Humanity has survived, and generally prospered, through various “ages” and “revolutions” over the last 10,000 years. They include the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution and, most recently, the Information Age. We are now seeing the beginning of the GNR Revolution, standing for Genetics, Nanotechnology and Robotics.

The engine that is driving the GNR Revolution is the exponential growth in the power of our computers. Since 1958, Moore’s Law has successfully predicted that our computers will double in power (per square cm. and per dollar of cost) about every two years. In the 1990s it was thought that Moore’s Law would fail in the first decade of the new century. Scientists predicted that it would become impossible to fit more components onto a chip because of thermal noise. Human ingenuity has bypassed that obstacle, and now the “final” limit is a long way in the future – more than a decade away. Well before Moore’s Law “hits the wall”, our species will no longer be the highest intelligence on Earth. Our computers will have surpassed us. That fact alone gives us a lot to think about.

One, important, reason for the sustained success of the Moore’s Law prediction is that our computers have become the means of building better computers. In effect, our computers are self-improving. Not just faster – smaller.

Nanotechnology has become a reality. Using our ever-growing technical toolkit, and borrowing from Nature’s, we are on the threshold of creating the first “nanobots” ‒ tiny machines that are smaller than one micron (1,000 nanometers) in size. They could be smaller than a single living cell. The smallest could be smaller than the wavelength of light ‒ and therefore too small to be visible with the best optical microscopes.

Man has great hopes for nanobots. Enthusiasts like Ray Kurzweil, author of “The Singularity is Near”, foresee nanobots being injected into our bodies to target and destroy cancer cells. Further into the future nanobots could repair cell damage, including age-related damage. The road to immortality, even eternal youth, beckons.

But, as with all man’s inventions, there is a dark side. Over history, those concerned with killing have always been in the forefront when scientific breakthroughs have opened up new possibilities. Killer nanobots are a terrifyingly real possibility.

The biggest challenge in nanotechnology is mastering the techniques of production. It takes vast numbers of nanobots for them to have any consequence as a force for either good or evil. The experts agree that the only practical approach is to have nanobots make nanobots.

Self-replicating nanobots are coming…

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The above text is from the introduction to my new book “The Nanobot Attack”. The book is a work of fiction, but its premise is very real. The setting is 2017, just seven years from the time of writing. Seven years has become a very long time when it comes to projecting technological change. Self-replicating nanobots may be here much sooner… 

The storyline of the book has a lab in the Middle East, with connections to an Islamic extremist group, develop the ultimate WMD ‒ killer nanobots. On September 11, 2017 they launch an attack on multiple cities in the U.S.

That nanotechnology could produce sophisticated nanobots should not surprise anybody that has been following recent developments in that field ‒ and few would be surprised if such technology fell into the hands of Islamic extremists. Sadly, nobody would be surprised if the extremists were to rationalize that their God wanted them to use the weapon against the accursed infidels…

So “The Nanobot Attack “is not just a believable science fiction story, it is a commentary on the bizarre world that we live in, where the human population is divided into alienated religious “tribes” that, in extreme cases, can rationalize mass murder as something that will be approved by their God. 

To dramatize the insanity of a world that makes such things possible, the book has the hero of the story, Luke Walker, escape the nanobot attack. His plane crashes off the shores of a remote Pacific island called Milao. On that island the hero discovers “another world”. 

Luke Walker meets a beautiful islander (Gina) and falls in love. He says to Gina “I had no idea such a place could exist. If anybody had told me I wouldn’t have believed them. A place without cars, television, telephones or the internet – and yet a place that is, in the most important ways, a much better place to live. All those things that I was conditioned to think were necessities are revealed as not needed in your world.” 

The island of Milao was colonized by a party of deists, fleeing religious persecution in Europe. The colonists assimilate with the Polynesian natives to form a community that flourishes without any of the material things that drive our world. Imagine a world without money! 

But “reality” returns for Luke. The commander of a US nuclear submarine learns of his survival and Luke returns to the U.S. to fight the terrorist’s nanobots.

The rest of the story will be my secret for a while…. The book is due to be published early November, but interested readers can obtain a free copy (pdf file) of Part I of The Nanobot Attack by request (using the Comments feature at the foot of this article).

About a million years ago, our pre-human ancestors used their fledgling intelligence to conclude that all life, including their own, must eventually face death – and that the world would continue after their lives ended. So far as we know we are the only creatures on earth that have faced this sobering fact.

I sometimes envy the wild creatures that are blissfully unaware of the perils of the future. They live for the moment. Even the squirrel, who diligently stockpiles food to tide him over the winter, is only blindly following the instincts that evolution has programmed into its behaviour. By trial and error evolution has given non-sentient life forms the information needed to make decisions affecting their future – but this “knowledge” is hard-wired. There is no burden of worry.

Our species, on the other hand, is keenly aware that the future is something to wonder and worry about. Every day the obituaries remind us that fame and fortune are no defence against the grim reaper.

Evolution is an additive process. We are the “sum of the parts” of our past. We share a common ancestor with all life on our planet. If you drew a family tree of all life on Earth we would lie on a branch close to the chimpanzee. Further up the tree (‘up’ meaning further back in time) the primate branch evolved as a distinct family and further back the first amphibians emerged from what had been strictly water-dwelling life.

So self-absorbed, live-for-the-moment ways are hard-wired into us by our past. Being concerned about the future is a newly acquired facility – which may explain why many of us are not good at it.

I am sure you know some chronic worriers who always seem to fear that the worst is about to happen. Some are so obsessed with their fears that they forfeit happiness – even to the extreme of suicide. Some depend on chemicals to escape their gloomy view of the future. Others invest time searching for hope in astrological charts or the visions of self-proclaimed prophets. Many others escape into reality shows and identification with sports teams’ fates.

Our ability to contemplate the future is a beautiful thing – but, as the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The worriers see it is an unwanted burden – but that is a selfish view. If we step out of the shoes of our individual lives (‘our mortal span’) and take a species-wide view, our ability to contemplate our future is a precious gift that we should cherish.

Alone among all the creatures that have lived on our planet we have the ability to shape a future for our species that knows no limit. In the sphere of technology we are becoming blasé as waves of new and exciting consumer goods come ever quicker. The “GNR” revolution (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) which is just getting into stride, will accelerate the pace of technological advances in all spheres, including medicine. The possibility of extending human life spans by decades and, one day, centuries is no longer far-fetched.

Our technology is close to giving us the capability to survive species-extinction-threatening events such as “NEO” impacts (“near earth objects” e.g. asteroids and comets). We will soon be able to engineer our planet’s climate. In the not too distant future we should have technology that will allow us to leave our planet and colonize others – de-coupling our species survival from that of our planet.

It is even possible that, one day, we could gain the ability to travel in time. The past, scientists are sure, will never be available to us – but travel to the future may be possible on a one-way ticket.

In this article I have been portraying our ability to shape the future as a blessing – a bonanza of yet-to-be realized potential. But a more mature way to view it is as a responsibility.

What we do today will shape the future for our children and their children ad infinitum. If we continue to see our intellectual potential and technological prowess as a cookie jar for our personal gratification we will, literally, be committing a “crime against humanity”.  We must accept full responsibility for a future that goes far beyond our individual lives – even beyond our ability to imagine…

To get the right perspective on the issues involved, I ask you to imagine that you are a member of another species of life on this planet. Imagine you are a cat (perhaps your pet). Now put yourself in the cat’s (metaphorical) shoes as it watches you towering over it. You flip a little switch high over its head and incomprehensible light replaces the dark. You touch a button on a piece of plastic and a picture shows on a flat panel and sound comes out of some boxes. You turn a small dial and the environment becomes warmer. These giants are not mere animals – they are gods!

And your cat does not know the half of it… The “gods” that can make cat food appear for its benefit are also re-engineering the planet for their personal benefit – regardless of the cost to the rest of the ecosphere. They are the cause of mass extinctions rivalling the “K-T” event, 65 million years ago, when an asteroid collision eradicated about half of all animal species including all the dinosaurs.

With power comes responsibility. It is time for us to accept that responsibility. Einstein saw this truth over 50 years ago when he said –

 “A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.” (Albert Einstein, 1954)

We are not children. We have to find our own way. We can’t look to our local politician to “see the light” and make laws that will oblige us to carry out our responsibilities. We, as individuals, are responsible for the future of our species.

Nature has a way of dealing with its (evolutionary) failures. Think about it…

Airport security is getting a lot of attention these days but suicide bombers come in many guises and those who program these human weapons are clever. It is time we confronted the root cause of the problem instead of its symptoms.

The road that led to religious terrorism began with the dawn of human intelligence.

Scientists today believe that the invention of oral language was the precursor of abstract thinking. As an experiment, I challenge you, the reader, to try deep thinking or, really, any kind of thinking, without forming words in your mind. Although our brains can react to events, such as a car rushing in our direction, on reflex, we have to silently verbalize our thoughts to process them in our wondering, reasoning, abstract thinking.

With the ability to engage in abstract thinking, Homo sapiens became “wondering man”.

About 50,000 years ago, wondering men in tribal groups all over the world gathered around campfires to contemplate the meaning of life and to entertain themselves with stories and theories. Typically the young men of the tribe were doing the wondering and asking, and the elders were the source of all wisdom and knowledge.

This led to man’s first religions. Most, if not all, of these religions incorporated the concept of a supernatural “something” to explain life. Many theologians and philosophers explain the process by saying that the concept of God arose out of a need to find meaning to life—and to deal with anxiety arising from man’s knowledge of his own certain death.

So the earliest religions came into existence, forged on an anvil of wonder but fashioned with the hammer of ignorance and tribal prejudice. Flawed from the beginning, man’s religions have evolved, like life itself, competing with one another in a struggle to survive in a changing world.

And so we have today’s insanity. Islam competes with Christianity in the major leagues; Judaism, which produced the Old Testament that is the foundation of both, is reviled by both. In the East, Hinduism, which is the oldest of man’s religions, has fathered a family of rivals including Buddhism and Sikhism. And a new religion, atheism, has come into being as the intellectual’s rejection of the lot.

All of this might be merely quaint and amusing if there were no priesthoods that, inevitably, include self-serving “leaders” who seduce their followers with a simple yet supremely effective formula that goes “we are the only true believers – all other gods are false – all who do not believe as we do are infidels”. Add one extra measure of hostile rhetoric and the “leader” is issuing a call to arms. The result is religious extremism.

All forms of extremism are, by definition, antisocial excesses – but religious extremism is the ultimate evil because those who kill in the name of their God believe that the highest court in the universe approves their cowardly acts.

The victims of 9/11 are testimony to the problem, and today they are joined by millions of air travelers suffering from the misguided efforts of governments that refuse to deal with the problem’s roots, preferring, in the name of “democracy”, to deal only with the symptoms of the disease.

Well, I say, “enough is enough”. It is time to put an end to this insanity. It is time for our species to grow up.

Now, I should make it clear that I am not joining the atheists in a disavowal of God. In fact, I believe in a creator God wholeheartedly and I see the amazing sequence of events that connect the dots from the Big Bang that began our universe to our arrival as an (almost) intelligent species as proof. No, what I am arguing for is an end to religion, or, more precisely, institutions that seek to differentiate their belief in God into elitist self-serving camps.

Islam is not being singled out in my attack on organized religion although it is a prime example of the syndrome. Christianity, like Islam, has its extremist, fundamentalist fanatics as well as its liberal followers – and, historically, Christian establishments (such as the Spanish Inquisition) have committed horrific crimes against their fellow men in the name of God. There are no religions of any substance that are exempt from this scourge.

It is time for us to use the intelligence that God gave us to reject the anachronistic concept of a tribalistic God that makes favorites. There is one God, period.

Our governments are doing us a great disservice by refusing to take a rational position on this subject. In the name of democracy they are condoning the enslavement of their constituents by modern-day snake oil salesmen who breed extremist passions in the hearts of the vulnerable. Not only do they permit these anachronisms, they promote them by giving tax exemption and allowing them to cultivate lobbying power to promote their self-interested goals.

Religious extremists have declared war on us. It is time to return the favor – not with suicide bombers but with a campaign of rationalism. Let us unite to tell our governments that we have had enough and that we call on them to end their meek acceptance of the perpetuation of the evils of organized religion with their elitist, divisive strategies.

With 7 billion human beings on our planet, projected to reach 9 billion by 2040, survival dictates that we see one another as a single species – not a patchwork of competing races and religions.

There is one God and God does not play favorites. There are no chosen people. State support for a competition among thousands of religions, denominations and sects that each proclaim themselves “true believers” (and therefore the rest of you are faithless) has to be consigned to the past where it belongs.

Interest in driverless cars began over 30 years ago and was accelerated by the European Prometheus project that put up over 1 billion dollars (in today’s money) for research and development. In 1994 this effort achieved a major milestone with the successful demonstration of two identical vehicles driving more than 1000 km in normal traffic on Autoroute 1 near Paris at speeds up to 130 km/h, including lane changes overtaking conventional vehicles. Given that the experimental vehicles did not use GPS technology and conventional computers in those times were a thousand times less powerful than they are today, this was a very impressive accomplishment.

In late 2007 General Motors announced that it was working towards a target date of 2018 for a driverless car that would be available to the public. The car, using GPS guidance and an array of sensing equipment, would be capable of completing long or short journeys involving all the challenges of today’s driving, including stop lights, stop signs and parking.

To date, billions of dollars of public money (Japan, Europe and the U.S.) have been spent on driverless car research and development and probably an equal amount of private funding. Given the downturn in GM’s fortunes it seems unlikely that they will meet their target date for a driverless car, but the bigger question is ‘who needs it?’

The first issue is that any dreams of reading a book or snoozing while ‘James’ takes responsibility for getting you to your destination can be discarded immediately. It is inconceivable that GM or any other automobile manufacturer would take responsibility for any accident that might occur. Designs for the cars include a conventional set of instruments and controls for a human driver who will have full legal responsibility for the vehicle. I visualize large, bolded warnings in the interior of the car – “A qualified driver must occupy the driver’s seat and be ready at all times to override the automatics! The manufacturer accepts no responsibility for any damages or injuries that may occur in the operation of this vehicle!” If you have ever wondered what kind of stress a driving instructor is under as he monitors his student’s cautious best efforts, monitoring a driverless car will be your chance to find out.

The larger issue is “what is the point?” If the goal is convenience or safety this will only be attained when the transportation system is completely automated. Then, all vehicles will be networked so that they can be aware of the position and motion of all other vehicles. The irony is that when that position is reached it will no longer make sense to have ‘personal’ vehicles.

With a computer-controlled fleet of vehicles it will make far more sense to make it into a publicly owned taxi system where you use your smart phone to tell the system that you need transportation to point ‘Y’. The transportation system will then use its GPS sensors to locate your current position and route the nearest available vehicle to pick you up. I can visualize that you might pay a premium for single occupancy. The ‘standard’ fare arrangement would permit the rerouting of your vehicle to pick up another passenger with a compatible destination.

But the largest issue of all is that in that future where robotic intelligence has reached the point that it ‘takes charge’ of our transportation, we will be on the brink of a future where we are no longer the dominant species on this planet. That position will be held by the ‘monster’ (aka ‘artificial intelligence’) that our ‘Frankenstein’ scientists have created. We may, for a time, delude ourselves into thinking that we are in charge of the computer intelligence but once our dependence on it crosses a point of no return we will be committed to a future that we will not be able to control.

Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity is Near” (which is to be released as a movie in early 2010) describes a future where robotic ‘transhuman’ intelligence is dominant. His premise is hard to dispute. The ‘singularity’ he refers to is the exponential growth of artificial intelligence. The driving force behind this exponential growth has three major components. The first of these components is Moore’s Law that has successfully predicted the growth in computing power per dollar (or per square centimeter) for the last 30 years. (Moore’s Law predicts a doubling of computing power every eighteen months.)

The second component is research into how the human brain works. This research is unraveling the mysteries of how, today, our brains are able to ‘outsmart’ computer intelligence. The third component is ‘nanotechnology’ which is the development of ‘machines’ whose dimensions are expressed in terms of nanometers (One nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter). Prominent among the techniques being used to assemble ‘nanobots’ is what is called ‘wet nanotechnology’ where living organisms such as cells or viruses are manipulated to become ‘factories’ for assembling raw materials (particularly carbon) into electronic components.

Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2015, we will be able to assemble an artificial intelligence that transcends the intelligence of any human being on Earth. Past that point, since future computing power has always benefited from the fruits of current computing power, it is certain that the ‘intelligence gap’ between our machines and us will grow ever wider.

There are those who, like me, feel that a computer intelligence, will always lack a ‘certain something’ (one word for which is spirituality) that only Nature can provide. But even if we are right, it will not affect the question of ‘who is the boss’. As Kurzweil says in his book (page 260) “A more intelligent process will inherently outcompete one that is less intelligent, making intelligence the most powerful force in the universe).”

The bottom line is that driverless cars will probably go down in cosmic history as the ‘Edsel’ of the 21st century – a century that will decide the future of our species. Enormous brainpower and research funding is currently being directed to the creation of technologies that are infinitely more dangerous than nuclear or even biological weapons.

The insidious thing about the GNR revolution (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) is that it has the potential to provide enormous benefits and, even, to make our species immortal – but, as with all our technological successes, it has a very dark flip side. Whether as a laboratory accident or by falling into the wrong hands, the products of the GNR revolution could swiftly bring an end to our species and, even, to all life on Earth.

Those who, like Kurzweil, are optimistic about a ‘transhuman’ future are fearful that opposition to their optimism could lead to government controls that delay ‘progress’. It has become a part of their propaganda to label opposition to their optimistic visions as ‘Luddism’ drawing a parallel to the uprising in England in 1811 when handloom operators vandalized mills employing weaving machines, fearing that their already deprived lives were going to be made worse as their jobs were being eliminated. Today the term Luddism is used with ‘technophobia’ as a derisive way to label those who express concern for a ‘post Singularity’ future.

I am not afraid of being labeled a Luddite and, in fact, I would take pride in it because it would mean that my views were being noticed and were seen as a threat to Kurzweilean ‘progress’.

My philosophical position is that we are not yet ready to manage the ‘post Singularity’ era. Our technological prowess has outstripped our maturity as a species. We must urge our governments to put a brake on GNR research and development so that controls and defenses against accidents and abuse are in place before it is too late. Even more importantly, we need to give ourselves time to ‘grow up’ to become future man.

Computers today are omnipresent. They have been an essential component of our work environment for decades and in the developed nations, few households lack a home computer with a high speed internet connection. Less visibly, almost all our appliances (including cameras, automobiles and elevators) incorporate computers that enhance their functionality.

It is part of human nature that we quickly take our technological miracle-working for granted. Our personal computers today are a thousand times more powerful than the massive ‘mainframe computers’ that served universities and governments in the 1970s. But we still sigh when they take more than a few seconds to retrieve the information we want and if I was paid a penny for every time a person says ‘stupid computer!’ I would be making millions of dollars a year. That is going to change.

In 15 years time, nobody will use the word ‘stupid’ when referring to computers. 

Powered by the “GNR” revolution (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) our computing power is growing exponentially and is predicted by Ray Kurzweil, noted inventor and ‘futurist’, to produce an artificial intelligence that will exceed that of any individual on earth as early as 2020. He is not alone in such predictions. Even those who consider his views optimistic accept that it is ‘only a matter of time’ before biological intelligence (exemplified in our species) takes a distant second place to computer intelligence – and once that milestone has passed, the gap in intelligence will grow ever quicker.

Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity is Near” welcomes this development. He sees it as the way to a utopian world where immortality is an option. Technologically, this possibility is real, because robots will not only be much more intelligent in the future, they will also be very much smaller – so small, in fact, that programmable ‘nanobots’, the size of human blood cells, will be able to enter our bloodstream and reverse the effects of aging (as well as clear us of diseases and ‘reprogram’ our genes to avert otherwise inevitable hereditary diseases).

Not everyone, however, views the ‘transhuman’ era (i.e. when an intelligence far greater than ours today is a reality) with the optimism that Ray Kurzweil does. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who has made a substantial contribution to the development of computer software, agrees with Kurzweil’s projections but is deeply concerned about their implications for humanity.

Bill Joy’s most notable public expression of concern about a transhuman future was expressed in his April 2000 article in Wired magazine (“Why the future doesn’t need us.“). In it he says, “The 21^st century technologies – genetics, nanotechnology and robotics (GNR) – are so powerful that they can spawn whole new classes of accidents and abuses. Most dangerously, for the first time, these accidents and abuses are widely within the reach of individuals and small groups. They will not require large facilities or rare raw materials. Knowledge alone will enable the use of them.” The possibility of abuse of technologies that have far greater (life/humanity) destructive power than nuclear weapons, is just one of his concerns.

Even more worrying to Bill Joy (and a great many people, including myself) is that all scenarios involving ‘superhuman’ intelligence pose grave threats to the future of ‘biological humanity’. By biological humanity I mean human beings as they exist today, unadulterated by fusion with technology.

Think about it. Imagine a world where the dominant intelligence is artificial – and is interconnected by an ultra-high speed wireless network. Imagine that this artificial intelligence is self-replicating and self-improving beyond our wildest dreams for ourselves. As Ray Kurzweil says in “The Singularity Is Near” ” (Page 260) – “A more intelligent process will inherently outcompete one that is less intelligent, making intelligence the most powerful force in the universe.”  Now what are the possibilities?

The first reality in this scenario is that we, biological humanity, will be irrelevant. Our future will be in the (metaphorical) hands of the robots. They may keep us on as ‘pets’ (after taking surgical steps to ‘cure’ our unpredictable and potentially threatening behavior)  – or they may dispassionately view us as just not worth the trouble and dispose of us. Of course, we can hope that some means of controlling the robot’s superior intelligence is engineered into the robots somehow – but now we have to worry about the enormous power that this will give to the handful of human beings who control this power.

There are two reasons why the Ray Kurzweil’s of this world yearn for the transhuman future. The first is that the Holy Grail of immortality is irresistible to a large number of people – and especially those who have everything money can buy, except diminishing days ahead. The second is that he sees the transhuman epoch as a natural progression of the evolution of order in our universe. Beginning with the Big Bang our universe has evolved to produce atoms, then suns and planets, then life and finally biological brains. Biology (to Kurzweil) will have achieved its destiny when it produces superhuman intelligence. We are merely the means to an end that doesn’t need us in its future.

Kurzweil sees a happy ending to this story in the form of a fusion of humanity and technology  – where, eventually, the two become indistinguishable. He, personally, is committed to a strategy that will maximize his chances of achieving immortality. Part of this plan is to extend his life so that he will be undiminished when it becomes possible for him to make the choice between uploading his ‘personality’ (all facets of his mind) to a robot – or employing age-reversal and augmentation treatment to elevate his existing body to become transhuman. To this end he follows a strict regimen involving an intake of over 100 supplements per day, as well as following a rigorous diet and exercise program.

To Kurzweil the merger of humanity and machine will be a ‘best of both worlds’ scenario. I believe that this outlook is naïve – and dangerous.

It is true that, today, our species is deeply flawed – but to fantasize a brave new world where a partnership of unequal intelligences solves all our (human) problems is delusional. A marriage between our imperfect selves and omnipotent machines will only amplify (and weaponize) our failings.

My position as set out in my blog and my book “The Future of Man – Extinction or Glory?”, is that we are in a race against time to ‘fix ourselves’ to become future man before it is too late. The imminent arrival of transcendent artificial intelligence is shortening the time horizon.

We must, as an urgent necessity, urge our governments to fulfill their responsibilities by putting the brakes on the GNR revolution before it is too late. Vast sums are being invested today, despite the ill health of the world economy, in a technology race that is infinitely more threatening than the nuclear arms race of the last century. The participants in this race include the ‘usual suspects’, the armies and quasi-armies of the world’s nations, who see all technology as potential weapons and counter-weapons, but they also include profit-oriented corporations of various sizes and nationalities – all with self-serving motives. And of course there is the possibility of a ‘marriage in hell’ – an alliance of money, fanaticism and knowledge that could unleash ‘the mother of all 9/11s’ to paraphrase Saddam Hussein.

We cannot and should not prohibit GNR technology. It has the potential to solve innumerable problems such as global warming, water and food shortages and exhaustion of non-replenishable resources. It could also improve our health immeasurably and eventually make our life span a matter of choice. What we must do, however, is ensure that its development and use is controlled so as to minimize the possibility of accident or abuse – and, most importantly, to ensure that we are the masters of this technology and not its victims.

There is a lot more to be said on this subject – but I will leave that to subsequent posts.

When Mother Nature got life started on Earth, 4.7 billion years ago, her formula was beautifully simple – she made life self-replicating according to a ‘recipe’ encoded within the cell. Her masterstroke was to make the recipe copying process almost error-proof. A very high degree of copying accuracy was needed – otherwise life would forever be a porridge of diverse primitive single cell organisms. But Mother Nature could see that some errors were necessary – so she made sure that the error protection routines (akin to our check-digit algorithms in computer-based digital data today) allowed the occasional error to pass. Replication errors produce mutations, and successful mutations are the launching pad for new species. This ‘perfect imperfection’ was the beginning of the evolutionary processes that, eventually, led to man – and who knows who or what beyond?

The essence of evolution is competition. Competition means winners and losers. Over the eons before man appeared on Earth, billions of species have come and gone. It is not something to agonize about; it is Mother Nature’s plan. In fact, to make sure that the lottery of evolution keeps working to produce winners and losers, she occasionally throws a monkey wrench into the works. Asteroid and cometary impacts, ice ages, and periods of global warming have dislodged species that had enjoyed thousands or even millions of years of evolutionary success. 

If Mother Nature has a plan, what is it? Looking at the evidence we see ever-growing diversity and complexity in life. Among life’s attributes we see intelligence on the rise.

Man has attempted to define intelligence in a way that makes us special as the only ‘intelligent species’ but intelligence is omnipresent among life forms. We mock the intelligence of birds (‘bird brains’) but we would not have all the migratory species if the first pioneers of their species had not figured out that it was a good idea to head towards the equator as winter approaches. Even plants are intelligent in the literal sense that they make intelligent decisions as their senses tell them that their environment is changing.

Intelligence is a critically important survival resource and, as such, is favored by evolution. In hindsight it was inevitable that, eventually, a sentient, technologically capable species would evolve. This was not an accident.

If man is part of Mother Nature’s plan, one’s first thought is that she must have lost her mind! We have committed so many atrocities against nature that our very existence seems to be a ghastly mistake. From our beginnings we have done what suited us best – indifferent to the harm we are doing to our fellow travelers on Earth. In part it is excusable. Does the elephant worry that, with his every step, little creatures are sent to an early grave? But what a footprint man has! We have been responsible for literally millions of extinctions – some by our selfish indifference, some by willful acts of ‘specicide’ (for example the massacre of over 50 million buffalos, motivated by a desire to damage the infrastructure of the native Americans).

Clearly, if there is to be a good outcome for Mother Nature’s experiment with our species, there must be a future for man that repays the enormous cost that our planet has paid.

Our past is regrettable but we cannot change that. The future is what counts. But the sobering reality is that there is not much ‘future’ left for our species.

I know that this kind of doomsday outlook is greeted by many with derision. What could topple man’s supremacy on Earth? Not only do we have no competition from other species, we have technology that could, in the foreseeable future, alter our environment to suit our needs. We could change climate zones to bring water to arid regions. We could defang hurricanes. And if a wandering asteroid, meteor or comet threatened to collide with Earth, we could avert the threat or, at least, reduce its effect to ensure the survival of our species. But there is a threat and it is deadly – Mother Nature set a trap!

Mother Nature was too smart to ‘go all in’ on her first effort with an intelligent species. She could not risk that her first effort might fail and be her last. She hedged her bets by setting a time limit on our reign as the dominant species. She knew that the excesses of a technological society that failed to ‘grow up’ to take responsibility for its future (and the future of its home planet) would lead to self-destruction once its population reached a critical mass. The clock is ticking – and the indications are not encouraging.

Cultural evolution (voluntary behavioral change) could still save us, because it can work at high speed. If we, ‘en masse’, were to see the folly of our current profligate, selfish ways and set a course to become future man we could pull ourselves out of our death spiral to achieve the noble future that Mother Nature intends for a worthy intelligent species.

But who is this ‘Mother Nature’ that throws the dice without fear or favor – and how can any individual influence our species destiny? The answer to the first question is that Mother Nature is a man-made term for the force (that common sense insists must have purpose) that has shaped our physical universe from the Big Bang to bring about our ‘now’. For many the preferred name for this force is God. But what is in a name? I prefer the name Mother Nature. Among my reasons are that God has been getting a lot of bad press recently (“The God Delusion”, “God is not Great”, etc.). Of course most of that bad press is to do with our religious institutions and the crimes of individuals who have secured power within those institutions. I have news for Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchins and all the ‘new atheist’ authors. God is not the problem – any more than Mother Nature is. If you are looking for a villain, I suggest looking in the mirror. As Pogo famously said ‘We have met the enemy, and it is us”.

As to the supposed futility of exhorting ‘the man in the street’ to be concerned about our species future, I ask my reader – “Who is responsible for the wellbeing of your children and grandchildren?” Is it your nation’s government? Is it the United Nations? The answer looks back at you from the mirror. You have the responsibility. Yes, it will take leadership and political systems to bring about the needed changes but all of this is driven by the will of the people. You cannot escape your responsibility by saying you are ‘just one person’.

What we are facing is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we decide that there is no hope and we are doomed – then we ensure that outcome. If, however, we decide that we cannot allow this to happen then we have a chance. Small as that chance may be, we owe it to our children (and to Mother Nature) to take it.

We think of ourselves as civilized - but what does that mean? The Romans who entertained themselves by watching Christians being thrown to lions thought that they were civilized. So did the English colonialists who kidnapped Africans to sell as slaves. And are the practitioners of female genital mutilation (partial or total removal of the clitoris of female children) in Africa and the Middle East civilized? The term ‘civilized’ is a relative term – and it changes with culture and time.

Humanity is a product of evolution. We share the same ancestors as the ape family. Until Homo sapiens split away from the ape family, it was genetic evolution that was in the driving seat. Since then, most of our evolution has been ‘cultural’ where behavior learned from our cultural leaders is adopted as the norm and becomes ingrained. By virtue of cultural evolution, today murder is not acceptable where once it was condoned (as long as the victim belonged to another tribe). In general it is fair to say that, as a result of cultural evolution, our behavior is much improved from our cave dweller era – but there is still a long way to go.

The civilizing process, it can be said, is one that modifies the primitive behavior that is ‘hard wired’ into us by the DNA passed on to us by our ancestors (going all the way back to the beginning of life on our planet). Early philosophers and psychologists have referred to the built-in behavior we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors as the ‘beast within’. By this view selfishness, lust, unbridled anger and a tendency to violence are all ‘natural’ behavior.

Some philosopher ‘greats’ have opined that this behavior is the ‘real man’ and should not be challenged. Nietzsche, for instance, felt that any efforts to bridle our natural impulses were misdirected. In his view it was right and proper for those who held power to use that power to gain yet more power at the expense of weaker opponents. To do otherwise, in his view, was inviting the extinction of our species as weak and unworthy in the jungle of  ‘survival of the fittest’.

But Nietzsche’s time is done – and, in general, when it comes to behavior, there is little to be learned from our past (except, perhaps, what not to do). Today, most of us believe that civilization is ‘good’ and that it is right to define progressively higher standards for our social behavior. Which brings us, however, to some real and topical questions such as: ‘Is it correct to acknowledge and accept behavior that is offensive to most members of a majority culture if it is accepted behavior within a minority culture?’

Most people, when asked such a question, will want a specific example. If the example is ‘severe’ (such as the female genital mutilation case) the answer comes swiftly. It is ‘no, such behavior should be prohibited in the strongest possible terms’. But when the aberrant behavior is ‘soft’, such as wearing clothing specific to a particular culture or religion, there is noticeable hesitation because now we enter the orbit of ‘democracy’ and all its emotive constituent parts, such as ‘liberty’, ‘freedom’ and ‘tolerance’. Now we are conflicted – and this is the dilemma of the western world today.

Democracy holds ‘motherhood’ status in the West – and few western politicians would dare to expose themselves to accusations of advocating ‘undemocratic’ policies. Adding to the politician’s plight is the simple fact that his career depends on the ‘popular vote’ in his electoral district.

If an electoral district accumulates a sizable community of a particular cultural minority (and such a community becomes a magnet for new immigrants of that culture) it becomes inevitable that, eventually, its elected representatives will be members of that community – even if it remains a statistical minority in the electoral district. Because these communities are more close-knit and united in their desire for political acceptance of their culture, they will vote as one for ‘their’ representative – while the opposing candidates will have their votes split by all the sub-plots of the larger community.

But is this bad? To many, ‘multiculturalism’ is a good thing. ‘Variety is the spice of life’ they would say. To come to a logical answer you have to imagine yourself in a time machine.

Travel back into our distant past when primitive tribalism was what defined ‘society’. Obeying their pre-human genes, our cave-dweller ancestors were fiercely territorial. This was not a time to ‘take a vacation’ in a neighboring region. ‘Culture’ was a set of (frequently bad) habits within the tribe and ‘anything goes’ was the morality so far as behavior to members of another tribe were concerned.

Move forward in time towards the present and things improve somewhat – but that tribalistic ‘us’ and ‘them’ attitude is still there, with distrust and distaste for ‘them’ the rule. Hatred of ‘them’ for wrongs done generations ago lives on. Wars are fought and millions die with this hatred for fuel.

Now travel into the future. The total human population is currently 7 billion. By 2040 it is projected to reach 9 billion. We will be facing issues that know no boundaries – global warming, reduced protection from the ozone layer, environmental pollution, increased vulnerability to pandemic disease. Are we to going to survive as a patchwork of competing cultures clinging to our tribal pasts?

Our only hope, as a species, is that we find a way to shed our tribal past and grow to see one another as members of a single global community. Religion, today, is a particularly divisive cultural force. Are we still savages? Is a slightly different view of ‘the one God’ a reason for fanatical hatred that can be carried to the extreme of suicide attacks on those of a different culture?

We think of ourselves as an intelligent species. Let’s use our intelligence to find a way to ‘grow up’ to become future man. Our leaders and our political systems cannot shy away from the issues involved. The cultural islands being created now within tolerant western democratic societies are anachronistic time bombs that will destroy us all.

Man’s closest relative on Earth is the chimpanzee. Our DNA is 98.5% identical. Small as it is, that difference sets us worlds apart — and evolution is widening the gap at an accelerating pace.

From an evolutionary standpoint, the critical difference between us and our primate cousins is that we have achieved a level of intelligence that makes ‘cultural evolution’ a major part of our past, present and future. While cultural evolution is also a component of evolution in many other life forms (including chimpanzees) only in man has it become a major force. But what do we mean by cultural evolution?                     

The word evolution is synonymous with change. In ‘classic’ genetic evolution the change is triggered by the transfer of genetic information (DNA) to future generations. If the (DNA) information increases the likelihood that the host individual will survive to pass on his genes to future generations that genetic information gains ‘market share’ in the gene pool. By this process, over great lengths of time, changes take place. Over enough time these changes can become dramatic — such as sea dwelling creatures evolving legs and the ability to move on dry land.                      

Cultural evolution is also driven by information acquisition, but now the incoming information is not genetic (DNA), it is ‘external’ – meaning that the information is acquired by the senses (sight, sound, touch, etc.). An intelligent organism will use the incoming information to make behavioral decisions (e.g. a bird’s decision to migrate). When the decisions have good consequences, the decision is likely to be ‘learned’ by other members of the social circle of the decision-maker. This learned behavior may then be passed through generations. When the learned behavior is sufficiently established it is likely to be ‘endorsed’ by genetic evolution so that it becomes ‘hard wired’ in DNA (as in our bird example). One documented example of this in humans involves the adult consumption of milk.            

It is, of course, natural for human babies to drink their mother’s milk. They are able to digest the milk by virtue of an enzyme called lactase that breaks down the lactose in the milk. In mammals, however, the production of lactase normally ceases as they grow up. Without lactase to help, milk becomes indigestible and causes unpleasant digestive problems.

About 8,000 years ago, however, it appears that adult humans experimented with cow’s milk and discovered that some adult humans were lactose tolerant. Because of a ‘defective’ gene, in some humans the lactase production gene had not been switched off after infanthood. As a life-fostering trait, this was favored by genetic evolution, and the ‘defective’ gene’s population grew. Lactose intolerance is now relatively uncommon among Europeans although it is still common among some cultures (e.g., Native Americans) whose ancestors did not domesticate cattle for their milk.

Another example of cultural evolution, less well supported by the anthropological record but much more important to the evolution of modern man, involves man’s invention of language. Scientists now believe that the invention of language was the precursor of abstract thinking — and gained the practitioners a considerable advantage over the ‘talk-nots’. Some scientists believe that this is the explanation for the extinction of H. Erectus and H. Neanderthal; aided by oral language H. Sapiens just ‘out-smarted’ them.

While accepted as an important component of evolution, cultural evolution is not well understood as to the processes involved. Today, our species is bombarded with external information which brings about behavioral changes that can sweep through our ‘connected’ cultures in a very short time. While many of the changes are transient, like clothing fashions (e.g. the mini-skirt), some are profound. The dramatic change in birth rates in many countries in the late twentieth century is a significant example that continues to puzzle scientists.

Whether we understand it fully or not, human cultural evolution is omnipresent and happening at breakneck speed. In complex ways, our behavior is changing in response to changes in our environment and, as the dominant species, many of our behavioral changes are impacting our world to create chain reactions – with major consequences.

It is, perhaps, appropriate that our intelligence, which was our saviour in the battle for survival 50,000 years ago and has brought us to a world population of seven billion (projected to reach nine billion by 2040) will very soon decide our future. With cultural evolution we have created a whirlwind that will either lift us to great heights or dash us to ruin. The phrase ‘live by the sword, die by the sword’ comes to mind. We have created a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we see ourselves as selfish creatures, driven by materialism and fleeting pleasures, we will assure an early and ignominious end for humanity. If we see ourselves as a truly intelligent and compassionate species that accepts responsibility for the future, then we will make for ourselves a noble future.

When I have shown friends the cover of my book ‘The Future of Man – Extinction or Glory’ some have responded with one-liners like ‘Okay, just give me the bottom line – what is it going to be  – extinction of glory?’ My answer rarely satisfies them (but it is the truth) — ‘the future is yours to choose’. The analogy is to the voting-age person consulting the opinion polls to find out how an election will turn out. The underlying irony is that the opinion polls are all trying to figure out how that wondering voter will vote.

We are now ‘voting’ for our future. Soon our children will vote and then their children. The votes are being cast, not as ballots, but by actions — actions that express our views as to our place in the world we live in and our sense of responsibility for its future.

If this vision of our future sounds like an argument for responsible action to deal with pollution, global warming or mindless consumption of non-renewable resources, that is no accident — but the issue is much broader than ‘good housekeeping’ on our planet. Far more fundamental to our future as a species is our ability to rise above the selfish tribalism of our past to reach the ‘next level’ and become future man, united in our determination to survive the tests ahead. Central to success in this effort will be reaching a meeting of the minds philosophically — and therefore spiritually.

You might ask ‘What does the future of our species have to do with religion?’ and my answer is — nothing. But ask me the question ‘What does a unifying belief in a higher purpose for our existence mean for our survival?’ and my answer is — everything. The distinction I make (between religion and God) is an important one. Our religions, concerned above all with their survival as distinct (and therefore competing) entities, are rooted in the past and divide us. The God that will unite us is focused on the future. This is the God of deism that does not rely on ancient books or demand blind faith when those books fail tests of fact or reason.

There are those who question that God, in any form, is relevant to our future. The atheists would have us believe nothing that cannot be scientifically proven. But is belief in nothing going to unite us and help us rise to the next level of humanity? This is no more tenable than the arguments of fundamentalists (Islamic and Christian) who believe that the morals and ethics of two thousand years ago should be our guide. Those standards are better than nothing — but we can do better. We must do better. We cannot reach our destination by focusing on the rear view mirror  — and when the journey will span many  generations, we need vision and motivation that transcends our individual lives and base self-interest.

Deism will light the way. I will be expanding on this subject in later posts. In the meantime I urge readers to visit the Deism website.

The earliest records of man, in the form of cave drawings, show that our ancestors believed in gods over 50,000 years ago. Psychologists and theologians have theorized that the principal drivers were a desire to find meaning for the awesome natural forces that wreaked havoc on their world from time to time and anxiety as they faced the knowledge that death awaits all living things.

Those early believers, almost certainly, did not have to face arguments from atheists – because the ‘proof’ for their god hypothesis was a frequent and dreaded visitor.

Fast forward 47,000 years and the first monotheistic religions arrived. The claim that Judaism was the first is disputed by many archeologists and theologians who point out that a number of monotheistic religions arose in the Middle East about 3,000 years ago. Zoroastrianism may have preceded Judaism, and as the official religion of Persia, a major power in those times, certainly had a much larger following.

The invention of writing was an important milestone for all religions, giving priests a means of recording the ‘facts’ (and myths), that were the foundations of their belief — ‘facts’ that had previously been passed for many generations by word of mouth. These records (initially stone slabs, then scrolls, and finally handwritten books) became important physical tokens of the religion concerned. They became objects of worship in the same manner that statues of gods were for millennia. Today there are literally hundreds of different scriptures that are viewed as ‘holy relics’ by their home religions. Many of these scriptures are believed to be ‘the words of God’ and, accordingly, ‘inerrant’ in every detail.

And then there were the ‘revelations’ that provide ‘proof’ for most, if not all, of the major religions — miracles and appearances of divine messengers. Unfortunately for those who would have us take these events as proof, none of the revelations were sufficiently controlled (in the sense of controlled experiments used to support a thesis) to be viewed today as any more than hearsay — relayed, unproven, accounts of those who are said to have witnessed the revelation.

Today’s reality is that the God hypothesis, 50,000 years after it was first postulated, remains just that — a hypothesis. It cannot be proved by any method that would satisfy a high school student’s understanding of science. In contrast to the earliest days of the God hypothesis, however, today there are a growing number of atheists who have no qualms about expressing their skepticism.

The other day I was checking out discussion groups on the web and came across a group that was asked to declare, justify and then debate their personal belief, or disbelief, in God. Predictably the main combatants were Christians opposing atheists. As I ‘lurked’, I found myself thinking about the dark days when Christians were placed in Roman arenas to oppose lions for the entertainment of the Romans. With few exceptions the atheist ‘lions’ in the discussion group swiftly dispatched the Christians — the exceptions being skilled Christian debaters who did not so much win as filibuster until the atheists were bored into silence.

Armed with the literary efforts of ‘new atheist’ writers such as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins — plus the ammunition readily available on atheist web sites which list all the ‘arguments from…’ that theists use, and then provide ready-made rebuttal lines — today’s atheists are having a field day. ‘Faith’ versus ‘fact’ is a one-sided contest in today’s world. Those who predict a steady decline in the Abrahamic religions (those based on the Old Testament) in the future are on safe ground.

But is that it? Do we only have two choices? Is it either faith-based religions drawing on holy scriptures and revelations, or ‘modern’, ‘rational’ atheism? Many individuals, like me, are uncomfortable about a choice between ‘blind faith’ and ‘nothing’.

There is, in fact, another legitimate option — and I am not talking about ‘sitting on the fence’ as an agnostic. It  is to believe in the God of deism. For useful discussion of theism versus deism we need to clarify the differences.

Theism is the belief in a ‘personal’ God that has revealed himself to man and who takes a keen interest in the affairs of human individuals (all 7 billion of us). The God of theism is ‘good’ (at least once he got over a grumpy spell in the Old Testament). Paradoxically, however, the God of theism makes favorites. The Jews were the ‘chosen people’ acccording to the Old Testament and most versions of theism give themselves favored positions over all other versions — even to the point that they label those who do not believe as they do ‘unbelievers’ who are doomed to a terrible fate — with extremist, fundamentalist factions ready to help them in that direction.

Deism is the belief that a supernatural entity was responsible for the creation of the universe (the Big Bang) with a plan (i.e. purpose) in mind —  but what happens to us, individually and as a species, is entirely up to us. Deists believe that God is interested in the fulfillment of his plan – but whether we play a useful role in fulfilling the plan will be decided by our conduct. Deism is NOT a religion. There are no churches, priests, scriptures or any other props for deism.

My own journey to deism (from an agnostic-leaning-to-atheist starting point) came as a result of my research for my book ‘The Future of Man – Extinction or Glory’.

As I sketched out the book’s outline, I could see that I would need to face the question ‘Is there a God?’ and I asked myself what ‘fact gathering’ would be required to answer this question. I wondered if I should study the Bible – then realized that, if I did, it would be necessary to study the bibles of all the other religions (and there are hundreds of them…). Then I considered studying the works of philosophers such as Aristotle, Kant and Spinoza who have pondered the existence of God over the centuries. Again I decided no – a) because it would take a lifetime to do justice to the task and b) since they all had different views, who was I to decide which was right?

So I settled on a ‘naïve’, ‘modernist’ approach – I decided I would form my own opinion, based on the relevant facts. This led me down two ‘evolutionary’ paths – path ‘A’,  our physical universe (i.e. cosmic evolution) and path ‘B’, life (i.e. biological evolution). This was still a large task, but I realized that I did not have to become ‘an authority’ in these fields. I just needed to reach an understanding of the major ‘generally accepted’ scientific facts that were the foundation of modern thought in the fields.

Without getting into the details (they are in the book), the conclusion I reached was that while there is  nothing that can be viewed as proof or disproof of the God hypothesis, there is strong circumstantial evidence of purpose. Now, if there is purpose, that implies intent — and if there is intent behind the evolution of our universe then there is a strong argument for a supernatural creator worthy of the name God. Not the ‘God of the tribes’ based on holy scriptures and revelations, the God of the future – the god of deism. A God we can all believe in.

I am going to ask you, the reader of this post, to let me know (click on ‘leave a comment’ below) if you think my view makes sense to you – and also to ‘pass the word’ to other like-minded people. I intend to expand on these thoughts with a series of deism-themed posts if I see an indication of interest. 

When I joined IBM in 1963 after realizing that the life of an accountant was not for me, I saw the beginning of the computer era. This took the form of the IBM 1401, the first generation of affordable, stored program computers. When I say “affordable,” I am speaking relatively. You could rent one for something under $2,000 per month. Earlier stored program computers were designed for universities, governments, and big business and cost millions.

The IBM 1401 was second generation, meaning that it was built using transistors. This made it a good deal more rugged than its vacuum tube predecessors and much smaller. You could fit a 1401 into your living room—if you had a good sized living room. For your $2,000 per month, you got a maximum memory size of 16 kilobytes. This is what programmers, like myself, had to work with to persuade the 1401 to complete commercial tasks.

Today’s personal computers are many orders of magnitude more powerful than the  1401, and their role in man’s affairs has become enormous. It is hard to even imagine our work lives today without computers. And most of those in the developed nations have computers in their homes. They are well on the way to being indispensible servants to man.

As computers have evolved, so has speculation that one day computers could become sentient. The first movie I recall with this speculation was 2001: A Space Odyssey (based on a science fiction book by Arthur C. Clarke). In that movie, HAL was the onboard computer accompanying a team of humans on a journey to Jupiter’s moon Europa. The most impressive aspect of HAL’s persona in the movie 2001 was that he was able to respond to oral questions thoughtfully and with a “human” (modulated) voice. Sadly, HAL became unhinged and attempted to kill its human companions.

Leaving aside for the moment the possibility of a mad artificial intelligence, let’s explore the real possibility that our computer friends could become sentient. The 2001 movie came out in 1965, and a lot has happened since.

HAL was able to play games at an advanced level and control his spaceship environment based on sensor inputs. We achieved that level with our computers some time ago. Onboard computers have been integral to humanity’s space missions since the first mission, and a computer (Deep Blue) succeeded in winning a chess match with Garry Kasparov, the world champion, in 1997.

But game playing and computer control systems do not mean sentience. When we use the term sentience, we mean human-like rationality and self-awareness. The most famous test in this area is the Turing test, which Alan Turing first proposed in 1950. The Turing test simply proposes a scenario where a human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine (both concealed from the human judge), each of which is trying to appear human. If the judge cannot reliably tell which is which, then the machine is said to pass the test. To make the test fair, Turing stipulated that the conversation should be in computer terms (e.g., keyboarding and display) and not human language. This is proper. He was concerned with the intelligence of the computer, not its speech recognition and voice synthesizing skills.

There is an annual competition for artificial intelligences that includes an award for a machine that passes the Turing test. So far (2009) this prize has not been awarded. In my opinion, however, it will not be long before it is awarded.

Turing projected the year 2000 as the date when a computer would pass his test. He predicted that a main memory of 1 gigabyte would be needed. He didn’t specify processing speed, but had he done so, I am sure it would be a speed that we have surpassed some time ago. Why hasn’t the Turing test been passed?

I can think of three major reasons. One is that all the “thinking” behavior of a computer is governed by its stored program interacting with data.

The execution of a computer program follows a logical path that you can think of as a decision tree. The execution will branch to an X subroutine on encountering condition X, to a Y subroutine on encountering condition Y, and so forth. But what if the program runs into condition ZZ, a condition not specified in the program? The answer is that the computer will come to a mindless stop. In my 1401 programming era, we called this an unspecified halt. In the experience of modern computer use, an unspecified halt would translate into a blue screen experience or a “crash”.  The overall point is that a computer will only do what it is told to do by the programmer. Another way of saying this would be to say that a computer cannot out-think its programmer(s).

The second point to be made as to a computer’s ability to fool a judge into thinking it is human is that the human mind is not the linear mind of a computer. The human mind possesses thousands of processors. Okay, you might say, we could do that in a computer design. The thing is that you still would not be emulating the human brain. The human brain basically considers a given scenario and proceeds by “jumping to conclusions”. If a conclusion fails to pass an internal reasonableness test, our brain jumps to another conclusion—until it is reasonably satisfied that it has done its best.

The third point is to do with the way “soft data” is handled by human beings. The fundamental structure of computer logic is binary, ideally suited to dealing with hard facts and making true/false decisions. But abstract human thinking involves a lot of gray areas where the data involved (the knowledge) is only partially understood, and our brain makes judgments and proceeds using common sense. There is no doubt that, eventually, our computers will have more hard data at their disposal than we do, but what about common sense and the ability to think past knowledge gaps?

So am I saying that it cannot be done? No, I am just saying that it is not easy. I think it will always be valid to say that a computer’s intelligence cannot exceed the sum of its designers (including the designers of both the hardware and software). But if we have a team of designers and layers and layers of software using advanced search and logical algorithms and we have enormous volumes of stored data with classifying tags to refer to, I think there is no question that we can create an artificial intelligence that will be very impressive. For instance, the jumping to conclusions thinking style of man has already been emulated by computer researchers in the field of hierarchical temporal memory. I think it is just a matter of time before artificial intelligence will exceed any individual human being’s intelligence in designated domains.

I emphasize “in designated domains” because I cannot, at the moment, imagine a computer equaling a Picasso or Mozart in artistic creativity. In fact, to generalize, I think I can say with confidence that computers will always score very low in any test of spirituality.

What do I mean by “spirituality”? I like the dictionary (per Wikipedia) version which goes, “Spiritual matters are those involving humankind’s ultimate nature and meaning, not only as material biological organisms, but as beings with a unique relationship to that which is beyond both time and material existence.” By this definition, one includes the creative arts (music, poetry, drama, art, etc) and the intellectual efforts of great thinkers seeking to understand man’s place in the universe.

Of course, if we were to confront the computer of our future—HAL Future, a computer that has passed a comprehensive test for its intelligence—with its poor performance in any test of its spirituality, it might easily reply, “So what? Who needs it?”

Now, I think that HAL Future’s “Who needs it?” question is a very important one because I believe that spirituality is going to be the substantive difference between humanity’s intelligence and artificial intelligence. And I think this is an enormously important difference.

The title to this post is “Our Computers – Successor to Man?” The reason for the title is that we should consider the possibility that man fails in his attempts to make the transition to future man (or doesn’t even make the attempt). What then? Well, I think the best candidate (on Earth) to replace man as the intelligence-provider to achieve God’s purpose would be our computers. (I am thinking out in time a hundred years or so.) How ironic that would be if man’s machine replaces man.

A computers-in-charge future is not so far-fetched when you think about it. Computers have none of our personality warts such as aggressiveness, egocentricity, personal ambition, irrationality, and quick temper. They would have no problem with a depleted ozone layer, global warming, or an atmosphere with reduced oxygen. Space travel would be a snap for them. No need for the extra weight of life-support systems. No worries about multiyear journeys between stars. Maybe God would be better off depending on our computers of the future?

I think not. I believe that our spirituality is critically important to our success at achieving our mission.

As a matter of fact, I think we will only succeed if we develop our spirituality. This is our secret ingredient, our magic wand—or whatever metaphor you might choose.

Of one thing we can be certain. One way or another, computers will be a big part of the future. We must hope that man succeeds in becoming future man. Then our computers will be our servants.