This testimony was presented April 9, 2003 at the Committee on Science, U.S. House of Representatives Hearing to examine the societal implications of nanotechnology and consider H.R. 766, The Nanotechnology Research and Development Act of 2003. It is reposted from the KurzweilAI Network.

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The Societal Implications of Nanotechnology

Raymond Kurzweil

Chairman Boehlert, distinguished members of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, and other distinguished guests, I appreciate this opportunity to respond to your questions and concerns on the vital issue of the societal implications of nanotechnology.  Our rapidly growing ability to manipulate matter and energy at ever smaller scales promises to transform virtually every sector of society, including health and medicine, manufacturing, electronics and computers, energy, travel, and defense.  There will be increasing overlap between nanotechnology and other technologies of increasing influence, such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence.  As with any other technological transformation, we will be faced with deeply intertwined promise and peril.

In my brief verbal remarks, I only have time to summarize my conclusions on this complex subject, and I am providing the Committee with an expanded written response that attempts to explain the reasoning behind my views. 

Eric Drexler’s 1986 thesis developed the concept of building molecule-scale devices using molecular assemblers that would precisely guide chemical reactions.  Without going through the history of the controversy surrounding feasibility, it is fair to say that the consensus today is that nano-assembly is indeed feasible, although the most dramatic capabilities are still a couple of decades away.

 The concept of nanotechnology today has been expanded to include essentially any technology where the key features are measured in a modest number of nanometers (under 100 by some definitions).  By this standard, contemporary electronics has already passed this threshold. 

For the past two decades, I have studied technology trends, along with a team of researchers who have assisted me in gathering critical measures of technology in different areas, and I have been developing mathematical models of how technology evolves.  Several conclusions from this study have a direct bearing on the issues before this hearing.  Technologies, particularly those related to information, develop at an exponential pace, generally doubling in capability and price-performance every year.  This observation includes the power of computation, communication – both wired and wireless, DNA sequencing, brain scanning, brain reverse engineering, and the size and scope of human knowledge in general.  Of particular relevance to this hearing, the size of technology is itself inexorably shrinking.  According to my models, both electronic and mechanical technologies are shrinking at a rate of 5.6 per linear dimension per decade.  At this rate, most of technology will be “nanotechnology” by the 2020s. 

The golden age of nanotechnology is, therefore, a couple of decades away.  This era will bring us the ability to essentially convert software, i.e., information, directly into physical products.  We will be able to produce virtually any product for pennies per pound.  Computers will have greater computational capacity than the human brain, and we will be completing the reverse engineering of the human brain to reveal the software design of human intelligence.  We are already placing devices with narrow intelligence in our bodies for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes.  With the advent of nanotechnology, we will be able to keep our bodies and brains in a healthy, optimal state indefinitely.  We will have technologies to reverse environmental pollution.  Nanotechnology and related advanced technologies of the 2020s will bring us the opportunity to overcome age-old problems, including pollution, poverty, disease, and aging. 

We hear increasingly strident voices that object to the intermingling of the so-called natural world with the products of our technology.  The increasing intimacy of our human lives with our technology is not a new story, and I would remind the committee that had it not been for the technological advances of the past two centuries, most of us here today would not be here today. Human life expectancy was 37 years in 1800.  Most humans at that time lived lives dominated by poverty, intense labor, disease, and misfortune.  We are immeasurably better off as a result of technology, but there is still a lot of suffering in the world to overcome.  We have a moral imperative, therefore, to continue the pursuit of knowledge and of advanced technologies that can continue to overcome human affliction.

There is also an economic imperative to continue.   Nanotechnology is not a single field of study that we can simply relinquish, as suggested by Bill Joy’s essay, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us.”  Nanotechnology is advancing on hundreds of fronts, and is an extremely diverse activity.  We cannot relinquish its pursuit without essentially relinquishing all of technology, which would require a Brave New World totalitarian scenario, which is inconsistent with the values of our society. 

Technology has always been a double-edged sword, and that is certainly true of nanotechnology.  The same technology that promises to advance human health and wealth also has the potential for destructive applications.  We can see that duality today in biotechnology.  The same techniques that could save millions of lives from cancer and disease may also empower a bioterrorist to create a bioengineered pathogen. 

A lot of attention has been paid to the problem of self-replicating nanotechnology entities that could essentially form a nonbiological cancer that would threaten the planet. I discuss in my written testimony steps we can take now and in the future to ameliorate these dangers. However, the primary point I would like to make is that we will have no choice but to confront the challenge of guiding nanotechnology in a constructive direction.  Any broad attempt to relinquish nanotechnology will only push it underground, which would interfere with the benefits while actually making the dangers worse. 

As a test case, we can take a small measure of comfort from how we have dealt with one recent technological challenge. There exists today a new form of fully nonbiological self-replicating entity that didn’t exist just a few decades ago: the computer virus.  When this form of destructive intruder first appeared, strong concerns were voiced that as they became more sophisticated, software pathogens had the potential to destroy the computer network medium they live in. Yet the “immune system” that has evolved in response to this challenge has been largely effective. Although destructive self-replicating software entities do cause damage from time to time, the injury is but a small fraction of the benefit we receive from the computers and communication links that harbor them. No one would suggest we do away with computers, local area networks, and the Internet because of software viruses. 

One might counter that computer viruses do not have the lethal potential of biological viruses or of destructive nanotechnology. This is not always the case: we rely on software to monitor patients in critical care units, to fly and land airplanes, to guide intelligent weapons in our current campaign in Iraq, and other “mission critical” tasks. To the extent that this is true, however, this observation only strengthens my argument.  The fact that computer viruses are not usually deadly to humans only means that more people are willing to create and release them.  It also means that our response to the danger is that much less intense.  Conversely, when it comes to self-replicating entities that are potentially lethal on a large scale, our response on all levels will be vastly more serious, as we have seen since 9-11. 

I would describe our response to software pathogens as effective and successful.  Although they remain (and always will remain) a concern, the danger remains at a nuisance level.  Keep in mind that this success is in an industry in which there is no regulation, and no certification for practitioners.  This largely unregulated industry is also enormously productive.  One could argue that it has contributed more to our technological and economic progress than any other enterprise in human history.  

Some of the concerns that have been raised, such as Bill Joy’s article, are effective because they paint a picture of future dangers as if they were released on today’s unprepared world.  The reality is that the sophistication and power of our defensive technologies and knowledge will grow along with the dangers. 

The challenge most immediately in front of us is not self-replicating nanotechnology, but rather self-replicating biotechnology.  The next two decades will be the golden age of biotechnology, whereas the comparable era for nanotechnology will follow in the 2020s and beyond.  We are now in the early stages of a transforming technology based on the intersection of biology and information science.  We are learning the “software” methods of life and disease processes.  By reprogramming the information processes that lead to and encourage disease and aging, we will have the ability to overcome these afflictions.  However, the same knowledge can also empower a terrorist to create a bioengineered pathogen. 

As we compare the success we have had in controlling engineered software viruses to the coming challenge of controlling engineered biological viruses, we are struck with one salient difference.  As I noted, the software industry is almost completely unregulated.  The same is obviously not the case for biotechnology.  A bioterrorist does not need to put his “innovations” through the FDA.  However, we do require the scientists developing the defensive technologies to follow the existing regulations, which slow down the innovation process at every step.  Moreover, it is impossible, under existing regulations and ethical standards, to test defenses to bioterrorist agents on humans.  There is already extensive discussion to modify these regulations to allow for animal models and simulations to replace infeasible human trials.  This will be necessary, but I believe we will need to go beyond these steps to accelerate the development of vitally needed defensive technologies. 

With the human genome project, 3 to 5 percent of the budgets were devoted to the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of the technology.  A similar commitment for nanotechnology would be appropriate and constructive. 

Near-term applications of nanotechnology are far more limited in their benefits as well as more benign in their potential dangers.  These include developments in the materials area involving the addition of particles with multi-nanometer features to plastics, textiles, and other products.  These have perhaps the greatest potential in the area of pharmaceutical development by allowing new strategies for highly targeted drugs that perform their intended function and reach the appropriate tissues, while minimizing side effects.  This development is not qualitatively different than what we have been doing for decades in that many new materials involve constituent particles that are novel and of a similar physical scale.  The emerging nanoparticle technology provides more precise control, but the idea of introducing new nonbiological materials into the environment is hardly a new phenomenon.  We cannot say a priori that all nanoengineered particles are safe, nor would it be appropriate to deem them necessarily unsafe.  Environmental tests thus far have not shown reasons for undue concern, and it is my view that existing regulations on the safety of foods, drugs, and other materials in the environment are sufficient to deal with these near-term applications. 

The voices that are expressing concern about nanotechnology are the same voices that have expressed undue levels of concern about genetically modified organisms.  As with nanoparticles, GMO’s are neither inherently safe nor unsafe, and reasonable levels of regulation for safety are appropriate.  However, none of the dire warnings about GMO’s have come to pass.  Already, African nations, such as Zambia and Zimbabwe, have rejected vitally needed food aid under pressure from European anti-GMO activists.  The reflexive anti-technology stance that has been reflected in the GMO controversy will not be helpful in balancing the benefits and risks of nanoparticle technology. 

In summary, I believe that existing regulatory mechanisms are sufficient to handle near-term applications of nanotechnology.  As for the long term, we need to appreciate that a myriad of nanoscale technologies are inevitable.  The current examinations and dialogues on achieving the promise while ameliorating the peril are appropriate and will deserve sharply increased attention as we get closer to realizing these revolutionary technologies. 

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Written Testimony:

I am pleased to provide a more detailed written response to the issues raised by the committee.  In this written portion of my response, I address the following issues:

• Models of Technology Trends: A discussion of why nanotechnology and related advanced technologies are inevitable.  The underlying technologies are deeply integrated into our society and are advancing on many diverse fronts.

• A Small Sample of Examples of True Nanotechnology: a few of the implications of nanotechnology two to three decades from now.

• The Economic Imperatives of the Law of Accelerating Returns: the exponential advance of technology, including the accelerating miniaturization of technology, is driven by economic imperative, and, in turn, has a pervasive impact on the economy. 

• The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of Nanotechnology and Related Advanced Technologies: Technology is inherently a doubled-edged sword, and we will need to adopt strategies to encourage the benefits while ameliorating the risks.  Relinquishing broad areas of technology, as has been proposed, is not feasible and attempts to do so will only drive technology development underground, which will exacerbate the dangers. 
  

Models of Technology Trends

A diverse technology such as nanotechnology progresses on many fronts and is comprised of hundreds of small steps forward, each benign in itself.  An examination of these trends shows that technology in which the key features are measured in a small number of nanometers is inevitable.  I hereby provide some examples of my study of technology trends.

The motivation for this study came from my interest in inventing.  As an inventor in the 1970s, I came to realize that my inventions needed to make sense in terms of the enabling technologies and market forces that would exist when the invention was introduced, which would represent a very different world than when it was conceived.  I began to develop models of how distinct technologies – electronics, communications, computer processors, memory, magnetic storage, and the size of technology – developed and how these changes rippled through markets and ultimately our social institutions.   I realized that most inventions fail not because they never work, but because their timing is wrong.  Inventing is a lot like surfing, you have to anticipate and catch the wave at just the right moment.

In the 1980s, my interest in technology trends and implications took on a life of its own, and I began to use my models of technology trends to project and anticipate the technologies of future times, such as the year 2000, 2010, 2020, and beyond.  This enabled me to invent with the capabilities of the future.  In the late 1980s, I wrote my first book, The Age of Intelligent Machines, which ended with the specter of machine intelligence becoming indistinguishable from its human progenitors.  This book included hundreds of predictions about the 1990s and early 2000 years, and my track record of prediction has held up well.

During the 1990s I gathered empirical data on the apparent acceleration of all information-related technologies and sought to refine the mathematical models underlying these observations.  In The Age of Spiritual Machines (ASM), which I wrote in 1998, I introduced refined models of technology, and a theory I called “the law of accelerating returns,” which explained why technology evolves in an exponential fashion.

The Intuitive Linear View versus the Historical Exponential View

The future is widely misunderstood.  Our forebears expected the future to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past.  Although exponential trends did exist a thousand years ago, they were at that very early stage where an exponential trend is so flat and so slow that it looks like no trend at all.  So their lack of expectations was largely fulfilled.  Today, in accordance with the common wisdom, everyone expects continuous technological progress and the social repercussions that follow.  But the future will nonetheless be far more surprising than most observers realize because few have truly internalized the implications of the fact that the rate of change itself is accelerating.

Most long-range forecasts of technical feasibility in future time periods dramatically underestimate the power of future developments because they are based on what I call the “intuitive linear” view of history rather than the “historical exponential view.”  To express this another way, it is not the case that we will experience a hundred years of progress in the twenty-first century; rather we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress (at today’s rate of progress, that is).

When people think of a future period, they intuitively assume that the current rate of progress will continue for future periods.  Even for those who have been around long enough to experience how the pace increases over time, an unexamined intuition nonetheless provides the impression that progress changes at the rate that we have experienced recently.  From the mathematician’s perspective, a primary reason for this is that an exponential curve approximates a straight line when viewed for a brief duration.  It is typical, therefore, that even sophisticated commentators, when considering the future, extrapolate the current pace of change over the next 10 years or 100 years to determine their expectations.  This is why I call this way of looking at the future the “intuitive linear” view.

But a serious assessment of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential.  In exponential growth, we find that a key measurement such as computational power is multiplied by a constant factor for each unit of time (e.g., doubling every year) rather than just being added to incrementally.  Exponential growth is a feature of any evolutionary process, of which technology is a primary example.  One can examine the data in different ways, on different time scales, and for a wide variety of technologies ranging from electronic to biological, as well as social implications ranging from the size of the economy to human life span, and the acceleration of progress and growth applies.  Indeed, we find not just simple exponential growth, but “double” exponential growth, meaning that the rate of exponential growth is itself growing exponentially.  These observations do not rely merely on an assumption of the continuation of Moore’s law (i.e., the exponential shrinking of transistor sizes on an integrated circuit), but is based on a rich model of diverse technological processes.  What it clearly shows is that technology, particularly the pace of technological change, advances (at least) exponentially, not linearly, and has been doing so since the advent of technology, indeed since the advent of evolution on Earth.

Many scientists and engineers have what my colleague Lucas Hendrich calls “engineer’s pessimism.”  Often an engineer or scientist who is so immersed in the difficulties and intricate details of a contemporary challenge fails to appreciate the ultimate long-term implications of their own work, and, in particular, the larger field of work that they operate in.  Consider the biochemists in 1985 who were skeptical of the announcement of the goal of transcribing the entire genome in a mere 15 years.  These scientists had just spent an entire year transcribing a mere one ten-thousandth of the genome, so even with reasonable anticipated advances, it seemed to them like it would be hundreds of years, if not longer, before the entire genome could be sequenced.  Or consider the skepticism expressed in the mid 1980s that the Internet would ever be a significant phenomenon, given that it included only tens of thousands of nodes.  The fact that the number of nodes was doubling every year and there were, therefore, likely to be tens of millions of nodes ten years later was not appreciated by those who struggled with “state of the art” technology in 1985, which permitted adding only a few thousand nodes throughout the world in a year.

I emphasize this point because it is the most important failure that would-be prognosticators make in considering future trends.  The vast majority of technology forecasts and forecasters ignore altogether this “historical exponential view” of technological progress.  Indeed, almost everyone I meet has a linear view of the future.  That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).

The Law of Accelerating Returns

The ongoing acceleration of technology is the implication and inevitable result of what I call the “law of accelerating returns,” which describes the acceleration of the pace and the exponential growth of the products of an evolutionary process. This includes technology, particularly information-bearing technologies, such as computation.  More specifically, the law of accelerating returns states the following:

• Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage.  As a result, the rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time.  Over time, the “order” of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.

• A correlate of the above observation is that the “returns” of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall “power” of a process) increase exponentially over time.

• In another positive feedback loop, as a particular evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more effective (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed towards the further progress of that process.  This results in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially).

• Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process.

• Technological evolution is another such evolutionary process.  Indeed, the emergence of the first technology-creating species resulted in the new evolutionary process of technology.  Therefore, technological evolution is an outgrowth of – and a continuation of  –  biological evolution.

• A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential.  When this happens, a paradigm shift (a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue.

• Each paradigm follows an “S-curve,” which consists of slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth), followed by rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth), followed by a leveling off as the particular paradigm matures.

• During this third or maturing phase in the life cycle of a paradigm, pressure builds for the next paradigm shift.

• When the paradigm shift occurs, the process begins a new S-curve.

• Thus the acceleration of the overall evolutionary process proceeds as a sequence of S-curves, and the overall exponential growth consists of this cascade of S-curves.

• The resources underlying the exponential growth of an evolutionary process are relatively unbounded.

• One resource is the (ever-growing) order of the evolutionary process itself.  Each stage of evolution provides more powerful tools for the next.  In biological evolution, the advent of DNA allowed more powerful and faster evolutionary “experiments.”  Later, setting the “designs” of animal body plans during the Cambrian explosion allowed rapid evolutionary development of other body organs, such as the brain.  Or to take a more recent example, the advent of computer-assisted design tools allows rapid development of the next generation of computers.

• The other required resource is the “chaos” of the environment in which the evolutionary process takes place and which provides the options for further diversity.  In biological evolution, diversity enters the process in the form of mutations and ever- changing environmental conditions, including cosmological disasters (e.g., asteroids hitting the Earth).  In technological evolution, human ingenuity combined with ever-changing market conditions keep the process of innovation going.

If we apply these principles at the highest level of evolution on Earth, the first step, the creation of cells, introduced the paradigm of biology.  The subsequent emergence of DNA provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments.  Then, the evolution of a species that combined rational thought with an opposable appendage (the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology.  The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking.  This hybrid will include “biologically inspired” processes resulting from the reverse engineering of biological brains.

If we examine the timing of these steps, we see that the process has continuously accelerated.  The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated.  During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years.  Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years.

With the advent of a technology-creating species, the exponential pace became too fast for evolution through DNA-guided protein synthesis and moved on to human-created technology.  Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation, and is, thereby, an evolutionary process.  The first technological steps  — sharp edges, fire, the wheel – took tens of thousands of years.  For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years.  By 1000 AD, progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two.  In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it.  Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century.  Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time.  The World Wide Web did not exist in anything like its present form just a few years ago; it didn’t exist at all a decade ago.

The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially).  So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries.  In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 20 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates.  So the twenty-first century will see about a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.

Moore’s Law and Beyond

There is a wide range of technologies that are subject to the law of accelerating returns.  The exponential trend that has gained the greatest public recognition has become known as “Moore’s Law.” Gordon Moore, one of the inventors of integrated circuits, and then Chairman of Intel, noted in the mid-1970s that we could squeeze twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit every 24 months.  Given that the electrons have less distance to travel, the circuits also run twice as fast, providing an overall quadrupling of computational power.

However, the exponential growth of computing is much broader than Moore’s Law.

If we plot the speed (in instructions per second) per $1000 (in constant dollars) of 49 famous calculators and computers spanning the entire twentieth century, we note that there were four completely different paradigms that provided exponential growth in the price-performance of computing before the integrated circuits were invented.  Therefore, Moore’s Law was not the first, but the fifth paradigm to exponentially grow the power of computation.  And it won’t be the last.  When Moore’s Law reaches the end of its S-Curve, now expected before 2020, the exponential growth will continue with three-dimensional molecular computing, a prime example of the application of nanotechnology, which will constitute the sixth paradigm.

When I suggested in my book The Age of Spiritual Machines, published in 1999, that three-dimensional molecular computing, particularly an approach based on using carbon nanotubes, would become the dominant computing hardware technology in the teen years of this century, that was considered a radical notion.  There has been so much progress in the past four years, with literally dozens of major milestones having been achieved, that this expectation is now a mainstream view.

Moore’s Law Was Not the First, but the Fifth Paradigm to Provide Exponential Growth of Computing. Each time one paradigm runs out of steam, another picks up the pace

The exponential growth of computing is a marvelous quantitative example of the exponentially growing returns from an evolutionary process.  We can express the exponential growth of computing in terms of an accelerating pace: it took 90 years to achieve the first MIPS (million instructions per second) per thousand dollars; now we add one MIPS per thousand dollars every day.

Moore’s Law narrowly refers to the number of transistors on an integrated circuit of fixed size, and sometimes has been expressed even more narrowly in terms of transistor feature size.  But rather than feature size (which is only one contributing factor), or even number of transistors, I think the most appropriate measure to track is computational speed per unit cost.  This takes into account many levels of “cleverness” (i.e., innovation, which is to say, technological evolution).  In addition to all of the innovation in integrated circuits, there are multiple layers of innovation in computer design, e.g., pipelining, parallel processing, instruction look-ahead, instruction and memory caching, and many others.

The human brain uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital-controlled analog computational process.  The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits.  But the brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in three dimensions.  There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry in three dimensions.  Nanotubes, an example of nanotechnology, which is already working in laboratories, build circuits from pentagonal arrays of carbon atoms.  One cubic inch of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the human brain.  There are more than enough new computing technologies now being researched, including three-dimensional silicon chips, optical and silicon spin computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to keep the law of accelerating returns as applied to computation going for a long time.

As I discussed above, it is important to distinguish between the “S” curve (an “S” stretched to the right, comprising very slow, virtually unnoticeable growth – followed by very rapid growth – followed by a flattening out as the process approaches an asymptote) that is characteristic of any specific technological paradigm and the continuing exponential growth that is characteristic of the ongoing evolutionary process of technology.  Specific paradigms, such as Moore’s Law, do ultimately reach levels at which exponential growth is no longer feasible.  That is why Moore’s Law is an S curve.  But the growth of computation is an ongoing exponential (at least until we “saturate” the Universe with the intelligence of our human-machine civilization, but that will not be a limit in this coming century).  In accordance with the law of accelerating returns, paradigm shift, also called innovation, turns the S curve of any specific paradigm into a continuing exponential. A new paradigm (e.g., three-dimensional circuits) takes over when the old paradigm approaches its natural limit, which has already happened at least four times in the history of computation.  This difference also distinguishes the tool making of non-human species, in which the mastery of a tool-making (or using) skill by each animal is characterized by an abruptly ending S shaped learning curve, versus human-created technology, which has followed an exponential pattern of growth and acceleration since its inception.

DNA Sequencing, Memory, Communications, the Internet, and Miniaturization

This “law of accelerating returns” applies to all of technology, indeed to any true evolutionary process, and can be measured with remarkable precision in information-based technologies.  There are a great many examples of the exponential growth implied by the law of accelerating returns in technologies, as varied as DNA sequencing, communication speeds, brain scanning, electronics of all kinds, and even in the rapidly shrinking size of technology, which is directly relevant to the discussion at this hearing.  The future nanotechnology age results not from the exponential explosion of computation alone, but rather from the interplay and myriad synergies that will result from manifold intertwined technological revolutions.  Also, keep in mind that every point on the exponential growth curves underlying these panoply of technologies (see the graphs below) represents an intense human drama of innovation and competition.  It is remarkable therefore that these chaotic processes result in such smooth and predictable exponential trends.

As I noted above, when the human genome scan started fourteen years ago, critics pointed out that given the speed with which the genome could then be scanned, it would take thousands of years to finish the project.  Yet the fifteen year project was nonetheless completed slightly ahead of schedule.

Of course, we expect to see exponential growth in electronic memories such as RAM.

Notice How Exponential Growth Continued through Paradigm Shifts from Vacuum Tubes to Discrete Transistors to Integrated Circuits

However, growth in magnetic memory is not primarily a matter of Moore’s law, but includes advances in mechanical and electromagnetic systems.

Exponential growth in communications technology has been even more explosive than in computation and is no less significant in its implications.  Again, this progression involves far more than just shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit, but includes accelerating advances in fiber optics, optical switching, electromagnetic technologies, and others.

Notice Cascade of “S” Curves

Note that in the above chart we can actually see the progression of “S” curves: the acceleration fostered by a new paradigm, followed by a leveling off as the paradigm runs out of steam, followed by renewed acceleration through paradigm shift.

The following two charts show the overall growth of the Internet based on the number of hosts (server computers).  These two charts plot the same data, but one is on an exponential axis and the other is linear.  As I pointed out earlier, whereas technology progresses in the exponential domain, we experience it in the linear domain.  So from the perspective of most observers, nothing was happening until the mid 1990s when seemingly out of nowhere, the World Wide Web and email exploded into view.  But the emergence of the Internet into a worldwide phenomenon was readily predictable much earlier by examining the exponential trend data.

Notice how the explosion of the Internet appears to be a surprise from the Linear Chart, but was perfectly predictable from the Exponential Chart

The most relevant trend to this hearing, and one that will have profound implications for the twenty-first century is the pervasive trend towards making things smaller, i.e., miniaturization.  The salient implementation sizes of a broad range of technologies, both electronic and mechanical, are shrinking, also at a double-exponential rate.  At present, we are shrinking technology by a factor of approximately 5.6 per linear dimension per decade.

A Small Sample of Examples of True Nanotechnology

Ubiquitous nanotechnology is two to three decades away.  A prime example of its application will be to deploy billions of “nanobots”: small robots the size of human blood cells that can travel inside the human bloodstream.  This notion is not as futuristic as it may sound in that there have already been successful animal experiments using this concept . There are already four major conferences on “BioMEMS” (Biological Micro Electronic Mechanical Systems) covering devices in the human blood stream.

Consider several examples of nanobot technology, which, based on miniaturization and cost reduction trends, will be feasible within 30 years.  In addition to scanning the human brain to facilitate human brain reverse engineering, these nanobots will be able to perform a broad variety of diagnostic and therapeutic functions inside the bloodstream and human body.  Robert Freitas, for example, has designed robotic replacements for human blood cells that perform hundreds or thousands of times more effectively than their biological counterparts.  With Freitas’ “respirocytes,” (robotic red blood cells), you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath.  His robotic macrophages will be far more effective than our white blood cells at combating pathogens.  His DNA repair robot would be able to repair DNA transcription errors, and even implement needed DNA changes.  Although Freitas’ conceptual designs are two or three decades away, there has already been substantial progress on bloodstream-based devices.  For example, one scientist has cured type I Diabetes in rats with a nanoengineered device that incorporates pancreatic Islet cells.  The device has seven- nanometer pores that let insulin out, but block the antibodies which destroy these cells.  There are many innovative projects of this type already under way.

Clearly, nanobot technology has profound military applications, and any expectation that such uses will be “relinquished” are highly unrealistic.  Already, DOD is developing “smart dust,” which are tiny robots the size of insects or even smaller.  Although not quite nanotechnology, millions of these devices can be dropped into enemy territory to provide highly detailed surveillance.  The potential application for even smaller, nanotechnology-based devices is even greater.  Want to find Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden?  Need to locate hidden weapons of mass destruction?  Billions of  essentially invisible spies could monitor every square inch of enemy territory, identify every person and every weapon, and even carry out missions to destroy enemy targets.  The only way for an enemy to counteract such a force is, of course, with their own nanotechnology.  The point is that nanotechnology-based weapons will obsolete weapons of larger size.

In addition, nanobots will also be able to expand our experiences and our capabilities.  Nanobot technology will provide fully immersive, totally convincing virtual reality in the following way.  The nanobots take up positions in close physical proximity to every interneuronal connection coming from all of our senses (e.g., eyes, ears, skin).  We already have the technology for electronic devices to communicate with neurons in both directions that requires no direct physical contact with the neurons.  For example, scientists at the Max Planck Institute have developed “neuron transistors” that can detect the firing of a nearby neuron, or alternatively, can cause a nearby neuron to fire, or suppress it from firing.  This amounts to two-way communication between neurons and the electronic-based neuron transistors.  The Institute scientists demonstrated their invention by controlling the movement of a living leech from their computer.  Again, the primary aspect of nanobot-based virtual reality that is not yet feasible is size and cost.

When we want to experience real reality, the nanobots just stay in position (in the capillaries) and do nothing.  If we want to enter virtual reality, they suppress all of the inputs coming from the real senses, and replace them with the signals that would be appropriate for the virtual environment.  You (i.e., your brain) could decide to cause your muscles and limbs to move as you normally would, but the nanobots again intercept these interneuronal signals, suppress your real limbs from moving, and instead cause your virtual limbs to move and provide the appropriate movement and reorientation in the virtual environment.

The Web will provide a panoply of virtual environments to explore.  Some will be recreations of real places, others will be fanciful environments that have no “real” counterpart.  Some indeed would be impossible in the physical world (perhaps, because they violate the laws of physics).  We will be able to “go” to these virtual environments by ourselves, or we will meet other people there, both real people and simulated people.  Of course, ultimately there won’t be a clear distinction between the two.

By 2030, going to a web site will mean entering a full-immersion virtual-reality environment.  In addition to encompassing all of the senses, these shared environments can include emotional overlays as the nanobots will be capable of triggering the neurological correlates of emotions, sexual pleasure, and other derivatives of our sensory experience and mental reactions.

In the same way that people today beam their lives from web cams in their bedrooms, “experience beamers” circa 2030 will beam their entire flow of sensory experiences, and if so desired, their emotions and other secondary reactions.  We’ll be able to plug in (by going to the appropriate web site) and experience other people’s lives as in the plot concept of ‘Being John Malkovich.’  Particularly interesting experiences can be archived and relived at any time.

We won’t need to wait until 2030 to experience shared virtual-reality environments, at least for the visual and auditory senses.  Full-immersion visual-auditory environments will be available by the end of this decade, with images written directly onto our retinas by our eyeglasses and contact lenses.  All of the electronics for the computation, image reconstruction, and very high bandwidth wireless connection to the Internet will be embedded in our glasses and woven into our clothing, so computers as distinct objects will disappear.

In my view, the most significant implication of the development of nanotechnology and related advanced technologies of the 21st century will be the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence.  First, it is important to point out that well before the end of the twenty-first century, thinking on nonbiological substrates will dominate.  Biological thinking is stuck at 1026 calculations per second (for all biological human brains), and that figure will not appreciably change, even with bioengineering changes to our genome.  Nonbiological intelligence, on the other hand, is growing at a double-exponential rate and will vastly exceed biological intelligence well before the middle of this century.  However, in my view, this nonbiological intelligence should still be considered human as it is fully derivative of the human-machine civilization.  The merger of these two worlds of intelligence is not merely a merger of biological and nonbiological thinking mediums, but more importantly one of method and organization of thinking.

One of the key ways in which the two worlds can interact will be through  nanobots.  Nanobot technology will be able to expand our minds in virtually any imaginable way.  Our brains today are relatively fixed in design.  Although we do add patterns of interneuronal connections and neurotransmitter concentrations as a normal part of the learning process, the current overall capacity of the human brain is highly constrained, restricted to a mere hundred trillion connections.  Brain implants based on massively distributed intelligent nanobots will ultimately expand our memories a trillion fold, and otherwise vastly improve all of our sensory, pattern recognition, and cognitive abilities.  Since the nanobots are communicating with each other over a wireless local area network, they can create any set of new neural connections, can break existing connections (by suppressing neural firing), can create new hybrid biological-nonbiological networks, as well as add vast new nonbiological networks.

Using nanobots as brain extenders is a significant improvement over the idea of surgically installed neural implants, which are beginning to be used today (e.g., ventral posterior nucleus, subthalmic nucleus, and ventral lateral thalamus neural implants to counteract Parkinson’s Disease and tremors from other neurological disorders, cochlear implants, and others.) Nanobots will be introduced without surgery, essentially just by injecting or even swallowing them.  They can all be directed to leave, so the process is easily reversible.  They are programmable, in that they can provide virtual reality one minute, and a variety of brain extensions the next.  They can change their configuration, and clearly can alter their software.  Perhaps most importantly, they are massively distributed and therefore can take up billions or trillions of positions throughout the brain, whereas a surgically introduced neural implant can only be placed in one or at most a few locations.

The Economic Imperatives of the Law of Accelerating Returns

It is the economic imperative of a competitive marketplace that is driving technology forward and fueling the law of accelerating returns.  In turn, the law of accelerating returns is transforming economic relationships.

The primary force driving technology is economic imperative.  We are moving towards nanoscale machines, as well as more intelligent machines, as the result of a myriad of small advances, each with their own particular economic justification.

To use one small example of many from my own experience at one of my companies (Kurzweil Applied Intelligence), whenever we came up with a slightly more intelligent version of speech recognition, the new version invariably had greater value than the earlier generation and, as a result, sales increased.  It is interesting to note that in the example of speech recognition software, the three primary surviving competitors stayed very close to each other in the intelligence of their software.  A few other companies that failed to do so (e.g., Speech Systems) went out of business.  At any point in time, we would be able to sell the version prior to the latest version for perhaps a quarter of the price of the current version.  As for versions of our technology that were two generations old, we couldn’t even give those away.

There is a vital economic imperative to create smaller and more intelligent technology.  Machines that can more precisely carry out their missions have enormous value.  That is why they are being built.  There are tens of thousands of projects that are advancing the various aspects of the law of accelerating returns in diverse incremental ways.  Regardless of near-term business cycles, the support for “high tech” in the business community, and in particular for software advancement, has grown enormously.  When I started my optical character recognition (OCR) and speech synthesis company (Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc.) in 1974, high-tech venture deals totaled approximately $10 million.  Even during today’s high tech recession, the figure is 100 times greater.  We would have to repeal capitalism and every visage of economic competition to stop this progression.

The economy (viewed either in total or per capita) has been growing exponentially throughout this century:

Note that the underlying exponential growth in the economy is a far more powerful force than periodic recessions.  Even the “Great Depression” represents only a minor blip compared to the underlying pattern of growth.  Most importantly, recessions, including the depression, represent only temporary deviations from the underlying curve.  In each case, the economy ends up exactly where it would have been had the recession/depression never occurred.

Productivity (economic output per worker) has also been growing exponentially.  Even these statistics are greatly understated because they do not fully reflect significant improvements in the quality and features of products and services.  It is not the case that “a car is a car;” there have been significant improvements in safety, reliability, and features.  Certainly, $1000 of computation today is immeasurably more powerful than $1000 of computation ten years ago (by a factor of more than1000).  There are a myriad of such examples.  Pharmaceutical drugs are increasingly effective.  Products ordered in five minutes on the web and delivered to your door are worth more than products that you have to fetch yourself.  Clothes custom-manufactured for your unique body scan are worth more than clothes you happen to find left on a store rack.  These sorts of improvements are true for most product categories, and none of them are reflected in the productivity statistics.

The statistical methods underlying the productivity measurements tend to factor out gains by essentially concluding that we still only get one dollar of products and services for a dollar despite the fact that we get much more for a dollar (e.g., compare a $1,000 computer today to one ten years ago).  University of Chicago Professor Pete Klenow and University of Rochester Professor Mark Bils estimate that the value of existing goods has been increasing at 1.5% per year for the past 20 years because of qualitative improvements.  This still does not account for the introduction of entirely new products and product categories (e.g., cell phones, pagers, pocket computers).  The Bureau of Labor Statistics, which is responsible for the inflation statistics, uses a model that incorporates an estimate of quality growth at only 0.5% per year, reflecting a systematic underestimate of quality improvement and a resulting overestimate of inflation by at least 1 percent per year.

Despite these weaknesses in the productivity statistical methods, the gains in productivity are now reaching the steep part of the exponential curve.  Labor productivity grew at 1.6% per year until 1994, then rose at 2.4% per year, and is now growing even more rapidly.  In the quarter ending July 30, 2000, labor productivity grew at 5.3%.  Manufacturing productivity grew at 4.4% annually from 1995 to 1999, durables manufacturing at 6.5% per year.

The 1990s have seen the most powerful deflationary forces in history. This is why we are not seeing inflation.  Yes, it’s true that low unemployment, high asset values, economic growth, and other such factors are inflationary, but these factors are offset by the double-exponential trends in the price-performance of all information-based technologies: computation, memory, communications, biotechnology, miniaturization, and even the overall rate of technical progress. These technologies deeply affect all industries.  We are also undergoing massive disintermediation in the channels of distribution through the Web and other new communication technologies, as well as escalating efficiencies in operations and administration.

All of the technology trend charts above represent massive deflation.  There are many examples of the impact of these escalating efficiencies.  BP Amoco’s cost for finding oil is now less than $1 per barrel, down from nearly $10 in 1991.  Processing an Internet transaction costs a bank one penny, compared to over $1 using a teller ten years ago.  A Roland Berger/Deutsche Bank study estimates a cost savings of $1200 per North American car over the next five years.  A more optimistic Morgan Stanley study estimates that Internet-based procurement will save Ford, GM, and DaimlerChrysler about $2700 per vehicle.

It is important to point out that a key implication of nanotechnology is that it will bring the economics of software to hardware, i.e., to physical products.  Software prices are deflating even more quickly than hardware.

Software Price-Performance Has Also Improved at an Exponential Rate (Example: Automatic Speech Recognition Software)

	1985	1995	2000
Price	$5,000	$500	$50
Vocabulary Size (# words)	1,000	10,000	100,000
Continuous Speech?	No	No	Yes
User Training Required (Minutes)	180	60	5
Accuracy	Poor	Fair	Good

Current economic policy is based on outdated models that include energy prices, commodity prices, and capital investment in plant and equipment as key driving factors, but do not adequately model the size of technology, bandwidth, MIPs, megabytes, intellectual property, knowledge, and other increasingly vital (and increasingly increasing) constituents that are driving the economy.

Another indication of the law of accelerating returns in the exponential growth of human knowledge, including intellectual property.  If we look at the development of intellectual property within the nanotechnology field, we see even more rapid growth.

None of this means that cycles of recession will disappear immediately.  Indeed there is a current economic slowdown and a technology-sector recession.  The economy still has some of the underlying dynamics that historically have caused cycles of recession, specifically excessive commitments such as over-investment, excessive capital intensive projects and the overstocking of inventories.  However, the rapid dissemination of information, sophisticated forms of online procurement, and increasingly transparent markets in all industries have diminished the impact of this cycle.  So “recessions” are likely to have less direct impact on our standard of living. The underlying long-term growth rate will continue at a double exponential rate.

Moreover, innovation and the rate of paradigm shift are not noticeably affected by the minor deviations caused by economic cycles.  All of the technologies exhibiting exponential growth shown in the above charts are continuing without losing a beat through this economic slowdown.

The overall growth of the economy reflects completely new forms and layers of wealth and value that did not previously exist, or least that did not previously constitute a significant portion of the economy (but do now): new forms of nanoparticle-based materials, genetic information, intellectual property, communication portals, web sites, bandwidth, software, data bases, and many other new technology-based categories.

Another implication of the law of accelerating returns is exponential growth in education and learning.  Over the past 120 years, we have increased our investment in K-12 education (per student and in constant dollars) by a factor of ten.  We have a one hundred fold increase in the number of college students.  Automation started by amplifying the power of our muscles, and in recent times has been amplifying the power of our minds.  Thus, for the past two centuries, automation has been eliminating jobs at the bottom of the skill ladder while creating new (and better paying) jobs at the top of the skill ladder.  So the ladder has been moving up, and thus we have been exponentially increasing investments in education at all levels.

The Deeply Intertwined Promise and Peril of Nanotechnology and Related Advanced Technologies

Technology has always been a double-edged sword, bringing us longer and healthier life spans, freedom from physical and mental drudgery, and many new creative possibilities on the one hand, while introducing new and salient dangers on the other.  Technology empowers both our creative and destructive natures.  Stalin’s tanks and Hitler’s trains used technology.  We still live today with sufficient nuclear weapons (not all of which appear to be well accounted for) to end all mammalian life on the planet.  Bioengineering is in the early stages of enormous strides in reversing disease and aging processes.  However, the means and knowledge will soon exist in a routine college bioengineering lab (and already exists in more sophisticated labs) to create unfriendly pathogens more dangerous than nuclear weapons.  As technology accelerates towards the full realization of biotechnology, nanotechnology and “strong” AI (artificial intelligence at human levels and beyond), we will see the same intertwined potentials: a feast of creativity resulting from human intelligence expanded many-fold combined with many grave new dangers.

Consider unrestrained nanobot replication.  Nanobot technology requires billions or trillions of such intelligent devices to be useful.  The most cost-effective way to scale up to such levels is through self-replication, essentially the same approach used in the biological world.  And in the same way that biological self-replication gone awry (i.e., cancer) results in biological destruction, a defect in the mechanism curtailing nanobot self-replication would endanger all physical entities, biological or otherwise. I address below steps we can take to address this grave risk, but we cannot have complete assurance in any strategy that we devise today.

Other primary concerns include “who is controlling the nanobots?” and “who are the nanobots talking to?”  Organizations (e.g., governments, extremist groups) or just a clever individual could put trillions of undetectable nanobots in the water or food supply of an individual or of an entire population.  These “spy” nanobots could then monitor, influence, and even control our thoughts and actions.  In addition to introducing physical spy nanobots, existing nanobots could be influenced through software viruses and other software “hacking” techniques.  When there is software running in our brains, issues of privacy and security will take on a new urgency.

My own expectation is that the creative and constructive applications of this technology will dominate, as I believe they do today.  However, I believe we need to invest more heavily in developing specific defensive technologies.  As I address further below, we are at this stage today for biotechnology, and will reach the stage where we need to directly implement defensive technologies for nanotechnology during the late teen years of this century.

If we imagine describing the dangers that exist today to people who lived a couple of hundred years ago, they would think it mad to take such risks.  On the other hand, how many people in the year 2000 would really want to go back to the short, brutish, disease-filled, poverty-stricken, disaster-prone lives that 99 percent of the human race struggled through a couple of centuries ago?  We may romanticize the past, but up until fairly recently, most of humanity lived extremely fragile lives where one all-too-common misfortune could spell disaster.   Substantial portions of our species still live in this precarious way, which is at least one reason to continue technological progress and the economic enhancement that accompanies it.

People often go through three stages in examining the impact of future technology: awe and wonderment at its potential to overcome age old problems; then a sense of dread at a new set of grave dangers that accompany these new technologies; followed, finally and hopefully, by the realization that the only viable and responsible path is to set a careful course that can realize the promise while managing the peril.

This congressional hearing was party inspired by Bill Joy’s cover story for Wired magazine, Why The Future Doesn’t Need Us.  Bill Joy, cofounder of Sun Microsystems and principal developer of the Java programming language, has recently taken up a personal mission to warn us of the impending dangers from the emergence of self-replicating technologies in the fields of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics, which he aggregates under the label “GNR.”  Although his warnings are not entirely new, they have attracted considerable attention because of Joy’s credibility as one of our leading technologists.  It is reminiscent of the attention that George Soros, the currency arbitrager and arch capitalist, received when he made vaguely critical comments about the excesses of unrestrained capitalism .

Joy’s concerns include genetically altered designer pathogens, followed by self-replicating entities created through nanotechnology. And  if we manage to survive these first two perils, we will encounter robots whose intelligence will rival and ultimately exceed our own. Such robots may make great assistants, but who’s to say that we can count on them to remain reliably friendly to mere humans?

Although I am often cast as the technology optimist who counters Joy’s pessimism, I do share his concerns regarding self-replicating technologies; indeed, I played a role in bringing these dangers to Bill’s attention. In many of the dialogues and forums in which I have participated on this subject, I end up defending Joy’s position with regard to the feasibility of these technologies and scenarios when they come under attack by commentators who I believe are being quite shortsighted in their skepticism. Even so, I do find fault with Joy’s prescription: halting the advance of technology and the pursuit of knowledge in broad fields such as nanotechnology.

In his essay, Bill Joy eloquently described the plagues of centuries past and how new self-replicating technologies, such as mutant bioengineered pathogens and “nanobots” run amok, may bring back long-forgotten pestilence.  Indeed these are real dangers.  It is also the case, which Joy acknowledges, that it has been technological advances, such as antibiotics and improved sanitation, which have freed us from the prevalence of such plagues.  Suffering in the world continues and demands our steadfast attention.  Should we tell the millions of people afflicted with cancer and other devastating conditions that we are canceling the development of all bioengineered treatments because there is a risk that these same technologies may someday be used for malevolent purposes?  Having asked the rhetorical question, I realize that there is a movement to do exactly that, but I think most people would agree that such broad-based relinquishment is not the answer.

The continued opportunity to alleviate human distress is one important motivation for continuing technological advancement.  Also compelling are the already apparent economic gains I discussed above that will continue to hasten in the decades ahead.  The continued acceleration of many intertwined technologies are roads paved with gold (I use the plural here because technology is clearly not a single path).  In a competitive environment, it is an economic imperative to go down these roads.  Relinquishing technological advancement would be economic suicide for individuals, companies, and nations.

The Relinquishment Issue

This brings us to the issue of relinquishment, which is Bill Joy’s most controversial recommendation and personal commitment.   I do feel that relinquishment at the right level is part of a responsible and constructive response to these genuine perils.  The issue, however, is exactly this: at what level are we to relinquish technology?

Ted Kaczynski would have us renounce all of it.  This, in my view, is neither desirable nor feasible, and the futility of such a position is only underscored by the senselessness of Kaczynski’s deplorable tactics.  There are other voices, less reckless than Kaczynski, who are nonetheless arguing for broad-based relinquishment of technology.  Bill McKibben, the environmentalist who was one of the first to warn against global warming, takes the position that “environmentalists must now grapple squarely with the idea of a world that has enough wealth and enough technological capability, and should not pursue more.”  In my view, this position ignores the extensive suffering that remains in the human world, which we will be in a position to alleviate through continued technological progress.

Another level would be to forego certain fields — nanotechnology, for example — that might be regarded as too dangerous.  But such sweeping strokes of relinquishment are equally untenable.  As I pointed out above, nanotechnology is simply the inevitable end result of the persistent trend towards miniaturization that pervades all of technology.  It is far from a single centralized effort, but is being pursued by a myriad of projects with many diverse goals.

One observer wrote:

“A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed. . . is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another.  You can’t get rid of the “bad” parts of technology and retain only the “good” parts.  Take modern medicine, for example.  Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields.  Advanced medical treatments require expensive, high-tech equipment that can be made available only by a technologically progressive, economically rich society.  Clearly you can’t have much progress in medicine without the whole technological system and everything that goes with it.”

The observer I am quoting is, again, Ted Kaczynski.  Although one will properly resist Kaczynski as an authority, I believe he is correct on the deeply entangled nature of the benefits and risks.  However, Kaczynski and I clearly part company on our overall assessment on the relative balance between the two.  Bill Joy and I have dialogued on this issue both publicly and privately, and we both believe that technology will and should progress, and that we need to be actively concerned with the dark side.  If Bill and I disagree, it’s on the granularity of relinquishment that is both feasible and desirable.

Abandonment of broad areas of technology will only push them underground where development would continue unimpeded by ethics and regulation.  In such a situation, it would be the less-stable, less-responsible practitioners (e.g., terrorists) who would have all the expertise.

I do think that relinquishment at the right level needs to be part of our ethical response to the dangers of 21st century technologies.  One constructive example of this is the proposed ethical guideline by the Foresight Institute, founded by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, that nanotechnologists agree to relinquish the development of physical entities that can self-replicate in a natural environment.  Another is a ban on self-replicating physical entities that contain their own codes for self-replication.  In what nanotechnologist Ralph Merkle calls the “broadcast architecture,” such entities would have to obtain such codes from a centralized secure server, which would guard against undesirable replication.  I discuss these guidelines further below.

The broadcast architecture is impossible in the biological world, which represents at least one way in which nanotechnology can be made safer than biotechnology.  In other ways, nanotech is potentially more dangerous because nanobots can be physically stronger than protein-based entities and more intelligent.  It will eventually be possible to combine the two by having nanotechnology provide the codes within biological entities (replacing DNA), in which case biological entities can use the much safer broadcast architecture.  I comment further on the strengths and weaknesses of the broadcast architecture below.

As responsible technologies, our ethics should include such “fine-grained” relinquishment, among other professional ethical guidelines.  Other protections will need to include oversight by regulatory bodies, the development of technology-specific “immune” responses, as well as computer assisted surveillance by law enforcement organizations.  Many people are not aware that our intelligence agencies already use advanced technologies such as automated word spotting to monitor a substantial flow of telephone conversations.  As we go forward, balancing our cherished rights of privacy with our need to be protected from the malicious use of powerful 21st century technologies will be one of many profound challenges.  This is one reason that such issues as an encryption “trap door” (in which law enforcement authorities would have access to otherwise secure information) and the FBI “Carnivore” email-snooping system have been controversial, although these controversies have abated since 9-11-2001.

As a test case, we can take a small measure of comfort from how we have dealt with one recent technological challenge.  There exists today a new form of fully nonbiological self replicating entity that didn’t exist just a few decades ago: the computer virus.  When this form of destructive intruder first appeared, strong concerns were voiced that as they became more sophisticated, software pathogens had the potential to destroy the computer network medium they live in.  Yet the “immune system” that has evolved in response to this challenge has been largely effective.  Although destructive self-replicating software entities do cause damage from time to time, the injury is but a small fraction of the benefit we receive from the computers and communication links that harbor them.  No one would suggest we do away with computers, local area networks, and the Internet because of software viruses.

One might counter that computer viruses do not have the lethal potential of biological viruses or of destructive nanotechnology.  This is not always the case; we rely on software to monitor patients in critical care units, to fly and land airplanes, to guide intelligent weapons in our current campaign in Iraq, and other “mission-critical” tasks.  To the extent that this is true, however, this observation only strengthens my argument.  The fact that computer viruses are not usually deadly to humans only means that more people are willing to create and release them.  It also means that our response to the danger is that much less intense.  Conversely, when it comes to self-replicating entities that are potentially lethal on a large scale, our response on all levels will be vastly more serious, as we have seen since 9-11.

I would describe our response to software pathogens as effective and successful.  Although they remain (and always will remain) a concern, the danger remains at a nuisance level.  Keep in mind that this success is in an industry in which there is no regulation, and no certification for practitioners.  This largely unregulated industry is also enormously productive.  One could argue that it has contributed more to our technological and economic progress than any other enterprise in human history.   I discuss the issue of regulation further below.

Development of Defensive Technologies and the Impact of Regulation

Joy’s treatise is effective because he paints a picture of future dangers as if they were released on today’s unprepared world.  The reality is that the sophistication and power of our defensive technologies and knowledge will grow along with the dangers.  When we have “gray goo” (unrestrained nanobot replication), we will also have “blue goo” (“police” nanobots that combat the “bad” nanobots).  The story of the 21st century has not yet been written, so we cannot say with assurance that we will successfully avoid all misuse.  But the surest way to prevent the development of the defensive technologies would be to relinquish the pursuit of knowledge in broad areas.  We have been able to largely control harmful software virus replication because the requisite knowledge is widely available to responsible practitioners.  Attempts to restrict this knowledge would have created a far less stable situation.  Responses to new challenges would have been far slower, and it is likely that the balance would have shifted towards the more destructive applications (e.g., software viruses).

The challenge most immediately in front of us is not self-replicating nanotechnology, but rather self-replicating biotechnology.  The next two decades will be the golden age of biotechnology, whereas the comparable era for nanotechnology will follow in the 2020s and beyond.  We are now in the early stages of a transforming technology based on the intersection of biology and information science.  We are learning the “software” methods of life and disease processes.  By reprogramming the information processes that lead to and encourage disease and aging, we will have the ability to overcome these afflictions.  However, the same knowledge can also empower a terrorist to create a bioengineered pathogen.

As we compare the success we have had in controlling engineered software viruses to the coming challenge of controlling engineered biological viruses, we are struck with one salient difference.  As I noted above, the software industry is almost completely unregulated.  The same is obviously not the case for biotechnology.  A bioterrorist does not need to put his “innovations” through the FDA.  However, we do require the scientists developing the defensive technologies to follow the existing regulations, which slow down the innovation process at every step.  Moreover, it is impossible, under existing regulations and ethical standards, to test defenses to bioterrorist agents.  There is already extensive discussion to modify these regulations to allow for animal models and simulations to replace infeasible human trials.  This will be necessary, but I believe we will need to go beyond these steps to accelerate the development of vitally needed defensive technologies.

For reasons I have articulated above, stopping these technologies is not feasible, and pursuit of such broad forms of relinquishment will only distract us from the vital task in front of us.  In terms of public policy, the task at hand is to rapidly develop the defensive steps needed, which include ethical standards, legal standards, and defensive technologies.  It is quite clearly a race.  As I noted, in the software field, the defensive technologies have remained a step ahead of the offensive ones.  With the extensive regulation in the medical field slowing down innovation at each stage, we cannot have the same confidence with regard to the abuse of biotechnology.

In the current environment, when one person dies in gene therapy trials, there are congressional investigations and all gene therapy research comes to a temporary halt.  There is a legitimate need to make biomedical research as safe as possible, but our balancing of risks is completely off.  The millions of people who desperately need the advances to be made available by gene therapy and other breakthrough biotechnology advances appear to carry little political weight against a handful of well-publicized casualties from the inevitable risks of progress.

This equation will become even more stark when we consider the emerging dangers of bioengineered pathogens.  What is needed is a change in public attitude in terms of tolerance for needed risk.

Hastening defensive technologies is absolutely vital to our security.  We need to streamline regulatory procedures to achieve this.  However, we also need to greatly increase our investment explicitly in the defensive technologies.  In the biotechnology field, this means the rapid development of antiviral medications.  We will not have time to develop specific countermeasures for each new challenge that comes along.  We are close to developing more generalized antiviral technologies, and these need to be accelerated.

I have addressed here the issue of biotechnology because that is the threshold and challenge that we now face.  The comparable situation will exist for nanotechnology once replication of nano-engineered entities has been achieved.  As that threshold comes closer, we will then need to invest specifically in the development of defensive technologies, including the creation of a nanotechnology-based immune system.  Bill Joy and other observers have pointed out that such an immune system would itself be a danger because of the potential of “autoimmune” reactions (i.e., the immune system using its powers to attack the world it is supposed to be defending).

However, this observation is not a compelling reason to avoid the creation of an immune system.  No one would argue that humans would be better off without an immune system because of the possibility of auto immune diseases.  Although the immune system can itself be a danger, humans would not last more than a few weeks (barring extraordinary efforts at isolation) without one.  The development of a technological immune system for nanotechnology will happen even without explicit efforts to create one.  We have effectively done this with regard to software viruses.  We created a software virus immune system not through a formal grand design project, but rather through our incremental responses to each new challenge.  We can expect the same thing will happen as challenges from nanotechnology based dangers emerge.  The point for public policy will be to specifically invest in these defensive technologies.

It is premature today to develop specific defensive nanotechnologies since we can only have a general idea of what we are trying to defend against.  It would be similar to the engineering world creating defenses against software viruses before the first one had been created.  However, there is already fruitful dialogue and discussion on anticipating this issue, and significantly expanded investment in these efforts is to be encouraged.

As I mentioned above, the Foresight Institute, for example, has devised a set of ethical standards and strategies for assuring the development of safe nanotechnology.  These guidelines include:

• “Artificial replicators must not be capable of replication in a natural, uncontrolled environment.”

• “Evolution within the context of a self-replicating manufacturing system is discouraged.”

• “MNT (molecular nanotechnology) designs should specifically limit proliferation and provide traceability of any replicating systems.”

• “Distribution of molecular manufacturing development capability should be restricted whenever possible, to responsible actors that have agreed to the guidelines.  No such restriction need apply to end products of the development process.”

Other strategies that the Foresight Institute has proposed include:

• Replication should require materials not found in the natural environment.

• Manufacturing (replication) should be separated from the functionality of end products.  Manufacturing devices can create end products, but cannot replicate themselves, and end products should have no replication capabilities.

• Replication should require replication codes that are encrypted, and time limited.  The broadcast architecture mentioned earlier is an example of this recommendation.

These guidelines and strategies are likely to be effective with regarding to preventing accidental release of dangerous self-replicating nanotechnology entities.  The situation with regard to intentional design and release of such entities is more complex and more challenging.  We can anticipate approaches that would have the potential to defeat each of these layers of protections by a sufficiently determined and destructive opponent.

Take, for example, the broadcast architecture.  When properly designed, each entity is unable to replicate without first obtaining replication codes.  These codes are not passed on from one replication generation to the next.  However, a modification to such a design could bypass the destruction of the replication codes and thereby pass them on to the next generation.  To overcome that possibility, it has been recommended that the memory for the replication codes be limited to only a subset of the full replication code so that there is insufficient memory to pass the codes along.  However, this guideline could be defeated by expanding the size of the replication code memory to incorporate the entire code.  Another protection that has been suggested is to encrypt the codes and to build in protections such as time expiration limitations in the decryption systems.  However, we can see the ease with which protections against unauthorized replications of intellectual property such as music files has been defeated.  Once replication codes and protective layers are stripped away, the information can be replicated without these restrictions.

My point is not that protection is impossible.  Rather, we need to realize that any level of protection will only work to a certain level of sophistication.  The “meta” lesson here is that we will need to continue to advance the defensive technologies, and keep them one or more steps ahead of the destructive technologies.  We have seen analogies to this in many areas, including technologies for national defense, as well as our largely successful efforts to combat software viruses, that I alluded to above.

What we can do today with regard to the critical challenge of self-replication in nanotechnology is to continue the type of effective study that the Foresight Institute has initiated.  With the human genome project, three to five percent of the budgets were devoted to the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of the technology.  A similar commitment for nanotechnology would be appropriate and constructive.

Technology will remain a double-edged sword, and the story of the 21st century has not yet been written.  It represents vast power to be used for all humankind’s purposes.  We have no choice but to work hard to apply these quickening technologies to advance our human values, despite what often appears to be a lack of consensus on what those values should be.

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More at KurzweilAI Network.

Heuristics is “a method of problem solving using exploration and trial and error methods”. A heuristic (pronounced hyu-RIS-tik and from the Greek “heuriskein” meaning “to discover”) is a “rule-of-thumb.” The following article is reposted from The Edge.

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Smart Heuristics

Gerd Gigerenzer

At the beginning of the 20th century the father of modern science fiction, Herbert George Wells, said in his writings on politics, “If we want to have an educated citizenship in a modern technological society, we need to teach them three things: reading, writing, and statistical thinking.” At the beginning of the 21st century, how far have we gotten with this program? In our society, we teach most citizens reading and writing from the time they are children, but not statistical thinking. John Alan Paulos has called this phenomenon innumeracy.

There are many stories documenting this problem. For instance, there was the weather forecaster who announced on American TV that if the probability that it will rain on Saturday is 50 percent and the probability that it will rain on Sunday is 50 percent, the probability that it will rain over the weekend is 100 percent. In another recent case reported by New Scientist an inspector in the Food and Drug Administration visited a restaurant in Salt Lake City famous for its quiches made from four fresh eggs. She told the owner that according to FDA research every fourth egg has salmonella bacteria, so the restaurant should only use three eggs in a quiche. We can laugh about these examples because we easily understand the mistakes involved, but there are more serious issues. When it comes to medical and legal issues, we need exactly the kind of education that H. G. Wells was asking for, and we haven’t gotten it.

What interests me is the question of how humans learn to live with uncertainty. Before the scientific revolution determinism was a strong ideal. Religion brought about a denial of uncertainty, and many people knew that their kin or their race was exactly the one that God had favored. They also thought they were entitled to get rid of competing ideas and the people that propagated them. How does a society change from this condition into one in which we understand that there is this fundamental uncertainty? How do we avoid the illusion of certainty to produce the understanding that everything, whether it be a medical test or deciding on the best cure for a particular kind of cancer, has a fundamental element of uncertainty?

For instance, I’ve worked with physicians and physician-patient associations to try to teach the acceptance of uncertainty and the reasonable way to deal with it. Take HIV testing as an example. Brochures published by the Illinois Department of Health say that testing positive for HIV means that you have the virus. Thus, if you are an average person who is not in a particular risk group but test positive for HIV, this might lead you to choose to commit suicide, or move to California, or do something else quite drastic. But AIDS information in many countries is running on the illusion of certainty. The actual situation is rather like this: If you have about 10,000 people who are in no risk group, one of them will have the virus, and will test positive with practical certainty. Among the other 9,999, another one will test positive, but it’s a false positive. In this case we have two who test positive, although only one of them actually has the virus. Knowing about these very simple things can prevent serious disasters, of which there is unfortunately a record.

Still, medical societies, individual doctors, and individual patients either produce the illusion of certainty or want it. Everyone knows Benjamin Franklin’s adage that there is nothing certain in this world except death and taxes, but the doctors I interviewed tell me something different. They say, “If I would tell my patients what we don’t know, they would get very nervous, so it’s better not to tell them.” Thus, this is one important area in which there is a need to get people — including individual doctors or lawyers in court — to be mature citizens and to help them understand and communicate risks.

Representation of information is important. In the case of many so-called cognitive illusions, the problem results from difficulties that arise from getting along with probabilities. The problem largely disappears the moment you give the person the information in natural frequencies. You basically put the mind back in a situation where it’s much easier to understand these probabilities. We can prove that natural frequencies can facilitate actual computations, and have known for a long time that representations — whether they be probabilities, frequencies or odds — have an impact on the human mind. There are very few theories about how this works.

I’ll give you a couple examples relating to medical care. In the U.S. and many European countries, women who are 40 years old are told to participate in mammography screening. Say that a woman takes her first mammogram and it comes out positive. She might ask the physician, “What does that mean? Do I have breast cancer? Or are my chances of having it 99%, 95%, or 90% ­ or only 50%? What do we know at this point?” I have put the same question to radiologists who have done mammography screening for 20 or 25 years, including chiefs of departments. A third said they would tell this woman that, given a positive mammogram, her chance of having breast cancer is 90%.

However, what happens when they get additional relevant information? The chance that a woman in this age group has cancer is roughly1%. If a woman has breast cancer, the probability that she will test positive on a mammogram is 90%. If a woman does not have breast cancer the probability that she nevertheless tests positive is some 9%. In technical terms you have a base rate of 1%, a sensitivity or hit rate of 90%, and a false positive rate of about 9%. So, how do you answer this woman who’s just tested positive for cancer? As I just said, about a third of the physicians thinks it’s 90%, another third thinks the answer should be something between 50% and 80%, and another third thinks the answer is between 1% and 10%. Again, these are professionals with many years of experience. It’s hard to imagine a larger variability in physicians’ judgments — between 1% and 90% — and if patients knew about this variability, they would not be very happy. This situation is typical of what we know from laboratory experiments: namely, that when people encounter probabilities — which are technically conditional probabilities — their minds are clouded when they try to make an inference.

What we do is to teach these physicians tools that change the representation so that they can see through the problem. We don’t send them to a statistics course, since they wouldn’t have the time to go in the first place, and most likely they wouldn’t understand it because they would be taught probabilities again. But how can we help them to understand the situation?

Let’s change the representation using natural frequencies, as if the physician would have observed these patients him- or herself. One can communicate the same information in the following, much more simple way. Think about 100 women. One of them has breast cancer. This was the 1%. She likely tests positive; that’s the 90%. Out of 99 who do not have breast cancer another 9 or 10 will test positive. So we have one in 9 or 10 who tests positive. How many of them actually has cancer? One out of ten. That’s not 90%, that’s not 50%, that’s one out of ten.

Here we have a method that enables physicians to see through the fog just by changing the representation, turning their innumeracy into insight. Many of these physicians have carried this innumeracy around for decades and have tried to hide it. When we interview them, they obviously admit it, saying, “I don’t know what to do with these numbers. I always confuse these things.” Here we have a chance to use very simple tools to help those patients and physicians to understand what the risks are and which enable them to have a reasonable reaction to what to do. If you take the perspective of a patient — that this test means that there is a 90% chance you have cancer — you can imagine what emotions set in, emotions that do not help her to reason the right way. But informing her that only one out of ten women who tests positive actually has cancer would help her to have a cooler attitude and to make more reasonable decisions.

Prostate cancer is another disease for which we have good data. In the U.S. and European countries doctors advise men aged 40 to 50 to take a PSA test. This is a prostate cancer test that is very simple, requiring just a bit of blood, and so many people do it. The interesting thing is that most of the men I’ve talked to have no idea of the benefits and costs of this test. It’s an example of decision-making based on trusting your doctor or on rumors. But interestingly, if you read about the test on the Internet in independent medical societies like Cochran.com, or read the reports of various physicians’ agencies who give recommendations for screening, then you find out that the benefits and costs of prostate cancer screening are roughly the following: Mortality reduction is the usual goal of medical testing, yet there’s no proof that prostate cancer screening reduces mortality. On the other hand there is proof that, if we distinguish between people who do not have prostate cancer and those who do, there is a good likelihood that it will do harm. The test produces a number of false positives. If you do it often enough there’s a good chance of getting a high level on the test, a so-called positive result, even though you don’t have cancer. It’s like a car alarm that goes off all the time.

For those who actually have cancer, surgery can result in incontinence or impotence, which are serious consequences that stay with you for the rest of your life. For that reason, the U.S. Preventive Services task force says very clearly in a report that men should not participate in PSA screening because there is no proof in mortality reduction, only likely harm.

It is very puzzling that in a country where a 12-year-old knows baseball statistics, adults don’t know the simplest statistics about tests, diseases, and the consequences that may cause them serious damage. Why is this? One reason, of course, is that the cost benefit computations for doctors are not the same as for patients. One cannot simply accuse doctors of knowing things or not caring about patients, but a doctor has to face the possibility that if he or she doesn’t advise someone to participate in the PSA test and that person gets prostate cancer, then the patient may turn up at his doorstep with a lawyer. The second thing is that doctors are members of a community with professional pride, and for many of them not detecting a cancer is something they don’t want to have on their records. Third, there are groups of doctors who have very clear financial incentives to perform certain procedures. A good doctor would explain this to a patient but leave the decision to the patient. Many patients don’t see this situation in which doctors find themselves, but most doctors will recommend the test.

But who knows? Autopsy studies show that one out of three or one out of four men who die a natural death have prostate cancer. Everyone has some cancer cells. If everyone underwent PSA testing and cancer were detected, then these poor guys would spend the last years or decades of their lives living with severe bodily injury. These are very simple facts.

Thus, dealing with probabilities also relates to the issue of understanding the psychology of how we make rational decisions. According to decision theory, rational decisions are made according to the so-called expected utility calculus, or some variant thereof. In economics, for instance, the idea is that if you make an important decision — whom to marry or what stock to buy, for example — you look at all the consequences of each decision, attach a probability to these consequences, attach a value, and sum them up, choosing the optimal, highest expected value or expected utility. This theory, which is very widespread, maintains that people behave in this way when they make their decisions. The problem is that we know from experimental studies that people don’t behave this way.

There is a nice story that illustrates the whole conflict: A famous decision theorist who once taught at Columbia got an offer from a rival university and was struggling with the question of whether to stay where he was or accept the new post. His friend, a philosopher, took him aside and said, “What’s the problem? Just do what you write about and what you teach your students. Maximize your expected utility.” The decision theorist, exasperated, responded, “Come on, get serious!”

Decisions can often be modeled by what I call fast and frugal heuristics. Sometimes they’re faster, and sometimes they’re more frugal. Deciding which of two jobs to take, for instance, may involve consequences that are incommensurate from the point of view of the person making the decision. The new job may give you more money and prestige, but it might leave your children in tears, since they don’t want to move for fear that they would lose their friends. Some economists may believe that you can bring everything in the same common denominator, but others can’t do this. A person could end up making a decision for one dominant reason.

We make decisions based on a bounded rationality, not the unbounded rationality of the decision maker modeled after an omniscient god. But bounded rationality is also not of one kind. There is a group of economists, for example, who look at the bounds or constraints in the environment that affect how a decision is made. This study is called “optimization under constraints,” and many Nobel prizes have been awarded in this area. Using the concept of bounded rationality from this perspective you realize that an organism has neither unlimited resources nor unlimited time. So one asks, given these constraints what’s the optimal solution?

There’s a second group, which doesn’t look at bounds in the environment but at bounds in the mind. These include many psychologists and behavioral economists who find that people often take in only limited information, and sometimes make decisions based on just one or two criteria. But these colleagues don’t analyze the environmental influences on the task. They think that for a priori reasons people make bad choices because of a bias, an error, or a fallacy. They look at constraints in the mind.

Neither of these concepts takes advantage of what the human mind takes advantage of: that the bounds in the mind are not unrelated to the bounds in the environment. The bounds get together. Herbert Simon developed a wonderful analogy based on a pair of scissors, where one blade is cognition and the other is the structure of the environment, or the task. You only understand how human behavior functions if you look at both sides.

Evolutionary thinking gives us a useful framework for asking some interesting questions that are not often posed. For instance, when I look at a certain heuristic — like when people make a decision based on one good reason while ignoring all others — I must ask in what environmental structures that heuristic works, and where it does not work. This is a question about ecological rationale, about the adaptation of heuristics, and it is very different from what we see in the study of cognitive illusions in social psychology and of judgment decision-making, where any kind of behavior that suggests that people ignore information, or just use one or two pieces of information, is coded as a bias. That approach is non-ecological; that is, it doesn’t relate the mind to its environment.

An important future direction in cognitive science is to understand that human minds are embedded in an environment. This is not the usual way that many psychologists, and of course many economists, think about it. There are many psychological theories about what’s in the mind, and there may be all kinds of computations and motives in the mind, but there’s very little ecological thinking about what certain cognitive strategies or emotions do for us, and what problems they solve. One of the visions I have is to understand not only how cognitive heuristics work, and in which environments it is smart to use them, but also what role emotions play in our judgment. We have gone through a kind of liberation in the last years. There are many books, by Antonio Damasio and others, that make a general claim that emotions are important for cognitive functions, and are not just there to interrupt, distract, or mislead you. Actually, emotions can do certain things that cognitive strategies can’t do, but we have very little understanding of exactly how that works.

To give a simple example, imagine Homo economicus in mate search, trying to find a woman to marry. According to standard theory Homo economicus would have to find out all the possible options and all the possible consequences of marrying each one of them. He would also look at the probabilities of various consequences of marrying each of them — whether the woman would still talk to him after they’re married, whether she’d take care of their children, whatever is important to him — and the utilities of each of these. Homo economicus would have to do tons of research to avoid just coming up with subjective probabilities, and after many years of research he’d probably find out that his final choice had already married another person who didn’t do these computations, and actually just fell in love with her.

Herbert Simon’s idea of satisfying solves that problem. A satisfier, searching for a mate, would have an aspiration level. Once this aspiration is met, as long as it is not too high, he will find the partner and the problem is solved. But satisfying is also a purely cognitive mechanism. After you make your choice you might see someone come around the corner who looks better, and there’s nothing to prevent you from dropping your wife or your husband and going off with the next one.

Here we see one function of emotions. Love, whether it be romantic love or love for our children, helps most of us to create a commitment necessary to make us stay with and take care of our spouses and families. Emotions can perform functions that are similar to those that cognitive building blocks of heuristics perform. Disgust, for example, keeps you from eating lots of things and makes food choice much simpler, and other emotions do similar things. Still, we have very little understanding of how decision theory links with the theory of emotion, and how we develop a good vocabulary of building blocks necessary for making decisions. This is one direction in which it is important to investigate in the future.

Another simple example of how heuristics are useful can be seen in the following thought experiment: Assume you want to study how players catch balls that come in from a high angle — like in baseball, cricket, or soccer — because you want to build a robot that can catch them. The traditional approach, which is much like optimization under constraints, would be to try to give your robot the complete representation of its environment and the most expensive computation machinery you can afford. You might feed your robot a family of parabolas because thrown balls have parabolic trajectories, with the idea that the robot needs to find the right parabola in order to catch the ball. Or you feed him measurement instruments that can measure the initial distance, the initial velocity, and the initial angle the ball was thrown or kicked. You’re still not done because in the real world balls are not flying parabolas, so you need instruments that can measure the direction and the speed of the wind at each point of the ball’s flight to calculate its final trajectory and its spin. It’s a very hard problem, but this is one way to look at it.

A very different way to approach this is to ask if there is a heuristic that a player could actually use to solve this problem without making any of these calculations, or only very few. Experimental studies have shown that actual players use a quite simple heuristic that I call the gaze heuristic. When a ball comes in high, a player starts running and fixates his eyes on the ball. The heuristic is that you adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze, the angle between the eye and the ball, remains constant. If you make the angle constant the ball will come down to you and it will catch you, or at least it will hit you. This heuristic only pays attention to one variable, the angle of gaze, and can ignore all the other causal, relevant variables and achieve the same goal much faster, more frugally, and with less chances for error.

This illustrates that we can do the science of calculation by looking always at what the mind does — the heuristics and the structures of environments — and how minds change the structures of environments. In this case the relationship between the ball and one’s self is turned into a simple linear relationship on which the player acts. This is an example of a smart heuristic, which is part of the adaptive tool box that has evolved in humans. Many of these heuristics are also present in animals. For instance, a recent study showed that when dogs catch frisbees they use the same gaze heuristic.

Heuristics are also useful in very important practical ways relating to economics. To illustrate I’ll give you a short story about our research on a heuristic concerning the stock market. One very smart and simple heuristic is called the recognition heuristic. Here is a demonstration: Which of the following two cities has more inhabitants — Hanover or Bielefeld? I pick these two German cities assuming that you don’t know very much about Germany. Most people will think it’s Hanover because they have never heard of Bielefeld, and they’re right. However, if I pose the same question to Germans, they are insecure and don’t know which to choose. They’ve heard of both of them and try to recall information. The same thing can be done in reverse. We have done studies with Daniel Gray Goldstein in which we ask Americans which city has more inhabitants — San Diego or San Antonio? About two-thirds of my former undergraduates at the University of Chicago got the right answer: San Diego. Then we asked German students — who know much less about San Diego and many of whom had never even heard of San Antonio — the same question. What proportion of the German students do you think got the answer right? In our study, a hundred percent. They hadn’t heard of San Antonio, so they picked San Diego. This is an interesting case of a smart heuristic, where people with less knowledge can do better than people with more. The reason this works is because in the real world there is a correlation between name recognition and things like populations. You have heard of a city because there is something happening there. It’s not an indicator of certainty, but it’s a good stimulus.

In my group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development I work alongside a spectrum of researchers, several of whom are economists, who work on the same topics but ask a different kind of question. They say, “That’s all fine that you can demonstrate that you can get away with less knowledge, but can the recognition heuristic make money?” In order to answer this question we did a large study with the American and German stock markets, involving both lay people and students of business and finance in both countries. We went to downtown Chicago and interviewed several hundred pedestrians. We gave them a list of stocks and asked them one question: Have you ever heard of this stock? Yes or no? Then we took the ten percent of the stocks that had the highest recognition, which were all stocks in the Standard & Poor’s Index, put them in the portfolio and let them go for half a year. As a control, we did the same thing with the same American pedestrians with German stocks. In this case they had heard of very few of them. As a third control we had German pedestrians in downtown Munich perform the same recognition ratings with German and American stocks. The question in this experiment is not how much money the portfolio makes, but whether it makes more money than some standards, of which we had four. One consisted of randomly picked stocks, which is a tough standard. A second one contained the least-recognized stocks, which is according to the theory an important standard, and shouldn’t do as well. In the third we had blue chip funds, like Fidelity II. And in the last we had the market — the Dow and its German equivalent. We let this run for six months, and after six months the portfolios containing the highest recognized stocks by ordinary people outperformed the randomly picked stocks, the low recognition stocks, and in six out of eight cases the market and the mutual funds.

Although this was an interesting study, one should of course be cautious, because unlike in other experimental and real world studies, we have a variable and very random environment. But what this study at least showed is that the recognition of ordinary citizens can actually beat out the performance of the market and other important criteria. The empirical evidence, of course — the background — is consumer behavior. In many situations when people in a supermarket choose between products they go with the item with name recognition. Advertising by companies like Benetton exploits the use of the recognition heuristic. They give us no information about the product, but only increase name recognition. It has been a very successful strategy for the firm.

Of course the reaction to this study, which is published in our book Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart, has split the experts in two camps. One group said this can’t be true, that it’s all wrong, or it could never be replicated. Among them were financial advisers, who certainly didn’t like the results. Another group of people said, “This is no surprise. I knew it all along. The stock market’s all rumor, recognition, and psychology.” Meanwhile, we have replicated these studies several times and found the same advantage of recognition — in bull and bear market — and also found that recognition among those who knew less did best of all in our studies.

I would like to share these ideas with many others, to use psychological research, and to use what we know about how to facilitate people’s understanding of uncertainties to help to promote this old dream about getting an educated citizenship that can deal with uncertainties, rather than denying their existence. Understanding the mind as a tool that tries to live in an uncertain world is an important challenge.

Copyright 2003 by The Edge

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Gerd Gigerenzer is Director of the Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and former Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He won the AAAS Prize for the best article in the behavioral sciences. He is the author of Calculated Risks: How To Know When Numbers Deceive You, the German translation of which won the Scientific Book of the Year Prize in 2002. He has also published two academic books on heuristics, Simple Heuristics That Make Us Smart (with Peter Todd & The ABC Research Group) and Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox (with Reinhard Selten, a Nobel laureate in economics).

I am currently reading Darwin’s Children. The following article by the same author is reposted from Greg Bear.com.

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The New Biology

Greg Bear

The revelation that the human genome consists of about thirty thousand genes, and that more than two thirds of these are alternate splicing genes, which code for more than one protein, and sometimes many more, puts the final nail in the coffin of reductionist views of evolution and genetics. Stephen Jay Gould said as much in his opinion piece in the February 19, 2002 New York TIMES:

“The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology…”

Dogma after dogma has fallen in biology in the last thirty years. The central dogma-that one gene produces only one protein-died in the last decade with the discovery of alternate splicing. (Genes also produce other, non-protein products, such as ribosomal RNAs.) The sidebar to this dogma, which claims that DNA is read-only-implying that the genetic material changes only through random mutations, not through insertion or rearrangement of genetic material-collapsed some time ago with the discovery of mobile genetic elements such as transposons and retroviruses. Nevertheless, the Central Dogma is still mentioned, nostalgically, sometimes almost reverently, in new textbooks.

RNA editing after transcription, and before translation, in mitochondria and elsewhere shatters the assertion that DNA is the final blueprint of proteins. Interchange of genes between mitochondrial and nuclear DNA poses real problems for those who advocate the total dominance of DNA templates in translation to proteins. Genes, it appears, migrate in many different ways, and for many different reasons. To ascribe all this activity to random accident or undirected molecular impulse is simply obtuse.

The evolutionary relationship between some retrotransposons, the so-called “jumping genes” first discovered in corn by Barbara McClintock, and many retroviruses has been firmly established.

One-generation gross changes in morphology, reacting to environmental stimulus, has been conclusively demonstrated in water fleas, arabidopsis, and other organisms(i). Evidence of massive gene exchange in bacteria and archaea blurs any chance of establishing a useful evolutionary tree for these microbes.

It’s been estimated that thousands of human endogenous retroviruses lie semi-dormant in our genome. They emerge in swarms in the placentas of pregnant women, but have not yet been shown to be transmitted laterally, that is, by infection, from individual to individual. I suspect that barrier will soon be broken, as well, leading to the possibility that some viruses operate as species-level retroviral infections, over tens of thousands or millions of years.

In one monograph on viruses(ii) published by the Santa Fe Institute, the editor goes so far as to suggest that we start thinking of viruses not as invariably pathogenic alien intruders, but as an extension of “self.” Viruses can act as emissaries shuttling information between cells and between organisms. This is demonstrably true for phages in bacteria, and is now apparent in metazoans, even humans. Non-pathogenic viruses flood our tissues, and the ocean is filled with phages. Evocative? You bet. Are these viruses diseases, or commensals, or both?

In 2000 NATURE published an article(iii) suggesting that an ancient viral gene facilitates implantation of human embryos in the womb. Similar viral genes perform similar functions in other mammals. This suggests that genes from any source can become an indispensable part of an organism’s genetic tool-kit.

The addition of a third color in the vision of great apes and humans bears the suspicious marker of retrogene duplication of an existing gene, which can be described as a random event only with great difficulty(iv) .

There are many traits being discovered that are passed to offspring not through the nuclear genes, but through cellular components, including maternal mitochondria, surface proteins, and prions.

Prions in yeast may serve a regulatory or innovation function in creating new proteins by allowing read-throughs across open reading frames.

The unfortunate aspect of the rancorous debate on evolution in the last seventy or more years has been the fossilization of hypotheses. One side says “God and God only,” the other says, “Random mutations and natural selection and nothing more.” Both are likely wrong. A third variety of “intelligent design” has long been awaiting our attention.

In my novel, Darwin’s Radio, published in spring of 1999, the vector of evolutionary change is an infectious human endogenous retrovirus-an idea derived from the curiously self-directing and self-regulating evolution of bacteria through gene exchange by phages and plasmids.

My hypothesis: through communication by pheromones, viruses, and sexuality, and through incorporation, selection, and editing of complexes of genes by a linguistically based and computational DNA, the genomes of individuals become part of an extensive, species-scale neural network that solves problems on a much vaster scale than science has ever anticipated.

Proposed changes in morphology are communicated through sexual activity and retroviruses and stored up in populations in a genetic “set-aside” area within each individual. A library of records of past adaptations is used to “judge” new phenotypic proposals within the genome, individually and across the species. Possible variations are selected and edited extensively based on evidence culled from the environment by the immune system. (The sophistication of the immune system has inspired some scientists to refer to it as another brain.)

The decision within a species to produce a new type of organism, or subtly modify aspects of an old one, is made using genomic rules we have yet to understand, but which are likely similar to the rules that also allow clusters of neurons, including brains, to solve problems that confront organisms in the environment.

Potential and real pathways for all these interactions have been shown to exist.

When environmental challenges arise, morphological changes are enacted in “suites” of mutually advantageous mutations. To avoid contaminating older populations, or to avoid being contaminated by them, speciation occurs, and the new organisms are allowed to compete as a more isolated breeding population in the arena of nature.

Thus, speciation can occur in bursts rather than over geological time, leading to “punctuated equilibrium.” In many instances, gentler modifications occur, within geologically separated populations that, for a time at least, can still interbreed. Evolution is hardly a one-trick pony-or dog!

A species-level network is also closely tied to larger networked systems, ecologies. Ecologies “recruit” and even alter species over remarkably short periods of time, pointing toward evolutionary collaborations between co-dependent species that would have been thought ridiculous in the recent past. Such recruiting and adaptation has little to do with natural selection per se, though of course the environment, and survival, are the final arbiters of the resulting designs.

A conference of molecular biologists held in 1998 reached conclusions similar to mine. Their papers were published in 1999 in a thick report edited by conference chair Lynn Caporale, Molecular Strategies in Biological Evolution, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, V. 870.

I have been invited to discuss these possibilities with biologists, most recently at the After the Genome Conference in Tucson, Arizona, chaired by Roger Brent of the Molecular Sciences Institute. There I met with biologists, computer programmers and engineers from MIT and a number of private companies who are being recruited to examine the nature of computational DNA, and to provide clues as to where to look next. While I do not claim that these scientists share all of my views, the discussion was open and very stimulating. The revolution is well under way.

Some refer to this burgeoning new view as “systems biology.” For many conservatives in biology, the changes are heartbreaking, even infuriating. But the evidence has been mounting for decades, and clear signs of the necessity for radical change has been evident for over fifty years. Arthur Koestler fought reductionism in psychology and biology from the 1950s to his death.

We’re facing a true paradigm shift. Is that surprising? Did anyone actually believe we had all the answers to something as marvelous and complex as life and evolution?

That organisms exchange genes through other than sexual means is now irrefutable for metazoans as well as microbes. Retroviruses, and now perhaps bacteria, may well serve as vectors for such exchanges. Commensal bacteria in our intestines commonly interact with our tissues. Surprisingly, there appear to be mechanisms in most organisms for evaluating and either destroying or utilizing RNA from outside sources, including retroviral sources. This evaluation process is extremely important, and understanding it may be key to understanding how the genome works in both individuals and in populations.

The “selfish gene” is certainly a valid concept in some instances, but not in the vast majority. Rather, because genes rely on interaction with many other genes-hundreds in some cases-to be effective, they are less like competitive rogues than tame office-workers. The “social gene” becomes a better model. And in fact the social aspects of the genome have been championed for decades by brave molecular biologists and geneticists, including Lynn Margulis.

Altruism in societies is well demonstrated, and rationally quite defensible. That genes operate in their own societies, and that species both compete and collaborate in those larger societies called ecosystems, functioning as nodes in an extended neural net, makes the problem of cooperation and altruism far more tractable.

Random processes are also at work in evolution, quite clearly, leading to either uncorrected errors or serendipitous discovery-but I do not think that we can any longer support random mutation as the sole cause or even the major cause of variation. Darwin himself deliberately avoided subscribing to chance as the sole cause of variation, thus leaving the actual cause to be discovered in the future. Later generations leaped in well before the facts were available, and cemented the hypothesis, slowing the pace of biological discovery by actively discouraging alternatives.

A similar reductionist slow-down happened in psychology with Behaviorism, whose central tenets are now largely discredited.

It is likely that medical research could have made more progress in combating retroviruses such as HIV if we had been less attached to near-religious dogmas, more willing to play with new hypotheses in the face of experimental evidence. The paucity of hypotheses in biological science may be something of an intellectual crime, perpetrated by academics protecting their own fiefdoms against assault by barbarian unbelievers-hardly an atmosphere in which to raise and tutor new generations of biologists.

These bills are now coming due. Careers and reputations are about to be massively re-evaluated, and new careers are about to be established, correcting the failures and misconceptions of the past, and perhaps correcting some unfortunate aspects of the culture of medicine and biology.

This is the way science should work, rather than stubbornly defending demonstrably incorrect dogmas, or trying to correct them with endless epicycles based on vague concepts. “Emergent properties,” “complexity,” and other buzzwords arouse my suspicions because they could serve to hide our ignorance of the basic processes at work in cells, organisms, and throughout nature-processes very similar to the processes in our own brains. These processes involve the encoding of information in morphologically based neural networks, where the “neural nodes” can range from genes to organisms in a species to species in ecosystems, and the use of that information to alter patterns structure and behavior.

To be sure, the theories behind neural networks remain unfinished and difficult at best, and there’s much work left to be done. A key question is whether genetic processes are formally describable, as some systems biologists believe, or more closely related to natural languages, as some computer programmers believe.

Information theory will be a rich lode for the exploration of all these topics, but must be used in the right way-and that way, frankly, is not at all clear at the moment. We understand far less about the users of information, and how information is converted into anatomy in living systems, than we do about how information is transported.

The debate on this is going to be enjoyably fierce, and we are going to encounter many more roadblocks in understanding how life works until these matters are resolved, or new and better questions are asked.

But we know the brain works. We know that ants and bees cooperate to solve problems beyond the individual. We know that bacteria form complex communities, social groupings, as in biofilms, to take advantage of resources or face environmental challenges. Community interaction and problem-solving seems to be a key behavior in nature, as important as competition.

What most researchers are seeing, around the world, is this: Too few genes, too much interaction, too much intergenomic activity, and rapid adaptation, much of it, perhaps most of it, highly regulated and organized.

As Lynn Caporale has pointed out, even evolution itself has evolved! And now it is much more efficient and directed than it was, say, in Archaean times. This may explain the immense lag between the first cells and complex organisms: learning how to evolve effectively!

There may indeed be teleological and intelligently directed evolution, but we do not need to blame it on God. DNA itself may be creative, and in its own way, goal-seeking and problem-solving.

This allows evolution to proceed in a more rational fashion, and explains much of what has been observed in the fossil record, and nearly all of what has been observed in living organisms.

Time and good science will tell. As always.

Copyright 2002 by Greg Bear

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(i) Nature 401, 60 – 63 (1999), Transgenerational induction of defences in animals and plants, Anurag A. Agrawal, Christian LaForsch, Ralph Tollrian Observations of morphological variations in Daphnia go back to Woltereck in 1908. See also S. Dodson, Predator-induced reaction norms, BioScience 39, 447-452.

(ii) VIRAL REGULATORY STRUCTURES AND THEIR DEGENERACY, edited by Gerald Myers, 1998, Addison/Wesley-Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, vol XXVIII, page 2.

(iii) Nature 403, Number 6771 785 – 789 (2000) Syncytin is a captive retroviral envelope protein involved in human placental morphogenesis , SHA MI, XINHUA LEE, et al.

(iv) PROTEIN EVOLUTION, by Laszlo Patthy, Blackwell Science, 1999. Patthay discusses work by Yokoyama and Yokoyama, Molecular evolution of visual pigment genes etc., in Population Biology of Genes and Molecules, eds. Takahata and Crow.

Reposted from Awakening Earth.

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A Centering Vision

Duane Elgin

In 1992, over 1600 scientists, including a majority of the living Nobel laureates in the sciences, signed a Warning to Humanity. Together they warned that “human beings and the natural world are on a collision course” and said that, “A great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”

An unyielding ecological challenge confronts humanity with a deeper challenge–that of building a future together that is: sustainable–in harmony with the Earth’s physical ecology; satisfying–in harmony with others or the social ecology; and soulful–in harmony with the spiritual ecology. Where can we look for guidance in imagining such a pathway into the future? Are there deep “design principles” built into the universe? Is evolution “going somewhere?” Is there a “central project” that can mobilize the cooperation and creativity of the human family? Are these the “right” questions? For example, should our concern be with a “centering process” instead of “central project?”

Evolutionary Insights from Nature

An arbitrary or artificially constructed central project will not have the power to draw us together as a species. Therefore, we need to explore the depths of nature’s wisdom if we are to discover our most authentic direction and aligning purpose for moving into the future. Our challenge is to not fight against the natural world, but to look at nature with an open mind to discover the evolutionary pathway that is most in accord with nature’s preexisting intentions. If we fight against nature, we will ultimately be struggling against ourselves–and our evolutionary journey will be one of frustration, stalemate, and alienation. If we cooperate with nature, we will be serving our deepest essence and character–and our journey will be one of joyful flow and rewarding experience.

The most direct way to learn about our evolutionary direction is by inspecting nature’s designs expressed throughout the physical universe. Wherever we look in the natural world there is a pervasive “signature” or “organizing pattern” that reveals the presence of self-referencing and self-organizing systems. At every level of the universe, we find nature building self-referencing and self-organizing systems– from the microscopic realm of atoms, through the middle-scale of human experience, and then on to the galactic scale.

The characteristic physical structure of self-organizing systems is the “torus” or a donut shaped pattern that is continuously regenerated (as in a tornado). The torus is the simplest geometry of a dynamically self-organizing system–and this easily recognizable form can be seen at every level of the cosmos.

Figure 1: The Torus as the Most Comon Shape
Found Throughout Nature

Earth’s Magnetic Field

Air Circulation in a Tornado

Magnetic Field Around a Person

Curvature of Space Around a Black Hole

Cross-Section of an Orange

Magnetic Field Around a Spiral Galaxy

If throughout nature, we find a characteristic structure that is being pervasively replicated or regenerated at every scale, then it points to a deeper dynamic at work: The universe has its own “central project”–that of growing self-referencing and self-organizing systems throughout. Therefore, if we want to choose an evolutionary direction that is most congruent with nature’s deepest intentions, it will involve developing our species-potential for self-organizing and self-referencing systems at every scale–from the personal to the planetary. But what does this mean? Self-organizing systems have a number of unique properties that can help us discern the “natural” direction of evolution throughout the cosmos:

Identity. A self-organizing system requires a center around which, and through which, life-energy can flow. A self-organizing system is self-creating and therefore must be able to reflect upon itself and continually “get ahold of itself.”

Conscious. A self-organizing system has a reflective capacity appropriate to its nature. With self-organizing systems present throughout the cosmos at every scale, it implies that consciousness must also be pervasively present throughout the cosmos.

Freedom. In order to be self-creating, we must exist in a context of great freedom. Quantum cosmology describes our existence as probabilistic, not deterministic. Freedom is present at the very foundations of existence. We can create ourselves any way that we want without arbitrary interference from the universe.

Paradoxical attributes. Self-organizing systems are both static/dynamic (flowing systems that appear to be stable structures); open/closed (continuously opening to the flow-through of energy and continuously closing into an identifiable entity); and unique/integrated (uniquely manifesting themselves at each moment while being completely immersed within and connected to other systems).

Community. Systems grow in concert with other systems in a mutually supportive process of co-evolution. Communities of free beings/systems are the building blocks of existence.

Emergence. Surprising potentials emerge as communities of self-organizing systems grow to higher levels of integration (e.g., from atoms to molecules to organisms to whole beings). We cannot to predict the nature of the new organism (or organization) that will emerge from synergistic combination of smaller systems.

Enlarged experiences. An expanded scope of community self-organization support new levels of existence and experience for members of that community. We can enlarge and deepen our life-experience by co-evolving whole new orders of systems with others. By becoming a global species, we dramatically enlarge and deepen our potentials as individuals.

The universe does seem to have a central project–that of growing self-referencing systems that are able to combine into larger synergistic communities that offer ever more opportunity for learning and expression in a context of ever-broadening freedom. This systems view of the idea of “a central project for humanity” is exciting because it generates as many questions as insights, and so invites a broader and deeper inquiry into our evolutionary direction and intention.

Humanity’s Central Project

What of humanity? Do we have a central project? Our very name refers to our central project. Humanity’s scientific designation is as homo sapiens sapiens. To be “sapient” is to be wise, but we are more than that–we are “sapient sapient” which means to be doubly wise. It has often been remarked that where animals “know,” only humans “know that they know.” One way of describing our highest potential as a species is our ability to achieve full self-reflective consciousness or the double-wisdom of “knowing that we know.” This is not a utopian agenda for humanity–with self-reflective consciousness we can become self-directing agents of the co-evolution of our global culture.

When we combine nature’s wisdom and humanity’s wisdom, the core evolutionary direction seems to be summed up in the phrase, “to be of soul-growing service.” In the words of the Dalai Lama, “The aim of the awakening mind is twofold–to attain enlightenment and to benefit all sentient beings.” Profound service to others and profound awakening for oneself are inseparable goals. The evolutionary direction is toward higher levels of soulfulness and service: Soul-growing as enriching, deepening, and broadening the spiritual sense of self. Service as supporting other beings in their discovery and development of themselves as soulful beings. If we conclude that we are here to be of soul-growing service, then the question becomes “What will nourish, strengthen, deepen, broaden, and enrich the life of our souls and our capacity for service?” How can our cities, neighborhoods, places of work, media, and so on, all contribute to this goal?

Conclusion

There is a direction to evolution in the universe–at every level the cosmos is generating self-referencing and self-organizing systems. Our core challenge and central project as a human family is to realize our initial maturity as a self-referencing and self-organizing species-civilization. Embedded within this core project is the personal, central project of every being–to unfold our soulful capacities for self-reflective knowing–which is to become full members of the species homo sapiens sapiens.

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Visit Duane Elgin’s Awakening Earth website.

Also see: Elisabet Sahtouris’ EarthDance, the following are links to the 21 chapters in reverse order. 

 Cosmic Continuation—21, Sustainable Society—20,  The Indigenous Way—19,  Ecological Ethics—18,  A Matter of Maturation—17,  The Body of Humanity—16,  Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15,  Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

 

Reposted from Awakening Earth.

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We live in a Living Universe

Duane Elgin

The first opportunity trend that could transform our impending crash into a spectacular bounce is a shift in our shared view of the universe—from thinking of it as dead to experiencing it as alive. In regarding the universe as alive and ourselves as continuously sustained within that aliveness, we see that we are intimately related to everything that exists. This startling insight—that we are cousins to everything that exists in a living, continuously regenerated universe—represents a new way of looking at and relating to the world and overcomes the profound separation that has marked our lives. From the combined wisdom of science and spirituality is emerging an understanding that could provide the perceptual foundation for the diverse people of the world to come together in the shared enterprise of building a sustainable and meaningful future.

For some, a shift in perception may seem so subtle as to be inconsequential. Yet, all of the deep and lasting revolutions in human development have been generated from just such shifts. Only three times before in human experience has our view of reality been so thoroughly transformed that it has created a revolution in our sense of ourselves, our relationships with others, and our view of the universe.

The first transformation in our view of reality and identity occurred when humanity “awakened” roughly 35,000 years ago. The archeological record shows that the beginnings of a reflective consciousness emerged decisively at this time as numerous developments were occurring in stone tools, burial sites, cave art, and migration patterns. Because we were just awakening to our capacity for “knowing that we know,” we were surrounded by mystery at every turn. Nonetheless, human culture was born in these first glimmerings of personal and shared awareness.

The second time our view of reality and human identity changed dramatically was roughly 10,000 years ago when humanity shifted from a nomadic life to a more settled existence in villages and farms. It was mid-way during the agrarian period, roughly 5,000 years ago, that we see the rise of city-states and the beginnings of civilization.

The third time that our perceptual paradigm transformed was roughly 300 years ago, when the stability of agrarian society gave way to the radical dynamism and materialism of the scientific-industrial era. Each time that humanity’s prevailing paradigm has changed, all aspects of life have changed with it, including the work that people do, the ways they live together, how they relate to one another, and how they see their role in society and place in the universe.

A paradigm is our way of looking at and thinking about ourselves and everything around us. It is the frame of mind out of which we operate. Our paradigm sets the limits on what thoughts we can think, what emotions we can feel, and what reality we can perceive. Willis Harman, renowned futurist, described a paradigm as “the basic way of perceiving, thinking, valuing, and doing associated with a particular vision of reality.” A paradigm tells most people, most of the time, what’s real and what’s not, what’s important and what’s not, and how things are related to one another. A paradigm is more than a dry mental map—it is our window onto the world that shapes how we see and understand the nature of reality, our sense of self, and our feelings of social connection and purpose.

We are now living at a time when humanity’s perceptual paradigm is undergoing one of its rare shifts, and that shift has the potential to dramatically transform life for each of us. A paradigm shift therefore goes to the core of people’s lives. It is much more than a change in ideas and how we think. It is a change in our view of reality, identity, social relationships, and human purpose. A paradigm shift can be felt in the body, heart, mind, and soul.

In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual, everything depends on the development of consciousness.

–Carl Jung

The whole of life lies in the verb seeing.

–Teilhard de Chardin

 How do paradigm shifts occur? Paradigms operate beneath the surface of popular culture, largely unnoticed until the old way of perceiving begins to generate more problems than it solves. These problems then become the catalyst for triggering the shift to the next paradigm, which opens up new opportunities. When we first enter a new civilizational paradigm (such as during the shift from the agricultural era to the industrial era), we experience new freedoms and creative potentials. As we fulfill the potentials of that paradigm, however, it eventually becomes a constricting framework. Its partial or incomplete nature leads to a crisis, which in turn leads to a breakthrough into the next, more spacious paradigm, in which a new level of learning and creative expression can unfold.

The paradigm of the scientific-industrial era, while it has afforded great benefits, is now generating far more problems than it is solving. These problems are catalysts for a paradigm shift. They are forcing us to expand our perceptual horizons to a higher and more inclusive level. Albert Einstein described a paradigm shift by saying that we cannot solve problems at the same level at which they are created.

The new paradigm that is emerging represents a convergence of insights from modern science and the world’s spiritual traditions. At the heart of the new paradigm is a startling idea—that our cosmos is not a fragmented and lifeless machine (as we have believed for centuries) but is instead a unified and living organism. Although it is new for our times, the idea that the universe is alive is an ancient one. More than two thousand years ago, Plato described the universe as “one Whole of wholes” and “a single Living Creature which encompasses all of the living creatures that are within it.” What is unprecedented is how this notion is being informed today by both modern science and the world’s diverse spiritual traditions. Let us look at the evidence from both these sources, beginning with recent scientific discoveries. Later in this chapter, we shall explore the implications of this paradigm shift, and the opportunity it presents for imagining and building a sustainable future.

Scientific Evidence of a Living Universe

Less than a hundred years ago, when Einstein was developing his theory of relativity, he considered the universe a static, unchanging system no larger than the cloud of stars that we now know to be our galaxy. Today, we know that the universe is expanding rapidly and contains at least 50 billion galaxies, each with a 100 billion or more stars. What is more, we now know that our cosmos embodies an exquisitely precise design. Researchers have calculated that if the universe had expanded ever so slightly faster or slower than it did (even by as little as a trillionth of a percent), the matter in our cosmos would have either quickly collapsed back into a black hole or spread out so rapidly that it would have evaporated. Beyond these surprising findings are even more extraordinary conclusions that, taken together, suggest our universe is a living system.

Although there is no clear agreement among scientists as to what constitutes a living system, it seems reasonable that if our cosmos is alive, it would exhibit specific properties that are characteristic of all life—such as being a unified entity, having some form of consciousness, and being able to reproduce itself. As we shall explore, these are among the properties of our universe that are emerging from modern science.

The cosmos is a unified system. Physicists used to view our universe as being composed of separate fragments. Today, however, despite its unimaginably vast size, the universe is increasingly regarded as a single functioning system. Because other galaxies are millions of light-years away, they appear so remote in space and time as to be separate from our own. Yet, scientific experiments show that things that seem to be separate are actually connected in fundamental ways that transcend the limitations of ordinary space and time. Described as “nonlocality,” this is one of the most stunning insights from modern science. Even though we live in a world of apparent separation, the new physics describes the more fundamental reality as that of seamless interconnection. Physicist David Bohm says that ultimately we have to understand the entire universe as “a single undivided whole.” Instead of separating the universe into living and nonliving things, Bohm sees animate and inanimate matter as inseparably interwoven with the life-force that is present throughout the universe, and that includes not only matter, but also energy and seemingly empty space. For Bohm, then, even a rock has its unique form of aliveness. Life is dynamically flowing through the fabric of the entire universe.

Our home galaxy—the Milky Way—is a swirling, disk-shaped cloud containing a hundred billion or so stars. It is part of a local group of 19 galaxies (each with a hundred billion stars), which in turn is part of a larger Local Supercluster of thousands of galaxies. This supercluster resembles a giant many-petaled flower. Beyond this, astronomers estimate that there are perhaps a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe (each with a hundred billion or so stars). Scientists and spiritual seekers alike ask the question; If this is a unified system, then could all this be but a single cell within a much greater organism?

It contains immense amounts of background energy. In the new view of reality, an extraordinary amount of energy permeates the cosmos. Empty space is not actually empty. Even in a complete vacuum, there exist phenomenal levels of background energy called “zero point energy.” Bohm calculated that a single cubic centimeter of “empty space” contained the energy equivalent of millions of atomic bombs. This is not simply a theoretical abstraction. A number of people are working to create energy devices that can tap into this background energy. Our universe is permeated by and exists within a vast ocean of flowing life energy.

The cosmos is continuously regenerated. For decades, the dominant cosmology in contemporary physics has held that creation ended with the Big Bang some 12 billion years ago and that, since then, nothing more has happened than a rearranging of the cosmic furniture. Because traditional physicists think of creation as a one-time miracle from “nothing,” they regard the contents of the universe—such as trees, rocks, and people—as being constituted from ancient matter. In sum, the dead-universe theory assumes creation occurred billions of years ago, when a massive explosion spewed out lifeless material debris into equally lifeless space and has, by random processes, organized itself into life-forms on the remote planet-island called Earth.

In striking contrast, the living-universe theory describes the cosmos as a unified system that is completely recreated at each moment. Unlike traditional physicists who believe that creation ended with the miraculous birth of the cosmos billions of years ago, living universe theorists hold that the cosmos continues to be maintained, moment by moment, by an unbroken flow-through of energy. They compare the cosmos to the vortex of a tornado or a whirlpool, as a completely dynamic structure. David Bohm calls the universe an “undivided wholeness in flowing movement.” In this view, our universe has no freestanding material existence of its own. The notion of continuous creation is even more remarkable when we consider that it includes not only matter but also the fabric of seemingly “empty” space. Space is not a simple emptiness waiting to be filled, but is itself a dynamically constructed transparency. Therefore, the entire cosmos is being regenerated at each instant in a single symphony of expression that unfolds from the most minute aspects of the subatomic realm to the vast reaches of thousands of billions of galactic systems. The whole cosmos, all at once, is the basic unit of creation.

It utterly overwhelms the imagination to consider the size and complexity of our cosmos with its billions of galaxies and trillions of planetary systems, all partaking in a continuous flow of creation. How can it be so vast, so subtle, so precise, and so powerful? Metaphorically, we inhabit a cosmos whose visible body is billions of light years across, whose organs include billions of galaxies, whose cells include trillions of suns and planetary systems, and whose molecules include an unutterably vast number and diversity of life-forms. The entirety of this great body of being, including the fabric of space-time, is being continuously regenerated at each instant. Scientists sound like poets as they attempt to describe our cosmos in its process of becoming. The mathematician Norbert Wiener expresses it this way: “We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves; whirlpools of water in an ever-flowing river.” Physicist Max Born writes, “We have sought for firm ground and found none. The deeper we penetrate, the more restless becomes the universe; all is rushing about and vibrating in a wild dance.” Physicist Brian Swimme tells us, “The universe emerges out of an all-nourishing abyss not only 12 billion years ago but in every moment.”

The new physics allows us to see everything in the cosmos as a flowing movement that co-arises along with everything else, moment-by-moment, in a process of continuous regeneration. If all is in motion at every level, and all motion presents itself as a coherent and stable pattern, then all that exists is profoundly orchestrated. All flows comprise one grand symphony in which we are all players, a single creative expression—a uni-verse.

Freedom is at its foundations. Another shift in the scientific view of the universe has to do with views about the existence of freedom. Whereas traditional physicists have seen the cosmos as being like a clockwork mechanism that is locked into predetermined patterns of development, the new physics sees it as a living organism that has the freedom and spontaneity to grow in unexpected ways. Freedom is at very the foundation of our cosmos. Uncertainty (and thus freedom) is so fundamental that quantum physics describes reality in terms of probabilities, not certainties. No one part of the cosmos determines the functioning of the whole; rather, everything seems to be connected with everything else, weaving the cosmos into one vast interacting system. Everything that exists contributes to the cosmic web of life at each moment, whether it is conscious of its contribution or not. In turn, it is the consistency of interrelations of all the parts of the universe that determines the condition of the whole. We therefore have great freedom to act within the limits established by the larger web of life within which we are immersed.

A living universe is a learning system in which we are free to make mistakes and to change our minds. In other words, if the universe is being continuously recreated, then each moment provides an opportunity for a fresh start. This is how the philosopher Renee Weber describes the creative and experimental nature of the universe: “Through us, the universe questions itself and tries out various answers on itself in an effort—parallel to our own—to decipher its own being.” Every moment, the universe recreates itself and provides us with an opportunity to exercise our basic freedom to do the same.

Consciousness is present throughout. Consciousness, or a capacity for knowing, is basic to life. If the universe is alive, we should therefore find evidence of some form of consciousness operating at every level—and that is exactly what we find. The respected physicist Freeman Dyson writes this about consciousness at the quantum level: “Matter in quantum mechanics is not an inert substance but an active agent, constantly making choices between alternative possibilities. . . . It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every electron.” This does not mean that an atom has the same consciousness as a human being, but rather that an atom has a reflective capacity appropriate to its form and function.

Consciousness is present even at the primitive level of molecules consisting of no more than a few simple proteins. Researchers have found that such molecules have the capacity for complex interaction that is the signature of living systems. As one of the researchers who made this discovery stated, “We were surprised that such simple proteins can act as if they had a mind of their own.”

At a somewhat higher level, we find consciousness operating in the remarkable behavior of a forest slime mold in search of a new feeding area. For most of its life, slime mold exists as a single-cell amoeba. When it needs food, however, it can transform itself into a much larger entity with new capacities. Individual amoebas send out signals to others nearby until thousands assemble. When they reach a critical mass, they organize themselves, without the aid of any apparent leader, into an organism that can move across the forest floor. Upon reaching a better feeding area, they release spores from which new amoebas are formed. Thus, under conditions of great stress, the forest slime mold is able to mobilize a capacity for collective consciousness and action so as to insure its own survival.

If some form of consciousness is operating at the level of atoms, molecules, and single-cell organisms, we should not be surprised to find that consciousness is a basic property of the universe that is manifest at every level. Scientific investigation of intuitive or psychic abilities in humans provides further insight into the nature and ecology of consciousness. Dean Radin, director of the Consciousness Research Laboratory at the University of Nevada, did an exhaustive analysis of parapsychological or psi research involving more than 800 studies and 60 investigators over nearly three decades. Based on this research, he concluded that consciousness includes both “receiving” and “sending” potentials.

Evidence of the receiving potentials of consciousness comes from experiments concerned with perception at a distance, which is sometimes called “remote viewing.” This is the ability to receive meaningful information by non-physical means about a remote person or location simply by opening our knowing faculty to that possibility. In remote viewing, the receiver does not acquire exact information but rather intuitive impressions regarding, for example, where a person might be located or his state of well-being. Radin found that remote viewing has “been repeatedly observed by dozens of investigators using different methods.” He concluded that a capacity for conscious knowing “operates between minds and through space.”

Evidence of the sending potentials of consciousness come from experiments dealing with mind-matter interactions, such as influencing the swing of a pendulum clock. Radin concluded that “after sixty years of experiments . . . researchers have produced persuasive, consistent, replicated evidence that mental intention is associated with the behavior of physical systems.”

I would have been reluctant to write about consciousness being a basic property of the universe—and in particular about parapsychology—had I not had an unusual opportunity to learn about it firsthand. during the early 1970s, I worked as a senior social scientist at the Stanford Research Institute, a large think-tank south of San Francisco that is now called SRI International. There I did studies of the long-range future, primarily for government agencies such as the President’s Science Advisor and the Environmental Protection Agency. While doing this intellectual work, I was invited to participate in parapsychological experiments that were being conducted at SRI by two senior physicists, Dr. Hal Puthoff and Dr. Russell Targ. Several days a week for three years I would go to their laboratory to take part in both formal and informal experiments.

One series of formal experiments involved remote viewing. The procedure was simple. I would be locked in a bare room with a pad of paper, a pencil, and a tape recorder and asked to describe where in the Bay Area one of the experiments would be. After my door was locked, his destination was selected from a pool of more than a hundred possible locations by drawing an envelope at random from a locked safe. My task, after waiting a half-hour for him to travel to his destination, was to describe in words or drawings the location of this outbound person. Was he in a boat on the bay? In a car on the freeway? In a grove of redwood trees? In a movie theater? In the room next door? My only instructions were, “Take a deep breath, close your eyes, and tell us what you see.” Although the impressions were subtle and fleeting, I gradually learned that we all have an intuitive ability to “see” at a distance. Through our intuition, each of us can acquire useful impressions, images, and insights about a person or place that is distant from us. In my experience and that of other subjects, the description was often sufficiently accurate to allow independent judges to match it with the actual location.

Another series of experiments involved working with a computer that would randomly select in advance, one of four buttons that were prominently displayed on top of it. My task was to intuitively discover which of the four had been selected and to press the correct button. More than 7,000 selections were tallied under controlled conditions—an exhausting process requiring intense concentration over dozens of test sessions. The results were significantly above chance.

These grueling experiments convinced me that we do have an intuitive connection with the universe; they also demonstrated that our capacity to use our intuition is still in its infancy given our early stage of learning. The most important insight that I take away from these and other experiments is that we all have an intuitive faculty. An empathic connection with the universe is nothing special; it is built into the workings of the cosmos. Participating in these experiments showed me that our being does not stop at the edge of our skin but extends into and is inseparable from the universe.

If consciousness is found at every level of the cosmos and, further, is not confined within the brain, but extends beyond the body and can meaningfully interact with the rest of the universe in both sending and receiving communications, then this is striking evidence that our cosmos is subtly sentient, responsive, conscious—and alive. The physicist Freeman Dyson thinks it is reasonable to believe in the existence of a “mental component of the universe.” He says, “If we believe in this mental component of the universe, then we can say that we are small pieces of God’s mental apparatus.” While it is stunning to consider that every level of the cosmos has some degree of consciousness, that seems no more extraordinary than the widely accepted view among scientists that the cosmos emerged as a pinpoint some 12 billion years ago as a “vacuum fluctuation”—where nothing pushed on nothing to create everything.

The cosmos is able to reproduce itself. A key attribute of any living system is its ability to reproduce itself. A startling finding from the new physics is that our cosmos may very well be able to reproduce itself through the functioning of black holes. In his book, In the Beginning: The Birth of the Living Universe, astrophysicist John Gribbin explains that the bursting out of our universe in the Big Bang is the time-reversed mirror image of the collapse of a massive object into a black hole. Many of the black holes that form in our universe, he reasons, may thus represent the seeds of new universes: “Instead of a black hole representing a one-way journey to nowhere, many researchers now believe that it is a one-way journey to somewhere—to a new expanding universe in its own set of dimensions.” Gribbin’s dramatic conclusion is that “our own Universe may have been born in this way out of a black hole in another universe.” He explains it in this way:

If one universe exists, then it seems that there must be many—very many, perhaps even an infinite number of universes. Our universe has to be seen as just one component of a vast array of universes, a self-reproducing system connected only by the “tunnels” through spacetime (perhaps better regarded as cosmic umbilical cords) that join a “baby” universe to its “parent.”

Gribbin suggests not only that universes are alive, but also that they evolve as other living systems do: “Universes that are ‘successful’ are the ones that leave the most offspring.” The idea of many universes evolving through time is not new. David Hume noted in 1779 that many prior universes “might have been botched and bungled throughout an eternity ere this system.”

Is the cosmos a living system? It certainly appears so in the light of recent scientific findings. Our universe is revealing itself to be a profoundly unified system in which the interrelations of all the parts, moment-by-moment, determine the condition of the whole. Our universe is infused with an immense amount of energy, and is being continuously regenerated in its entirety, while making use of a reflective capacity or consciousness throughout. As an evolving, growing, and learning system, it is natural that freedom exists at the quantum foundations of the universe. It even appears that the universe has the ability to reproduce itself through the vehicle of black holes. When we put all of these properties together, it suggests an even more spacious view of our cosmic system. Our universe is a living system of elegant design that was born from and is continuously regenerated within an even larger universe. We are living within a “daughter universe” that, for 12 billion years, has been living and growing within the spaciousness of a Mother universe. The Mother Universe has existed forever, holding countless daughter universes in its grand embrace while they grow and mature through an eternity of time.

The Mother Universe

When our cosmos blossomed into existence from an area smaller than a pinpoint some 12 billion years ago, it emerged out of “somewhere.” Modern physics is beginning to speculate on the nature of this generative ground. The distinguished Princeton astrophysicist John Wheeler describes space as the basic building block of reality. He explains that material things are “composed of nothing but space itself, pure fluctuating space . . . that is changing, dynamic, altering from moment to moment.” Wheeler goes on to say that, “Of course, what space itself is built out of is the next question . . . . The stage on which the space of the universe moves is certainly not space itself . . . . The arena must be larger: superspace… [which is endowed] with an infinite number of dimensions.” What Wheeler calls “superspace,” I am calling the “Mother Universe.”

The idea of a “superspace” or Mother Universe is not simply a creation of theoretical physics. It is a reality that can be directly experienced and has ancient roots in the world’s meditative traditions. For example, more than 20 centuries ago, the Taoist sage Lao-tzu, described it this way:

There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.

Regardless of what the Mother Universe is called, all wisdom traditions agree that it is ultimately beyond description. Nevertheless, many attempts have been made to describe her paradoxical qualities. Here are six of the key attributes of the Mother Universe as seen by both East and West:

ï Present everywhere—The clear, unbounded life-energy of the Mother Universe is present in all material forms as well as in seemingly empty space. The Mother Universe is not separate from us, nor is it other than the “ordinary” reality that is continuously present around us. The Mother Universe is also not limited to containing only our universe; there likely are a vast number of other universes growing in other dimensions of her unimaginable spaciousness.

ï Non-obstructing—The Mother Universe is a living presence out of which all things emerge, but it is not itself filled or limited by these things. Not only are all things in it; it is in all things. There is mutual interpenetration without obstruction.

ï Utterly impartial—The Mother Universe allows all things to be exactly what they are without interference. We have immense freedom to create either suffering or joy.

ï Ultimately ungraspable—The power and reach of the Mother Universe is so vast that it cannot be grasped by our thinking mind. As the source of our existence, the Mother Universe is forever beyond the ability of our limited mental faculties to capture conceptually.

ï Compassionate—Boundless compassion is its essence. To experience the subtle and refined resonance of the Mother Universe is to experience unconditional love.

ï Profoundly creative—Because we humans do not know how to create a single flower or cubic inch of space, the creative power of the Mother Universe to bring into existence and sustain entire cosmic systems is utterly incomprehensible.

It is useful to contemplate these extraordinary characteristics of the Mother Universe so as to awaken ourselves to the profound miracle in which we are immersed. In that spirit, here is an evocative portion of what the Chinese monk, Shao, has written in describing what I call the Mother Universe:

If you say that It is small,

It embraces the entire universe.

If you say It is large,

It penetrates the realm of atoms.

Call It one; It bears all qualities.

Call It many; Its body is all void.

Say It arises; It has no body and no form.

Say It becomes extinct; It glows for all eternity.

Call It empty; It has thousands of functions.

Say It exists; It is silent without shape.

Call It high; It is level without form.

Call It low; nothing is equal to It.

In looking across the world’s spiritual traditions, the insight emerges again and again that, although we live in a world of seeming separation and division, our universe is a unified whole that is brimming with life and infused with a divine presence. Here are a few examples:

“Earth’s crammed with Heaven, and every common bush afire with God.”

–Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poet

The Tao is the sustaining Life-force and the mother of all things; from it, all “things rise and fall without cease.”

–Taoist tradition of China

“Heaven and earth and I are of the same root. . . are of one substance.”

–Sojo, a Zen monk

Jesus was asked, “When will the kingdom come?” He replied, “It will not come by waiting for it. . . . Rather, the Kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

–Gospel of Thomas, Gnostic Gospels

“For those who are awake the cosmos is one.”

–Heraclitus, ancient Greek philosopher

“My solemn proclamation is that a new universe is created every moment.”

–D. T. Suzuki, Zen scholar and teacher

“I am in some sense boundless, my being encompassing the farthest limits of the universe, touching and moving every atom of existence. The same is true of everything else. . . . It is not just that ‘we are all in it’ together. We all are it, rising and falling as one living body.”

–Francis Cook, Buddhist scholar, describing Hua-yen Buddhism

“All Hindu religious thought denies that the world of nature stands on its own feet. It is grounded in God; if he were removed it would collapse into nothingness.”

–Huston Smith, scholar of the world’s sacred traditions

“There is a life pouring into the world, and it pours from an inexhaustible source.”

–Joseph Campbell, scholar of world’s creation stories

“Creation, then, is an ongoing story of new beginnings, opportunities to begin again and again. God began to create, is still creating; nothing is finished.”

–Wayne Muller, ordained minister

“God is creating the entire universe, fully and totally, in this present now. Everything God created. . . God creates now all at once.”

–Meister Eckhart, Christian mystic

“The entire cosmos comes forth moment by moment from this one fundamental innate mind of clear light.”

–Lex Hixon, scholar of the world’s sacred traditions

Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, Taoists, mystics, tribal cultures, and Greek philosophers have all given remarkably similar descriptions of the universe and the life-force that pervades it. These are more than poetic and metaphorical descriptions. Because we find the notion of a living universe emerging across cultures and millennia as well as from modern science, there is compelling evidence that it forms the basis of a powerful perceptual paradigm—one that will open up enormous opportunities for the human family as we are pressed to create a sustainable future for ourselves.

Implications of the Living Universe Paradigm

Like any paradigm shift, the shift to a living universe paradigm is transformative. In addition to changing our view of the universe, it can alter our sense of identity, our sense of purpose, how we relate with others, and much more. Let’s consider a few of its many implications.

A rebirth of connectedness in all aspects of life. To explore how our experience of the world might change with a shift to a living universe paradigm, let’s look at how American Indians perceive and experience the world. Their culture provides a clear window into the experience of living with an infusing aliveness that is an intimate part of everyday life.

Author Luther Standing Bear expresses the wisdom of indigenous peoples around the world when he says that, for the Lakota Sioux, “there was no such thing as emptiness in the world. Even in the sky there were no vacant places. Everywhere there was life, visible and invisible, and every object gave us a great interest in life. The world teemed with life and wisdom; there was no complete solitude for the Lakota.” For the Lakota, who inhabited the upper mid-West of the United States, religion was based on a direct experience of an all-pervading spirit throughout the world. Since a life-force was felt to be in and through everything, all things were seen as being connected and related. Because everything is an expression of the Great Spirit, everything deserves to be treated with respect.

This paradigm was not unique to the Lakota. One of the most dense concentrations of Indian populations in North America—the Ohlones— lived along the fertile region that is now San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Monterey in California. The Ohlones lived sustainably on this land for 4,000 to 5,000 years. Like the Lakota, their religion was without dogma, churches, or priests because it was so pervasive, like the air. Malcolm Margolin describes their experience of the world in his book, The Ohlone Way:

The Ohlones, then, lived in a world perhaps somewhat like a Van Gogh painting, shimmering and alive with movement and energy in ever-changing patterns. It was a world in which thousands of living, feeling, magical things, all operating on dream-logic, carried out their individual actions. . . . Power was everywhere, in everything, and therefore every act was religious. Hunting a deer, walking on a trail, making a basket, or pounding acorns were all done with continual reference to the world of power. 

In shifting to the living universe paradigm, we rediscover the aliveness that is at the foundation of the universe, and we realize that we are not disconnected from the larger universe, and never have been. An Ojibwe Indian poem expresses this realization beautifully:

Sometimes I go about pitying myself, and all the while I am being carried on great winds across the sky.

With a cosmology of a living universe, a shining miracle exists everywhere. There are no empty places in the world. Everywhere there is life, both visible and invisible. All of reality is infused with wisdom and a powerful presence.

The awakening of cosmic identity. In the industrial era paradigm, we are no more than biological beings, ultimately separate from others and the rest of the universe. The new findings from physics, however, reveal that we are intimately connected with the entire cosmos. Our actual identity or experience of who we are is vastly bigger than we thought—we are moving from a strictly personal consciousness to a conscious appreciation of ourselves as integral to the cosmos. Physicist Brian Swimme explains that the intimate sense of self-awareness we experience bubbling up at each moment, “is rooted in the originating activity of the universe. We are all of us arising together at the center of the cosmos.” We thought that we were no bigger than our physical bodies, but we are discovering that we are beings of cosmic dimension, part of the flow of continuous re-creation of the cosmos. By becoming aware of that stream of life in our direct experience, we become conscious of our connection with the living universe.

Technically, we humans are more than homo sapiens or “wise”—we are homo sapiens sapiens or “doubly wise.” In other words, whereas animals “know,” humans have the capacity to “know that we know.” In this new paradigm, our sense of identity takes on a paradoxical and mysterious quality: we are both observer and observed, knower and that which is known. We are each completely unique yet completely connected with the entire universe. There will never be another person like any one of us in all eternity, so we are absolutely original beings. At the same time, since our existence arises from and is woven into the deep ecology of the universe, we are completely integrated with all that exists. Awakening to the miraculous nature of our identity as simultaneously unique and interconnected with a living universe can help us overcome the species-arrogance and sense of separation that threaten our future.

Living lightly in a living universe. In a dead universe, materialism makes sense; in a living universe, simplicity makes sense. Let’s consider these two alternatives.

If the universe is unconscious and dead at its foundations, then each of us is the product of blind chance among materialistic forces. It is only fitting that we the living exploit on our own behalf that which is not alive. If the universe is lifeless, it has no larger purpose or meaning, and neither does human existence. If we are separate beings in a lifeless universe, there are no deeper ethical or moral consequences to our actions beyond their immediate, physical impacts. It is only natural, therefore, that we focus on consuming material things to minimize life’s pains and maximize its comforts.

On the other hand, if the universe is conscious and alive, then we are the product of a deep-design intelligence that infuses the entire cosmos. We shift from feelings of existential isolation in a lifeless universe to a sense of intimate communion within a living universe. If life is nested within life, then it is only fitting that we treat everything that exists as alive and worthy of respect. Our sense of meaningful connection expands to the entire community of life, including past, present, and future generations. Every action in a living universe is felt to have ethical consequences as it reverberates throughout the ecosystem of the living cosmos. The focus of life shifts from a desire for high-consumption lifestyles (intended to provide both material pleasures and protection from an indifferent universe) toward sustainable and simple ways of living (intended to connect us with a purposeful universe of which we are an integral part). In a living universe, it is only natural that people would choose simpler ways of living that afford greater time and opportunity for meaningful relationships, creative expression, and rewarding experiences. As we consciously explore our connection with a living universe, concern with material consumption will naturally tend to shift into the background of our lives.

Living with purpose in a living universe. The shift to a new paradigm also brings a shift in our sense of evolutionary purpose We are shifting from seeing our journey as a secular adventure in a fragmented and lifeless cosmos without apparent meaning or purpose, to seeing it as a sacred journey through a living and unified cosmos whose purpose is to serve as a learning system. Our primary purpose is to embrace and learn from both the pleasure and the pain of the world. If there were no freedom to make mistakes, there would be no pain. If there were no freedom for authentic discovery, there would be no ecstasy. In freedom, we experience both pleasure and pain in the process of discovering our identity as beings of both earthly and cosmic dimensions. In the words of the Australian aborigines, we are learning how to survive in infinity.

Living ethically in a living universe. A form of natural ethics accompanies our intuitive connection with a living universe. When we are truly centered in the life current flowing through us, we tend to act in ways that promote the well-being and harmony of the whole. Our connection with the Mother Universe provides us with a sort of moral tuning fork that makes it possible for individuals to come into collective alignment. An underlying field of consciousness weaves humanity together, making it possible for us to understand intuitively what is healthy and what is not, what works and what doesn’t. We can each tune into this living field and sense what is in harmony with the well-being of the whole. When we are in alignment, we experience—as a sort of kinesthetic sense—a positive hum of well-being. In a similar way, we also experience the hum of discordance.

The new paradigm will usher us into an era in which people will be inclined to live ethically because they understand that everything they do is woven into the infinite depths of the Mother Universe. In his Book of Mirdad, Mikhail Nimay describes this insight beautifully:

So think as if your every thought were to be etched in fire upon the sky for all and everything to see. For so, in truth, it is.

So speak as if the world entire were but a single ear intent on hearing what you say. And so, in truth, it is.

So do as if your every deed were to recoil upon your head. And so, in truth, it is.

So wish as if you were the wish. And so, in truth, you are.

When we discover that all beings are part of the seamless fabric of creation, it naturally awakens in us a sense of connection with and compassion for the rest of life. We automatically broaden our scope of empathy and concern when we realize that we are inseparable from all that exists. We no longer see ourselves as isolated entities whose being stops at the edge of our skin, and whose empathy stops with our family, or our race, or our nation. We see that, because we all arise simultaneously from a deep ocean of life-energy, a vital connection always exists among all beings.

The living universe paradigm is not simply a lateral shift from one set of values to another; it is a contextual shift, from one cultural atmosphere to another, from one perceptual environment to another. It transforms the human story. After 12 billion years of evolution, we stand upon the Earth as agents of self-reflective and creative action on behalf of the universe. We see that we are participants in an unceasing miracle of creation. This recognition brings a new confidence that our potentials are as exalted, magnificent, and mysterious as the living universe that surrounds and sustains us.

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Visit Duane Elgin’s Awakening Earth website.

Also see: Elisabet Sahtouris’ EarthDance, the following are links to the 21 chapters in reverse order. 

 Cosmic Continuation—21, Sustainable Society—20,  The Indigenous Way—19,  Ecological Ethics—18,  A Matter of Maturation—17,  The Body of Humanity—16,  Less Than Perfect, More Than Machine—15,  Worldviews from Plato to the Present—14,  Worldviews from the Pleistocene to Plato—13, What the Play Is All About—12,  The Big Brain Experiment—11,  From Possums to People—10,  From Polyps to Possums—9,  From Protists to Polyps—8, Evidence of Evolution—7,  A Great Leap—6, The Dance of Life—5, The Problems for Earthlife—4, The Young Earth—3, Cosmic Beginnings—2, and a  Twice Told Tale—1.

Reposted from The Spunk Library.

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The Nature of Action

Dale Allen Pfeiffer

1. Argument– We must give up expectations but not the confidence that we can deal with any contingency. Humans only act if they believe their best interests are being served. Look for the best, not in the future but in this moment as it transpires. Educate others, fight injustice, but never lose sight of the beauty in this moment. Every plan right down to the most finely conceived incorporates within it a probability that the future shall deviate, which probability increases in direct proportion to the timespan of the plan and also to the number of people it will affect. This is the dualism of purpose: we must be subjective of the present while objective of the future. Live in the moment. If your formulations help you to get more out of this present moment, then that is fine, but don’t be disappointed if the world doesn’t live up to your expectations. Next time try to place a little less importance on expectations and a little more importance on this world as it is being experienced.

Small scale action is much more likely to succeed. The smaller scale an action, the greater its chances of success. This is part of the appeal of both anarchism and Buddhism: both promote the proliferation of small scale action to affect major change. The best of anarchist thought contains an almost spiritual element in its view of individual responsibility and the common welfare. Perhaps we do have a chance, if we can pull our heads out of the clouds and stop arguing about the best way to proceed. If we could simply act from the heart, then we could do no wrong.

Action can either be directed internally into the self, or externally into the environment and community. There are four courses of effective action: self-education, education of others, fighting injustice and organizing.

2. Self– Put your own house in order, first of all. Strive for enlightenment and education. Open yourself to the world, choose to feel. Cultivate compassion. Study science (hard and soft), history, literature. Remember, however, that the definition is secondary to that which is defined; a name is but the smallest part of anything. Look for the divine in all matter and events. Judge not least ye be judged.

Furthermore, never accept anything told to you by the mass media; even where self-interest is not evident, information is distorted by misinformation, misunderstanding and delusion. Be critical and selective, seek out alternative sources of information. The mass media can paint a view of the world which will have strong and subtle effects on individual perception. There is no such thing as truth–or, rather, truth comes in many versions.

Avoid obsession, unless it is obsession with the miracle of existence. Dwell in contentment with consideration for cohabitants and environment. Awaken.

3. Others– Fight ignorance. Strive to help others see clearly even as you strive to focus your own awareness. Know that, next to self-enlightenment, bringing awareness to others is the most important thing you can do to benefit the entire world. Acquire knowledge and teach. Try not to contribute to disinformation.

Try never to overlook suffering or injustice but seek their resolution. Determine never to be complacent. Understand that a good deal of suffering and injustice is a product of our socio-economic condition and comprehend what this admission implies. Do not convert and subvert, rather communicate and illuminate. Where social injustice is an issue, civil disobedience tactics are appropriate, and revolution (with all that entails) would even be justified should it provide a reduction in suffering and injustice. Fight not with might, but with illumination.

4. Organize– Do not struggle on by yourself. Despite individualist presentations of history, a single human being holds little immediate influence over the tides of time and events. One person alone must fight for her or his own existence while two people can work together for their mutual benefit. The history of mankind is an epic of movements and star-crossed individuals who pop up to lend focus at key confluences.

Network and organize. Seek out people who think as you do, people who can offer you help and support. Together you can form a common basis on which to found your actions. A dream alone is but a dream, while a dream shared has greater reality.

Organize to fight injustice. Find others who share your concern and organize with them to produce a solution to the issue of contention. Work as a humanitarian, with no intention of harming anyone. Work for solutions, not persecutions.

Always be aware that you are fighting for the recognition and respect due to everything, from each and every human, tree and stone down to every atom.

5. Liberation– Everything physical is made of matter.

The fundamental constituents of matter are the atoms, which are themselves composed of subatomic particles which are, in fact, energy.

Energy is made of momental elements of existence. Each moment of energy is an unbiased perception of existence, pure consciousness. So once again we find the mystical, animistic view of the universe; anything of atoms made is all ablaze with life.

Marx sought to liberate the working class from capitalist exploitation; we seek to liberate commodities as well. All so-called commodities have a right to exist untampered; they take meaning of their existence and should be respected on that account. The artful manipulation of matter treats material with respect and therefore is justifiable so long as the resource is not threatened by exploitation. The right of existence must be granted to every resource, humans being no more favored than any other arrangement of atoms and other arrangements being no less divine. We seek to liberate the chicken and the cow, the corn and the cotton, the timber and the ore.

All resources must be respected and conserved; the natural state should be our ideal. All livestock is owed a basic quality of existence; all environments and ecosystems are to be kept healthy and viable, as our vitality is linked to theirs. We must take responsibility for every bite of food that we eat (meat and vegetable–yes, every single oat) and for every commodity that we consume. We should apologize to the grass as we tread upon it, and we should ride upon the gestalt of the physical universe. Please don’t walk on the grass–dance upon it.

Mankind needs humility and compassion, both of which are amply supplied by poverty and hardship. Oh, that there were some other way. Only wounded heroes could possess the humanity to bring enlightenment to our homes. Sound the rally of the wounded heroes.

6. Conclusion– Capitalism is merely our best explanation of the current socio-economic environment. As such, this theory is marred by all the weaknesses of human thought and perception. It was a description of one phase in the unending and dynamic evolution of socio-economic ecology. We can speculate about the next trend in this evolution, but the only thing we can say for certain is that change will come. All we can do is work in our own small way to insure that the next phase is as equable and humane as possible. We must identify the motive force behind this change and learn how to manipulate it with wisdom and mercy.

Market, work place, media, home and church; these are the environments of socio-economic existence. Changes in the socio-economic situation are affected through changes in the market, work place, media, home and/or church. The market is the stomping grounds of capitalists and corporations, and must be carefully infiltrated by capable sympathizers who should seek to expropriate capitalist profits for the workers, and who will lend their talents to the process of socio-economic evolution. Workers should seek the one big worldwide union, based on the anarcho-syndicalist pattern. Once the size of this union has attained a critical mass, workers should seek to liberate the tools of their profession. The workers need skills in mass civil-disobedience and sabotage, and they must be prepared to fight if necessary. The media must be opened so that everyone can better appreciate what is actually transpiring about each of us. Perhaps the Internet has the freedom and the reach to communicate effectively. You are still in charge of your own home, make it a harmonious place. Except for a minority of fundamentalists, most people have drifted from institutional religion, liberalizing the tenants of the church. Through church or through intellect, everyone needs to become aware of the sacred bond tying each of us to the rest of existence. Subversion and subterfuge are the watchwords of the day and pureness of heart is the attitude to be attained by all true agents of evolution. The agent of evolution, in whatever sector of the socio-economic environment, above all must strive to make herself or himself a better person and the world a better home. Evolution is about getting on with life, not the sacrifice of life.

All the progressive economics and radical sociology, all of the theory and science, will get you nowhere with the masses. This is a job for the poet, the artist and the musician. The coming volution must be foretold in myth and folklore, that is: in the very consciousness of humankind. We must live the evolution, and by doing so blow life into even the most empty of existences. We must remember to supplicate the spirits and atone for our ignorance. Praise the existence of God in everything of atoms made. If we could give to everything the right of existence, there would be no need to worry about human rights. We can never achieve utopia so long as our motives harbor any element of greed. We will walk into the future pure or we will be dragged in, bloody and beaten.

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Read Timothy Wilken, MD on Life: Needs and Actions

Reposted from Earth Crash Earth Spirit.

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What is good for Human Beings?

Stephen Boyden

According to the principle of evodeviation, when animals are exposed to life conditions which differ from those to which their species is genetically adapted through evolution, signs of phylogenetic maladaptation are likely to be manifest. The hypothesis was put forward that, in the case of the human species, the principle of evodeviation applies not only to the physical or material aspects of life conditions, but also to less tangible behavioral and psycho-social aspects. It follows, assuming this hypothesis to be correct, that consideration both of the material and of the behavioral and psycho-social aspects of life conditions of primeval people could provide important clues to the nature of the biologically determined or universal health needs of the human species.

With these thoughts in mind, a list has been prepared which is a summary both of the life conditions of hunter-gatherers and, accepting the principle of evodeviation and the hypothesis that it applies to intangible aspects of life experience, of the optimum life conditions for members of the human species in general. The list begins with the more tangible material aspects of life conditions and ends with the more intangible psycho-social and behavioral aspects. With respect to many of the postulated health promoting aspects of life conditions, including the intangible aspects, the principle of the optimum range is applicable; that is to say, too little or too much of a given condition may be detrimental to health.

Life conditions conducive to health in Homo sapiens

• Clean air (i.e. “paleolithic air” – not contaminated with hydrocarbons, sulphur oxides, lead, etc.)

• Environmental temperatures within the range of those experienced in the ‘natural habitat’ (“habitat with the characteristics of those inhabited by human beings in phase one societies”)

• Exposure to visible light (duration and intensity) within the range of that experienced in the natural habitat

• Noise levels within the range of those experienced in the natural human habitat

• Diet:

  • Calorie intake neither less nor more than metabolic requirements. Social norms which allow the individual to eat when hungry, but which do not encourage overconsumption of calories in response to ritual, habit, or, for example, boredom

  • Foodstuffs providing the full range of nutritional requirements for the human organism. In the primeval situation this is usually provided by a diverse range of different foodstuffs of plant origin and some lean meat (cooked)

  • A diet which is balanced in the sense that it does not contain an excess of any particular kind of chemical constituent or class of foodstuff

  • Foodstuffs with a physical consistency of that of natural foods containing fiber

  • Foodstuffs devoid of potentially noxious contaminants or additives

• Clean water – free of contamination with chemicals or pathogenic microorganisms

• Minimal contact with microbial or metazoal parasites and pathogens

• An effective emotional support network providing a framework for spontaneous care-eliciting, care-receiving and care-giving behavior

• Frequent interaction on a daily basis with members of the extended family and in-group on matters of mutual interest and concern

• Opportunities and incentives for small-group interaction on projects of mutual interest and concern

• A social environment which confers responsibilities and obligations on the individual toward the in-group

• Opportunities for the individual to move spontaneously and freely from one small group to another, and to and from a state of solitude

• Levels of sensory stimulation which are neither much less nor much greater than those of the natural habitat

• A pattern of physical work which involves some short periods of vigorous muscular work and longer periods of medium muscular work, but also frequent periods of rest

• A polyphasic sleeping pattern, and the opportunity to rest or sleep in response to the urge to do so

• Opportunities and incentives for the learning and practice of manual skills and for creative behavior in general

• Opportunities and incentives for active involvement in recreational activities

• An environment which has high interest value and in which changes of interest to the individual are continually occurring (and at a rate which can easily be handled by the human psyche)

• Opportunities for considerable spontaneity in behavior

• Considerable variety in daily experience

• Short goal-achievement cycles

• Aspirations of a kind likely to be fulfilled

• An environment and lifestyle which are conducive to a reasonable degree of:

  • a sense of personal involvement

  • a sense of purpose

  • a sense of belonging

  • a sense of responsibility

  • a sense of interest

  • a sense of excitement

  • a sense of challenge

  • a sense of satisfaction

  • a sense of comradeship and love

  • a sense of enjoyment

  • a sense of confidence

  • a sense of security

So, how well does your life measure up to the above list?

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Read Timothy Wilken, MD on Life: Needs and Actions

Last thursday, we featured an article about A New Superpower in Town. The author Jim Moore recommends this example of how that new superpower could work. Reposted from The American Prospect.

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What Could Have Happened

Robert Kuttner

With war looming, the one man who might possibly cause George W. Bush to modify his course of action is British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It was Blair, you might remember, who persuaded Bush to go to the United Nations last fall. Yet by deciding to invade Iraq without the UN’s blessing, Bush has savagely undercut Blair’s domestic fortunes. The prime minister’s well-respected Labour Party leader in the House of Commons, former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook, resigned yesterday. Two other cabinet ministers resigned last night. Yet another minister, Clare Short, who holds the international development portfolio, has threatened to resign.

Short has been working with international religious leaders, many of them American, to try to enlist Blair to support an alternative. Tonight, the House of Commons debates a crucial resolution authorizing British military participation in the absence of UN Security Council approval. Brits awakened today to full-page ads signed by American religious leaders that have been placed in every major British daily.

The ads, part of a campaign coordinated by Short and Labour Party dissidents, promote a six-part alternative third way “between war and inaction.” The plan would:

1. Indict Saddam Hussein before an international war-crimes tribunal.

2. Pursue “coersive disarmament” using a multilateral UN armed force that would back up a greatly enhanced team of inspectors.

3. Foster a democratic, post-Hussein Iraq with a UN occupation force rather than a U.S. occupying army.

4. Spend billions on humanitarian aid for the Iraqi people rather than tens of billions on war.

5. Expedite the “road map” to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement.

6. Revive international cooperation in the war against terrorism.

The ad, headed, “PRIME MINISTER BLAIR, IT IS TWO MINUTES BEFORE MIDNIGHT,” is signed by Jim Wallis of Sojourners, a religious magazine; John Bryson Chane, Episcopal bishop of Washington; Clifton Kirkpatrick, a leader of the Presbyterian Church USA; Melvin Talbert of the United Methodist Council of Bishops; and Daniel Weiss, immediate past general secretary of the American Baptist Churches in the USA.

As many as 160 Labour MP’s are expected to vote against British participation in the war tonight, and there is an outside chance that Blair could lose a majority of the Labour vote, causing him to rely on the opposition Tories to win the resolution. This in turn could put his prime ministership at serious risk.

Well-placed sources say that Blair told an American delegation of religious leaders last month that he feels ill-treated by Bush. At the recent summit in the Azores, Blair reportedly pushed hard for Bush to agree that any occupation would be under UN rather than U.S. military auspices, but the only concession Bush made was to resurrect the “road map” idea for Israeli-Palestinian peace — a catchphrase whose meaning largely remains to be filled in.

Blair, the most loyal of Bush’s allies, could well be one of the early casualties of Bush’s increasingly unilateral Iraq policy. The vote in the House of Commons is expected about 5:30 EST tonight.

Copyright © 2003 by The American Prospect, Inc.

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I too have been suggesting ways for this new superpower to solve problems more effectively than national states. See: A Synergic Future, A Synergic Future -II, Ortegrity,  What Is Wrong with Making Money?

The SafeEARTH series. See: 1) Beyond Crime and Punishment, 2) Synergic Containment: Protecting Children, 3) Synergic Containment: Science & Rationale, 4) Synergic Containment: Protecting Community and 5) Synergic Disarmament—Wisdom, we shouldn’t have!

Also see Reaction to Synergic Containment.

Found this article on the web published under the title The Second Superpower Rears its Beautiful Head at: Jim Moore’s Weblog. It is also available in PDF.

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A New Superpower in Town

James F. Moore

As the United States government becomes more belligerent in using its power in the world, many people are longing for a “second superpower” that can keep the US in check.  Indeed, many people desire a superpower that speaks for the interests of planetary society, for long-term well-being, and that encourages broad participation in the democratic process.  Where can the world find such a second superpower?  No nation or group of nations seems able to play this role, although the European Union sometimes seeks to, working in concert with a variety of institutions in the field of international law, including the United Nations.  But even the common might of the European nations is barely a match for the current power of the United States.

There is an emerging second superpower, but it is not a nation.  Instead, it is a new form of international player, constituted by the “will of the people” in a global social movement.  The beautiful but deeply agitated face of this second superpower is the worldwide peace campaign, but the body of the movement is made up of millions of people concerned with a broad agenda that includes social development, environmentalism, health, and human rights.   This movement has a surprisingly agile and muscular body of citizen activists who identify their interests with world society as a whole—and who recognize that at a fundamental level we are all one.  These are people who are attempting to take into account the needs and dreams of all 6.3 billion people in the world—and not just the members of one or another nation.  Consider the members of Amnesty International who write letters on behalf of prisoners of conscience, and the millions of Americans who are participating in email actions against the war in Iraq.  Or the physicians who contribute their time to Doctors Without Borders/ Medecins Sans Frontieres.

While some of the leaders have become highly visible, what is perhaps most interesting about this global movement is that it is not really directed by visible leaders, but, as we will see, by the collective, emergent action of its millions of participants.  Surveys suggest that at least 30 million people in the United States identify themselves this way—approximately 10% of the US population.  The percentage in Europe is undoubtedly higher.  The global membership in Asia, South America, Africa and India, while much lower in percentage of the total population, is growing quickly with the spread of the Internet.  What makes these numbers important is the new cyberspace-enabled interconnection among the members.  This body has a beautiful mind.  Web connections enable a kind of near-instantaneous, mass improvisation of activist initiatives.  For example, the political activist group Moveon.org, which specializes in rapid response campaigns, has an email list of more than two million members. During the 2002 elections, Moveon.org raised more than $700,000 in a few days for a candidate’s campaign for the US senate. It has raised thousands of dollars for media ads for peace—and it is now amassing a worldwide network of media activists dedicated to keeping the mass media honest by identifying bias and confronting local broadcasters.

New forms of communication and commentary are being invented continuously.  Slashdot and other news sites present high quality peer-reviewed commentary by involving large numbers of members of the web community in recommending and rating items. Text messaging on mobile phones, or texting, is now the medium of choice for communicating with thousands of demonstrators simultaneously during mass protests.  Instant messaging turns out to be one of the most popular methods for staying connected in the developing world, because it requires only a bit of bandwidth, and provides an intimate sense of connection across time and space.  The current enthusiasm for blogging is changing the way that people relate to publication, as it allows realtime dialogue about world events as bloggers log in daily to share their insights.  Meta-blogging sites crawl across thousands of blogs, identifying popular links, noting emergent topics, and providing an instantaneous summary of the global consciousness of the second superpower.

The Internet and other interactive media continue to penetrate more and more deeply all world society, and provide a means for instantaneous personal dialogue and communication across the globe.  The collective power of texting, blogging, instant messaging, and email across millions of actors cannot be overestimated.  Like a mind constituted of millions of inter-networked neurons, the social movement is capable of astonishingly rapid and sometimes subtle community consciousness and action.

Thus the new superpower demonstrates a new form of “emergent democracy” that differs from the participative democracy of the US government.  Where political participation in the United States is exercised mainly through rare exercises of voting, participation in the second superpower movement occurs continuously through participation in a variety of web-enabled initiatives.  And where deliberation in the first superpower is done primarily by a few elected or appointed officials, deliberation in the second superpower is done by each individual—making sense of events, communicating with others, and deciding whether and how to join in community actions.  Finally, where participation in democracy in the first superpower feels remote to most citizens, the emergent democracy of the second superpower is alive with touching and being touched by each other, as the community works to create wisdom and to take action.

How does the second superpower take action?  Not from the top, but from the bottom. That is, it is the strength of the US government that it can centrally collect taxes, and then spend, for example, $1.2 billion on 1,200 cruise missiles in the first day of the war against Iraq.  By contrast, it is the strength of the second superpower that it could mobilize hundreds of small groups of activists to shut down city centers across the United States on that same first day of the war.   And that millions of citizens worldwide would take to their streets to rally.   The symbol of the first superpower is the eagle—an awesome predator that rules from the skies, preying on mice and small animals.  Perhaps the best symbol for the second superpower would be a community of ants.  Ants rule from below.  And while I may be awed seeing eagles in flight, when ants invade my kitchen they command my attention.

In the same sense as the ants, the continual distributed action of the members of the second superpower can, I believe, be expected to eventually prevail.  Distributed mass behavior, expressed in rallying, in voting, in picketing, in exposing corruption, and in purchases from particular companies, all have a profound effect on the nature of future society. More effect, I would argue, than the devastating but unsustainable effect of bombs and other forms of coercion.

Deliberation in the first superpower is relatively formal—dictated by the US constitution and by years of legislation, adjudicating, and precedent.  The realpolitik of decision making in the first superpower—as opposed to what is taught in civics class—centers around lobbying and campaign contributions by moneyed special interests—big oil, the military-industrial complex, big agriculture, and big drugs—to mention only a few.  In many cases, what are acted upon are issues for which some group is willing to spend lavishly. By contrast, it is difficult in the US government system to champion policy goals that have broad, long-term value for many citizens, such as environment, poverty reduction and third world development, women’s rights, human rights, health care for all. By contrast, these are precisely the issues to which the second superpower tends to address its attention.

Deliberation in the second superpower is evolving rapidly in both cultural and technological terms.  It is difficult to know its present state, and impossible to see its future.  But one can say certain things. It is stunning how quickly the community can act—especially when compared to government systems.  The Internet, in combination with traditional press and television and radio media, creates a kind of “media space” of global dialogue.  Ideas arise in the global media space. Some of them catch hold and are disseminated widely.  Their dissemination, like the beat of dance music spreading across a sea of dancers, becomes a pattern across the community.  Some members of the community study these patterns, and write about some of them. This has the effect of both amplifying the patterns and facilitating community reflection on the topics highlighted.  A new form of deliberation happens.  A variety of what we might call “action agents” sits figuratively astride the community, with mechanisms designed to turn a given social movement into specific kinds of action in the world.  For example, fundraisers send out mass appeals, with direct mail or the Internet, and if they are tapping into a live issue, they can raise money very quickly. This money in turn can be used to support activities consistent with an emerging mission.

The process is not without its flaws and weaknesses.  For example, the central role of the mass media—with its alleged biases and distortions—is a real issue.  Much news of the war comes to members of the second superpower from CNN, Fox, and the New York Times, despite the availability of alternative sources.  The study of the nature and limits of this big mind is just beginning, and we don’t know its strengths and weaknesses as well as we do those of more traditional democracy.  Perhaps governance is the wrong way to frame this study. Rather, what we are embarked on is a kind of experimental neurology, as our communication tools continue to evolve and to rewire the processes by which the community does its shared thinking and feeling.  One of the more interesting questions posed to political scientists studying the second superpower is to what extent the community’s long-term orientation and freedom from special interests is reinforced by the peer-to-peer nature of web-centered ways of communicating—and whether these tendencies can be intentionally fostered through the design of the technology.

Which brings us to the most important point: the vital role of the individual.  The shared, collective mind of the second superpower is made up of many individual human minds—your mind and my mind—together we create the movement.  In traditional democracy our minds don’t matter much—what matters are the minds of those with power of position, and the minds of those that staff and lobby them.  In the emergent democracy of the second superpower, each of our minds matters a lot.  For example, any one of us can launch an idea.  Any one of us can write a blog, send out an email, create a list.  Not every idea will take hold in the big mind of the second superpower—but the one that eventually catches fire is started by an individual.  And in the peer-oriented world of the second superpower, many more of us have the opportunity to craft submissions, and take a shot.

The contrast goes deeper.  In traditional democracy, sense-making moves from top to bottom. “The President must know more than he is saying” goes the thinking of a loyal but passive member of the first superpower.  But this form of democracy was established in the 18th century, when education and information were both scarce resources.  Now, in more and more of the world, people are well educated and informed.  As such, they prefer to make up their own minds.  Top-down sense-making is out of touch with modern people.

The second superpower, emerging in the 21st century, depends upon educated informed members.  In the community of the second superpower each of us is responsible for our own sense-making.  We seek as much data—raw facts, direct experience—as we can, and then we make up our own minds.  Even the current fascination with “reality television” speaks to this desire: we prefer to watch our fellows, and decide ourselves “what’s the story” rather than watching actors and actresses play out a story written by someone else.  The same, increasingly, is true of the political stage—hence the attractiveness of participation in the second superpower to individuals.

Now the response of many readers will be that this is a wishful fantasy.  What, you say, is the demonstrated success of this second superpower?  After all, George Bush was almost single-handedly able to make war on Iraq, and the global protest movement was in the end only able to slow him down.  Where was the second superpower?

The answer is that the second superpower is not currently able to match the first.  On the other hand, the situation may be more promising than we realize.  Most important is that the establishment of international institutions and international rule of law has created a venue in which the second superpower can join with sympathetic nations to successfully confront the United States.  Consider the international effort to ban landmines.  Landmines are cheap, deadly, and often used against agrarian groups because they make working the fields lethal, and sew quite literally the seeds of starvation.  In the 1990s a coalition of NGOs coordinated by Jody Williams, Bobby Muller and others managed to put this issue at the top of the international agenda, and promote the establishment of the treaty banning their use.  For this, the groups involved were awarded the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize.  While the United States has so far refused to sign the treaty, it has been highly isolated on the issue and there is still hope that some future congress and president will do so.

At the Kyoto meetings on global climate change, a group of  NGOs coordinated by Nancy Keat of the World Resources Institute joined with developing nations to block the interests of the United States and its ally, big oil.  The only way for the United States to avoid being checkmated was to leave the game entirely.  In the World Trade Organization, the second superpower famously shut down the Seattle meeting in 1999, and later helped to force a special “development round” focused on the needs of poor countries.  That round is currently underway—and while the United States and others are seeking to subvert the second superpower agenda, the best they have achieved to date is stalemate.

And finally, while George Bush was indeed able to go to war with Iraq, the only way he could do so was to ignore international law and split with the United Nations.  Had he stayed within the system of international institutions, his aims likely would have been frustrated.  The French and the Germans who led the attempt to stop him could not, I believe, have done what they did without the strength of public opinion prodding them—the second superpower in action.

Now we all know that the Bush administration has decided to undermine, in many cases, the system of international law.  Some argue that by pulling out, the administration has fatally damaged the international system, and ushered in a new era where the United States determines the rules—hub and spoke style—through bilateral deals with other nations.  The result, some will say, is that the second superpower no longer has a venue in which to meet the first effectively.  In my view this is an overly pessimistic assessment—albeit one that members of the second superpower need to take seriously and strive to render false by our success in supporting international institutions.

International law and institutions are not going away.  Too many parties want and need them.  First, individuals around the world are becoming more globally aware, and more interested in international institutions. Global media, travel, and immigration all contribute to citizens being aware of the benefits of consistent approaches to everything from passport control to human rights. It is striking, for example, that up until the final days before the war, a majority of the US population wanted the president to deal with Iraq in concert with the United Nations.  Second, business organizations want global rule of law.  Global trade is now central to a vast majority of businesses and almost all nations—and such trade requires rules administered by multilateral bodies.  Third, most nations want a global legal system.  In particular, European nations, wary of war, outclassed in one-on-one power confrontations with the United States, have become strongly committed to a post-national world.  They are pouring collective national resources of enormous magnitude into continuously strengthening the international system.

The key problem facing international institutions is that they have few ways to enforce their will on a recalcitrant US government.  And this is where the second superpower is a part of the solution.  Enforcement has many dimensions. When the United States opts to avoid or undermine international institutions, the second superpower can harass and embarrass it with demonstrations and public education campaigns. The second superpower can put pressure on politicians around the world to stiffen their resolve to confront the US government in any ways possible.  And the second superpower can also target US politicians and work to remove at the polls those who support the administration’s undercutting of international law.

Longer term, we must press for a direct voice for the second superpower in international institutions, so that we are not always forced to work through nations.  This means, as a practical matter, a voice for citizens, and for NGOs and “civil society” organizations.  For example, the Access Initiative of the World Resources Institute is working to give citizens’ groups the ability to influence environmental decisions made by international organizations such as the World Bank.  The Digital Opportunity Task Force of the G8 group of nations included a formal role for civil society organizations, as does the United Nations Information and Communications Technology Task Force.

Overall, what can be said for the prospects of the second superpower?  With its mind enhanced by Internet connective tissue, and international law as a venue to work with others for progressive action, the second superpower is starting to demonstrate its potential.  But there is much to do.  How do we assure that it continues to gain in strength?  And at least as important, how do we continue to develop the mind of the second superpower, so that it maximizes wisdom and goodwill? The future, as they say, is in our hands.  We need to join together to help the second superpower, itself, grow stronger.

First, we need to become conscious of the “mental processes” in which we are involved as members of the second superpower, and explore how to make our individual sense-making and collective action more and more effective.  This of course means challenging and improving the mass media, and supporting more interactive and less biased alternatives.  But more ambitiously, we will need to develop a kind of meta-discipline, an organizational psychology of our community, to explore the nature of our web-enabled, person-centered, global governance and communication processes, and continue to improve them.

Second, and ironically, the future of the second superpower depends to a great extent on social freedoms in part determined by the first superpower.  It is the traditional freedoms—freedom of the press, of assembly, of speech—that have enabled the second superpower to take root and grow.  Indeed, the Internet itself was constructed by the US government, and the government could theoretically still step in to restrict its freedoms.  So we need to pay close attention to freedom in society, and especially to freedom of the Internet.  There are many moves afoot to censor the web, to close down access, and to restrict privacy and free assembly in cyberspace.  While we generally associate web censorship with countries like China or Saudi Arabia, tighter control of the web is also being explored in the United States and Europe.  The officials of the first superpower are promoting these ideas in the name of preventing terrorism, but they also prevent the open peer-to-peer communication that is at the heart of the second superpower.  We need to insist on an open web, an open cyberspace, around the globe, because that is the essential medium in which the second superpower lives.

Third, we must carefully consider how best to support international institutions, so that they collectively form a setting in which our power can be exercised.  Perhaps too often we attack institutions like the World Bank that might, under the right conditions, actually become partners with us in dealing with the first superpower.  International institutions must become deeply more transparent, accessible to the public, and less amenable to special interests, while remaining strong enough to provide a secure context in which our views can be expressed.

And finally, we must work on ourselves and our community.   We will dialogue with our neighbors, knowing that the collective wisdom of the second superpower is grounded in the individual wisdom within each of us.  We must remind ourselves that daily we make personal choices about the world we create for ourselves and our descendants.  We do not have to create a world where differences are resolved by war. It is not our destiny to live in a world of destruction, tedium, and tragedy.  We will create a world of peace.

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About James F. Moore

Write James F. Moore

Reposted from Sustainable Measures.

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What is an Indicator of Sustainablity? 

Maureen Hart

An indicator is something that helps you understand where you are, which way you are going and how far you are from where you want to be. A good indicator alerts you to a problem before it gets too bad and helps you recognize what needs to be done to fix the problem. Indicators of a sustainable community point to areas where the links between the economy, environment and society are weak. They allow you to see where the problem areas are and help show the way to fix those problems.
 
Indicators of sustainability are different from traditional indicators of economic, social, and environmental progress. Traditional indicators — such as stockholder profits, asthma rates, and water quality — measure changes in one part of a community as if they were entirely independent of the other parts. Sustainability indicators reflect the reality that the three different segments are very tightly interconnected, as shown in the figure below:
 

	Communities are a web of interactions among the environment, the economy and society.

 
As this figure illustrates, the natural resource base provides the materials for production on which jobs and stockholder profits depend. Jobs affect the poverty rate and the poverty rate is related to crime. Air quality, water quality and materials used for production have an effect on health. They may also have an effect on stockholder profits: if a process requires clean water as an input, cleaning up poor quality water prior to processing is an extra expense, which reduces profits. Likewise, health problems, whether due to general air quality problems or exposure to toxic materials, have an effect on worker productivity and contribute to the rising costs of health insurance.
 
Sustainability requires this type of integrated view of the world — it requires multidimensional indicators that show the links among a community’s economy, environment, and society. For example, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a well-publicized traditional indicator, measures the amount of money being spent in a country. It is generally reported as a measure of the country’s economic well-being: the more money being spent, the higher the GDP and the better the overall economic well-being is assumed to be. However, because GDP reflects only the amount of economic activity, regardless of the effect of that activity on the community’s social and environmental health, GDP can go up when overall community health goes down. For example, when there is a ten-car pileup on the highway, the GDP goes up because of the money spent on medical fees and repair costs. On the other hand, if ten people decide not to buy cars and instead walk to work, their health and wealth may increase but the GDP goes down.
 

“Trying to run a complex society on a single indicator like the Gross National product is like trying to fly a 747 with only one gauge on the instrument panel … imagine if your doctor, when giving you a checkup, did no more than check your blood pressure.”   Hazel Henderson, Paradigms of Progress

In contrast, a comparable sustainability indicator is the Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare. In order to get a more complete picture of what is economic progress, the ISEW subtracts from the GDP corrections for harmful bases or consequences of economic activity and adds to the GDP corrections for significant activities such as unpaid domestic labor. For instance, the ISEW accounts for air pollution by estimating the cost of damage per ton of five key air pollutants. It accounts for depletion of resources by estimating the cost to replace a barrel of oil equivalent with the same amount of energy from a renewable source. It estimates the cost of climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions per ton of emissions. The cost of ozone depletion is also calculated per ton of ozone depleting substance produced. Additionally, adjustments are made to reflect concern about unequal income distribution. The correction for unpaid domestic labor is based on the average domestic pay rate. Some health expenses are considered as not contributing to welfare, as well as some education expenses. (See Indicator Spotlight for more on the ISEW as a sustainability indicator.)
 
Like the GDP, the ISEW bundles together in one index tremendous amounts of information, but the key difference is that the information takes into account the links between environment, economy and society.
 
Indicators of sustainable community are useful to different communities for different reasons. For a healthy, vibrant community, indicators help monitor that health so that negative trends are caught and dealt with before they become a problem. For communities with economic, social, or environmental problems, indicators can point the way to a better future. For all communities, indicators can generate discussion among people with different backgrounds and viewpoints, and, in the process, help create a shared vision of what the community should be.

Traditional Versus Sustainability Indicators

The tables below compare traditional indicators with sustainable community indicators.
 

Economic Indicators
Traditional Indicators	Sustainability Indicators	Emphasis of Sustainability Indicators
Median income   Per capita income relative to the U.S. average	Number of hours of paid employment at the average wage required to support basic needs	What wage can buy   Defines basic needs in terms of sustainable consumption
Unemployment rate   Number of companies   Number of jobs	Diversity and vitality of local job base   Number and variability in size of companies   Number and variability of industry types   Variability of skill levels required for jobs	Resilience of the job market   Ability of the job market to be flexible in times of economic change
Size of the economy as measured by GNP and GDP	Wages paid in the local economy that are spent in the local economy   Dollars spent in the local economy which pay for local labor and local natural resources   Percent of local economy based on renewable local resources	Local financial resilience

 

Environmental Indicators
Traditional Indicators	Sustainability Indicators	Emphasis of Sustainability Indicators
Ambient levels of pollution in air and water	Use and generation of toxic materials (both in production and by end user)   Vehicle miles traveled	Measuring activities causing pollution
Tons of solid waste generated	Percent of products produced which are durable, repairable, or readily recyclable or compostable	Conservative and cyclical use of materials
Cost of fuel	Total energy used from all sources   Ratio of renewable energy used at renewable rate compared to nonrenewable energy	Use of resources at sustainable rate

 

Social Indicators
Traditional Indicators	Sustainability Indicators	Emphasis of Sustainability Indicators
SAT and other standardized test scores	Number of students trained for jobs that are available in the local economy   Number of students who go to college and come back to the community	Matching job skills and training to needs of the local economy
Number of registered voters	Number of voters who vote in elections   Number of voters who attend town meetings	Participation in democratic process   Ability to participate in the democratic process

 

Characteristics of Effective Indicators

An indicator is something that points to an issue or condition. Its purpose is to show you how well a system is working. If there is a problem, an indicator can help you determine what direction to take to address the issue. Indicators are as varied as the types of systems they monitor. However, there are certain characteristics that effective indicators have in common:

• Effective indicators are relevant; they show you something about the system that you need to know.
   
  
• Effective indicators are easy to understand, even by people who are not experts.
   
  
• Effective indicators are reliable; you can trust the information that the indicator is providing.
   
  
• Lastly, effective indicators are based on accessible data; the information is available or can be gathered while there is still time to act.
  

An example of an indicator is the gas gauge in your car. The gas gauge shows you how much gasoline is left in your car. If the gauge shows the tank is almost empty, you know it’s time to fill up. Another example of an indicator is a midterm report card. It shows you whether a student is doing well enough to go to the next grade or if extra help is needed. Both of these indicators provide information to help prevent or solve problems, hopefully before they become too severe.
 
Indicators can be useful as proxies or substitutes for measuring conditions that are so complex that there is no direct measurement. For instance, it is hard to measure the ‘quality of life in my town’ because there are many different things that make up quality of life and people may have different opinions on which conditions count most. A very simple substitute indicator is ‘Number of people moving into the town compared to the number moving out.’
 
Examples of familiar measurements used as indicators in everyday life include:

• Wave height and wind speed are indicators of storm severity
   
  
• Barometric pressure and wind direction are indicators of upcoming weather changes
   
  
• Won-lost record is an indicator of player skills
   
  
• Credit-card debt is an indicator of money-management skills
   
  
• Pulse and blood pressure are indicators of fitness
  

Note that these are all numeric measurements. Indicators are quantifiable. An indicator is not the same thing as an indication, which is generally not quantifiable, but just a vague clue. In addition to being quantifiable, effective indicators have the four basic characteristics noted above. These characteristics are:
 
Relevant
An indicator must be relevant, that is, it must fit the purpose for measuring. As indicators, the gas gauge and the report card both measure facts that are relevant. If, instead of measuring the amount of gas in the tank, the gas gauge showed the octane rating of the gasoline, it would not help you decide when to refill the tank. Likewise, a report card that measured the number of pencils used by the student would be a poor indicator of academic performance.
 
Understandable
An indicator must be understandable. You need to know what it is telling you. There are many different types of gas gauges. Some gauges have a lever that moves between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ marks. Other gauges use lights to achieve the same effect. Some gauges show the number of gallons of gasoline left in the tank. Although different, each gauge is understandable to the driver. Similarly, with the report card, different schools have different ways of reporting academic progress. Some schools have letter grades A through F. Other schools use numbers from 100 to 0. Still other schools use written comments. Like the gas gauge, these different measures all express the student’s progress or lack of progress in a way that is understandable to the person reading the report card.
 
On the other hand, a gas gauge that showed the number of BTU’s left in the tank would probably not be very useful to you in deciding when to fill up the tank. Likewise, a report card that gave grades in ancient Greek script would be a mystery to most people. In order for you to know when action is needed, you must be able to understand what an indicator is telling you.
 
Reliable
An indicator must be reliable. You must trust what the indicator shows. A good gas gauge and an accurate report card give information that can be relied on. A gas gauge that shows the tank is empty when in fact it is half full would make you stop for gasoline before it is needed. A gas gauge that shows the tank is half full when in fact it is empty would cause you to run out of gas in an inconvenient place. Similarly, if a student’s grade were reported wrong, an honors student could be sent for remedial work and a student who needs help would not get it. An indicator is only useful if you know you can believe what it is showing you.
 
Reliability is not the same as precision. When your gas gauge registers empty, you know there is still a gallon or so of gasoline left as a reserve. The gas gauge reliably under-reports the amount of gasoline. An indicator does not necessarily need to be precise; it just needs to give a reliable picture of the system it is measuring.
 
Accessible Data
Indicators must provide timely information. They must give you information while there is time to act. For example, imagine a gas gauge that only gave you the amount of gasoline in the tank when the engine was started. After you have been driving for several hours, that reading is no longer useful. You need to know how much gasoline is in the tank at each moment. Similarly, a report card distributed a week before graduation arrives too late to give a student remedial help. In order for an indicator to be useful in preventing or solving a problem, it must give you the information while there is still time to correct the problem.
 
One of the biggest problems with developing indicators of sustainability is that frequently the best indicators are those for which there is no data, while the indicators for which there is data are the least able to measure sustainability. This has led many communities to choose traditional data sources and measures for indicators. There are several advantages to traditional indicators. First, the data is readily available and can be used to compare communities. Second, traditional indicators can help to define problem areas. Third, traditional indicators can be combined to create sustainability indicators.
 
However, there is a real danger that traditional data sources and traditional indicators will focus attention on the traditional solutions that created an unsustainable community in the first place. It may be tempting to keep measuring ‘number of jobs,’ but measuring ‘number of jobs that pay a livable wage and include benefits’ will lead to better solutions. Discussions that include the phrase ‘but you can’t get that data’ are not going to lead to indicators of sustainability. In fact, if you define a list of indicators and find that the data is readily available for every one of them, you probably have not thought hard enough about sustainability. Try to define the best indicators and only settle for less as an interim step while developing data sources for better indicators.

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