 |
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Origin >
Dangerous Futures >
Statement for Extropy Institute Vital Progress Summit
Permanent link to this article: http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=/articles/art0612.html
Printable Version |
|
| |
|
Statement for Extropy Institute Vital Progress Summit
Responding to the Presidential Bioethics Council report, "Beyond Therapy," Ray Kurzweil has written a keynote statement for the Extropy Institute's Vital Progress Summit, an Internet virtual discussion and debate.
Published on Extropy Institute Vital
Progress Summit site and KurzweilAI.net, February 18, 2004
Technology has always been a double-edged sword, bringing us longer
and healthier life spans, freedom from physical and mental drudgery,
and many new creative possibilities on the one hand, while introducing
new and salient dangers on the other. Technology empowers both our
creative and destructive natures. Genetic engineering is in the
early stages of enormous strides in reversing disease and aging
processes.
Ubiquitous nanotechnology, now about two decades away, will continue
an exponential expansion of these benefits. These technologies will
create extraordinary wealth, thereby overcoming poverty, and enabling
us to provide for all of our material needs by transforming inexpensive
raw materials and information into virtually any type of product.
Lingering problems from our waning industrial age will be overcome.
We will be able to reverse remaining environmental destruction.
Nanoengineered fuel cells and solar cells will provide clean energy.
Nanobots in our physical bodies will destroy pathogens, remove debris
such as misformed proteins and protofibrils, repair DNA, and reverse
aging. We will be able to redesign all of the systems in our bodies
and brains to be far more capable and durable. And that's only the
beginning.
There are also salient dangers. The means and knowledge exists in
a routine college bioengineering lab to create unfriendly pathogens
more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Unrestrained nanobot replication
("unrestrained" being the operative word here) would endanger
all physical entities, biological or otherwise. As for "unfriendly"
AI, that's the most daunting challenge of all because intelligence
is inherently the most powerful force in the Universe.
Awareness of these dangers has resulted in calls for broad relinquishment.
Bill McKibben, the environmentalist who was one of the first to
warn against global warming, takes the position that we have sufficient
technology and that further progress should end. In his latest book
titled "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age," he
metaphorically compares technology to beer and writes that "one
beer is good, two beers may be better; eight beers, you're almost
certainly going to regret." McKibben's metaphor comparing continued
engineering to gluttony misses the point, and ignores the extensive
suffering that remains in the human world, which we will be in a
position to alleviate through sustained technological progress.
Another level of relinquishment, one recommended in Bill Joy's Wired
magazine cover story, would be to forego certain fields--nanotechnology,
for example--that might be regarded as too dangerous. But such sweeping
strokes of relinquishment are equally untenable. Nanotechnology
is simply the inevitable end result of the persistent trend towards
miniaturization that pervades all of technology. It is far from
a single centralized effort, but is being pursued by a myriad of
projects with many diverse goals.
Abandonment of broad areas of technology will only push them underground,
where development would continue unimpeded by ethics and regulation.
In such a situation, it would be the less-stable, less-responsible
practitioners (e.g., terrorists) who would have all the expertise.
The siren calls for broad relinquishment are effective because they
paint a picture of future dangers as if they were released on today's
unprepared world. The reality is that the sophistication and power
of our defensive technologies and knowledge will grow along with
the dangers. When we have "gray goo" (unrestrained nanobot
replication), we will also have "blue goo" ("police"
nanobots that combat the "bad" nanobots). The story of
the 21st century has not yet been written, so we cannot say with
assurance that we will successfully avoid all misuse. But the surest
way to prevent the development of the defensive technologies would
be to relinquish the pursuit of knowledge in broad areas. This was
the primary moral of the novel Brave New World.
Consider software viruses. We have been able to largely control
harmful software virus replication because the requisite knowledge
is widely available to responsible practitioners. Attempts to restrict
this knowledge would have created a far less stable situation. Responses
to new challenges would have been far slower, and it is likely that
the balance would have shifted towards the more destructive applications
(that is, the software pathogens). Stopping the "GNR"
technologies is not feasible, at least not without adopting a totalitarian
system, and pursuit of such broad forms of relinquishment will only
distract us from the vital task in front of us. In terms of public
policy, the task at hand is to rapidly develop the defensive steps
needed, which include ethical standards, legal standards, and defensive
technologies. It is quite clearly a race. There is simply no alternative.
We cannot relinquish our way out of this challenge.
There have been useful proposals for protective strategies, such
as Ralph Merkle's "broadcast" architecture, in which replicating
entities need to obtain replication codes from a secure server.
We need to realize, of course, that each level of protection will
only work to a certain level of sophistication.
The "meta" lesson here is that we will need to place society's
highest priority during the 21st century on continuing to advance
the defensive technologies and to keep them one or more steps ahead
of destructive misuse. In this way, we can realize the profound
promise of these accelerating technologies, while managing the peril.
| | |
|
| |
Mind·X Discussion About This Article:
 |
|
|
 |
What is Ray responding to?
|
|
 |
|
What exactly is Ray addressing here? Bill McKibben and Bill Joy's Wired magazine article? What do they have to do with the Presidential Bioethics Council report, "Beyond Therapy" ??
I haven't had time to read everything at the Presidential Bioethics site, http://bioethics.gov, but I did read a section on stem cell research called "Ethics of Human Stem Cell Research" which featured the thoughts of Dr. Gene Outka and Leon Kass. These two have views explicitly grounded in what I consider superstitious nonsense: religion. Outka makes statements like "...to conduct research on embryos that creates them in order to destroy them clashes directly with the judgment that entities conceived have irreducible value" and "...that once conceived each entity is a form of primordial human life that should exert a claim upon us to be regarded as an end and not a mere means only." Why? Should I not swat and kill mosquitoes also because they have biological end for taking my blood? Outka also says "...it is another thing to instrumentalize embryos through and through when what we intend in the actions we perform exhaustively concerns benefits to third-parties." Why does an embryonic stem cell deserve any rights at all? Why shouldn't we "instrumentalize embryos through and through" ? Since when do the rights of embryos have any claim over those of living, breathing "third-parties?" Those third-parties are us and our loved ones. Should we also grant rights to mosquitoes over the minor inconvenience of an itchy bite they cause third parties?
They argue that embryos have "irreducible value" but value to who? They mean "value to God." If an embryo is not wanted it has little value to us human beings, we can always make more than we need. Their human value is not "irreducible," Their value is what they cost to produce. Isn't it our human values that dictate our rights?
Don't we have enough scientific data to assert that it's the human brain that is the source of our essential rights and values? It's the human brain that concieves them and desires them. Isn't everything medical science does ultimately for the health of brains? When a person is brain dead we shut off life support, if, like Christopher Reeve, everything else is damaged and cut off, it's the brain we work to preserve.
Can non-thinking things have rights? |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
|
Re: What is Ray responding to?
|
|
|
|
Are you going to vote for John Kerry?
I am.
I really let this forum down by not being here in early 2004. Sorry. I was on the road preserving ballot access for the single choice in favor of less government that we had in 2004 ( http://www.badnarik.org/ ). The only rational choice for President, as usual, was the Libertarian candidate for president.
Of course he had no chance of winning, but when your choices are the political philosophy of Hitler (Bush) or Stalin (Kerry) why would you choose either?
Technology under Kerry would have been stifled even more than it was/is under Bush, just through normal, "common sense" regulation. You see, regulation is the use of force in the hands of the ingorant majority. -Why should they be tolerant and try to understand the difficult issues when they don't have to? -It's far easier for the FDA to ban things than to "allow" them to market.
Our government says (through its actions) "You have no individual rights, if the majority votes them down"
Well, guess what? -Hitler got elected on the same message, because the Weimar Republic's decayed society did not value individual rights. Is there any scientific reason behind the drug war? -No. Certainly no reason worth losing our precious Bill of Rights over. To see a full set of arguments in detail on this point, please read "The Ominous Parallels" by Leonard Peikoff, or just take a look at http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills or better yet, take a look at :
http://www.roadblock.org/roadblocks/az.htm
or
http://www.libertybill.net/np.html
Kerry supports this nonsense the same as Bush does. (And he's a gun grabber, so he'd really bring us a step toward democide "mass murder by government")
http://www.innocentsbetrayed.com/
There would still be the "Roadblock" no-warrant or valid reason searches of private property under Kerry. Would we want either of these rogue administrations in a position to hold absolute power? That's what we get if the "leading force" controls access to defensive nanotechnology. (read the largest account on the following link if you want to know what the future of America everywhere will be like with government "supervision" of nanotechnology):
http://www.roadblock.org/roadblocks/az.htm
The best thing nano-scientists could do is to, upon development, distribute nanotrechnology knowledge and equipment to gunowners like these:
http://www.barrettrifles.com/
http://www.libertybill.net/np.html
http://www.john-ross.net/
Why? These are the people who hae proven that they can handle the responsiblity of distributed power, already. Nobody knows anything about how a president will handle power when they're elected, especially the ones elected on vague platforms and general statements (the Democrats, Republicans, and Greens). These Parties get elected on promises of using government power (not restricting its use).
Again, if governments promising the best have given us mass murder in the past http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills , why would we ever trust them with the unlimited power of nanotechnology? A few individuals who have shown intelligence and restraint in the past would be infinitely more likely to prevent the misuse of this technology.
To understand the philosophical reasons for maintaining adequate self-defense technology, I strongly recommend the book "Unintended Consequences" by John Ross, followed by detailed research on that author's sources, since the work is historical fiction. Emphasis on the "historical".
We are at a fork in the road. Those who have trusted government force in the past have either laid the ground for mass murder, or been pushed into mass graves themselves. Let's learn from history.
-Jake |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Re: Statement for Extropy Institute Vital Progress Summit
|
|
|
|
Oh, common! What was your option in 2000? A Green Pagan (Gore) or a devoted Christian (Bush). The last is better, after all.
I know the choices are few but I care less about who comes in than about getting rid of a group of people (one man isn't responsible for much of anything in government, even the president) who have taken this country into a pattern of politics by confrontation with other countries, acting as if the U.S. is above the law (they want a world court for the rest of the world but don't want to be held back by it themselves), a policy of letting big companies rip off the public and state governments (see what Enron did to California by creating an energy crunch and the administration refusing to let regulators correct the condition), and pushing the country into a massive debt that will haunt not only our children and their children after them, but may bring about a global recession, if not a depression (remember 1997).
Bush is one of those Christians who believe it's all right to kill people in the name of Christ but not OK to pursue any technology that interferes with big business or his religious beliefs -- no matter what it does to the economy or the environment. He helps the vice president and his cronies (Haliburton and others) systematically loot the public treasury for their own gain while claiming to help the people he governs. (fifty-dollar tax breaks for the masses but huge tax breaks for the special interests who avoid paying taxes by using off-shore banks and having mail-box headquarters in the Caribian and South America)
My opinion is that whoever gains the presidency, they can't do much worse than Bush and will probably do a lot better. Bush and his team are all cold warriors who are taking on the problems of today as if they were part of a new cold war with the Muslim nations. {The religion Reagan and all the presidents after WWII fought was Communism.)
The old tactics of beating other nations into submission and telling them to become more like the U.S. are not a valid way of dealing with a global civilization that is emerging from modern commerce, transportation and communications. What the present administration is doing affects not only the people of this country but has global consequences that must be acknowledged. We no longer live in an "us or them" world. No one country can rule over all the others any more. That kind of thinking is what we have to get rid of. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Re: Statement for Extropy Institute Vital Progress Summit
|
|
|
|
No bioethics will give you the Singularity. Not that of Bush, who is so afraid of 100 cells large embryo, not that of EU, which so scared about modified corn.
Stupid politicians _everywhere_ - more here. But you cannot - I repeat, you cannot - expect, that they will be radically different from their electorate.
Christians in America "deserves" Bush, as Greens over here "deserves" Romano Prodi.
Or at least - you can't expect biotech friendly president - where do you live? Maybe in Turkey, but only until Muslim clerics make a connection between God and genes. What are about to do.
Fortunately, there is no link between God and supercomputer in the heads of your political elite. So they will not restrict this area for quite some time. In fact, your current administration puts SC high in its agenda.
I'll stop now, before I go off topic of this thread.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Arthur Caplan counters Beyond Therapy report
|
|
|
|
In "Is Biomedical Research Too Dangerous to Pursue?" in the Feb. 20 issue of Science magazine, Arthur Caplan, director, Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania, takes on Kass and others. He states: "The concern that advances in biotechnology will come at a terrible price--the loss of authentic happiness, the loss of what makes life meaningful--struggle, suffering frailty, finitude, and death do not seem to square with what we have already experienced in the wake of biomedical progress. Do those who use glasses, insulin injections, wheelchairs, inhalers, oxygen tanks, hearing aids, or prosthetic limbs feel inauthentic or overcome by a loss of meaning in their lives? If I use a calculator, a computer, or the Internet to solve a problem, do I feel that I have been cheated out of a more authentic experience enjoyed by my grandparents, who used pen and paper calculation, visited a library, or mastered the plication table? There is little evidence for the dour view that we can only be happy when we have earned our happiness."
Science, Volume 303, Number 5661, Issue of 20 Feb 2004, p. 1142 http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/303/566 1/1142 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
