 The obvious question is, okay, so much for all the boys and their toys. I promise you that I didn't really care that much about technology. What I really care about is culture and values and who we are and what makes us tick and all that stuff. Well, so where does this, so the obvious question becomes, well, where does this all take us and when? And when you talk to people who are thinking about this, you get three scenarios for the future. Now, these are not predictions. I don't have a crystal ball, unfortunately. They are credible stories about how the world could turn out in the very near future, given what we know now. And these three scenarios are heaven, hell, and prevail. Now, in the heaven scenario, there are guys like Ray Kurzweil, for example, who has written a book called Singularity is Near, and he's a classic advocate of the heaven scenario. And what he sees is the possibility that you have all of these technologies taking off like this in our lifetimes. You conquer stupidity, ignorance, ugliness, disease, pain, forgetfulness, and even death. Ray takes 250 pills a day, and he genuinely thinks he's immortal. He really thinks he's going to live for a very long time. And who knows? When you look at the implications of all of these technologies, it could happen. There are guys right now, very sober scientists, as is right, who are at the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute on Aging, and they've got this enormous bet going that the first person to robustly and youthfully live to the age of 150 is already alive today. And these are sober scientists. Are they right? Who knows? But, you know, you're already seeing little moments like two years ago, the absolute number of people dying in the United States went down for the first time. Maybe it's a statistical blip, but who knows? I mean, what it does reflect is how the big killers like cancer and stroke and heart disease are already being affected by all of these technologies. And it's already affected aging. I mean, who hasn't seen some great-grandparents in their 80s who suddenly decide to take off for the great wall of China? And you say, what's up with this? And they say, 80 is the new 60. And People Magazine just had a cover story with some major babe on the cover. And what was the deal? The deal is some desperate housewives. And the reason she was on the cover is that she was celebrating her 40th birthday. And you say, you know, didn't used to always be that way. You know, that 40-year-olds would end up on the cover of a magazine like that. I mean, already you're seeing that our sense of what aging is is already being changed. So the heaven scenario is credible. It could happen, but it's only one scenario. There's also the mirror image, which is the hell scenario. And in that world, they see the same kind of curve of exponential change, but they see it going straight down to either the destruction of the human race within the next 20 years. Well, that's the optimistic version. The pessimistic version is the one where you imagine the destruction of all of life on earth within the next 20 years. And the reason that's credible is because they say, well, you know, you look at the powers of these technologies and you say, well, suppose this gets into the hands of madmen or fools, you know, already. I mean, there was the Australian mouse pox incident, which was this classic example. It turns out that Australia is this isolated ecology that from time to time has introduced species that have no natural enemies, and they just run amok. And one of these examples is mice. Apparently, they are from time to time just overrun by mice, mice everywhere. So these Australian scientists were looking to create a mouse contraceptive, and instead they created a monster. They made one change in the genetic structure of a disease called mouse pox, a virus. And all of a sudden this virus became 100% fatal. Every single mouse died. And then they took what they learned and they put it on the internet where anybody can see it. Well, the people who worry about the health scenario, this just drives them nuts because mouse pox virus doesn't hurt humans, but it's a very close relative of smallpox, which obviously does. And the information is now on the web, you know, for in principle, you know, to make a smallpox virus unbelievably lethal. Well, that just drives people nuts. One of the lessons here is that if you're dealing with self-replicating anything, whether it's viruses, biological viruses, or information viruses, or robots, or anything else, you better know where the off switch is on this stuff, because, you know, you can just imagine a circumstance in which, you know, this technology running amok in a self-replicating way could, in fact, make a very credible health scenario and could, you know, cause incalculable, unprecedented damage. But again, that's heaven and hell. And the trouble with those two scenarios, in my view, is that while they're entirely credible, they make perfect sense, they are technodeterministic, which means that these are ideas that believe that human history is basically driven by its technology. And that we're just along for the ride. Could be, maybe so, but there's at least one other possibility, and I call that prevail. And in the prevail scenario, the notion is that we humans are not just along for the ride, and we're not just the pawns of our technologies, that we can influence history, and we can make choices in an important way. And so if you were graphing this, you know, it wouldn't be some nice smooth curve either up or down. It would have reverses and loops and belches and snorts the way history usually looks like. And the core of the prevail scenario is the idea that maybe there's not one curve of change. Maybe there's two. The idea is, suppose you don't just have all of this change in technology. Suppose you've got a curve that's going right behind it and going up almost as fast, which is human response to this change in imaginative, unpredictable, bottom-up, leaderless way. And there's reasons for guarded optimism about this in history. For example, if you were looking out at the future of the human race from around 1200 AD in Europe, you'd be pretty pessimistic. I mean, you'd see marauding hordes and you'd be seeing plagues and, you know, things look pretty grim. It comes then around 1450, and all of a sudden you've got the printing press, which is a brand new way of storing and sharing and collecting information. And the effect is amazing. First, you know, you get the Renaissance, and then you get the Enlightenment, which produces science itself and democracy and the world we live in today, which is dramatically different, you know, from what you were worried about in the Middle Ages. And what's interesting about this is that it was all bottom-up. I mean, it wasn't, this was beyond the imagination of any one king or any one country or any one parliament. It was all people who were just doing the best they can. You know, the people of Venice got run off the land by the marauding hordes. They went out into the middle of the swamp and invented world trade. You know, I mean, it was all kind of ad hoc bottom-up, the classic human saga. You see, the same thing happened in 911. The fourth airplane, Flight 93, never makes it to its target. Why? Because the Air Force is so smart? No. Because the White House is so smart? Hell no. It's because a whole bunch of people onboard that aircraft, you know, empowered by their air-phone technologies, figured out, diagnosed, and cured their society's ills in a little under an hour flat. Was it an ideal solution? No, of course not. They all died. But nonetheless, it was good enough. And that's at the heart of the question of whether or not you're seeing two curves rather than one. The test of the prevail scenario, it's basically a bet on humans being surprising. It's a bet on, it's a faith in humans coming together in unexpected ways, in an unprecedentedly clever ways, in a bottom-up way. And the question is, you know, do you see any evidence of that around you? And you say, well, how about eBay? That's not just the world's biggest flea market. That's hundreds of millions of people worldwide producing incredibly complicated behavior in a bottom-up way without leaders. What about YouTube? Same thing. And it's changing elections. It's changing how we think about power. You know, all of the social networking thing is allowing people to produce very complicated results without relying on, you know, they're not waiting around for some Senate Commerce Committee or something. They're not waiting for their leaders in a top-down way. They're coming up with solutions as best they can, as fast as they can. And that's crucial to the prevail scenario because if the change is coming at you ever faster, the solutions have got to come ever faster too. And that's the problem with top-down hierarchies. So the test would be, for it to prevail, would be the quantity, the quality, the variety, and the complexity of ways that humans find to connect. The test would be, you know, interesting group behavior, groups, not individuals. It'd be like watching a flock do amazing things. And the significance of this, it's occurred to me is that, you know, we've got a long way to go and not a whole lot of time to get there. I submit, you know, if you look at these trends. So it's occurred to me to wonder, you know, we can't find any other evidence of intelligent life in the universe. And I wondered about why that is. I mean, you know, where is everybody? And it occurred to me to wonder, well, maybe all intelligent species get to this point where they take control of their own evolution and take control of really who they are in a really basic way. Maybe this is the final exam. Maybe everybody else is flunked. That's not us flunk.