In 2088, our branch on the tree of life will come crashing down, ending a very modest (if critically acclaimed) run on planet earth. The culprit? Not global warming. Not atomic war. Not flesh-eating bacteria.
Not even too much television. The culprit is the integrated circuit - aided by the surprising power of exponential growth. We will be driven to extinction by a smarter and more adaptable species - the computer. And our only hope is to try and accelerate human evolution with the aid of genetic engineering.
Behind this revolution lies a simple story of exponential change. You hear about exponential curves all the time. Exponential inflation is out of control - running 15 percent, 25 percent, 100 percent a year! Exponential population growth is overwhelming the earth! Yet exponentials don't seem real - if population growth is out of control, why can I still get a seat on the bus? In fact, humans endure a more or less confined life, far removed from the hurried pace of exponentials. Forty-five Fahrenheit is cold, eighty-five Fahrenheit is warm. Five hundred calories a day, you starve; three thousand, you may grow as fat as a pig. Our lives advance between two narrow signposts, and our minds can't grasp even the vaguest concept of rapid but predictable change. So how do we know the computers are coming?
If we can't trust human intuition to provide an early warning, consider this simple example of continual change. Imagine that the price of automobiles drops exponentially. At US$200,000, a Rolls Royce is large, expensive, and unaffordable. You'd never even consider a Rolls as the family sedan. But say the Rolls drops in price by a factor of two each year.
After one year, it costs $100,000 - still out of price, out of mind. In the second year, at $50,000, the car stays parked in England. In the third year, at $25,000, you start comparison shopping: the Rolls versus the Taurus. In the fourth year, the kids take one with them to college. After 11 years, the Rolls costs less than $100. Now, instead of renting a car on vacation, you buy a Rolls at the airport and leave it with the redcap in lieu of a tip on your return. In 20 years, Rolls Royces cost less than a quarter; they are soon repurposed as ocean breakwaters and highway barriers.
Exponentials start slowly and remain disarmingly out of sight. Yet they build strength relentlessly until they grow too large to ignore. By then, whole industries have changed and whole cultures have fallen.
The cost and intelligence of computers follows an exponential curve, having improved by a factor of two every 30 months over the last century. That's a factor of 1 trillion every 100 years, and there is no sign the pace will slow appreciably for another century. Processors that once filled entire floors - directing the manufacture of automobile engines - now sit inside V-8s, adjusting valve timing. And by 2088, that box of silicon, wires, and plastic will place humans on the endangered species list.
Why 2088? Well, by 2088, the next factor of a trillion enables computers to match human beings in skills and intelligence. In some respects, they already have. The "operating system" for a person is his or her genetic code. DNA instructs each cell in a body how to grow, how to deal with infection, and how to wire neurons in the brain to think. The program is about 3 billion bits long. Sure, 3 billion bits sounds impressive, but the genetic code is small enough to fit comfortably on a CD-ROM. Like DOS, each new version consists of modules incorporating the baggage of previous generations - the history of evolution is written in our genes. But unlike DOS, even some minor code rewrites are worth the price of an upgrade. For example, out of the 3,000,000,000 odd bits of DNA, human beings and chimpanzees have 2,999,400,000 in common. It may be hard to believe, but you and Rush Limbaugh are just a few snips of the genetic shears apart.
Still, DNA without a brain is useless. No one is exactly sure how many neurons fill each cranium, but they're thought to number around 10 billion. And each neuron turns on and off about 1,000 times a second. If the brain were a computer, it would be rated at 10 trillion operations per second.
By 2088, enough code will exist to fill the silicon brain. Some of the code may start out as modules intended to help cameras in factories track parts along assembly lines. These modules will be recycled for the computer's eyes. Weather forecasting models will join with genetic programs, helping the computer to anticipate changes in its environment. Trading software from Wall Street will sharpen its negotiation skills. Some parts will write themselves, as the computer varies its genetic code and keeps only those changes it judges beneficial. Like our own DNA, the computer's genetic code will betray its heritage after millions of experiments.
The scary thing isn't that computers will match our intelligence by 2088; the scary thing is that this exponential curve keeps on going, and going, and going. By 2090, the computer will be twice as smart and twice as insightful as any human being. It will never lose a game of chess, never forget a face, never forget the lessons of history. By 2100, the gap will grow to the point at which homo sapiens, relatively speaking, might make a good pet. Then again, the computers of 2088 might not give us a second thought.
What's a poor human to do? We might fight back, smashing integrated-circuit fab lines, but society couldn't function without its silicon codependents.
No integrated circuits? Then no Swatch watches, no low-polluting cars, no credit cards. We need integrated circuits as much as they need us. If we had a little time, say another couple hundred million years, evolution might have time to kick in. After all, evolution propelled mammals out from under the feet of dinosaurs and into the canyons of Manhattan; perhaps Darwin's great insight could get us out of this mess as well.
Unfortunately, the benign pruning of human genes by evolution's hand is a bit too slow and undirected to play guardian angel. A hundred years isn't much time for evolution to work its magic. So mankind is fortunate that gene splicing arose at the same moment in history as the computer.
Today, gene splicing coaxes vats of bacteria into producing human insulin by the gallon. The first tentative steps in repairing human genetic disease have succeeded, "upgrading" a child's genetic code beyond the parents initial, but flawed, design. Eventually, DNA engineering will be commonplace. People will snip out genes to regrow nerves damaged in a car accident or modify others to control cholesterol.
Tampering with nature seems foolhardy, but there really isn't any choice. Humans are programming computers today that will someday take our place in nature - it would be foolhardy not to program our own genetic code in response.
So, next time you power down a computer at night, do so with pleasure. In 2088, the computers are shipped without an "off" switch.
