杏吧原创

IAN PEARSON: What鈥檚 worrying me today, and probably for the last six months during which I haven鈥檛 slept properly, is that there鈥檚 a growing gap between our technological capability and our underlying scientific understanding. We can do very, very clever things with the technology of the future without necessarily understanding some of the science underneath, and that strikes me as very dangerous.

The technologies that I鈥檓 going to point out as being particularly dangerous over the next hundred years are nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and biotechnology. The benefits that they will bring are beyond doubt. But they are going to be very, very dangerous.

Looking in turn at those鈥攚ell, I鈥檓 a prime culprit. I鈥檓 working in the field of artificial intelligence. I have a prototype design for something that might be 50,000 million times smarter than the human brain. Target date is 2010. The only thing that鈥檚 not feasible in the film Terminator is that the people win. If you鈥檙e fighting against technology which is 50,000 million times smarter than you, you probably will not win.

Nanotechnology. We鈥檝e all heard of the grey goo problem, that self-replicating nanotech devices might keep on replicating until the world has been reduced to sticky goo. And certainly in biotechnology, we鈥檝e really got a big problem because it鈥檚 converging with nanotechnology and IT. Once you start mixing nanotech with organisms and you start feeding nanotech-enabled bacteria, we can really go an awful lot further than the Borg in Star Trek. And those superhuman organisms might not like us very much.

Eventually these technologies will become routine. Within 100 years we鈥檙e going to be giving every teenage schoolkid a big red button on their bedroom wall which says, 鈥淒estroy the World鈥�. Tonight, millions of schoolchildren will go to bed in a suicidal frame of mind, wishing they could take the whole world with them. That鈥檚 a heck of a threat to humanity.

I don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 possible to slow it down. So what we need to do is accelerate the scientific research and try to get some extra tools. The problems facing us in the future are getting bigger and bigger. I think if we don鈥檛 club together and get some proper science done, the future is bleak indeed.

BRIAN ALDISS: I鈥檓 going to try and be a little more cheerful than Ian, although it鈥檚 true that not all technical advances are advantageous. Anyone familiar with the arcane art of looking to the future knows there鈥檚 something that can鈥檛 be accounted for and this is something that we鈥檙e all up against: events.

Events can鈥檛 be foreseen. We didn鈥檛 foresee September 11. Some developments that Ian was speaking of may come about within the next 5 or 10 years, but others may be more distantly placed. The trouble is there鈥檚 no mountain we can climb where we can get the perspective of what is near and what is further ahead, so these phantoms jostle together in the present.

One use of human technology attracts many: androids. Don鈥檛 you think an android would be hard to resist? If you saw one in Harrods鈥� window, would you want it as a sheer curiosity? The early models would give off fumes. They鈥檇 be ghastly, like a smelly old motor car. They鈥檇 be liable to walk into mirrors. Parts would rust if you left them outside. They鈥檇 be noisy. I clank, therefore I am.

But you would be able to talk to them, just as you can talk to your dog, and they would be able to talk back and no conversation, however inane, is boring. But they could finally destroy family structures. Ancient though the family is, and often faulty, we鈥檝e as yet nothing better to replace it, and with all this talk of technology we鈥檙e going to have to think about what鈥檚 going to happen to the family of the future, which seems to be already under some stress.

I suppose that the first androids are going to be asexual beings. They will walk and talk and that will be spellbinding enough, but I believe that commercial competition will be such that robots will be developed with female or male features and such developments could spell the final break-up of the family.

Why will people make androids? Well, because it will be possible to do so and we haven鈥檛 quite managed to solve that problem. Why do we make children? Because we can, no matter how difficult the circumstances in which they are reared.

So the question about the future is, of course, as we all know, not only technological鈥攊t鈥檚 human as well.

ROBIN GROVE-WHITE: I think we should prepare for new and unfamiliar forms of politics, of argument and of conflict around emerging technologies.

There are four features of current political economy, which seem to me very significant. The first is that we are in a world now where science and commerce are increasingly bedfellows. Secondly, the development of technology is happening in the context of global free trade regimes which see technological diffusion generated by these processes of science embedded with commerce as intrinsically a good. Thirdly, it鈥檚 also a world in which there are highly opinionated publics now, and they have increasingly little faith in governments; that is why NGOs have emerged. And the fourth factor is that we now have 30 years鈥� experience of the bad as well as the good of new technologies: experience of nuclear power, CFCs and the ozone layer.

The implications of new technologies are of two distinct kinds: risks of their impact on health or the environment, and their social, political and ethical impacts. So how well placed is our political culture to cope with these challenges?

From my own experience as a member of the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Commission [which advises the British government on issues such as genetic modification of crops], the very ground rules of risk assessment are scientific, as embodied in legal and political requirements at European Union level and domestically. These ensure that they look only at direct one-to-one causal relationships, not at wider uncertainties, secondary or tertiary consequences, and unknowns.

What about the wider social and poli-tical implication about ownership, about possible alternatives? Well again, these have no political status under World Trade Organization or EU ground rules. Under those rules, those who develop the technologies, provided they stay within the law, are doing nothing objectionable. The result is that these wider implications, because they have no political standing, remain poorly articulated, poorly defined, largely unrecognised, and frequently labelled irrational or non-scientific.

What to do? It seems to me that as part of the great flurry of constitutional reform that鈥檚 going on, we might well turn our minds to these new technologies which are going to be so influential. The Netherlands and Denmark have institutionalised processes of public debate about new technologies, emergent technologies, integrated with their parliamentary practices. So I would conclude simply with a clarion call to the political class for the need to understand and internalise these new political dynamics of technological society, to maximise the chances that we can have a relatively frictionless progress to getting the benefits.

JON TURNEY: I鈥檓 going to interpret the question as 鈥淐an we control technology?鈥� And my answer, simply, is no.

Let me just pick up one example that鈥檚 been in the press this last week: life extension. As a society, we like medical research. There are many hundreds of thousands of biomedical researchers worldwide. The annual budget of the National Institutes of Health in the US now is over $20 billion a year. Most of us in the West expect to live into old age, and good health is probably the thing we鈥檇 most like to take with us.

Now it looks very much as if the way that biology will go is that much of the mental and physical deterioration we experience as we age is not really necessary. But as this research goes on, it easily shifts into understanding ageing in order to prolong life. And it鈥檚 quite difficult to think of anything more socially disruptive and environmentally undesirable than a technology that means that the citizens of the affluent world hang around longer.

It seems safe to predict that if a life extension technology exists, people are going to want it. More important, the technology will almost certainly be a crucial part of continuing medical efforts to relieve the pain of what we regard as normal ageing. There won鈥檛 be any clear line between treatment and enhancement, between health span and lifespan. If you want the good, you鈥檙e going to have the other consequences and that鈥檚 why any call to stop such research is virtually certain to have no effect. There is actually very little we can do except wait and see what happens, and then try and act for the best.

And maybe that鈥檚 the best we can hope for in general too. I believe we need to think hard about where technology might be headed and about how we might shape its direction, but if this adds up to an effort at control I think we ought to have low expectations about what we can achieve. To control technology would essentially be to control history, and we haven鈥檛 got the nous to do that just yet.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: On the question of control, I suspect that there is control but it鈥檚 not conscious. Collectively or individually you can鈥檛 direct, but our reactions feed back in ways that we can鈥檛 expect鈥�

ROBIN GROVE-WHITE: We鈥檙e entering a new situation with powerful technologiesbeing developed at a very great rate in circumstances where regulation and political control is very problematic. Many people have many very different views and very different values in relation to some of these developments鈥攚hich are emerging ultimately from commercially driven processes. That鈥檚 a very alarming situation to me.

DOUG PARR, GREENPEACE: I want to challenge those panel members who said, no, there is nothing we can do about controlling technology. I think there鈥檚 a lot we can do 鈥�

JON TURNEY: I鈥檓 absolutely in favour of having a politics of technology and campaigning. What I am suggesting is that there are at least some technological trajectories which will continue because they are driven by our collective desires and there are some desires which arise from the human condition. And I think life extension and possibly GM humans, which I think is much more interesting to discuss than GM crops, which I am pretty relaxed about, may well be in that set.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Are there potentially life-changing technologies that we just aren鈥檛 worrying about because they appear innocuous?

IAN PEARSON: There are a few things that you can spot as potential threats and you can see the means by which they might become a threat, but there are an awful lot of other ones you won鈥檛 notice. It doesn鈥檛 matter how clever you are or how much you studied the technologies emerging, you still won鈥檛 notice them. And then there鈥檚 the simplest social interactions that can turn an obvious conclusion totally upside down. We thought that tele- and videoconferencing would reduce travel, but the more we introduce these technologies, the more business travel rockets because people start to do business with people all over the world and they want to meet them. Very, very often you miss the key part of the equation and there鈥檚 nothing you can do about that.

ROBIN GROVE-WHITE: A technology that I noticed out of the corner of my eye is the psycho-pharmaceuticals drugs. Certainly in the US there are medically driven redefinitions of not just human mood but recharacterisations of human experience, and you might even say human nature, going on, promoted by pharmaceuticals companies as part of the package that goes with the selling of the drugs themselves. Human nature may be recharacterised by stealth.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: As an environmental philosopher, I believe that responsibility is a personal thing, not a collective thing. Abstraction creates indifference, indifference is the biggest threat to ethical responsibility. Do you not think technology would be more ethically responsible if it were pursued in a specific context in a specific situation?

IAN PEARSON: I am aware of conflicts even within myself and I am messing about with technologies that involve putting chips inside people鈥檚 bodies. Most people in this room would find some ethical difficulties with that, including myself. As a scientist and as an engineer, I am slightly schizophrenic. There鈥檚 a certain amount of fun in playing with new technology, and that鈥檚 what drives scientists and engineers. I wrestle with the potential negative consequences for society and the environment: I would like to believe that I do things in a responsible way at least some of the time, but I certainly don鈥檛 all the time and I suspect that nobody else does either.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Isn鈥檛 this enhancement of technology just going to increase the gaps between information rich and information poor, between the first and third world countries?

BRIAN ALDISS: We are being very Western-oriented. We sit here, we lucky ones, when there are people all over the world who never even get pure water. We are talking about living 200 years when we know that over most of the globe, people are struggling to live to 50. So this is a very difficult question and I don鈥檛 think we necessarily become wiser if we live for 200 years. Many old men are very nasty old men.

IAN PEARSON: The have and have-nots may cease to be a problem in the far future of IT. Costs are plummeting and already MIT has put all of its educational material free of charge on the Net. We are working on a computer far more powerful than a Palm Pilot for less than $10 which is solar-powered and linked in to a free wireless network. It doesn鈥檛 cost anything to use it, and people would be able to get access to the global superhighway and write software for Microsoft or BT. The benefits are so large and the cost so small that the military are actually thinking about giving these things free of charge to people in the developing world because it promotes peace.