be optimistic, then, and assume that we really do survive our own intelligence. What are the preconditions for crossing over to the next evolutionary epoch? Today they are in their infancy, and may take us a few more centuries to truly master. Here is a brief sketch of each:

Controlled Thermonuclear Fusion

There is a very real sense in which we cannot come of age in this universe until we master its basic power source. Yes we’ve made enough thermonuclear bombs to turn the Earth into rubble, but until we can harness this power safely, cheaply, and cleanly we are not there yet.

Each gallon of water on the planet contains enough cheaply recoverable deuterium (hydrogen plus a neutron) to produce energy in a fusion reactor equivalent to 300 gallons of gasoline. And that’s just for starters. One gram of matter, a fingernail clipping, yields 25 Million kilowatt-hours of energy via E = Mc². We are literally awash in energy that we are yet too ignorant to know how to harness, much less to control. 

Why do we need to master fusion power? Because it will forever change our relationships with ourselves and our environment. The basis of all economic activity is energy. We are dependent on each other for survival because the resources we need are too expensive for each of us to acquire on our own. If energy was essentially free, each individual would find mere survival trivial. The need to “earn a living” would reduce to spending no more than 1% of our time tending to the “cornucopia machines,” producing food, shelters, capital works projects, and the like. We would have the means not merely to control weather and move mountains, but to create and live on artificial planets. The next evolutionary epoch may demand such a move, but more on this later.

Artificial Intelligence  

Today many people deny that thinking machines are even possible, just as they thought flying machines were impossible before the Wright Brothers. Yes the problems are much harder than AI’s pioneers thought. But sooner or later we can expect machines to excel in general purpose learning and problem solving, including learning how to make better problem solvers. And then the world will quickly become a much different place.

Will intelligent robots replace us or have us as pets? I strongly doubt it. We’ve already connected our neurons to silicon chips, allowing the blind and deaf a measure of sight and hearing. Laboratory demonstrations already show people controlling computers wirelessly, through pure thought. No, we will incorporate artificial intelligence into ourselves, prosthetics for the mind. As an aside, something called the CTD Principle (Church Turing Deutsch) implies that no intelligence in the universe can ever be beyond our ken – it’s purely a matter of band-width. (If you really want to know what I just said, please ask me at the end.)

It should be obvious why mastery of AI is a precondition for the next evolutionary epoch. Emancipating ourselves from the highly limited bandwidth of our 1.6 liter brains will be just as potent as emancipating ourselves from energy dependency. I shall return to AI when we look more directly at the next epoch.

Genetic Engineering  

Of all the preconditions, genetic engineering has had the most public exposure recently. So, I’ll say the least about it here. Mastery of this field entails being able to predict the detailed result of drafting or changing any genetic blueprint. Clearly we are a long way from this level of mastery. But the motivation is certainly there. Just why this is a precondition should be obvious to most of you, and will become even more obvious after we discuss the next epoch.

Social Engineering  

As I’ve hinted, the next evolutionary epoch will produce systems on a scale as far beyond what biology can produce, as biology transcends chemistry, and chemistry transcends the elements. The exquisite beauty and fragility of the structures that will evolve will require protection from malevolence and the “oops effects”. We need to take steps to survive our own intelligence!

By extrapolating from what we already know is possible, what kind of beings, life‑styles, and cultures are in store for our descendants – that is, for those who dare? For example, consider how extremely limited our senses are: we can see only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum; we can hear only a tiny range of sound; our tolerance for temperature is likewise very limited; our brains are not up to the myriad interrelated challenges now confronting humanity. What if we could amplify our sensory inputs and brain powers ten-fold or more? What if we could control the design and shape of our bodies? What if we could live healthy lives for as long as we like – achieve de facto immortality? For me these prospects are tremendously exciting. For most of us, such ideas are very scary.

[How many people would like to live forever?]

I suspect that only a small fraction of the population will possess the mastery, means, and motivation to cross over to a post-human existence. The vast majority of humanity will neither understand nor want to be part of something so patently radical.  Indeed the conservatives will want to ban such endeavours. So to avoid conflict, the venue for the great sundering will likely be colonies in space, fusion-powered cylinders many kilometres in diameter, slowly rotating to simulate gravity and possessing a benign climate,

an artificial Earth without the limitations and problems of our cosmic cradle. Humans on Earth will decouple from the self-mutants in space, the two having as much concern for each other as apes have for humans, and visa versa.

Let’s imagine what could become of those who do step through the portal. First and foremost will be our ability to survive independently and indefinitely – de facto immortality. This entails capabilities at two levels: individuals will be empowered to design, construct, maintain, and evolve their own bodies; societies will be responsible to sequester complete backups of such individuals – their current physical state together with all their personality and memory data. Thus should a catastrophe destroy one’s current incarnation, what we would call death, one is literally reincarnated – rebuilt and restarted from the most recent intact backup, the net effect being a period of amnesia since that backup was made. Clearly, Darwinian rules of survival and evolution no longer apply.

The very thought of thriving for thousands perhaps even billions of years may be mind blowing enough. But that is not the half of it. Immortals will be physically and mentally unique in ways that go far beyond anything possible today. For example, individuals will design themselves to be comfortable living in very different environments; some may want to live in the vacuum of space, others at the bottom of an ocean. All our senses, if we wish, will be expanded a thousand-fold – we might choose to see the world directly in light spanning frequencies from microwave to x-ray. Likewise we will be free to design our senses of touch, smell, taste, hearing, and temperature; even “see” those phenomena, like magnetism, to which we are now totally insensate.

Of course, we will need much bigger and better minds with which to make sense of this extraordinary richness of inputs and outputs. And we will need those minds for other reasons as well; just consider the scope and scale of unintended effects that we need to avoid when we have access to limitless amounts of the universe’s fundamental power source. Given a society of de facto immortals, each endowed with huge and divergent perceptual and intellectual capabilities, they will want to enjoy each other’s unique perspectives on the world, and will want to engage in personal and group intercourse that make the delights and pleasures of our existences puny indeed.  

It is most important to keep in mind that we need not give up any of the constructive abilities and drives we now possess; be they sensorial, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, sexual, altruitional, or whatever.  Instead, we gain the ability to amplify all of them, both within ourselves and our societies. What must go are the reckless and malicious behaviours that lead to self-extinction; they are totally incompatible with the fantastically complex entities and structures that will self-evolve in the next epoch.

In particular, a group of immortals may want to merge, virtually or physically, to produce a collective consciousness, as if the group were a single living organism. When individuals join groups they will have to be willing to alter themselves so as to be unable to violate the membership rules. In turn, groups are members of groups, and similar conditions will apply, right up to the entire society. There will also have to be rules controlling the creation of new immortals, and the characteristics they can have. This is what social engineering is really all about in the new epoch.

Should an individual or group decide they no longer want to abide by the rules, rule amendment rules can be invoked. If that fails to satisfy the contrarians, they are always free to quit a group, or physically leave and start up a new society far enough away that mutual interference becomes highly unlikely. Because such immortals also command immense energy resources and know-how, extremely different life-styles and world-views will be quite feasible, perhaps even the norm. Incredibly rich and diverse societies will evolve, with individuals living vicariously through each other’s unique perspectives. Clearly, whole new moral, ethical, and governance systems will have to be invented and proven before social engineering is mastered. Of course, my own mind is far too puny to do more than hint at the possibilities. 

In conclusion, my thesis is that information – or equivalently: the ability to sustain a dynamic balance between chaos and order – replaces energy as the ultimate determinate of value and currency.

Boring?: NO! Infinitely many problems. Almost all are computationally impossible. . But they can admit of partial solutions.

Intelligence: the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence has, after 50 years, come up with zip, not even a whisper. What does that tell you? Thank goodness there are trillions of planets where life is happening, because the odds of making it through the “intelligence crisis” are probably very poor.

Purpose: to innovatively combat the 2nd Law while remaining close to the order/chaos boundary.

Life after death: today it is an oxymoron, but in the 4th Epoch, get  hit with a bus and you have true life after death – a far more satisfying promise.

God? Arthur C. Clarke: any sufficiently advanced civilization will be indistinguishable from magic. IF God exists, it may take billions of years before we understand how to understand God.

I cannot even imagine what the fifth evolutionary step might be, except to speculate that if the information ever becomes known that permits entropy reductions on a cosmic scale, our descendants will have achieved god-like knowledge and power.

 

In the brief time I’ve had to tease you with my thoughts of the far out future, I have had to omit many details and interesting side topics. I hope you have enjoyed being teased like this and want to explore more for yourselves. Perhaps my next step should be to start a weblog that can be enriched by the feedback of thoughtful people like you.