Picking up The Future of Humanity, I recognized the photo on the back cover as the face of a commentator I’ve seen on PBS Nova documentaries aired on Netflix. Recognizing someone’s photo is a dumb reason to buy a book, but not the dumbest. (That distinction is reserved for Being And Nothingness which I bought because I thought it would be good for me.) Kaku is an astrophysicist so, unsurprisingly, his book assumes that the future of humanity is not on Earth but among the stars. The book opens with a whirlwind survey of space flight’s history, takes a brief look at the current state of affairs, then moves on from there. As Kaku sees it, the next major step in our bright and shining future is a manned (yes, manned) landing on Mars. There are certain challenges which face us if we are to achieve this step. Kaku breaks down these challenges and addresses them in turn while acknowledging that they are interdependent and all must be addressed at once to assure success.
The challenges can be reduced to two major categories: 1) biology, and 2) engineering. How do you maintain a human body for the 2+ years a return flight to Mars would entail while in zero and low gravity environments? And how do you protect a body from the sustained exposure to radiation that will occur both in flight and on Mars? In terms of engineering, the issues centre around questions of acceleration (and deceleration). Are there more efficient ways to propel a rocket so that most of the fuel isn’t expended in carrying fuel? And how are astronauts going to live while on Mars? Shelter? Oxygen? Water?
It seems that if we are to establish a permanent presence in space, an essential step if we are to safeguard our future (because, let’s be honest, we’re fucking up egregiously here on Earth), then we will have to further develop certain technologies, most notably robotics to perform tasks in harsh environments, and artificial intelligence so that robots can engage in intelligent decision-making when operating too remotely for human guidance. Ultimately this will require self-replicating nanotechnology and a merging of human and machine intelligence to produce transhuman beings able to function in hostile environments.
In tone and general outlook, Kaku’s book reminds me of I. M. Levitt’s 1956 book, A Space Traveller’s Guide To Mars. Although published more than 60 years apart, the books share a sentiment of optimism, an absolute faith in technology’s capacity to overcome all obstacles, and a penchant for the speculative. In the case of Levitt, many of his speculations about Mars (and how we might get there) have been rendered ridiculous by the fact that we have sent probes there which have provided data about everything from soil composition to weather patterns. In the case of Kaku, his book was published only last year, so it’s too soon to tell how successful his speculations will be. He has protected himself by projecting some of his technologies and discoveries so far into the future that by the time he’s proven or disproven, no one will remember him.
To support his speculations, Kaku trots out a variety of experts all of whom share a couple distinctive features: 1) they are almost invariably men; and 2) they almost invariably grew up reading science fiction. We get the feeling that when grown men make speculative extrapolations from science, they reveal something of their healthy adolescent fantasy lives. Anti-matter rocket propulsion. Laser-porting nanotechnology to other worlds. Extracting human personalities (souls?) as code and laser beaming them at light speed to other worlds to be implanted (downloaded) into waiting machines. Dyson Spheres.
I find it difficult to read Kaku without marshalling other writers as an antidote to his uncritical optimism. Take, for example, Meredith Broussard, whose book, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, injects more realistic expectations into conversations about machine learning. Her central thesis is that the people who drive AI are sci-fi geeks who inhabit a sexist ethos devoid of ethics and are blind to their own limitations. As she notes:
… we have a small, elite group of men who tend to overestimate their mathematical abilities, who have systematically excluded women and people of colour in favour of machines for centuries, who tend to want to make science fiction real, who have little regard for social convention, who don’t believe that social norms or rules apply to them, who have unused piles of government money sitting around, and who have adopted the ideological rhetoric of far-right libertarian anarcho-capitalists.
What could possibly go wrong?
In the same vein is Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget. He is highly critical of what he describes as cybernetic totalism—the belief that human beings can be reduced to algorithms (a favourite of Google’s founders)—which he identifies as junk science, nothing more than ideology couched in technological language and promoted by people who never matured beyond adolescence.
Finally, I take exception to the underlying premise of Kaku’s book, namely that our future lies beyond the planet Earth. Despite its apparent optimism, the underlying premise hints at something quite dark. Our future lies beyond the planet Earth because, if we stay, we will annihilate ourselves. However, this engages us in behaviour which psychologists would describe as avoidance. It’s easier to flee than to face squarely our shortcomings and to address them. If we leave the planet Earth, we merely take our self-destructive habits with us and replicate them elsewhere.
Instead, maybe the future of humanity lies in self-mastery. We earn the right to leave the planet by nurturing wisdom. To that end, I recommend as a further antidote a tiny book by Pico Iyer called The Art of Stillness which celebrates the virtues of going nowhere. As Iyer observes: “You don’t get over the shadows inside you simply by walking away from them.” Rather, the greatest rewards come from sitting still. But that requires you to ignore the ever-pressing demands of new technologies.