GRIN and bear it

The future may be bright. But the future may also be dark and disturbing. GRIN is an acronym that represents the four big emerging technologies of our times. Many believe them to be the defining technologies of the age and their speed of development will determine how far we decide to travel down the road of post-humanism to the point where humans are physically and intellectually enhanced - Human 2.0. In this short article I raise some of the issues for debate that will shape the future of humankind.

GRIN stands for Genetics, Robotics, Information technology, and Nanotechnology. Singularly, each technology is influential and each is developing at a rapid pace. In combination, GRIN technologies are advancing exponentially. Each technology has courted its fair share of controversy, particularly from the disquiet expressed about their ethical and moral implications, but also due to the unknown long term consequences they may bring. Nanotechnology is so new that no-one is really sure what will come of it (Bonsor and Strickland, 2011), whilst robotics is so mature a science that we now know almost too much about it. Robotics for example, is not governed by the failsafe laws predicted by Asimov (no robot shall do harm to a human being). The use of drones and other military applications of robotics have sadly demonstrated that machines are governed by humans, and robots enables human controllers to kill very efficiently. So concerning is its rapid progress that a United Nations expert has recently called for a halt to military robot development.

Genetic manipulation of the building blocks of life has spawned advances in genetic manipulation, germline cell therapy and genetically modified crops. None of these is without its dangers and difficulties, but each is also making ground on perennial problems such as inherited health problems, pest control and food production.

The potential for the combination of all of the GRIN technologies to advance human capabilities is great, but there are also several important issues with which we shall all be aware of. It is one thing for example, to create an artificial being such as a robot to perform mundane tasks, but what happens if it becomes sentient? Artificial humans have long been a popular topic of dystopic science fiction and popular culture. From the myths of ancient Greece, Frankenstein's monster, through to Terminator and I Robot, the warning is clear. Give a machine a mind and superior strength, and it is liable to turn upon its maker.

More likely to emerge first will be hybrid enhanced humans. What happens when we begin to merge humans with cybernetic systems to such a level that we create super-humans - true cyborgs? Even more likely, how will we justify tampering with genetics to the point where we are cloning versions of ourselves with the sole intent to harvest their DNA or organs for experimentation or for transplantation? All of these scenarios are possible, some are already happening, and some are in the process of being realised, but are they desirable or ethical? Do GRIN technologies give humankind a blank cheque to experiment to the point of no return? Do we have a license to combine man and machine to the point where we can no longer see the join? Are we able to reasonably measure the benefits of Human 2.0 against the potential dangers and threats, when in fact we are not yet able to predict outcomes and consequences?

I suspect that GRIN technologies will appear with increasing regularly in the news as our knowledge advances, to the point where hybrid, enhanced humans are commonplace, and machines achieve equivalent processing power to replicate human thought. At that point we will have achieved the 'Singularity'. According to prophets of the new age such as Ray Kurzweil, the Singularity is the imminent point in human development where technology is advancing so rapidly that humankind will no longer be able to comprehend it. Then we will see the age of the Transhuman - where biology is transcended by technology, and where GRIN technologies enhance humans beyond their natural capabilities. It will be the tipping point, and there will be no turning back.

Perhaps we have already gone too far. Genetically altered human beings already exist and have been with us for more than a decade. We are not talking here about test-tube babies. We are referring to the experiments first conducted by the Institute of Reproductive Medicine and Science at St Barnabas Hospital in New Jersey. Genetically modified babies have been born to women who had difficulty conceiving naturally. The Institute added extra DNA from a female donor egg before they were fertilised, and when the babies were born, they were found to have inherited the DNA from one man and two women (Hanlon, 2013). All well and good, you may think. 30 women who previously could not conceive now have teenage children. But what if scientists next decide to push the experiment further and create humans that have enhanced physical strength or intellectual capabilities? What will be the consequences of this act? Have we now forever artificially altered the genetic structure of the future human race? Will we have to simply GRIN and bear it?

Photo by Yorgos Nikas (Wellcome Images)


GRIN and bear it by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.