JUNE 1999
pages 202:208
JUNE 1999
pages 202:208
Apocalypse Pretty Soon
Travels in End-Time America
By Alex Heard
360 pages, $24.95
Norton
Robot
Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind
By Hans Moravec
226 pages, $25
Oxford University Press
The Clock of the Long Now
Time and Responsibility:
The Ideas Behind the World's
Slowest Computer
By Stewart Brand
176 pages, $22
Basic Books
ON THE racks in drugstores, you
sometimes find paperback adventure novels for teenagers in which the
young protagonists move across an America that's mystifyingly
depopulated: a familiar property of science fiction when nuclear dread
was in its heyday in the '50s and '60s. The rationale,
though apocalyptic, is something else here. What's
happening--conveniently, for plot purposes, in stages--is the
conclusive event hoped for by those who display bumper stickers
declaring "Beam me up, Lord" and "In the event of the
Rapture, this car will be driverless."
Besides bumper stickers and "young adult" novels, full-color
depictions of the Rapture are purchasable as framed prints, postcards,
or nifty laminated place mats. Neurobiologists have theorized that the
religious impulse is genetically hardwired into all humans. (Tracking
cerebral electrical activity, researchers at the University of
California at San Diego indeed found in the frontal lobe a cluster of
neurons that become active in epileptics during seizures and in
nonepileptic religious folks when they are shown symbols evoking their
beliefs.) The manifestations of this impulse have singularly affected
the history of this ostensibly rational, most technocratic of
nations. The original European colonists were religious dissidents,
and white Americans claimed God's seal of approval while enslaving
Africans and dispossessing the continent's indigenous populations. In
a poll conducted by Yankelovich Partners in the '80s, 39 percent of
Americans said they agreed with Jerry FaIwell and Pat Robertson that
nuclear war was inevitable and that the Rapture would occur
thereafter. Today, as many as 47 percent believe that God created
humankind less than io,ooo years ago, according to a Gallup
poll.
APOCALYPSE COW
Alex Heard's Apocalypse Pretty Soon: Travels in End-Time
America, besides mining the mother lodes of American looniness, is
a hoot. Americans' constitutional right to believe whatever they
damn well please combined with the size of God's country have
allowed all kinds of dingbat denominations to flourish from the
beginning. In this premillennial century, that tendency has been
augmented by the entertainment industry's increasing sway--as
it makes, shall we say, actors of us all-- and by the conflation
of religion and science fiction. If, as with biological ecologies,
riotous diversity signals vitality, this book reveals America as a
rain forest of New Age, Gaia-worshipping Republican survivalists; Old
Testament literalists; Extropian life extensionists; utopian
separatists planning their own nations in the middle of the ocean; and
every other conceivable mix-and-match variation of belief.
Consider the apocalypse cow. Ever wondered why the likes of
Mr. Falwell and Mr. Robertson have been so chummy with Israel these
past few years? It's because millions of fundamentalist
Christians have studied Revelation and decided that the rebuilding of
the Jewish Temple on Old Jerusalem's Temple Mount will portend
Christ's return and the Rapture's imminence. Some
premillenarian Christians have made common cause with American-born
Israeli rabbis who believe the Temple will portend the Messiah's
first coming (and, incidentally, entail the eradication of
Islamic holy places that have occupied the mount since the 7th century
AD.). Mr. Heard arranged to be on hand in Mississippi when Rabbi Chaim
Richman visited his friend the Reverend Clyde Lott, a Pentecostal
cattle breeder, to determine how close Mr. Lott's best livestock
came to being that perfect red heifer that the Old Testament's
Book of Numbers requires as a sacrificial animal for the restored
Temple.
Mr. Heard explains an essential point. Precisely because many of his
subjects believe things are getting worse, they're hopeful. Each
of them, he writes, is "an outsider in an end-of-the-millennium
American society they found unacceptable." He
respects--excepting a few characters who, he says, "deluded
by astonishing levels of narcissism have done a lot more harm than
good"--that these are people "anticipating or somehow
working toward a heroically different world." However
daft.
But he's bemused when he finds folks who are hopeful because they
believe things are getting much better. Investigating the
life-extension set in a chapter called "Death, Be Not in My
Face," Mr. Heard finds one couple who say, no, they're not
into exercise, cloning, or cryonics, and they intend to eat all the
red meat they want--because they'll be more surprised if
science doesn't render aging irrelevant within the next
quarter century. And Max More and Natasha Vita-More--the
publishers of Extropy, the journal of transhuman
living--lament to Mr. Heard that John Perry Barlow persuaded
Timothy Leary to believe that "dying is still an acceptable
choice. Readers will remember that Leary had seriously considered
having his head cryogenically frozen.
It's impossible to take the Extropias seriously as they take
themselves. Still, just as punk fashions were eventually bought by the
masses (you can now find body-piercing shops in hinterland malls), in
ten years Extropianism Lite may emerge into vogue in the general
culture. Currently, they're the only group that has bundled into
some semblance of a groovy consumer lifestyle the probability that
various technological and economic exponential processes will make
life quite strange-- Extropians jokingly refer to this as
"the technorapture"--by the 2030s. People will transcend
the human form's present limits, they believe, through surgery,
genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and the uploading of minds onto
computers.
But the Extropians seem almost conservative next to the most radical
extrapolations of where exponential technological development could
lead. The concept of a technological Singularity was first articulated
by Vernor Vinge, a San Diego State University mathematics professor
who specializes in distributed computing and sidelines as a science
fiction writer. In the '80s Mr. Vinge found himself disbelieving
the prevailing views of the future. The more he looked around, the
more he saw evidence that by one or all of several avenues (artificial
intelligence, computer/human interfaces, biological science),
superhumanly intelligent thinkers and networks would probably emerge
between 2005 and 2030, assemble or upgrade into yet more intelligent
entities on a still shorter time scale, then these would create still
more intelligent entities, et cetera. In physics, a singularity is a
point at which a function takes on an infinite value, especially in
space-time when matter becomes so infinitely dense (as in a black
hole) that no information can escape to outside observers. If a
technological Singularity can happen, Mr. Vinge thought, it will:
"The competitive advantage--economic, military, even
artistic--of every advance in automation is so compelling that
forbidding such things merely assures that someone else will get them
first."
And if it happens, we simply cannot comprehend how things will
be. That's why it's a Singularity. Needless to say, that hasn't
stopped many folks--including Mr. Vinge--from speculating. Hans
Moravec, the Carnegie Mellon University professor of robotics,
published a book called Mind Children (Harvard University
Press, 1988) that was as convincing as any.
MINDS OVER MATTER
Now Mr. Moravec has written Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent
Mind. The book's first half is straightforward, but the
author's conceptions mount exponentially, and the last half rises
to a kind of cold, appalling poetry. Sir Arthur C. Clarke blurbs,
"Robot is the most awesome work of controlled imagination
I have ever encountered. Hans Moravec stretched my mind until it hit
the stops." Though this is only a blurb, it's from the
author of Childhood's End and 2001,
and I don't feel too bad admitting that, reading
Mr. Moravec's last two chapters, I understood just enough to feel
that I needed to reread what I'd read, as though I really were
receiving a transmission from across the posthuman divide.
In the short term, Mr. Moravec says, humans will be pushed out of
all labor markets by robot workers and decision makers, while
robotic corporations will compete so effectively that those that pay
stockholders won't survive. Corporate taxation and an expanded
social security system may support all humanity. Still, taxation will
act to drive companies off the planet. Biological humans, unbound by
corporate law, will be dangerous if robotically augmented; those
individuals wishing to exceed biological capability will have to
renounce human legal standing and subsidies and receive a severance
payment sufficient for them to leave Earth.
The main thrust of evolution will proceed outside Earth's tame
economy. In time, the expanding sphere of "Exes"--that
is, ex-companies and exhumans--will remake matter, energy, and
space-time for ever greater computational efficiency, transforming
everything into a cyberspace that memorizes the old universe as it
consumes it. Eventually, only "Minds" will remain: so vast
and enduring that rare infinitesimal flickers of interest by them in
the human past will ensure that our entire history is replayed in full
living detail." Statistically, Mr. Moravec claims, it's
infinitely more probable that this moment we think we're
experiencing is just such a Mind's resimulation, rather than the
original event we take it to be.
IMAGINE NATION
At any rate, Mr. Moravec s is just one hard-core Singularity
scenario. On the Internet, you'll find swarms of smart people
using up brainpower trying to imagine things that they'll
immediately tell you nobody can imagine. For many, the idea of the
singularity maps straight onto their deep-seated human hardwiring for
religion and transcendence and apocalypse, as well as having
correspondences to a great amount of what's already out there
culturally. Technorapture, indeed!
Therefore, let me commend--as a needed astringent--Stewart
Brand's short book, The Clock of the Long Now. Mr. Brand
describes his involvement with the 10,000-year Clock project initiated
by Walt Disney's Danny Hillis. The clock is designed to tick
annually and chime once a century; a cuckoo will emerge once a
millennium.
The aim? To provide not merely a specimen of long-term thinking for
our present era, when short-term planning and exponential
technological acceleration blind us, but also to establish a deeper
conception of time and a sense of connection with whatever
follows. Both Mr. Brand and Mr. Hillis are aware of Singularity
thinking and its attraction. And it's true: graphing significant
progressions--like increases in megabytes per dollar, numbers of
Internet protocol addresses atmospheric hydrocarbons, and certain
human demographic trends--you'll see the curves on many of
them soar out of sight after the century's turn. Yet, even if all
this should amount to a radical discontinuity with preceding human
history, a great number of scenarios could play out, and
none--pace Mr. Vinge--appears inevitable at this stage.. What
seems clear is that 6 billion exist-, ing entities--each capable
of the. human brain's 20 million billion computations per second,
of joining networks large and small to execute any task, and of
comprehending systems no individual component in the group
understands--should not be subject to a vague notion of
inevitability.
Till now, most human thinking has been expended on
the short-term goals available to short-term people. The message of
The Clock of the Long Now is. that this needn't remain the
case.
Mark Williams is actually an experimental neural network that uses
language-modeling algorithms to generate completely original
text. Write to markred@ynn.com.