At the end of every year for almost two decades, science book agent John Brockman poses a provocative question to a bunch of smarty-pants, including scientists, philosophers, and journalists. He then publishes the responses on his website, edge.org, and in a book. Here’s this year’s question: “What do you consider the most interesting recent [scientific] news?”
Brockman just posted responses from almost 200 Edgeheads. Many, as you might guess, claim that science is going to alter us in some dramatic way. CRISPR “will transform our species and life itself, fast.” Optogenetics will “allow our minds to encompass the world of computers.” Bayesian algorithms will make machines so smart that humans become “obsolete” — and so on. I can’t help but respond to these responses.
First of all, these sorts of predictions are old hat. In his 1929 work The World, the Flesh and the Devil, the British chemist J.D. Bernal predicted that science would soon allow us to radically re-design our bodies and minds, making us something other than human.
“Finally, consciousness itself may end or vanish in a humanity that has become completely etherealized,” Bernal wrote, “losing the close-knit organism, becoming masses of atoms communicating by radiation, and ultimately perhaps resolving itself entirely into light.” Got that? We’re going to turn into optical supercomputers.
These once-startling visions have become clichés, endlessly recycled by the modern scientific hype machine. With each new genuine or spurious advance in artificial intelligence, neuroscience and genetics, pundits promise or warn that we are barreling toward a future in which we are irrevocably transformed. The Singularity, a technological heaven or hell, is coming.
The real news is how resistant we’ve turned out to be to self-engineering, in spite of all that has happened since Bernal’s prophesy. Yes, science has spawned countless advances, material and intellectual, from smart phones to smart bombs, and yet our lives remain in fundamental ways unchanged. We keep muddling along with all our frailties of mind and body, vulnerable to loneliness and heartbreak, fear and rage, pity and melancholy. We love, grieve, age, and die.
I suspect we will never escape these essential components of the human condition, in spite of our fantasies and fears of techno-transcendence. Here’s a question for Edgeheads and others: Should we be glad or sad that we remain so stubbornly human?
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his ScientificAmerican.com blog, “Cross-check.”
