On Humanity Overcoming its Technology

“For the first time in the history of the human species, we have clearly developed the capacity to destroy ourselves.” So says Noam Chomsky in an essay titled “Humanity Imperiled
The Path to Disaster.”

Finally, the human species and its survival are becoming the focus of at least some human attention. This concern should be the bedrock of all efforts to create a better world. Every effort in that direction should be able to show its significance for human species preservation and enhancement.

With this in mind it is useful to see how it plays out in the views of those who think about it as a profession. Oxford University is the home of the multidisciplinary Future of Humanity Institute. The Institute has a major commitment to the evaluation of various threats to the survival of the human species.

The BBC report on the work of the Institute explores the thinking of its members in a document  that can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22002530k. Everything from pandemics to war as a cause of human species extinction is evaluated in terms of what our species has survived up to this point in the context of an evolution that has seen far more species go extinct than survive. In the end, they come up with the human species’ greatest threat to its survival. This threat resides in our brain and increasing technological accomplishments. Currently biological engineering, artificial intelligence and machine self-replicative production rank high in their species lethality. What is of primary concern with these threats is the inability of humans to control them; their broad potential for unintended consequences. When a life form is modified or created using genetic engineering have all the potential effects, physical, mental and social been taken into account? Put another way; the gap between discovery and implementation is getting wider as the potential of the technology is increasing, some would say exponentially. For example, in today’s news we are told that Uruguayan scientists have transferred a gene that produces fluorescence in jellyfish to sheep that now glow in the dark. One researcher gave as a reason for doing this, beyond diabetes and hemophilia, that their success may attract outside corporate research and production to their small country. In other words, we have modified a long-established life form in order to attract investment. As to the need for greater control over technology and its development need one say more?

To me, one of the most threatening cases of unintended consequences was the development of the atomic bomb. Einstein proposed it because he was concerned that the Germans were developing it. It was used, it was said, to save American lives that would be lost in an invasion of Japan. The fact that Japan had indicated its willingness to concede defeat in discussions with the Russians if they could retain the Emperor in power was known. However, that was not enough to save the lives of Japanese civilians, including children, because the real objective was to demonstrate our new technology to the Russians. On the occasion of the bomb’s first test explosion Robert Oppenheimer, head of the Manhattan project that developed the bomb, made clear the terrible consequences that would flow from this technology. Today some of the smallest countries on the planet have deployed this technology. All this to impress the Russians. It simply stimulated rapid development of the technology of mass human annihilation in yet another country.

But the beat goes on. We have allowed corporations to drive the process of technology development and deployment with little concern, other than for profit. Does Monsanto know or care whether its genetically modified corn may greatly reduce corn diversity and thereby the grain’s resistance to some newly mutated corn disease? Has the importance of biodiversity been adequately brought to bear on a technology driven by relatively short term profit? We are allowing the worst institutions, as far as accountability is concerned, to decide these matters. That a halt must be called to this process is more than evident, it is imperative. Can it be made a cause célèbre, in a world of hype, where fact loses out regularly to fiction?

As I have noted previously, in the human bifurcation of body and brain, the brain, unfortunately so often driven by the appetites of the body, is taking humanity into the territory of unimaginable consequences. Clearly, we must take technological development out of the hands of profit-driven corporations. Our concern is not to find or create the next market; it is to create a viable future for the human species.

Bob Newhard