Question 1: Tell us about yourself

I'm a philosophical fugitive. I'm from England, I moved here (to California) in 1987, to do my PhD in philosophy. I escaped from England because it is a very traditional place, looking more towards the past than the future. I think that that was more true then than it is now, I think that it is actually more progressive now, as far as things like biotech research. I didn't feel fully at home in England, and looked to America, particularly California, as a place that was more future-oriented. Timothy Leary used to say the genetic and cutting-edge cultural migration went from East to West, ending up in California (before heading outward to space in his 1970s view). Whatever the truth of his view, it fit my desire to move from the Old World to the New World. My disappointment has to find far more of the old world here than I hoped.

Despite the general economic and cultural gloom in England in the 1970s, I always felt an odd fit since I was relentlessly optimistic in a constructive way. At five years old, I watched the Apollo 11 moon landing with rapt fascination and excitement, I was captivated by all of the Apollo missions - I watched every one of them. To make a lot of history very short--I became very interested in life extension when I was in my early-mid teens. I also found myself drawn to several aspects of the idea of enhancing human capabilities. Throw in incessant reading, education in economics, philosophy, and political theory plus a love of advanced technology and you have the elements that came to evolve in the Extropian philosophy. Extropian thinking (I prefer to avoid "isms") is a group of attitudes, values, and interests. The early version of focused on life extension, space exploration, expanding intelligence and political liberties. When I co-founded the first UK cryonics organization in 1986, I wrote quite a bit of extropic stuff for our publication, Biostasis. Not too long after making the 6,000 mile move to California (in 1997), I founded Extropy magazine with "T.0. Morrow" (as he likes to be called to maintain some anonymity), which encapsulates all of these ideas. I was glad to succeed in developing the magazine into Extropy Institute (ExI) with the help of friends and colleagues. For over a decade, ExI has acted as an intellectual beacon, attracting others who felt out of place. I frequently enjoy the pleasure of receiving a message from someone who thought no one else though like they did. The term "extropy" is a metaphor representing (loosely) the opposite of entropy - it increases order, intelligence wisdom, vitality, and improvement.

Question 2: What is your opinion of the technological Singularity?

I've studied the concept for quite a while, and I'm somewhat a skeptic of the idea. I do believe that there will be a Singularity in a sense - in my recent debate with Ray Kurzweil, which is on his website (http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=1%23476). I refer to the concept of a surge, rather than a single point, 2035 or whatever. Singularity enthusiasts see some incredible Singularity event, all at once, which changes everything radically. I think that is probably unlikely. I think, for instance, that simple projections of computer power are misleading; you also have to take into account social factors and economic factors. There is often a lag between the invention of a technology, and the effect that it has on people. This is true with every major technology, and the lag can generally be measured in decades. Digital computers have been around for decades, but it was only in the last few years that we saw an effect on productivity. It's only now that we organize work to take advantage of the new technology. So Hans Moravec argues that we'll have human level intelligence in 2030 because we should have the hardware then, I just don't think that that is very plausible, looking at the historical situation. I see more of a series of surges - biotech surges, machine intelligence surges, nanotech surges, I don't necessarily see all of the surges occurring at the same time. These surges will be difficult to deal with, but I don't think there will be one day when everything suddenly and radically changes.

One reason why I'm skeptical of the concept of a Singularity is that to me is rings of Christian doctrine, the rapture of the future if you like. I think that there is a strong psychological/cultural pull for that outlook, which is another reason to be suspicious. Those concerns aside, the Singularity notion is a handy way to express a whole range of technological trends that cannot realistically be expected to be linear in nature.

Question 3: Can you give any timeframes for these "surges"?

As far as timeframes, it is very difficult to pin down; there are so many uncertainties. I prefer to make predictions about the past-it's easier! In dealing strategically with the future, I prefer alternative scenario thinking to single-point predictions. I think it's difficult enough to predict which changes will come before others-artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, agelessness, for example, though plenty of people seem to be disturbingly certain. I will say that I think general machine super-intelligence is going to be much harder to implement than people think. That has already proven to be the case during the past thirty years or so, where progress has been disappointing in both AI and manned space exploration. I could turn out to be wrong, Ray Kurzweil makes the case that we can model intelligence on natural systems, and make better brain scanning devices. Still, I think that biotech will be the first surge, which we are already beginning to see. It is going to have profound effects, for instance in reversing ageing. I think there will be a biotech surge in the next couple of decades, starting in the next few years. To make things more confusing, biotech is already clearly blending and merging with other technologies and fields.

As far as nanotech, I don't think nanotechnology should be seen as one thing. There will be nanotech in computing, nano-materials, nanoprobes, simple nanobots, chemical self-assembly, and nanotech-assembling devices. Each of these advances could happen at different rates, but they should all be happening within the next twenty years or so. Machine intelligence will probably be after biotech, and quite a bit of nanotech happens. But they are all pretty close as far as human history is concerned, they are all very rapid and in that sense can be thought of as a Singularity, or a spike. We need critical thinking, as far as how we are going to handle these problems. We've moving there fast, but our philosophy and culture is out of step.

Question 4: Ray Kurzweil argues that when machine intelligence does occur, it will necessarily soar past human intelligence. Would you agree?

On this issue I am very close to Ray's views, as opposed to Hans Moravec's views. I don't think that there will be a stark distinction between human intelligence and machine intelligence. The picture that Moravec presents rather starkly is that machines will become smarter than us and very rapidly leave us behind and become completely separate beings. I think that there will be a whole ecology of different species, and I think that one option open to humans will be the option of being augmented. I think that we will have increasingly intimate connections with the machines; they're going to get increasingly miniaturized; we'll be surrounded by them, we'll be wearing them, we'll swallow them, and they be will become part of us. I think that a co-evolution of human and technology is more likely, and certainly more desirable, than dominance of machine intelligence.

You have to ask what people are willing to pay for, and I don't see a huge market for autonomous intelligences. There will be a huge market for intelligences that are good at solving particular problems, for instance in oil exploration or in military intelligence or in business strategy or even in research and discovery. But for human-level and human-wide intelligence, I don't think that there is a huge motivation to develop that. They could be outstanding at certain tasks but work intimately together with human beings. Although there may be pure machine intelligence at some point, I think that for the most part we will be augmented. The biological part of us will be increasingly vestigial. After a few decades, we might turn around and think "I'm not using my biological brain much anymore." I think that we may eventually become nonbiological or postbiological entities, though that's a relatively distant speculation-although one that makes sense scientifically and philosophically.

Question 5: But what about robotics? Won't it be quite difficult to integrate humans with robots?

With the good virtual reality interface, why not use a robot body as an extension of your own body? Hook yourself in, have your senses hooked to that robot body, and go in undersea exploration, or handling radioactive materials, whatever it is, it could be similar to Heinlein's Waldo. If you want machines that would be good at navigating surfaces, so you could explore places like the moon Europa. These robots wouldn't have to be good at personal relationships, marketing, organizing businesses, or giving a lecture. We won't necessarily see household robots; I think that that view will soon seem silly. We may have certain robotic pets, but more likely, we'll have microdevices that clean your house and the objects in it without you noticing. So everything in your house is always spotless. I'm not sure that macroscale robots are the most efficient way to go, it certainly doesn't work that way in nature. The number of large robots will really depend on the market demand. Micro-robots will usually be more effective, less obtrusive, and cheaper than the kind of robots we've long seen in science fiction.

Question 6: You've mentioned nanotechnology. What is your opinion of Eric Drexler, and Drexler's vision of molecular nanotechnology?

First of all, I don't consider myself technically competent to judge the feasibility; all I can do is give my impressions of it based on the level of science I do know, plus applied critical thinking and observation of personalities involved. I think that many critiques of his ideas are based on parodies of his views. (This is a sadly common technique, as I know from books which have represented my ideas poorly in order to critique them.) The idea of a singular assembler that does everything is a vast oversimplification of his view. There will probably be a range of different assembling devices. Even now, with the early state of nanotechnology (no doubt defined a little more broadly than would Eric) I'm seeing numerous alternative pathways and approaches, from the more biological to the more mechanical (and approaches that seem to blend these).

Eric had a brilliant insight in thinking thoroughly about where things are headed, towards thinking about things on the molecular level. This is a man who developed a vision (not "had" a vision, since that's too sudden and too passive for the reality) over years and years despite a long period of criticism and misunderstanding. Eric has an admirable mind which managed at the same time to be focused yet deeply aware of the big picture. You see Eric Drexler's influence in the way so many people are using the term "nanotechnology" even when they aren't doing nanotech, in order to get funding. (Though I do think there are reasonable arguments about the more productive uses of the term.) I think that he is pushing in the right direction. He was valiant to put out these ideas; he persisted with these controversial topics for years. In one sentence--I think that we will eventually have molecular assemblers, but I expect them to take a form that would surprise us today.

Question 7: Let me ask you about Moore's Law. How much longer do you think that it will continue? If it ends within the next decade can we still have the surges that you talk about?

I read a conversation between Moore and (Bob) Metcalf from a couple of years ago, and I was amused at how extremely conservative their views are. People keep declaring the end to something, and it keeps being overcome. Moore's law isn't really a law, but an observation that has turned out to be very reliable. Many researcher recognize developments that should enable this rate of progress to go on for the next ten or twelve years at least. Beyond that are all sorts of possibilities-things like nanocomputers, DNA computing, quantum computing, spintronics, picocomputing with neutronium-and it is unclear how useful they will be. We don't even know what is going to happen in another five or ten years. People are working in two dimensions right now; I expect that we can move to three dimensions, that is a better way of organizing them. We're also seeing innovation along other dimensions-asynchronous chips that do away with a CPU, radio-microchips, FPGA, ZISC, distributed or grid computing, biochips, biological-inorganic hybrid chips, optical computing If we do meet a barrier, then we can go to different ways of organizing things. So I am not terribly worried about progress for the next twenty or thirty years.

So we should have enough computing for doing things like protein folding, which will allow us to design drugs exactly, and in silico biology, and simulations of neurological activity. There should be plenty of power for that. Japanese researchers just introduced a new computer that surpassed the old speed record by a remarkable multiple. We have a long way to go, computer power shouldn't be a major limitation. I think the major problem would be applying the computer power to problems. Of course, Marvin Minsky's view is that you could take an old 386 computer and actually run human intelligence on it. I doubt that, but don't tell Marvin! I don't think that the technical limits will be reached for at least a dozen years, probably twenty years, and maybe never. Once we reach the top of the "s-curve" of silicon, we can switch to something other overlapping s-curve. Once silicon slows down, we can switch to optical processors or nano-computers or quantum computers or even neutronium computers.

Question 8: Hugo Degaris has some rather radical views about the twenty first century. He believes that there will be a war in the 21st century between humans and machines. What is your opinion of Degaris's views?

I'm not sufficiently acquainted with his reasoning behind this view, but I have thoughts about that general picture of the future. I think that the "us vs. them" mentality is one that I am somewhat suspicious of; I think the relationship will be more integrated. It is important to factor in economics. A lot of futurist thinking gets bogged down in purely technical considerations. Will sentient machines fill the same evolutionary niche as us? Will they want the same things as us? Will it make more sense to fight or to cooperate (which includes trade)? In the long run, it generally makes sense to cooperate. Even if sentient machines were smarter than us, that wouldn't necessarily mean that they would replace us. Sentient machines may simply be more enlightened, and not encumbered by our warlike heritage. It is difficult for me to imagine that there will be any kind of war in the traditional sense. If we had antagonistic interests, there wouldn't be a war. Rather, they would gain control and we wouldn't know it. If they are that smart they would understand our psychology, and they wouldn't need to go to war. They would be prodding us with the right incentives, to do exactly what we want. It is much easier and less expensive than destruction! A superintelligence wouldn't use threats, bombs, or viruses. So I don't see that exactly that situation arising and I'm cautiously optimistic about our future relationship with advanced machine intelligence.

Question 9: Does the number of erroneous and inaccurate predictions of the technology of the future give you pause? How do you seek to avoid inaccurate predictions?

Yes. That is why I try to avoid predictions. I think that predictions are exceedingly hard to get right, because there are so many interacting factors, and so many possible interactions, that you really don't know what the outcome will be. Who really predicted the web? In the 1940s, Vannevar Bush had a vague idea of it. People were predicting flying cars, moon colonies and things like that instead. You can't predict the future, except in general trends. I think that you can show ever increasing computer power, a deeper understanding of biology, genetics, and neurology, we have increasing choice as to who we are and what we do. We can safely talk about general trends, instead of trying to make predictions, which I think is a losing game. I prefer scenario thinking or "scenario planning", which was first done in the military. In the 1970's Shell Corporation used scenarios to propose possible futures. They saved huge amounts of money by examining a scenario which stated that oil prices were going to go down. You can project trends and look at possible futures, and that way you can craft a robust strategy.

Question 10: What do you think of the prospects for extending the human life span?

The current limit for life spans is 122, and I don't think that we're going to break that limit without serious engineering. The average lifespan has been growing steadily, not primarily because of medicine, but because of public health. For 20 years I've alternated between being pessimistic and optimistic, currently I am optimistic. There are quite a few pathways that could lead to radically extended life spans. In the next decade or two we will see more and more tissues being replaced, and organs being replaced or regenerated. We've converted stem cells to neural tissue. Part by part, we will be pushing back the limits of the human body. The process will be piecemeal. People will simply realize that "I'm 95, I'm still active, my bones are strong, and I've had my knees feel like new." All these things will happen. One day we will realize that we don't have to die. I am reasonably confident that many of us today will be part of the first generation of humanity that will not face an inevitable death. Even if our genes self-destruct at 100 or 110, we can replace those cells and reprogram them bit-by-bit. People who are reasonably young today, if they take care of themselves and don't get killed by an accident, probably won't have to face old age. I'm pretty optimistic. I think that we may have the means to cure or effectively manage most forms of cancer within the next decade. We've only made slow progress until now, but I think that we are on the verge of some breakthroughs.

Question 11: What are your views on cloning?

Therapeutic cloning is becoming a powerful biomedical technique with tremendous potential value. Unfortunately we have way too many legal and political decision-makers who are either terribly ignorant of the real science, or who are stuck using outdated and largely-useless philosophical models for thinking about it. The strength of religions in this country, especially Christianity, is part of the problem. But there is plenty of other bad thinking out there without obvious ties to religion. Actually, I often think that religion is not just a cause of poor thinking but also a symptom of it. Reproductive human cloning doesn't get me very excited. People getting upset about cloning is rather ludicrous. We have a form of cloning now, what about identical twins? A clone would be a delayed identical twin. Certainly, it's not safe enough to do responsibly today, but it will surely become quite reliable within a few years. I don't think that it will be very popular outside of a few rare situations. Why would you want a clone of yourself, unless you are incredibly arrogant and think that you are the best possible person in the world? Okay, I can think of one reason: If you believe you've come to know yourself extremely well, you might want to start with the same genes and see how well you can raise a child. However, I think that desire usually presupposes an excessively deterministic view of genes and personality. I think that cloning will for the most part be a short-term phenomenon, but rather inevitable. It will be seen as little more interesting that we now see in vitro fertilization (IVF). People will eventually forget about it and concentrate on more interesting things, like genetic engineering. And why would you want to clone your DNA to create a new person when you could intelligently select all desirable gene combinations to endow your offspring with every advantage possible?

Question 12: What are your plans for the future, and what are Extropy Institute's plans for the future?

Extropy Institute has been focused on gathering people together, and emphasizing the ideas I mentioned earlier-overcoming human limits, and transforming human nature for the better on a long-term basis. People who have pondered these ideas are finding a home. I have people who come to me on a daily basis and tell me that. So that is a major function for us.

Extropy Institute also has an educational function. People come to us quite frequently, and we try to convey ideas about possible futures. We discuss positive trends and events, not just apocalyptic scenarios. We talk about potential downsides, how to prevent destructive scenarios, what directions we can go. We've been using more "expert voices" to do that. We are just working out the next stage right now; we are actually in a transition stage. We have a rich community of people, a global community. It's wonderful to see the change since we started. When we started, most people mocked these ideas as being impossible. Now you see these ideas in newspapers all the time, and the debate is whether they are desirable. Our next stage is arguing against the fears and objections, to argue why we really should do these things.

My personal activities focus on strategic scenario thinking and proactive future-planning, for individuals and businesses. How can you deal with the onrush of events, when progress gets faster and faster? How does one think critically and creatively about the future? How do you figure out how to live and work effectively amidst rapid and constant change? To me this is an interesting area because it applies philosophical thinking, business skills, strategic skills, psychology, and a wide-ranging understanding of different technologies. This requires a synthetic thinking and wide-ranging perspective that I've always found natural. That is where I am focusing now - strategizing about the future, rather than just theorizing about it. Creating it, not just picturing it. Guiding, not just pointing. And, of course, constantly learning, not just explaining.