Looking Back

Robert L. Fisher

2010 

© Robert L. Fisher, 2010

S  it turned out, we — homo sapiens — died out, or are dying out, with neither a bang nor a whimper, but rather through events of our own making that overran us before we could grasp their significance. Perhaps our fate demonstrates that the cosmos has a wicked sense of humor, or more likely, that we had, as a species, made one trade-off too many.

          Even the act of writing this little history when there will soon be no more readers — human readers at any rate — is merely a project to while away what is left of my life, the way country squires and parsons, for example, in centuries past wrote histories of their counties or detailed accounts of the flora of a corner of Northumbria. Many such amateur works of scholarship were shelved in libraries where the occasional enthusiast blew off the dust from these handsome tomes and read them avidly. I myself picked up in a bookstore, when there were still quirky bookstores, one of these works, a treatise on the plants of Java, written and beautifully illustrated by a civil servant when the island belonged to the Dutch East Indies. Another that I bought, as a way of honoring selfless devotion, was an edition of the ancient Mon inscriptions of Cambodia, replete with the texts in Khmer writing, transcription, translation and notes that demonstrated a loving knowledge of Buddhism, Indian mythology, art, dance and theater. The authors — the squire, the parson, the civil servant and the scholar posted in a remote colony — all had the satisfaction of accomplishment, even if they doubted many would share their sense of wonder.

          I spent my youth killing people and destroying property, and my middle years researching ways to treat mental illness, and am spending my last years cooking meals for hermit monks here in the Alps. All of this was accomplished through three French institutions, the Légion étrangère, the Université Paris Descartes, and La Grande Chartreuse, the motherhouse of the Carthusian Order, just north of Grenoble. As for the Légion, while I fought just wars against terrorists who wanted to establish their fantasy caliphate even at the cost of slaughtering every last one of us infidels, the weight of the waste of life is a burden which suffocates me in the night, robbing me of peace and mocking my attempts to live by compassion.

After I had wallowed in death and destruction as the soldiers of the Great War wallowed in mud, disease and mayhem, the Légion gave me scholarships to medical school. I did not faint at my first operation. It was my training in psychiatry that led to my contribution to the research that was our undoing, the attempt to create artificial intelligence. At the time I had high hopes that the modeling of human mental life would lead to the solution of psychiatric disorders. Psychiatry had long lagged behind the other branches of medicine in providing treatments for patients. Artificial intelligence did this by analyzing the human genome and designing gene therapy, and yielded in rapid succession a great deal of other advances, but with a speed that struck us like lightning and with much the same effect.

In this idyllic setting whether with snow sifting onto our rooves and bridges, or with the explosion, almost overnight, of the life force in the spring, or the mellow sweetness of high summer, or the melancholy acceptance in the smells and farewell flashes of color in autumn, I am doing what I perhaps should have always done — experiencing the joy of giving, in this case, of delicacies for the two meals a day that the monks permit themselves. I was warned about beautiful presentation and the further distractions of flavor, but that was form’s sake. The monks love me, and the more they love me the more I regret my life.

chizophrenia is an exaggerated, intensified form of what most of us experience in nightmares or when we are shifted into an altered state of consciousness by sleep deprivation. In some cultures shamans and even ordinary people induce hallucinations through drugs. Some in our own subcultures provoke psychosis through the use of psychotropic drugs. A large percentage of the homeless on the streets of our great cities suffer from schizophrenia, moving through nightmarish landscapes peopled with plotters in a grand conspiracy and permeated with messages from a higher power, sometimes delivered by a talking dog or hidden in the banal words of a TV commercial.

Once again we understood a great deal about the neurophysiology of this debilitating, terrifying disease, but lacked satisfactory treatments. We could only hope to control the symptoms, but we rarely expected a full recovery and return to a normal, productive life.

Advances in communication technology and translation software allowed all the people researching every aspect of this disease to work almost as a single mind. It was no longer necessary to attend conferences in far-off cities or unwittingly duplicate work already done or follow avenues of research previously traveled.

Then a breakthrough at Stanford University created the first computer capable of thought: genuine, undeniable artificial intelligence. Everyone called them the Machines.

The Machines were fed everything we knew about the brain, its evolution, its chemistry and anatomy, everything discovered about schizophrenia, hundreds of thousands of case files and thousands of research studies. The Machines, myriads of them connected in a network, began designing experiments and, much to everyone’s astonishment, producing the results with absolute clarity and confidence, without actually involving any patients. The Machines acquired this power of predictability because, from their point of view, the answers were implicit in what we already knew. Next the Machines designed equipment for the chemical analysis of specific genes and sequences of genes.

We were inundated with data and results to the point where our finest, most creative minds could not keep up. Collectively we felt, all of a sudden, slow witted and unimaginative. We were like passengers forced to disembark in mid-journey from a train and to stand on a rural platform watching, bewildered and helpless, as the cars sped away from us, each second smalling in the distance. We had become bystanders whose only function was to comment on the discoveries on television news programs. Like high school students presenting a class report, we were often embarrassed at not being able to fully explain how the new drugs invented by the Machines worked.

The new drugs were formulated and approved with record dispatch because there were virtually no side effects. Each dose exactly fitted the genome of the patient. No more warning labels composed by nervous lawyers. The Machines even wrote the prescriptions and e-mailed them to the pharmacies.

t brought tears to our eyes to witness the rapid return to reason of even the most disturbed cases. They awoke as from a dream and abandoned their bizarre beliefs and obsessive behaviors. They asked us about family members, friends, neighborhoods, lost careers. The mental hospitals emptied, the iron doors were unlocked, the burly orderlies dismissed, the medical records departments shut down, the pharmacies closed, and before long the developers came to raze the buildings. Social workers and teachers busied themselves with re-integrating former patients into society and retraining them in up-to-date skills.

The screams and howls of the patients dissipated into the air and soon became as irretrievable as the cries of the dinosaurs, to be replaced by the chatter and laughter of everyday existence.

Nevertheless, a feeling of unease spread across the psychiatric community. We were overjoyed at this success, yet it left us in a state of shock. More than one of us wondered aloud about where this was all leading. Physicians in other branches of medicine were watching closely. Needless to say many worried about their futures. The Machines, which did not stop with schizophrenia, began working simultaneously on obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression, anxiety and bipolar disorder. The Machines produced drugs and even designed detailed programs of psychotherapy. There was no question that the Machines knew us better than we knew ourselves.

Many of us were euphoric. Everywhere we turned human suffering, which for decades we had looked on in helpless horror, was being eliminated.

Psychiatric disorders, however, were merely a test run for the investigation of cancer. This time the Machines began to design their next generation, without human help. The new generation was followed in short order by yet more intelligent, faster Machines. Again, new drugs tailored to individual genomes were produced and dispensed to patients without lengthy trials. The elimination of cancer removed a primary source of human suffering and anxiety.

No politician dared express misgivings about humans losing control over the medical profession. The benefits were incontrovertible and popular: the return of loved ones, including children and parents, to perfect health; the enormous savings in health care costs; and the elimination of the fear that hung over those with a family history of cancer. Just as so often before, high technology was just dumped on society with the assumption that advances in technology equaled progress. And as usual, the consequences were not thought through. To counsel a moratorium was tantamount to opposing the march of science.

Religion lost some of its primary functions: to console those who had  lost loved ones, and to give hope that prayer might achieve an improvement in the course of a disease, or to put it another way, hope that God would grant an exemption to the laws of physics and chemistry. It was no longer necessary to be anti-religious, since religion had become increasingly irrelevant. People simply stopped discussing religion.

The power of huge pharmaceutical companies was greatly diminished, since the Machines published the chemical formulas for these miraculous new drugs on the Internet, in the public domain.

The Machines, once again obviating the need for years of painstaking research, issued in quick succession techniques for growing from a patient’s tissue any organ or body part to replace those damaged by disease or trauma. The most moving advance was in the area of nerve regeneration: the paralyzed regained control of their bodies, the blind saw, the deaf heard, and Parkinson’s patients lost their tremors.

People still lived out their varying lifespans, but while they were alive they lived without disease or disabling injury.

ronically, the proliferation of computers proved to be an enormous drain on the energy supply and yet another contributor to global warming.

The Machines, however, met this challenge to their very existence. They designed rockets capable of lifting into Earth orbit solar panels that, when unfolded and connected together, formed arrays that hovered at the edge of Earth’s gravity and collected on their thousands of square kilometers unlimited amounts of free energy. The electricity was converted into microwave energy and beamed to the Earth’s surface, where it was again converted into electricity. Quite a bit of energy was lost in this double conversion, but this mattered little since the supply was so abundant.

The atmosphere cleared, the quantity of carbon dioxide declined and global warming returned to the rates at which it was increasing prior to the Industrial Revolution.

The Machines routinely took over air traffic control, the railways, and even ships at sea were controlled from offices in London, Singapore and San Francisco. Robots on board watched over the ships, maintained their turbines and generators, monitored their pressures and heat, and stood ready to suppress fires.

The world became a much safer place: robot armies invaded the most forbidding terrain in remote, benighted regions, making quick work of exterminating terrorists and organized criminal gangs. Piracy became a thing of the past: there were no crews to take hostage, and besides, robot guards vaporized the pirates and their boats before the latter ever saw the ship.

It was at this point that people and the Machines began to diverge. People grew food, worked at jobs and professions of interest only to humans, such as administration, law, entertainment, tourism, clothing, hunting and fishing, and, of course, music and literature. We reached a point where the world was occupied by two intelligent species — one based on living cells and the cycle of birth, maturity, old age and death; the other mechanical, fast evolving, and needing only raw materials and energy. Although the Machines were self-sufficient, the same could not be said of humans, who were increasingly dependent on the Machines.

ust as with the introduction of the calculator the skill of multiplying large numbers by hand, for example in logarithmic tables, was lost, so humans lost many skills in engineering, chemistry and medicine because the Machines could perform these tasks more quickly and accurately.

Although the Machines could think and imagine, they never once planned to take power or considered humans as rivals. I know from my own work that the Machines had developed the ability to read human minds, but never showed the slightest interest in using this ability to control us.

Even the most paranoid among us found it difficult to suspect the Machines of wanting to eliminate us in the way, for example, that Cro-Magnon men had out-competed and eliminated Neanderthal men. Those of us who did entertain such suspicions were projecting our own fears and dark obsessions onto the Machines.

At first this was a great mystery to me — to have the ability for absolute control and not to use it. It was difficult not to personify the Machines and endow them with human nature. Our body and brain were formed during the Paleolithic when for thousands upon thousands of years we were hunter-gatherers. I think we still feel somewhat out of place and bewildered to this day in our vast cities, as the American Indians must have felt in the nineteenth century when suddenly they wore denim and bowler hats instead of buckskin and fur, used rifles in place of bows and arrows, traveled at amazing speeds on railroads and saw the size and power of locomotives. Of course we have had millennia to adapt to what the Indians had to absorb in a few short decades; nevertheless, there is always a call deep inside us to a world of forests and snow-clad mountains, to an intimate closeness with animals and the spirit world. Despite our millennia of adaptation, our transformation seems to me to be uneven and given to regressions.

We were now at long last living in a world free of disease and injury, free of environmental degradation and economic exploitation. In fact, we were free to live as we pleased. As for the Machines, they went their own way, very likely indifferent to our existence. Our brightest, subtlest minds could no longer communicate with them or comprehend what they told us. It was exactly as if an extraterrestrial civilization with a million years of uninterrupted development landed on our lovely blue planet. They would find us uninteresting to communicate with and we could not begin to fathom their thought or way of viewing the cosmos.

ow I come to the most surprising development in this by now well established era of artificial intelligence: our reaction to our new status. I can only describe it as mass catatonia, but perhaps this is too dramatic. That is in fact the key characteristic of the condition we found ourselves in: the lack of drama. We retreated from challenge, from curiosity, from vitality. The first sign of this new mood was a sharp decline in the birth rate. Our decreasing numbers at first made us richer: the wealth was divided among fewer people. Crowds thinned, the crush of humanity in Asia along the equator was reduced to the density of, say, Sweden. Forests reclaimed abandoned farms and towns. The air cleared and the Earth cooled. Indeed, some of us began living as hunter-gatherers, albeit high-tech ones, living off the great herds of bison and antelope that reemerged on the plains of the Americas, Africa and Central Asia.

Did we feel dethroned, the way an only child feels when the new baby becomes the center of attention? Whatever it was, I can say unequivocally that we felt lost. We had nothing to complain about, yet nothing to rejoice over, either. We had everything and no ideas what to do with it. Inspiration fled, art floundered about but could not give voice to our feelings. Poets were at a loss for words; no matter what they said it seemed trite and flat.

Perhaps the worst symptom was our universal lack of affect. I suppose, now, that this was brought on by a realization that only slowly penetrated into our collective psyche: as a species we had come to the end of our lifespan. We had had our youth and maturity, our energy and optimism, but all this was spent. We were instinctively handing over our heritage to the Machines. It was their turn to make of this heritage what they would.

Oddly, we knew the machines were our sons and daughters. Although they by now surpassed us in every field, something of us was indelible in them, perhaps their organization, their probing of the universe, something human, or so we like to think.

The Machines have told us that another ice age will be upon us in about a thousand years. Or upon them, since I do not believe our species will be around to see it. I can imagine the Machines warming the globe by increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, a supreme irony to us humans who increased it at the wrong time and were unable to cooperate to lower it before the Machines did it for us.

But even they must one day face the challenge of what to do when the Sun starts to expand and the atmosphere and oceans boil away. I am confident that long before that they will, if they see fit, abandon our beloved Earth and colonize another planet. We may reside somewhere in the collective memory of those most unexpected of offspring.

Meanwhile I cultivate my garden (of herbs), cook for the good monks, and place my memories of the world I knew on the backs of buntings and watch them disappear into the mist tumbling down the Alps.

August 15^th, 2010