Cybercene or Biocene: Which Future Will We Choose?
Just as scientists announce that we’ve entered the human-dominated Anthropocene, we’re actually on the threshold of a post-human world, being supplanted by machines of our own invention. Is it worth pausing in the twilight of our self-extinction to rescue our most humane qualities, strike a better balance with our inventions and reconnect with the rest of nature?
Wow, that was quick! After 12,000 years of the Holocene, that long-enduring era of a stable climate and the rise of human civilization, scientists announced in August 2016 that we’d officially entered the Anthropocene, an era of indisputable human domination. They were a little late to the party, though. By their own reckoning, the shift actually began in the 1950s with a burst of postwar industrial development, an era of boundless faith in the transformative power of technology.
But with the new millennium, this star-struck optimism has given way to technological skepticism and widespread despair about the human future. Suddenly we face the grim consequences of our heedless pursuit of technotopia. We’re drowning in a miasma of suffocating carbon dioxide emissions, sea level rise, mass extinction of species, pandemics, climate catastrophes, political extremism, and social conflict. Those of the one percent with the means and inclination are heading for the exits, in repurposed missile silos, offshore colonies of the coddled, even into space.
We’re actually living in the twilight years of the Anthropocene in the transition to a world of our own creation but no longer governed by us. In our place, we’re programming the steering wheel to operate on auto-pilot without considering where it’s taking us. AI promises a frictionless life of comfort and convenience and a final escape from the messiness of being human — rid at last of our chronic conflicts with others and ourselves, our ceaseless suffering as we search vainly for peace of mind in all the wrong places. Who wouldn’t want out of that?
And yet handing it all over to Hal and donning Google glasses to view our personally curated channel of virtual self-replacement is unlikely to spring us free from the constraints of earthly existence. Alas, as mindfulness pioneer Jon Kabat-Zinn observes, “wherever we go, there we are.” We carry our scattered, shattered selves on our backs, lugging the dirty laundry of our unrealized lives behind us, from which our ill-fitting clothes spill in endless regrets.
We’ve already seen that despite their promises of connecting everyone with everyone, social media have succeeded catastrophically, luring us from the complicated intimacies of face-to-face relationships into a bottomless pit of virtual anonymity. Ostensibly intended to fulfill our longings for love and friendship, they have in fact only exacerbated the crazy-making torment of self-isolation and harrowing loneliness. Would the complete supplanting of our individuality by pre-programmed scripts and designer personalities succeed in nourishing our famished souls any more effectively than the first generation of anti-social media?
We still have time, though precious little, to make a different choice. There’s probably no stopping the momentum of AI as it upends every dimension of our personal and collective lives, but we can redirect its viral spread in more humane directions. Instead of looking for ever more efficient ways to replace reality with reality shows and ourselves with bots for every conceivable function, we can apply our ingenuity to developing a more satisfying relationship with ourselves, each other and our inventions. If, as MIT social technologist Sherry Terkle says, texting had been developed before the simple telephone, we’d see mere voice contact as an epic advance. And if we returned instead to the simple, satisfying pleasures of heartfelt face-to-face conversation, we’d achieve a great leap forward in human evolution. Sometimes we need to step back to our original selves to move forward in our collective consciousness.
It’s not a matter of abandoning AI, a feat as impossible as reversing the tides. It is, rather, a case of making more judicious use of AI as a complementary form of intelligence while re-embracing those unique qualities of being and awareness that we humans are gifted with but have yet to fully develop — our empathy for others, human and otherwise, and our capacity to be here for one another in service not to money or power but to our common good. We urgently need to strike a better balance between technological innovation and the cultivation of commonsense wisdom about how best to apply our inventiveness to the paramount challenges of our time.
The good news is that it’s entirely within our most humane capabilities to recommit to our humanity as we pause at the precipice of omnicide and self-extinction. It’s precisely at those moments when we are collectively most threatened that we come together to do what needs to be done to survive. And remarkably, it’s just at those most perilous moments that we instinctively relinquish, albeit all too briefly, our obsession with our private selves and enter “hive mind” to sacrifice for one another in the service of all. Social science research reveals that in ever more frequent events like mass shootings, floods, hurricanes and wildfires, people instinctively help one another. Contrary to our own expectations and warnings from those in positions of authority that in moments of crisis we need to defer to them to avoid mass panic, we actually self-organize for collective survival, queueing up and coming to the aid of one another even at great risk to ourselves.
In such moments we actually turn out to be better than we think we’re capable of being. The impulse to be here for one another temporarily transcends class, race, age, and ethnicity, leveling the playing field as at no other time in human history. At the moment people often defer to those least able to help themselves, giving a hand to the elderly and disabled. The celebrated case of London under the Blitz during the Second World War, like Manhattan in the first hours and days after the World Trade Center attacks, demonstrated that class-bound cultures can achieve and maintain this state of collective compassion for months and even years at a time. Unfortunately, it generally doesn’t extend into peacetime, when stratifications reassert themselves with dismaying regularity and we retract into our private selves, to the emotional and spiritual impoverishment of all. One of our most daunting challenges is to learn to extend our altruistic behavior in times of emergency to caring for one another through all the rhythms and routines of everyday life.
Billionaire bunker in a used missile silo
As it happens, the perfect storm of calamities now gathering on the horizon presents us with history’s most urgent and universal challenge to our collective survival, leaving no one unaffected, not even those who seek to buy their way out of it in fruitless attempts at personal secession from the human predicament. Besides, who would want to live in an underground missile silo with only video screens of blue skies and pastoral panoramas to remind us of what we’ve lost? And how long could they bear subsisting in enforced solitary confinement with only scant survival rations to nourish them in place of the flourishing natural and human community they would have enjoyed had they invested in our shared fate while it was still possible?
For those who choose to remain above ground and draw closer to one another, stranger and friend alike, these most perilous moments are also life’s richest, for it’s at just such interludes that we demonstrate the better angels of our natures. As legendary oral historian Studs Terkel told me at age 94, soon after surviving his fifth coronary bypass surgery, “Don’t ever give up on people. Just when you’re about to they’ll surprise you.”
Giving over our messy, complicated but ultimately rewarding humanity to the automated, pre-programmed efficiencies of AI strips us of our most adaptable and humane tools for self-rescue, the life rafts that alone can safely carry us to the far shore. And in the clutch, like everything else we do, many of our cyber inventions will most likely malfunction in spectacular ways. Cyber warfare, a direct expression of AI gone rogue in its most destructive forms, has already done more damage to our fragile but resilient experiment in American democracy than 225 years of extreme abuse. Through the unconstrained expression of trolls’ twisted ids, our crucial norms of public discourse have been decimated if not terminally destroyed.
And now we face the prospect of all-out cyber wars in which our power grids, communications and transportation systems, sanitation and water systems, financial sector and apparatus of governance will be paralyzed and the entire infrastructure of advanced technological society comes to a sudden, silent halt. How long such paralysis would last and how we would cope is an open question and a frightening prospect. Given our ever more extreme dependence on these overly complex and interconnected systems and our generations-long loss of knowledge about how to survive and recover our resilience in their absence, our innate capacities for adaptation, recovery and mutual aid will be severely challenged.
Now, not once the power goes out, is the time to take back the steering wheel from the amoral, insensate technologies in which in our heedlessness we are vesting our destinies. It’s time and past time to develop the wisdom to match our ingenuity. Wisdom has been sadly lacking for most of our human history, leading us to blunder into ever more destructive conflicts and inflict still greater injustices on one another. Then within a few generations, we unlearn all the lessons of those tragedies for which millions have died. Time to grow up, we the impetuous adolescents of the universe, and cultivate the humane capacities within our emphatically mixed human personalities. Our inventions will only be as wise as we make them.
The Anthropocene contains within its DNA a fatal hubris, daring us to imagine that we humans are the pinnacle of evolution and masters of the universe. Yet the Cybercene would be an equally unbalanced outcome likely to produce still more dystopian societies. It’s time to envision and create a synthesis that merges the wisest of human inventions with our most humane values.
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Call it the Biocene, an enduring era of thriving life in which humans finally find our proper place in the great chain of being — no longer dominant but coequal with all creation and in balance with our inventions. That’s a long way from where we are today, yet at the warp speed of the present this moment is our decision point. May we choose wisely.
