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Green or Gray?
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Green or Gray?
Will the future be green (based on biotechnology) or gray (based on nanotechnology and nanotech-powered AI)? Ray Kurzweil and Gregory Stock will debate this issue at the Foresight Senior Associate Gathering. Both have advantages, but environmentalists and anti-biotech activists may load the dice in favor of gray.
Originally published April
4, 2002 at Tech
Central Station. Published on KurzweilAI.net April 5, 2002
Will the future be green? Or gray? Or, to put it another way,
do we face a choice between a "biofuture" and a "machine
future"? Biophysicist Gregory Stock will be debating artificial
intelligence guru Ray Kurzweil on this very topic at the Foresight
Institute's conference in Palo Alto later this month. But at the
risk of stealing a bit of their thunder (but, I suspect, no more
than a bit), I want to address the issue now.
Those who favor the gray approach--relying on nanotechnology and
nanotech-powered artificial intelligence--note that machines can
do a lot of things that living creatures can't. They can be made
of materials that are stronger and easier to control, they can be
designed from the ground up with comparative straightforwardness,
and they can be designed to function without troublesome issues
such as sex, mutation, and evolution. Or, if such traits seem desirable,
those can be designed in. It's like the difference between a car
and a horse. Machines will sit quietly, without needing to be fed,
watered, or even dealt with--much, anyway--until they're needed.
And when they are needed, they'll do what they're told, without
deciding that they'd really rather munch on some delicious-looking
daffodils along the way.
The green approach offers the flip side of these advantages. With
machines, you have to know what you're doing. With biotech, you
just have to find an organism that knows how to do what you want--more
or less, anyway--and do a little modification. Want people to be
able to photosynthesize? You don't have to invent photosynthesis,
just figure out a way to put chloroplasts into human skin. (Okay,
this is a silly example, but you get the point.) Cars may be a better
means of getting around than horses are today, but people figured
out how to travel on horseback long before they were up to building
automobiles, and the first few generations of automobiles were no
great shakes compared to horses, either. And we still don't have
a car that knows the way home on its own when you're too drunk to
drive.
In truth, of course, there's a lot of overlap. You can, in principle,
do most of the things that you could do with nanotechnology using
advanced biotechnology, since biological processes are really just
naturally evolved nanotechnology. And in the process of using and
studying biological systems, you're sure to learn things that will
have important applications for nanotechnology. (The reverse is
probably also true--in engineering nanodevices, you're almost certain
to learn things that will have biological applications.) One need
only look at Robert Freitas' fascinating work of conceptual engineering,
Nanomedicine (Landes Bioscience, 1999) to see the ways in
which biology and engineering will mesh.
Interestingly, though, it's the Greens who may provide much of
the impetus for going gray. Over the past couple of decades, environmentalists
who are opposed to genetic engineering have spent a lot of time
demonizing biotechnology as "tinkering with life." By
treating DNA as something almost holy, they have sought to make
any sort of manipulation of genes seem like desecration to those
who agree with them. This is a pretty silly argument, but it is
one that has won some converts.
The problem is, having chosen to take that approach, they've committed
intellectual disarmament where nanotechnology and other gray technologies
are concerned. When you're building robots, you're not tinkering
with life. You're tinkering with, er, machines--and what more appropriate
subject is there, in the popular mind, for tinkering with?
So although there may be little reason, on the merits, to choose
between going green and going gray, the actions of environmentalists
and anti-biotech activists may load the dice in favor of more mechanical
approaches. Thus do politics and science interact.
Copyright (c) 2002 Tech
Central Station. Used with permission.
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Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
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I can't wait, honest.
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> The future seems bad which ever direction we go. We are loosing sight of the Love aspect.
Love is about everybody being happy. Future technologies are to ensure just that. We are not losing sight of the Love aspect. But ' can we do more and/or go faster? I don't know.
> I like nature, much better than fake stuff. Nature is good.
If you are talking about 1) a fake/virtual world: why would you prefer the real world to a virtual one, if the virtual one can ' eventually - provide you with every aspect of the real one plus much more? 2) a fake entity: you may like nature, but nature doesn't like you. It prefers to be as independent of you as possible. As we DO depend on each other, we like to LOVE each other and make sure we serve each other's interests. But no doubt, what we really want to be is 'fake', if fake means, and it will, being less vulnerable then we are now.
> Why don't we all just sort it out. and be honest.
I don't know what you are saying here exactly, but allow me to express my view on 'it':
First, this view may not be too realistic, or only semi. Or even desirable. But here it is: I suggest we have RULE 1: we keep our hands to ourselves at all times. Adults, parents, teenagers, children, RULE 2: we do not try and make each other feel inferior, guilty or bad in any way, about anything, RULE 3: everybody helps everybody out.
Presently we follow RULES 1-3 partially, some of the time. Why? Well, maybe (a little) pressure on us makes us control our minds better. Can't we do that while following RULES 1-3 wholly, all the time? Maybe. At least it seems that we could more often and better reach each other - have each other do or not do something ' through peaceful communication, by expressing conviction (if genuine) on the matter we wish to persuade and by presenting evidence (if genuine) why it should be so.
A GRAND RULE that God (am not religious) should have had all of us following from the beginning, is that we do not make bad decisions. If we have a choice, that is.
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Re: Green or Gray?
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Something I've noticed about people who want to curtail research of any kind: they would never be able to build it themselves in a billion years. Moreover, they wouldn't want it to exist, even if they could build it, because they want life to be harsh, brutal, and short, IE Hobbes. After all, if they can't rise above the animal state of existence, why should anyone else be able to? -It's just jealousy and a lack of creativity.
Take a look at the extra enjoyment and beauty that technology has given us: it is immense. Moreover, to contemplate technology and its further use has given the human mind interesting work for eons into the future.
The anti-technologists (anti-biological or anti-machine) are all born of the same lack of imagination and desire for brutality. They are the same as any basic authoritarian mind that loves speeding tickets, government bureaucracy, the unnecessary imposition of conformity and social order. They love these things, because filth and boredom and tyranny that they can understand means more to them than beauty, creativity, and freedom that they can neither understand, not contribute to.
Free market engineers would do well not to impart benevolent or useful motives to the anti-technologists. In my opinion, this desire to "work with" them or to compromise with them in order to reduce nanotechnology's possible detriments is simple-minded credulity.
What happens when you allow them into your laboratory, with a few police officers in tow? They can then behave like a chimpanzee, and will. They will begin pant-hooting, and the police officers will just _destroy your work_.
You see, one doesn't need to understand something in order to destroy it.
At best, you will allow them to tie you down with speed-bumps on the road of your discovery. There will be inspections that force you to delay your work, and attempt to explain things to barely post-simian legislatures.
Essentially, making the scientific process "democratic" at this stage of the game would be akin to the catholic church deciding what a modern-day Galileo could publish. Those in government who purport to "make us safe" should be viewed with the same kind of doubt as the Catholic Inquisitors.
Keep in mind that Isaac Newton was one of the first sound money advocates (he advocated of a gold standard, and distrusted paper money systems). This was because he saw that paper money was a mechanism of those who had nothing to offer attempting to parasitize the value that was being created by those who had brought something worth trading to the market.
Now I ask you, technologists: Do you think that increased processing power brought to humanity has a value? How about increased or eternal life? What about space travel, personal flight machines, advanced self-defense mechanisms, beautiful clothing and the ability to alter one's physical form for business, lovemaking, swimming, flight, etc...
Should any of these things need to be approved by simpletons with nothing to offer but their desires to curtail the advancement?
Don't make the mistake of believing that their motives are humane or sincere. The instant that you do that, you give them power over you, whether their motives are humane or not.
If a bunch of pre-agricultural horse-punchers want 30-year lifespans, clad in stinking unwashed leather garments and prone to disease, under the vestigial fear of a primitive "God", let them have their vision alone. But don't give them credulity that they don't deserve and haven't earned.
I may not be much more intelligent than they are, but at least I don't want to shackle you and restrict your achievements. I recognize the extra beauty that you've already brought to my life. I accomplish more work now than ever would have been possible for me without my apple computer, without electricity, etc... I have only benefitted through my access to your creations. After all, I can always choose not to support them with my dollar, if they are not really valuable to me.
But can I leave the labor of the Luddite behind if I choose? No, because their labor is not an added value of its own, but merely a subtraction of your own efforts. The Luddites can already choose to live without technology, but they do not make that choice, because it really isn't the best choice, and this is obvious even to them.
If you can help me to improve the function of my body and brain, and automate even more wrote tasks for me, then I will be grateful. Will those same Luddite beneficiaries be grateful as well? No, they won't. They believe that by controlling you, they help decide what "policy" should be. But this policy amounts to nothing but a bully's club placed over your head.
In my opinion to even acknowledge this debate as valid is much a waste of time, because so much work has been done on the subject already http://www.aynrand.org/site/PageServer?pagename=me dia_topic_environmentalism_and_animal_rights . It is only because most scientists do not recognize the government for what it is that there is any controversy in this area. Governments, in fact, are not necessary between civilized people. At most, paid courts of law can mediate disputes between objective people who disagree on fundamental value assessments.
The values of the anti-technologists are the same as they were 100 years ago. It isn't that they fear the misuse of the tools themselves: They hate the increased value that the better tools bring to life.
The industrial revolutionaries ignored these primitivist belief structure for the poison they are, and for very good reason. They brought teir view of life into existence, without begging permission from anyone. The market vindicated them, and there were more than enough people to proclaim the value of their creations by giving them dollars for access to their creations.
Do the same. We will support you with our dollar, or with gold, if you prefer. Ignore the eco-terrorists and their crude government tools, and cruder arguments against technology. |
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Re: Green or Gray?
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from eldras:
Well I understanbd a bit about libertarian philosophy, but i agree with some of the stuff you said here.
There is a hell of a lot of negativity about, and it's not an attack it's a symptom of depression.
people get trapped and for safety knock anything.
Darwin and freud hid to aviod the attcks on their theories, and there were many, especially if you are a pioneer.
The time it takes for a major paradigm shift is four years I think, of exposure to it regularly.
Grey v Green
I have no problems here: I think that advances up different sides of a mountain lead to the same top.
I think Intelligence is a fundamantal force in the universe, and when it is excellerated faster (it IS accellerating and has been for some billion years as human intelligence developed)
Nano, bio and A.I. will be the same thing when they are sufficiently developed.
but I think we have responsibilty to others too. Leadership is unfashionable in Europe, but it means not dominating, but being sensible to the needs and requirements of others BEFORE they see it themselves and making provisions for them.
That's part of the social contract.
We have not evolved as single strong entities but co-operating entities.
Most of us at times are weak and need others. Some let me stick my neck out here ALL people who are not functioning independantly are ill, and that lack of health can and will be corrected before the human era is over in the next couple of decades.
Our ideas only 7 years ago thought ridiculous, are now becomeing rapidly acceptable and major newspapers are debating the ethics rather than the practicalities of major lab work, often government fundied, that even 5 years ago was thougyht of as science fiction by most people.
The speed at which we adapt makes me hopeful that the death meme will go soon too, and a new spiritual awakening will seize people.
Eldras |
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