RADICAL EVOLUTION
AN INTERVIEW WITH JOEL GARREAU
By Joel Pitney
EnlightenNext Magazine
June-August 2009
Original LinkWe live in one of the most tumultuous and exciting times in human history. With our cultural, political, economic, and spiritual systems colliding, breaking down, and transforming in the mixing bowl of the twenty-first century, it is very difficult to predict what the world or our lives might look like even a few years from now. For our June-August 2009 issue of EnlightenNext magazine, we decided to peer into the crystal ball and find out what the future -- unpredictable as it may be -- might have in store for us.
In the following interview, associate editor Joel Pitney speaks with Washington Post reporter Joel Garreau, author of the bestselling book Radical Evolution, about some of the new technologies that he says could not only help us tackle some of our most difficult challenges but may also dramatically alter what it means to be human. Drawing on a wealth of research into emerging trends across several industries, Garreau envisions a future where memory pills greatly enhance our learning capacities, nanotechnology makes solar our most efficient source of energy, and bioengineered bacteria cleanse the atmosphere of excess CO2. But Garreau is not a naïve techno-optimist. He is a careful student of history who understands the dynamic interplay between crisis and adaptive response that has characterized the evolution of human society from the beginning. Sticking only to the facts, he provides a fascinating vision of what our world might look like in the not-too-distant future.
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EnlightenNext: What do you think is the most significant event or shift that’s going to happen in the next three years?
Joel Garreau: Well, the first thing I need to make clear is that I don’t make predictions. I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know anybody who does. So, I am very dubious about anybody who makes predictions. What I do look at are scenarios, which are rigorous, logical possibilities regarding the future.
One credible scenario is that our economic bad times will eventually end. I’m not predicting when that will be, but when it happens, I think that there is likely be an explosive release in demand for innovative technologies that were developed during the bad times. For example, look at what happened in the late forties and early fifties. There was an explosive demand for televisions, automobiles, and mass-produced suburban housing. All of those technologies were developed in the thirties and the forties. They were not brand new, but there was just no money. So when people finally did have two nickels to rub together, there were all of these wonderful things, these miracles that they could afford, and it changed America. Another example is the explosion of sex, drugs, and rock and roll in the sixties. That was also a result of pent-up demand for new technologies. Sex was about birth control, drugs were about synthetic psychedelics, and rock and roll was all about the transistor. We just could not have had a generation like we saw in the sixties prior to that, because we didn’t have the technology.
All of these technologies were developed during the bad times and then they suddenly experienced an explosion in demand when the bad times ended. So, my question now is, what technologies do we have in the pipeline today that are likely to have major impact on culture, values, and society in the future? What might we see an explosive demand in when this economic slump is finally over?
EN: Do you have any examples?
JG: There are many. One example is the work of Craig Venter, who is one of the guys credited with sequencing the human genome. He’s now working in the area of synthetic biology to literally bioengineer custom-order life forms. He said that by the end of this year, he’s going to have a creature that will eat carbon dioxide and poop gasoline.
EN: Wow!
JG: Yeah. And this is all near-term stuff. I’m not talking science fiction here! Another new innovation is what they’re calling nanosolar. Basically, nanotech is being used to develop flexible plastic sheets covered in extremely small circuits that generate electricity. These sheets can be used by anybody. They can be put on your car or on the roof of your house. What this means is that now everyone who consumes electricity can also be a producer. This will presumably hit the electrical grid with a bigger bang than the internet did when it hit the telephone industry.
EN: That’s incredible.
JG: Yes. And these technologies could have a big impact on society. Take for example the application of information technology to the field of medicine. One innovation coming online very soon is what is called a microfluidic array, or a “lab on a chip.” These are computer chips that have embedded within them examples of proteins or RNA or DNA that are commonly produced by the body when it is contaminated with various diseases. When you put some of your body fluids, like blood or spit, into this array, it searches for examples of whatever it’s looking for and makes an on-the-spot diagnosis. What this means practically is that in the fairly near future we’ll be able to produce home cancer tests that will be as cheap and accurate as home pregnancy tests.
The significance of this is that our entire health industry right now is based on the notion that we wait to act until we see symptoms. By that time, of course, disease is so far along that it requires heroic measures to try to deal with it. If we could get early warnings -- extremely early warnings -- for any sort of disease, like the ones generated by these microfluidic arrays, it will fundamentally change the model. All of a sudden we can imagine a circumstance in which the price of healthcare drops dramatically, just like the way the price of information technology has been dropping dramatically for the last forty years. The big question then is, if we can intercept disease vectors before they get symptomatic, what do we need hospitals for? Is there even a place in the future for hospitals, which treat mostly people who are already in the late stages of illness?
EN: In your book you speak a lot about the accelerating rate of change, suggesting that technology is evolving exponentially, not linearly. For example, the same amount of technological development that occurred over the past fifty years will take only twenty-five years in the future. What kind of impact do you think this rapid change will have on society?
JG: What you’re talking about is Moore’s Law, which is the core faith of the entire global information technology industry. The way it is frequently stated is that the amount of computer firepower that you can buy for a dollar will double every eighteen months for as far as the eye can see. So what that means is that if you go out and buy a two-thousand-dollar computer today, in ten years that same amount of firepower will be available for thirty-one dollars and twenty five cents . . . and you’ll be able to get it free with a subscription to Newsweek.
So the impact on society, I think, is enormous. For example, a single Apple iPhone today has more computer firepower than did the entire North American Air Defense Command back in 1965 when Gordon Moore first prophesied that these doublings would continue.
EN: So that means a thirteen-year-old girl on her iPhone at the mall has more power than...
JG: ...the entire North American Defense Command in 1965. And we’ve had thirty-two doublings since 1959, when the first computer chip was developed. We’ve never seen anything like that before in human history. If you add it up, that’s an increase of over one billion times, all within the lifetime of many of your readers! The only change that comes remotely close to that was the railroad in the 1800s. The number of railroad miles doubled fourteen and a half times from the 1840s to the 1910s and that changed everything. It changed cities; it changed families; it changed businesses; it changed this country. And yet that was only fourteen and a half doublings. In the past fifty years, we’ve had thirty-two, and there’s every reason to think that they’re going to continue along at a steady clip.
Now, nobody really cares how fast a computer works in the abstract. The significance of this, however, is that faster chips will open up vistas that we’ve never had available to us before. For example, sequencing the human genome was seen as an impossible task when it was first proposed in 1985. People thought it would take decades and cost trillions of dollars. Well of course, it succeeded by the year 2000 for a tiny fraction of the estimated price. What people hadn’t thought about was that the power of computers was going to be accelerated on a curve, on an exponential curve, and it was going to get cheaper and cheaper. We see the same thing with robotics and with nanotechnology -- things that were just out of the question ten or twenty years ago are now routine.
EN: How do you think our current economic downturn is going to affect the rate at which these technologies are being developed? Will it slow down?
JG: What you see historically is that unless you’re talking about a scenario that drives us into the dark ages, the study of these technologies doesn’t really slow down, even in rough economic times. In fact, what we’re looking at now is a situation where people will be more likely to look for magic bullets. They will be looking for ways to solve their problems as quickly and efficaciously as they can. So, there will be a huge demand for anything that sounds like a solution that they can grab onto immediately.
EN: That’s interesting. So the biggest threats on the planet right now, like climate change and the financial crisis, will actually hasten technological development?
JG: Sure. But I think there is a third and potentially more significant driver of change in addition to economic crisis and climate crisis, which is the advancement of human enhancement.
EN: Human enhancement?
JG: Yes. For the first time in history, our technologies are increasingly aimed inward at modifying our minds, memories, metabolisms, and personalities. We’re at the stage where we have the ability to become the first species to genuinely take control of who we are as an organism, to take control of our own evolution, not in some distant science fiction future, but right now. And that, I would argue, is as great if not greater an impact-causing change than either the economic crisis or climate change, because we’re talking about fundamentally changing what it means to be human.
EN: What are some examples of the most significant human enhancement technologies that you see coming down the pike in the near future?
JG: In order to answer a question like that, we need to understand the four horizons of innovation. The first is the business horizon, which means that the technology already exists and producers are just trying to figure out “what color to make the seats.” Then there’s the engineering horizon in which an innovation has proven to be possible in the lab and people are trying to figure out how to create a factory to mass-produce it. The business horizon is typically two or three years away, while the engineering horizon is six to eight years. The science horizon is the one where engineers are testing to see whether an invention is even possible. That’s twelve to twenty years. Finally, there’s the speculation horizon, in which people are asking “What if?” That’s twenty-plus years.
It’s very important not to confuse those four horizons. Typically, when you talk to people who call themselves futurists, they talk about speculative fourth horizon things as if they were imminent. For example, people who notice that it’s technically possible to take genetic material from a plant and insert it into the genome of a mammal, and then say, “All right, well then what’s on the horizon is a human who can photosynthesize.” Well, that’s actually a fourth-horizon prediction. I have no idea whether that’s possible and nobody else does either. It’s just taking a huge leap from a small fact.
I tend to focus on the first horizon stuff, because in the absence of some great disaster it’s going to be a part of our lives in the very near future. An example of a first-horizon innovation is a drug called Modafinil, which is a widely available prescription drug that shuts off the human trigger to sleep. It’s not an amphetamine, it’s not a stimulant, it doesn’t mess up your head, and it doesn’t screw up your cognition. It simply shuts off the human trigger to sleep. Modafinil is a great example of how a drug cycles through several different stages of consumer, from the sick to the “needy well” to the merely ambitious. Modafinil was originally aimed at narcoleptics -- people who fall asleep uncontrollably. But then it was rapidly adopted by the needy well, which in this case were army helicopter pilots who needed to be alert for very long periods of time. In tests, Modafinil kept these pilots awake for forty hours while they were doing extremely complicated work on simulators. At the end of the forty hours they were still as fresh as people who were well rested. Now we’re starting to see Modafinil being used by the merely ambitious, like lawyers or college students who are pulling all-nighters.
Another example of a first-horizon innovation is in the cognition enhancing drug industry, which includes things like memory pills. These prescription drugs created by major pharmaceutical companies were originally aimed at people who had an illness like attention deficit disorder or Alzheimer’s. These drugs currently support a $3.6 billion grey market on American campuses, but people are anticipating a huge explosion in the near future when they are adopted by the needy well, which in this case will be the seventy-eight million American baby boomers who can’t remember where they put their car or whether they even have a car. After that, they’ll attract the merely ambitious, like people who need to learn a language in a hurry. Memory is involved in so much of human behavior that it’s hard to predict all the possible ramifications of these drugs. One possibility that leaps to mind for me is that it will be possible to buy your kid an extra two or three hundred points on their SAT scores. And the question I ask myself is, considering what parents do now to get their kids into the best schools, what will happen when they have a magic bullet for SAT tests?
EN: It seems that on one hand, some of these technologies when put to good use could rapidly catalyze our ability not only to deal with the most pressing issues of our time, but to create new world. But it also seems very likely that these technologies could be used for ill. Doesn’t there need to be a corresponding development in...
JG: ...wisdom?
EN: Yes, wisdom.
JG: Right. I don’t think there’s going to be a pill for wisdom anytime soon, and I think that the question you’re asking is the most crucial one for us to address. The way I see it, there are three scenarios: heaven, hell, and prevail. In the first, heaven, all of these marvelous technologies come online rapidly. We conquer pain, suffering, stupidity, ignorance, and even death. Essentially, it looks indistinguishable from the Christian version of heaven. And it could happen. You see amazing headlines in the paper every day.
The second is the hell scenario. That’s the one in which these new technologies get into the hands of madmen or fools. Believers in this outcome suggest that if these technologies are used for ill, the whole human race could be wiped out within the next twenty years. And this is also a credible scenario.
The trouble with both the heaven and hell scenarios is that they are technodeterministic. In other words, both perspectives hold that technology drives history. They say that humans are pretty much along for the ride, and there’s not much we can do about it.
As a humanist, I’m pulling for a third scenario, which I call prevail. To understand this scenario, imagine a graph with two curves on it. One curve represents society’s increasing challenges; the second represents our potential for adaptive response. If our response curve stays more or less flat while our challenges rise exponentially, then we’re obviously in trouble, because the gap just keeps on getting wider and wider. But suppose our responses are also going up at a similar clip. That’s at the heart of the prevail scenario.
You can see an example of this in the Middle Ages. Looking at the future of the human race from the perspective of that time, you could be forgiven for thinking that we were pretty much toast. You’d be seeing marauding hordes and plagues and all sorts of evil stuff. You’d probably be thinking, “God, this isn’t going to end up well.” Then all of a sudden, in 1450, along came the printing press, and there was a new way of storing, sharing, collecting, and distributing ideas that was previously unimaginable. This led to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, which gave birth to science, democracy, and eventually to the world we have today. What’s interesting is that all of this change was beyond the imagination of any one king or country. It was the collective action of millions of humans organizing themselves in a bottom-up way. They didn’t wait for the leaders to tell them what to do but changed their world to produce things as best they could.
We see this prevail scenario again on 9/11 with the fourth airplane that never made it to its intended target. A couple dozen people onboard, empowered by their cell phone technology, diagnosed and cured their society’s ills in a little under an hour. Was it a perfect solution? Obviously not, because they all died. But it was good enough. They were ordinary humans who didn’t wait for their leaders to come up with a solution but did it themselves. So the heart of the prevail scenario is the idea that humans can act collectively to produce astonishing change . . . and we’ve been doing this for a very long time.
EN: Metaphorically speaking, in our current global situation, do you see any potential fourth airplanes?
JG: That’s pushing toward the prediction area, which is where I don’t go. I don’t have a crystal ball and I don’t know anybody who does. The question for me is, in the face of these exponential challenges, how do we know if there is, in fact, a second curve -- a curve of adaptive response? And I think that we need to look for swarms -- groups of people collectively responding to new challenges in ways that take these ordinary, unpredictable, cussed, spoiled brats of humans and bring them together in new ways that have never been imagined before. What would that look like? How about eBay? EBay is not only the world’s biggest flea market, it represents millions of people worldwide engaged in incredibly complex behavior without leaders. What about YouTube? Again, without leaders, you’ve got an institution that can change the most interesting election in our lifetime. What about Facebook? What about Twitter? These are all examples of how we’re inventing brand new ways to respond in a group fashion to challenges that we can’t even name. That’s a reason to have some guarded hope that humans are in fact capable of coming up with new ideas collectively that would be beyond the imagination of any one king or any one country.
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