I, NANOBOT
By Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Alan H. Goldstein who developed our A-PRIZE. First published on Salon.com.
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Scientists are on the verge of breaking the carbon barrier - creating artificial life and changing forever what it means to be human. And we're not ready.
Don't call me Ishmael, for I am not a survivor. Don't call me Cassandra either, since some might believe what I foretell. Perhaps I am the final manifestation of the singularity ignited in Olduvi Gorge a million and a half years ago. The flame that has grown to consume our planet and send sparks into outer space. The singularity that started as an ineffable, ineluctable pulse resonating through the neural matrix of Homo habilis. A voice that said, You whoever you are, You must sharpen that stone, pick up that bone, cross that line. A voice of supreme paradox; one that simultaneously makes us uniquely human, yet is itself not human.
Nor is it the black extraterrestrial monolith of Stanley Kubrick's imagining. Rather, it was always here. Hard-wired into us at the atomic level - and we into it. A voice whose physical manifestation, the tool, sang its song millions of years before human beings walked the earth. This voice prophesied and then enabled our coming. It will instruct us in our going. Or so I say, while understanding too well that in the 21st century we are all jaded and stultified with sensory overload. It's always the end of the world as we know it - and we feel bored.
So why listen to the voice of one who is not Ishmael, not Cassandra, not even Ralph Nader? Because I can tell you something that no one else can. I can tell you the exact moment when Homo sapiens will cease to exist. And I can tell you how the end will come. I can show you the exact design of the device that will bring us down. I can reveal the blueprint, provide the precise technical specifications. Long before we can melt the polar ice caps, or denude the rain forests, or colonize the moon, we will be gone. And we will not - definitely will not - end with a bang or a whimper. The human race will go to its extinction in a state of supreme exaltation, like an actor climbing the stairs to accept an Academy Award. We will exit the stage of existence thinking we are going to a spectacular party.
The usual suspects - those who have become known for predicting the evolution of humans and their technology - just don't get it. Mainly because they don't understand what the definition of "it" is. They don't realize what evolution is. They have come to the problem from artificial intelligence, or systems analysis, or mathematics, or astronomy, or aerospace engineering. Folks like Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy and Eric Drexler have raised some alarms, but they are too dazzled by the complexity and power of human cybersystems, devices and networks to see it coming. They think the power of our tools lies in their ever-increasing complexity - but they are wrong.
The biotech folks just don't get it either. People like Craig Venter and Leroy Hood are too enthralled with the possibilities inherent in engineering biology to get it. And our "bioethicists", like Arthur Caplan, and those who cling to their human DNA like it was the Holy Grail or the original tablets of stone, blathering on like Captain Kirk about what special, sacred things we humans are - they can't possibly get it. All these people who think (or fear) that technology will ultimately trump biology have missed the cosmic point. They are not even wrong. To begin to get it, one must dispense with artificial boundaries. If you are only thinking about cybersystems and DNA you can't possibly get it. And if you are thinking outside the box, you are still thinking too much like a human being.
Linus Pauling would have gotten it right away. Erwin Schrödinger too, and probably Robert Oppenheimer. Bertrand Russell got it. In fact he named it. What Ray, and Craig, and Eric, and Arthur can't see is the power of pure chemistry - what Bertrand Russell called "chemical imperialism". What they don't get is this - a system does not have to be complex to be transcendently, transformatively powerful. After all, we and everything we have created are nothing but the product of "carbon imperialism" - carbon being the element that all known life is based on. Nothing but the power of pure chemistry. Living and nonliving materials, everything that exists in the physical world of our experience burns with that same electron fire. The fire of the chemical bond.
