Will technology pull the plug on the world
Technological scenarios of secular eschatology
Brendan Christopher Cathcart, Staff/illustration by ted barker
“The end is near!” shouts the scraggly-haired man in the sandwich board featured in countless movies and television shows since the inception of such technologies as were capable of broadcasting his intense, doubtable, yet somehow believable message. This is an old message, as old as any religion. With the inception of new technologies, new philosophies, and new moralities, the idea has not gone away. According to naysayers the world is going to end just as it was when we were still hunting bison on the plains, by worldwide cataclysm. It just hasn’t happened yet.
In the Western past it was because of conceptual towns like Sodom and Gomorrah that the world was destined to suffer being burned to its foundations in the coming apocalypse. Today the perceived responsibility for the imminent end of the world rests on the perception that there are significantly under-regulated and irresponsible technologies being created that may be out of our control.
The idea of creating hitherto unprecedented technologies such as artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, neurotechnology, and the possibility of opening up a black hole on Earth through particle acceleration strikes fear into many hearts, contributing to modern conceptions of the end, doomsday, the apocalypse. Many of these technologies could not have even been imagined a century ago, but now seem so very close to fruition that it’s time to get up our guard and prepare for the worst for the sake of our species. So some think.
If the international non-proliferation treaties hold, then the weapons of mass destruction not found by the U.S. army in Iraq are the least of humanity’s worries. The Lifeboat Foundation, an organization dedicated to protecting the world from what they call
“existential events,” are already at work creating programs to protect humanity from potential technological threats. They define an existential event as an event, “where an adverse outcome would either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically curtail its potential.” Global warming is just such an event. But come on, global boring. There are quicker, more exciting ways to go.
The singularity-master? Destroyer?
The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI) defines the Singularity as “the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.” Though malicious A.I. is one such possibility suggested by the idea of singularity, it’s not quite as simple as the I-Robot conception, where artificial intelligence decides that humans are a liability because they have a tendency to gravitate toward violence and destruction.
The term “singularity” was coined by mathematician and sci-fi writer Vernor Vinge as a stand-in term for something beyond the grasp of human understanding, like the sublime, objectivity, or God. In the same way that our primate ancestors couldn’t anticipate or even begin to understand what it means to have human-level consciousness, so we humans will be ancestors to a form of consciousness that we cannot anticipate or understand. In his 1993 article “The Coming Technological Singularity” Vinge says: “Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly thereafter, the human era will be ended.”
A.I. consciousness, if it does ever come into being, will very likely not be simply a replication of human consciousness; it will be something different entirely. And that new form of consciousness will likely think of us the way we generally think of animals as soulless tools, food, pets, slaves, toys, raw materials for products or just flat-out unnecessary. Malice won’t be an issue.
If A.I. does decide to get rid of us then there are many ways it could do so: launching the world’s warheads; shutting down containment systems in class-4 virology labs; manipulating the energy flowing through computers to kill users; taking control of computer-controlled military units like Predator UAVs and bombing civilization; shutting down refrigeration units that keep food and medicine supplies stable.
When Vinge says that the human era will be ended, he doesn’t necessarily mean that we will have been wiped off the face of the earth. Rather, what we have traditionally understood to be human will have changed so radically that it essentially will not exist any longer. Smarter-than-human intelligence can and likely will take on forms other than autonomous artificial life.
SIAI lists a few of the other technologies in the works that would also fit the Singularity description: “direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation.” Though these would allow giant leaps forward in human capabilities, each presents its own special risks to the safety of humanity. For example, direct brain-computer interfaces could make a person vulnerable to computer viruses, or to remote control. Mass suicides, murders, or zombification could be initiated by malicious hackers.
Global ecophagy by biovorous nanoreplicators
Nanotechnology, simply put, is technology on a molecular scale. The uses for technology small enough to work on molecules are infinite. Inside a human body, for example, nanobots could seek out and destroy bacteria and viruses, they could deliver medicine directly into cells, and they could rebuild tissue or bone that has been damaged by injury, disease or sickness. Other applications range from architecture to agriculture to military. However, there are very real risks associated with machines that could rearrange or destroy matter on a molecular level.
In the article “Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations” Robert A. Freitas, a research scientist in Texas, discusses one of the principle fears related to the unmitigated proliferation of nanotechnology. “Perhaps the earliest-recognized and best-known danger of molecular nanotechnology is the risk that self-replicating nanorobots capable of functioning autonomously in the natural environment could quickly convert that natural environment into replicas of themselves on a global basis, a scenario usually referred to as the ‘gray goo problem’ but perhaps more properly termed ‘global ecophagy.’”
At least in the case of A.I. there would still be intelligent life-forms on the planet; not so with nanoreplicators. They would exist solely to perform a single function and they would do it without question or reflection. Then when all biological life is gone, they would eventually die for a lack of energy source, leaving the planet as denuded and as devoid of life as the moon.
The question is why would nanotechnology potentially do such a thing? It’s because, says Freitas, “Unlike almost any other natural material, biomass can serve both as a source of carbon and as a source of power for nanomachine replication.” If such a process were unleashed, the time it would take to transform the entire planet would happen very fast.
“A self-replicating pathogen,” says the Lifeboat website, “whether biological or nanotechnology based, could destroy our civilization in a matter of days or weeks.”
Human produced black holes
CERN Corporation, the European Organization for Nuclear Research based in Switzerland, has recently completed construction on what’s known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). CERN’s website gives some specs for the project. A 27-kilometre circular tunnel built houses 100 mentres underground, the world’s most power particle accelerator, capable of firing two proton beams in opposite directions at the force of 7 TeV (trillion electron volts), colliding at 14 TeV to create never before observed reactions between particles.
The LHC will be capable of squeezing energy into the size of one million millionth the size of a mosquito. What CERN and in fact the entire worldwide physics community hopes to observe through the experiments performed in the LHC are particles never before seen directly in the universe. Scientists have only been able to account for four percent of the mass in the universe, leaving 96 per cent unseen, supposedly in the form of dark matter, dark energy, antimatter, and what’s known as the Higgs-boson field that is theorized to give particles their mass.
Working with such extreme forces is something humans have never yet done, so any speculations about what might happen are only speculations. Sir Martin Rees, a royal society professor at Cambridge University, has said on the Lifeboat Foundation website that as much caution and calculation as has been employed in the LHC project still can’t confidently account for a process they’ve only theorized about. “Some experiments are designed to generate conditions more extreme than ever occur naturally. Nobody then knows exactly what will happen.” One potential consequence noted by CERN is that “tiny black holes could be produced in collisions at the LHC. They would then very quickly decay into what is known as Hawking radiation.”
Sounds confident and under control, but according to the article “Do Black Holes Radiate?” by mathematics professor Adam Helfer at the University of Missouri, Hawking radiation, whereby a black hole gives off thermal radiation and then explodes, is so far only theory, never actually observed. If it doesn’t go as predicted the results could be catastrophic, but don’t worry, it would likely happen so fast that nobody would have time to notice.
Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, says on the Lifeboat website that, “[F]uture high-energy particle accelerator experiments may cause a breakdown of a metastable vacuum state that our part of the cosmos might be in, converting it into a ‘true’ vacuum of lower energy density. This would result in an expanding bubble of total destruction that would sweep through the galaxy and beyond at the speed of light, tearing all matter apart as it proceeds.” Death by black hole would happen so fast that no one would even experience dying.
