Accelerating Rate of Change Scary

This column is a bit afield from my typical fare, a fill-in until a  couple of Illinois-focused pieces jell. 

 For most of human history, there has been no change from  generation to generation. Peasants tilled their fields across the centuries  with the same primitive tools. Their masters carried on “economic  development” (warfare) unabated. 

 The rate of change over time was flat, scraping along the bottom  of the chart. 

 Real change began in the Golden Age of 5th Century BC Greece,  I would say, followed in the 700s AD or so with Islamic and Tang  Dynasty China scientific advances. Then followed the 14th Century  Renaissance and later the Scientific Method and Industrial Revolution.  The 20th Century saw the rate of change catapult sharply upward.  Yet the change we have seen in recent years in artificial intelligence,  cyber communication and genetic manipulation have been at a breath taking, exhilarating and sobering, almost incomprehensible rate that has  the line on the chart headed almost straight up. 

 In the 19th Century, Mendel’s path-breaking experiments with the  inheritance of characteristics languished in obscurity for decades before  being recognized; Darwin delayed publication of his work on evolution  for many years. 

 Today, in contrast, boundless scientific findings from hundreds  of thousands of scientists carom about laboratories around the globe via  digital journals, and via dense personal networks of scientists, in split second time. 

 Can we mostly rather simple humans handle the changes?  Do you have a robotic vacuum sweeper yet; how about a robotic  valet? 

How will we absorb truck drivers to be replaced by driverless 

rigs, as if we don’t have enough trouble absorbing high school-educated  workers today? 

 Are you ready for cyber-warfare? How will you handle life  without electric power and digital communication? 

 The super-powers are already testing cyber-war. Russia and  China relentlessly improve their capabilities, testing them with hacking  forays around the globe. 

A few years ago, the U.S. and Israel successfully sent a digital  virus that crippled Iran’s nuclear processing capacity. 

 Most daunting of all, to me anyway, is the looming creation,  already being experimented with in China, of designer humans via the  cutting, splicing, inserting of DNA inside embryonic stem cells.  I just finished “The Gene,” by brilliant medical scientist  Siddhartha Mukherjee, author of the best-seller a few years back about  cancer (“The Emperor of All Maladies”). 

 The impressively well-read Mukherjee, now at Columbia  University, takes readers on a journey from Aristotle (don’t we all start  there) to the scary present of genetic manipulation. 

 Replacing mutated disease-causing genes for all time would, of  course, be fortuitous achievements. But humans won’t stop there. We will want to design smarter, more attractive offspring. Maybe  such could be solely benign, yet the outcomes might just as likely be as  grotesque as Hitler’s efforts to build a master race. 

 Scientific change is progressing much, much faster than social  evolution. 

 In “The Better Angels of Our Nature,” Harvard psychologist  Steven Pinker observes persuasively that the world is much less violent  today than it has been throughout history. 

 Yet zoologist Desmond Morris captures reality neatly by noting  that we humans are not “fallen angels” to be lifted somehow back to  perfection, but instead we are “the risen ape,” evolving slowly.  What to do? 

 Mukherjee wrings his hands over what might be wrought by  science through genetic engineering if we act before we think, as he  worries the Chinese are doing. He proposes instead a go-slow manifesto.

 I recall reading about the World Parliament of Religions held in  conjunction with the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.  The confab brought together leaders of all religions to seek common  ground in behalf of the world’s societies. 

 We need another such gathering for both eminent scientists as  well as leaders of the world’s path-breaking scientific nations. We must review whither we are tending, and of what might be  done to focus on disease elimination and not on unfettered human  design. 

 I am not confident we have evolved the foresight to do so. Hang  on for the ride.