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The following sources do not necessarily reflect the Center's position and, likewise, may or may not be consistent with a biblical worldview. These sources, however, are excellent resources for familiarizing oneself with the all sides of the issue.
Bains, William. Biotechnology: From A to Z. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bauer MW, Gaskell G, eds. Biotechnology - the Making of a Global Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Borém, Aluízio, Fabrício R. Santos, David E. Bowen. Understanding Biotechnology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, 2003.
Brooks, Rodney A. Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. New York: Pantheon Books, 2002.
In Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us, Rodney A. Brooks argues that we are on a path that will lead inevitably toward "a merger between flesh and machines." Such a merger will be preceded by two technological revolutions. The robotics revolution, which Brooks places somewhere in the early part of this century, will change the fundamental nature of society by producing intelligent robots. The biotechnology revolution will transform the technology of humans and machines, so that each becomes more like the other. This revolution will therefore change the very nature of humans.
Drawing upon his own experiences with the design and building of robots, Brooks then goes on to detail what he sees as the steady development of each of these revolutions. In the last 25 years, robots have become ever more advanced, capable of mimicking human behaviors that once eluded them. Interestingly, the greatest challenges in robotic development have centered around human behaviors that the average five-year-old has mastered. At the same time, computers' computational powers have easily mastered complex tasks such as playing chess or calculating convoluted math problems. Brooks sees time as the only obstacle standing between the current state of affairs, and a time when truly sentient robots -- thinking and feeling in every human sense of the words -- come to be. The author points out that humanity has already accepted a certain amount of robotic integration, and even goes so far as to call people with cochlear implants and pacemakers "hybrids."
Brooks asserts that any discomfort with the idea of a truly bio-robotic merger stems from humanity's long struggle with the notion that human beings are not inherently special. Brooks believes that we are simply complicated machines and are no more special than the machines with which we now and will one day live.
Colson, Charles W, Nigel M. De S. Cameron. Human Dignity in the Biotech Century: A Christian Vision for Public Policy. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004.
Cox, Earl D. and George S. Paul. Beyond Humanity: Cyber Evolution and Future Minds. Roackland, MA: Charles River Media, 1996.
In Beyond Humanity: Cyber Evolution and Future Minds, authors Gregory S. Paul and Earl D. Cox see the ultimate future expression of human evolution as the development and supremacy of "cyberlife": computers and robots. As like-minded futurists have predicted, they see a future in which humanity fades -- gradually or not -- into the life of the machines it has created. Indeed, the authors assert that computing power, neuroscience, and nanotechnologies are advancing at such a rate that they will very quickly converge to become the greatest developmental phenomenon since the spark of life itself.
Forgoing any significant argument to the contrary, Paul and Cox assert that the human mind itself is "exclusively natural" and based on fundamental, knowable processes. These processes can (and will) be replicated to provide immortality to those who choose to download their minds into machines. Essentially, there is nothing DNA has produced that technology cannot surpass.
While placing their faith squarely in the power of technology, the authors go to great lengths to argue that the practitioners of more traditional forms of faith have no place in the dialogue about this future -- and have no tenable alternative scenarios to provide. The only God that will ever be will exist only after machines have evolved to the point that they have the power to control the universe (or universes), and realize that they can do so and understand the implications thereof.
Because Paul and Cox believe they have utterly grasped the human mind as nothing more than chemical impulses, and reality as nothing more than our perception of reality, they imagine that it will not be long at all until machines are self-aware -- with brains far superior to anything that evolution has managed to churn up within humanity. From this point on, human systems for organizing society will collapse -- the chief among these being capitalism. Parts of the world that lack the money, technology, or scientific workforce to keep up in the revolution will falter and fall behind and will presumably represent the first steps toward human extinction. Nonetheless, the authors believe this will be an extinction in only the most technical of terms: pseudo-humanity will continue by merging with machines. Thus, while more and more human children will choose immortality by downloading their brains into machines, humans as creatures will die out (but their consciousness will live on). The authors take comfort in this, although their exuberant faith in science, technology, and such a possible (they would say probable) future hints at a religiosity they themselves claim to disdain.
Drexler, K. Eric. Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology. New York: Anchor Books, 1986.
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by K. Eric Drexler explores the possible consequences of the advent of nanotechnology. Developments in nanotechnology will lead to machines capable of manipulating individual atoms to construct matter on the most basic level. Advances in artificial intelligence will ensure that these machines are able to "think." The central, revolutionary device in such a world will be the replicator: a machine (or more properly, a collection of nanomachines) that can deconstruct any material and manipulate the individual atoms to constitute anything.
Such replicators will be able to copy themselves (reproduce) at an astonishing rate. Such a development will be dangerous, but it will also bring opportunities. Labor and pollution will be things of the past. However, the same evolutionary principles that Drexler believes have made humanity the dominant form of life on earth will also govern the development of machines and artificial intelligence. As such, there is a very real danger that those machines may supplant humanity as the dominant form of "life" on the planet.
As the developers of these technologies, it is up to humans to build in controls that will ensure that the machines are "law-abiding." Drexler highlights key areas where nanotechnology will revolutionize life and open up new areas of exploration and development previously closed off to humans. These include the ability to explore and exploit space and all of its resources, the virtual banishment of disease, and the almost unlimited ability to extend life and even reverse death. Drexler does not neglect to pose the questions that these advances will inevitably raise: if we are able to extend life indefinitely, is it right to do so? Will the earth be able to sustain an ever-growing, never-thinning population? Will nanotechnology's ability to reverse the damage done to earth by humans be sufficient to sustain such a population? Drexler asserts that, regardless of the answers, unless we place the survival of humanity high on the priority list humans will be courting their own extinction by blindly moving forward toward technological extremes such as "smart replicators." It is our own evolutionary imperative, he maintains, to make sure that as we develop artificial intelligence and further integrate machines into our existence that we do so carefully and deliberately. For Drexler, the fundamental importance is "the survival of life and liberty." If they are supplanted by the life and liberty of machines, nothing else matters. Yet, he says that we cannot stop the technologies and so we must learn to place limits upon them.
Fransman M, Junne G, Roobeek A, eds. The Biotechnology Revolution? Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Fukuyama F. Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. NewYork: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Fumento, Michael. Bioevolution: How Biotechnology is Changing Our World. San Francisco, California: Encounter Books, 2003.
Harris J. Wonderwoman & Superman: the Ethics of Human Biotechnology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992.
Kurzweil, Ray. The Age of Spiritual Machines. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.
In The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil asserts that robots will one day overtake humanity both intellectually and spiritually. This will occur, Kurzweil believes, because humanity has reached a point at which it is capable of building intelligences greater than its own. Kurzweil asserts that the triumph of robots will be every bit as important as the creation of the human intelligence from which machine intelligence springs.
Is it even possible for an intelligence to create an intelligence more intelligent than itself? The history of evolution, he believes, bears this out. In a world where machines surround us to such a degree that we hardly think to notice them, Kurzweil posits that they are beginning to take an active role in the "society of minds" within each person, and within the society as a whole. In fact, machines already compete quite well with humans when it comes to solving complex problems, be they mathematical or otherwise. In the future, computational power will advance to the point that the "idiot savants" of the machine world will become multidimensional -- capable of not only thinking, feeling, and perceiving in superhuman ways, but also of reverse-engineering the human brain and storing the information it contains.
The suggestion here is of a sort of human immortality granted by machines, in which a person continues his or her existence in the braincase of a machine. Kurzweil sees an easy transference from computational advances and the maturing of embryonic technologies such as nanotechnology to full-fledged computer consciousness. Initially, electronic implants will be used to physically repair damaged "memory circuits" in the brain. Given that capability, it will then be a short leap to fully porting one's memory and -- if one assumes that such a thing is merely an outcropping of physical processes -- one's entire consciousness to a machine.
This begs the question, what will our bodies look like? If we do indeed still insist on having bodies, they will likely be modeled after our natural ones, replacing biological cells with self-replicating nanobots built at the atomic level. On the other end of the spectrum, Kurzweil asserts that all of the elements of what we now consider our "spiritual" life will be easily replicated (given enough processing power and memory capacity) in machines. Thus, machines of the future will laugh, feel hurt, sense the presence of "God," go to houses of worship, meditate, and play. Regardless of whether machines are really experiencing these things the way humans do, we will have no right to question their subjective experience.
Moravec, Hans. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.
Hans Moravec is Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory of Carnegie Mellon University. In Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, he looks at machines and their interrelation with humans and imagines a world in which humans attain a sort of immortality through robots that take on the human characteristics of their hosts. Moravec posits that human intelligence is soon to be overtaken by machines that have, in mere decades, made advances in intelligence that (according to Moravec) took humans billions of years of evolution to achieve. Mind Children undertakes scientific considerations of the processing power, memory, and physical dexterity required for a machine to exhibit human intelligence. The author views this transfer of power as an inevitability -- in order to compete, cultures will require faster and more powerful machines. Eventually, this will lead to machines which encase (or imitate) the human brain, which the author views simply as a finite, physical human component. While humans can live in a symbiotic relationship with machines, machines will in time transcend all we know and create a post-biological world. Moravec argues that this world will be one in which humanity lives on, but in a vastly superior form: as machinery.
__________. Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendant Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
In Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind, author Hans Moravec welcomes the evolution of machinery from non-reasoning, non-perceiving instrumentation to self-aware, super-human consciousness. Moravec outlines the continuing advances in computer and robotic development and asserts that if one extrapolates from this "evolution," it is easy to imagine robots that outperform humans in every conceivable way. While such advances will make the world "a nicer place to live," they will also push human beings out of the essential roles that we now fill. Moravec is not alarmed by the possibility that humanity will be displaced completely. On the contrary, he sees these future super-beings as our "mind children," and, as such, the logical next step in our own evolution. While he is quick to point out that presently the machine's "mind" is unlike ours in almost every way, he attributes human capacities for reasoning, perceiving, and acting to millions of years of human evolution. He asserts that the equivalent of such evolution is currently taking place in the robot world and will continue at a fevered pitch through the middle of this century.
Moravec conceives of four evolutionary stages in robot development, each with a corresponding parallel to the biological world. By 2010, first-generation robots will have the intellectual capacity of lizards; by 2020, second-generation robots will be at the mouse stage; by 2030, third-generation robots will be as smart as the average monkey; and a short decade later, fourth-generation robots will have made the short journey from monkey- to human-level capabilities. With each corresponding robotic generation, evidence of "internal life" (consciousness) will mount. Although the continuing development of robots will herald the end of capitalism, and presumably most other human bases for society, Moravec optimistically imparts a level of compassion to future robots that humanity now lacks. He hopes that, as our children, they will be compelled to take pity upon us.
Parens, Erik, ed. Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1998.
Postman, Neil. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.
In his book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Neil Postman, cultural critic, communications theorist, and Chair of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at New York University, sees technological development void of cultural controls as one of the greatest threats to western civilization. While conceding that technology has lessened life's burdens, he posits that it poses a great threat in the way it redefines old words. Terms such as "information," "intelligence," "public opinion," and "wisdom" all now mean different things in light of the technological developments of the last century than they did in previous periods of human history.
Postman defines three kinds of cultures: tool-using cultures, technocracies, and technopolies. In tool-using cultures, beliefs direct the invention of tools. In technocracies, the symbolic becomes increasingly subject to the requirements of tool development. With inventions like the mechanical clock and the telescope, technology began to subvert the traditional symbolic world, contrary to the intentions of the inventors. In a technopoly, the primary goal of human labor and thought is efficiency, technical calculation supercedes human judgment, subjectivity is regarded as an obstacle to clear thinking, and affairs of citizens are best guided by experts. In short, society is best served when people are placed at the disposal of technique and technology.
Technopolists are convinced that technical progress is humanity's supreme achievement and the means by which our most serious problems can be solved. Postman asserts, however, that such a culture is one whose theories do not offer guidance about what is acceptable in the moral domain. He offers as case studies advances in medical technology, computer technology, and "invisible" technologies such as language, statistics, and management. Each in its own way has redefined humanity in quantitative terms and has devalued the importance of the symbolic world. In fact, the trivialization of significant cultural symbols is necessary for a technopoly to survive. Such an outlook, which Postman defines as "scientism," implies that faith in science -- and the technology it produces -- can serve as a comprehensive belief system in and of itself: one that gives meaning to life, as well as a sense of well-being and even immortality. Postman offers what he sees as ways for individuals and cultures to resist this trend, even going so far as to provide tenets for the "loving resistance fighter" to follow. In culture, he sees education as an antidote: an education that emphasizes the purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness of what is learned and that is largely nontechnical in its viewpoint.
Rifkin, Jeremy. The Biotech Century. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam, 1998
