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WHAT’S NEXT
FOR TECHNOLOGY, BUSINESS, SOCIETY, AND YOUR CAREER. In September 2001 PC MAGAZINE issued a
special edition to celebrate the first twenty years of the PC and to
speculate on what the next twenty years might bring. John Heilemann interviewed some of industry’s
key leaders and has presented a thoughtful, disturbing, and chillingly
accurate view of the future. If your life touches or is touched by
technology, risk management, or ethics, you will find this article of
interest. Key thoughts:
“In the next few decades, people will kill
each other in large numbers as a direct result of the advancement of
science.” What are YOUR reactions? Send reactions to lstybel@boardoptions.com and we
will publish them at the end of the piece. September 4, 2001 Second Coming It happened quickly;
few saw it coming. Over the past 20 years, the PC, the Internet, and the
protean enterprises that arose around them propelled an economic
transformation as sweeping as any since the Industrial Revolution. Together
these changes were responsible for the lion's share of industrial and
service-sector growth. They allayed the fear that U.S. competitiveness was in
steep decline. They sparked a wave of corporate restructuring, spurred
improvements in productivity, and ushered in what even traditionalists like
Fed chairman Alan Greenspan acknowledged as a new economy. And by collapsing
distance and traversing national borders, they helped turn Marshall McLuhan's
notion of the world becoming a global village from theory into practice. Along the way, computing
crept from the fringes to the center of popular culture. By the peak of the
Internet boom, it often seemed as if geeks and gadgets had become our
national pastime—the focus of an enthusiasm so intense it bordered on abject
fetishism. Then came the crash. In the
wake of the past year's litany of horrors, the public's infatuation with all
things digital has faded. On Wall Street and on Main Street, in the press and
even in Silicon Valley, a feeling has set in that the information revolution has
played itself out, or at least has entered a period of prolonged abeyance. Summing up the new
conventional wisdom in a recent article in The New York Times, David Brooks,
author of the book Bobos in Paradise, wrote, "Suddenly, it doesn't
really matter much if the speed of microprocessors doubles with the square
root of every lunar eclipse (or whatever Moore's Law was)." He
concluded, "Of course, people are still using computers.... What's gone
is the sense that the people using the stuff are on the cutting edge of
history, and everyone else is road kill." However extreme Brooks's
assessment may seem, it contains an element of truth. An epoch has ended, but
the era ahead promises something quite different. For the past 20 years, the
information revolution has been about computing itself; for the next 20, the
main event will be the breakthroughs that computing makes possible. The
escalating power of computers will be felt on the desktop and in the cloud.
Yet its effects in the office and at home will be dwarfed by what happens in
the lab, where the intermingling of computing with next-wave technologies
(genomics, biotech, nanotech, robotics) is destined to unleash advances so
profound that they will amount to what the futurist Peter Schwartz calls
"a second scientific revolution." The scale of these advances
is nearly unfathomable. In the words of Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems' chief
scientist, they will "open up the opportunity to completely redesign the
world—for better or worse." As the digital revolution unfolded, its
benefits so manifestly outweighed its costs that the costs seemed barely
worth worrying about. In the decades ahead, that will no longer be true. The
dilemmas posed by the second-order revolutions won't be simply economic but
ethical, moral, even spiritual; they will cut to the core of what it means to
be human. And they will compel us not only to look beyond the lessons learned
thus far in our entanglements with technology but also to reexamine some of
our most deeply held convictions. As Stewart Brand, author and
founder of The Well, puts it, "If people think that coping with the
changes caused by computing has been hard, just wait'll they see what's
coming next." To catch a glimpse of what
might be coming, the only place to go is Silicon Valley. True, the carnage
wrought by the past year's tech wreck has been severe; the landscape is
littered with fallen start-ups, and even the industry's stalwarts lie
wounded. Yet it may not be all that grim. After raking in unprecedented
profits in the 1990s, the venture capitalists are perched on an ungodly pile
of cash—totaling nearly $100 billion. But now they are turning their
attention back to start-ups that build actual technology rather than
paper-thin "business models." As sanity slowly returns to the Valley,
the prospect of a revival (not soon, but soon enough) is surprisingly solid. John Doerr, for one, remains
optimistic. A partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Doerr is the
Valley's most prominent venture capitalist. Having established his reputation
by bankrolling Internet darlings like Amazon.com and Netscape, he is now
betting millions more that the Net's adolescence will be a bigger deal than
its splashy infancy. He criticizes Wall Street's dismissal of the Web as
grossly premature, protesting, "We're just a few milliseconds after the
Big Bang." In the next five to ten years, he believes, the Internet will
metamorphose into the Evernet—"the always-on, high-speed, ubiquitous,
multiformat Web." While Doerr's faith in the Net is undimmed, his focus is
no longer monomaniacal. He now thinks there are two new revolutions afoot,
both built squarely on the back of the microchip. "The Human Genome
Project is the warm-up act for a broader set of technologies—proteomics,
cloning, developmental biology—that we must and will develop," he says.
"The other area is distributed clean power, transportation, and water
for the tens of millions of people globally who live on less than a dollar a
day." Each of these sets of technologies, Doerr contends, could be as important
as the Net and maybe more profitable. Around the time I spoke with
Doerr, I also called on Intel's chairman, Andy Grove. Where Doerr is a
cheerleader and a salesman, Grove is a skeptic, a cynic, a hard ass. Yet like
Doerr, Grove remains bullish about the Internet, arguing that it is likely to
change the world more in the next five years than it has in the past five, as
international adoption catches up to America. Also like Doerr, Grove expects
an even more explosive change to occur at the intersection of the life
sciences and the information sciences—a change "in the area of genetics,
molecular biology, and the like, which would be inconceivable without very powerful,
highly connected, and available computers. The impact on drug development,
health care, and human life is difficult to imagine." Grove continues, "If
this change happens as extensively as some people think it will, the
consequences could be far more important than the enabler. Compared with
directly altering life and death, computers and the Internet don't seem like
such a big deal. But without them, this genetics/molecular-biology stuff
would never get off the ground." Until recently, these sorts
of predictions—optimistic but not wild-eyed, stretching out not much more
than a decade ahead—were as far as most people in Silicon Valley were willing
to go. With good reason: It was widely assumed that Moore's Law would break down
around 2010. But thanks to rapid leaps in molecular electronics (in which
individual molecules and atoms serve as circuit elements in place of
lithographically drawn transistors), the emerging consensus is that chips
will continue their march up the Moore's Law curve for another 30 years. "By 2030," says
Joy, his voice a queasy mixture of awe and dread, "we'll be building
machines that are a million times more powerful than today's PCs." A
pause. "A million is a very big number." Molecular electronics is a
new subfield of nanotechnology: the science of manipulating matter at the
atomic level. Since nanotech was first introduced to the mainstream in the
mid-1980s by scientist Eric Drexler, it has held out the potential of letting
us snap together the basic building blocks of nature to create a future of
almost magical abundance—one in which the human immune system could be
augmented to wipe out most diseases and most products could be manufactured
at a cost close to zero. By Drexler's account in his book Engines of
Creation, nanotech could ignite "changes as profound as the Industrial
Revolution, antibiotics, and nuclear weapons all rolled up in one." A few years ago, Drexler's
claims strained credulity among all but a cadre of borderline mad scientists.
But not anymore. "Nanotech is coming along faster than anyone except the
most rabid true believers expected," says Brand. "Now you've got
nanostudies centers at top universities all over the country. Already they've
come up with carbon nanotubes, which have these incredible properties of
being, like, a hundred times stronger and a hundred times lighter than steel.
Oh, and by the way, depending on how you twist them, they can be used as
insulators, conductors, or semiconductors. So basically any material you make
out of this stuff can be computational." Overlapping and mutually
reinforcing, nanotech, biotech, and computing share certain characteristics
that set them apart from most other technologies that have preceded them. For
one thing, they are—literally and physically—smaller. "We are entering
the era of the tiny," says Brand, "where all the action takes place
at the molecular, the atomic, and eventually the subatomic scale." For
another, they all possess an unusual (and unsettling) feature: They are
autocatalytic; that is, self-accelerating. "This is genuinely
new," Brand says. "The last century was transformed by three
technologies: television, the telephone, and jet airplanes. All three sped up
society in various ways, but none had the property of speeding up itself. So
along comes what looks like just another transformative technology—computing—but
it turns out to have this peculiar trait baked in called Moore's Law. And the
reason Moore's Law keeps being true is that the first thing you do with each
generation of denser chips is use them to make even denser chips. It's also
the reason computer technology is the dominant, pace-setting technology that
everything else is always sprinting to keep up with. Then along comes biotech
in the context of computing, and you get Craig Ventner cracking the human
genome in, like, two weeks. You get biotech self-accelerating just as much as
computing. And you get nanotech doing the same thing—along with all the stuff
that comes after that." The mere thought of what
comes after that is enough to make most reasonable people feel as though
their heads might explode. (Autocatalytic, indeed.) Yet scientists now seem
to agree broadly that the biotech and nanotech revolutions, in that order,
will be in full swing by the end of this decade. So what in God's name will
2010 to 2020 bring? To get a bead on that distant
horizon, I visited Peter Schwartz, one of the rare professional futurists who
doesn't exude the ripe scent of charlatanism. Trained academically as a
rocket scientist, Schwartz worked for years in the planning division at Royal
Dutch/Shell and then went on to found the Global Business Network, a renowned
strategy consulting firm. Recently, Schwartz has taken
on a project with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) to scour
the globe in search of research initiatives that might produce major
upheavals in the future. "I've been asked to set my sights 20 or 30
years out," he says with a grin, "to the place where the line between
science and science fiction gets blurry." A good start is an article
published in 1993 (and well-known among futurists) by Vernor Vigne, a
mathematician and computer scientist at San Diego State University.
Extrapolating from Moore's Law, Vigne reached the conclusion that machines
would become sentient around 2030. "Shortly after that," Schwartz
elaborates, "machines would become supersentient. And shortly after that—poof!
We're obsolete." Having concocted a scenario
in which machine intelligence was guaranteed to exceed human intelligence,
Vigne offered a modest proposal: Humans should devise a means of boosting
their own brainpower, so they would have a fighting chance. "Intelligence
amplification" may sound far-out, but it's by no means a fantasy.
"It turns out that there are several feasible pathways to do it,"
says Schwartz. "We're talking IQs of 300-plus!" Schwartz describes
some of the ways in which technicians 20 or 30 years from now might endow a
so-so brain with the quality of genius. He spoke of employing chemicals or
electrical stimuli to goose our capacities for sensory perception and memory,
of "smart drugs," of "real-time neural ballistic
computation," and of the quest for an "interface between silicon
and organics." Schwartz races from one
brain-bending idea to the next: from "complex adaptive matter" to
"tether propulsion" and from quantum computing to an incipient
subfield of biotech known as regenerative medicine, whereby biochemical
treatments such as stem-cell injections might induce a damaged body to repair
itself. "My guess is that in 30 or 40 years, we'll no longer do surgery,
except in trauma cases," Schwartz predicts. "And people will look
back on the medical practices of today and say, 'They cut patients open? How
barbaric!'" Finally, Schwartz turns to
the breakthroughs that are about to burst forth across all the core sciences—particularly
physics. Pointing to recent discoveries on the cosmic scale (that the
universe is expanding at an accelerating rate) and at the atomic and
subatomic levels (that neutrinos are not what we've long thought they were),
which cast doubt on firmly established verities in physics, Schwartz
declares, "There is a high likelihood that we are currently in a
situation similar to a century ago, just before Einstein and Bohr put forth
their ideas about relativity and quantum mechanics, which stood the Newtonian
universe on its head." Despite their diversity,
Schwartz's prophecies share two qualities. First, all are made feasible by
giant steps in computing. "Maybe the biggest oncoming revolution of all
is the convergence of biology, physics, and chemistry at the nano
scale," Schwartz says. "The only reason it's even conceivable is
that computers let us mess around, with precision, with objects that are far
too small for physical manipulation." The truth is plain to see. In
Schwartz's view, "All of science is now information science." And
all revolutions are now, at bottom, information revolutions. The second common quality is
that none of Schwartz's predictions fill him with unalloyed glee. That might
not seem surprising, unless you recall that Schwartz was responsible for
"the long boom"—not just the phrase but the book-length scenario
behind it. In his book, Schwartz sketched a future where technology would
spawn a 25-year run of blessed peace and bountiful prosperity, which would in
turn "transform our world into the beginnings of a global civilization—a
new civilization of civilizations that will blossom through the coming
century." While Schwartz still
professes faith in the long boom, his optimism about the future, once so
pristine it verged on Panglossian, is now far more measured. When asked about
the challenges posed by the radical changes science is about to thrust upon
us, Schwartz's reply is cold: "The biggest political
challenge in this new century is the conflict between the secular and the
sacred—between secular societies and religious societies. And it's one that
science and technology will only exacerbate. Cloning, life extension, genetic
manipulation, superintelligence, sentient robots—this stuff has a way of
really freaking people out, because it touches on fundamental issues of human
identity. What is a human? Are we God-endowed or just chemicals? If I succeed
in growing a cell out of chemicals, what does that say about God? If I can
manufacture an iris or something even more beautiful, what does that say
about God? These are the sorts of questions we'll confront. The issues will
be profound. And the conflicts will be life-and-death." Schwartz takes a breath. "In the next few
decades, I do believe people will kill each other in large numbers as a
direct result of the advancement of science." Think what you will about
Schwartz's chilling conclusion, the gravity of his concerns reflects a core
truth: Both the promise and the perils of the emerging 21st- century
technologies far exceed those the information revolution has tossed up so
far. "In Washington, D.C.,
the debates we've had on information technology—on privacy, copyright,
antitrust—have often seemed intense," says Tom Kalil, one of the Clinton
administration's top technology advisers. "But when you think about
whether genetic engineering might lead to a caste system, with classes of
genetic haves and have-nots, or to someone creating designer pathogens to
infect millions of people with a deadly disease—when you think about that,
the issues of whether people should be able to download music for free or
companies should be allowed to put cookies in your browser seem kind of—well,
small." No one has done more than Bill
Joy to make vivid and haunting the dangers of the 21st-century technologies.
In a 15,000-word essay in the April 2000 issue of Wired, Joy examined the
risks posed by the unchecked development of genetic engineering, robotics,
and nanotech. His fear was fueled by the fact that all three technologies
were not only self-accelerating but also self-replicating, and that all were
in the process (due to Moore's Law) of being democratized. The suggestion is
that the new technologies would be uniquely hazardous—prone to new classes of
accident and abuse. In the 20th century, the most fearsome technologies, such
as nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, required rare raw materials,
highly classified information, and industrial facilities. In the 21st, all
that will be needed is a computer and some brainpower. For Joy, the potential
consequences seem dire indeed: at worst, human extinction. Genetics and
nanotech could produce a plague that wipes out either the species or the
biosphere around us; farther off in the future, robotics might lead to a race
of self-replicating superintelligent machines, which eventually will come, à
la Vernor Vigne, to supersede us. Faced with this array of harrowing
scenarios, Joy concluded that the only feasible path to salvation is "relinquishment:
to limit development of the technologies that are too dangerous by limiting
our pursuit of certain kinds of knowledge." Joy's prescription was bound
to be as controversial as his diagnosis, for it seemed that one of our most
eminent scientists was calling for an immediate and draconian abandonment of
broad areas of science. But that wasn't quite right, as Joy tells me.
"What I said and what I mean is that we should stop doing things we deem
too dangerous to do. Which is really just a tautology. It's a call for a
rational collective dialog and an assessment of the costs and benefits of the
new technologies. To say we should not do that which we judge too dangerous
to do is really just a definition of sanity, right?" If Joy's aim was to provoke a
dialog, he succeeded magnificently and at the same time failed miserably.
Joy's warnings have inspired a voluminous, impassioned, and articulate
reaction. In government and academia, among scientists and civilians, in
America and all over the world, the appetite for his thoughts has been
virtually insatiable—everywhere, that is, except in Silicon Valley. There the
reaction to Joy's argument has ranged from knee-jerk rejection ("he's
just wrong") to mute silence. This was no surprise to Joy, but dispiriting
nonetheless. "It's one thing to be aware that the industry is myopic and
short-sighted," he says, "but it's another to have this kind of
demo." Myopia and short-sightedness
may be part of the problem, but something deeper is also at work. As Brand
explains it, "One of the big changes in the past 20 years is that
basically all science and tech have become commercial science and tech."
This development has been part and parcel of an era where the triumph of the
free market was vindicated on a global scale, and the animal spirits of
capitalism have raged as exuberantly as at any time in history. The system
has produced unsurpassed innovation and wealth, but it has some glaring
weaknesses. "You could say that capitalism is just a
couple-hundred-year-old mechanism for speeding up science," Joy says.
"But capitalism and the free market are not very good at saying 'pause,'
let alone 'stop.'" Politics, by contrast, is
quite proficient at both; to no small extent, our system of government was
designed explicitly to slow things down. So perhaps it's not surprising to
learn that some of Joy's most receptive readers and most constructive critics
have hailed from the realm of politics and public policy. Not long after his
piece was published, Joy flew out to Harvard University to talk with
professors at the Kennedy School of Government. The sessions were animated,
thoughtful, intellectually rigorous. And although some of the faculty and
researchers took issue with one or another of Joy's points and some differed
with him about the scale of the risks or the timeframe for action, everyone
respected the urgency and the quality of his crusade. "We've been dealing with
technologies of mass destruction for decades now," says Graham Allison,
the former dean of the Kennedy School and now a professor specializing in
national-security matters. "The kinds of threats Bill is talking about
are unique in some ways, but in other ways they're not. Biotech may very well
turn out to be as great or greater a threat in the first half of the 21st
century as nukes were during the second half of the 20th. And the sooner we
start thinking about how to deal with that in a rational and careful way, the
better chance we'll have of averting the worst." For some ardent free
marketeers, Joy's visions and the audience he has earned among the governing
classes have been a cause for alarm. George Gilder, the conservative
technopundit, accuses Joy of having "unveiled the 21st century's leading
rationale for anticapitalist repression and the revival of statism—a tonic
for beleaguered socialists, a program and raison d'être for a new New
Left." He predicts that Joy's ideas "will propel the Techno-Left
into the vanguard, allowing it to absorb the Greens and become the main
adversary of freedom and faith in this century." Put aside the histrionics and
the tone of hysteria and it's clear that Gilder and his allies are on to
something. The reaction to Joy's philosophy outside the technology and
science establishment—like the public's alarm over the imminent possibility
of human cloning or the movement in Europe against genetically modified foods—is
a sign that the recent shift in sentiment toward technology runs deeper than
mere skepticism. Among educated people in many walks of life (including the
tech world), there is a growing sense that, as Joy puts it, "we are
being propelled into this new century with no plan, no control, no
brakes," and that commercialism and the free market have no solutions to
offer. "The market has won the
economic argument, and that's irreversible," says Schwartz. But there
are plenty of other essential arguments, and here the market seems to have
nothing of interest to say. "This is just one really obvious
example," adds Kalil, "but it's nothing but a cop-out to say 'let
the market decide' if we're going to do genetic engineering on the germ line. As such questions
increasingly come to the fore and as the inability or the unwillingness of
the technology industry to address them becomes increasingly evident,
government may step in to fill the void. For his part, Schwartz predicts that
"a reassertion of the power of the state," though perhaps not by
means of old-style regulation, is "almost inevitable." Brand
agrees. "I can't help but think that some set of moral/ethical/political
frameworks will become a part of the debate to a much greater degree than
they are now, if for no other reason than there is just so much weird shit
going on!" The weirdness, of course, has
barely begun. In the next 20 years, the digital revolution will enter its
next phase, as computing and the Net help spawn second-order revolutions.
These revolutions will offer nearly unimaginable rewards, but they will also
raise issues that, as Brand says, "go to the essence of who we are as
humans, as societies, as a civilization." Until now, the questions posed by technology were raised and discussed mainly by technologists, and to a lesser extent by the industrialists who employ them. In the decades ahead, that insularity seems certain to be shattered, as the questions grow so urgent and overwhelming that the public has no choice but to address them head-on. Indeed, the widening and deepening of the national conversation over technology and its consequences is likely to be one of the less obvious but more notable changes held in store by the next 20 years—and maybe the most heartening. For just as the old saw has it that politics is too important to be left to the politicians, there is no doubt that we are entering an age where science is too important to be left to the scientists. |
