TECHNOLOGY PROVIDE HUMAN AUTOMATIC EXTINCTION

1. TECHNOLOGY PROVIDE
HUMAN AUTOMATIC EXTINCTION
The Dalai Lama, when asked what surprised him most about humanity, answered "Man....
Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his
health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that
he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having
never really lived."
Humans are major agents of changes in their own environment. Many of those human-caused
changes have been beneficial for human survival. Human life expectancy for the world as a whole has
risen dramatically over the last couple of centuries while the human population has reached levels never
before seen in the history of the species. There are even technologies under development that promise to
literally halt and reverse aging and this writer is a big supporter of the accelerated development of
rejuvenation technologies. But the whole point is humans are developing technologies that could be used
to create threats to the continued existence of the human species.
An argument about historical longevity of mammalian species ought at the very least take into
consideration that humans are causing the death of large numbers of other species (mammalian and
otherwise). Many species now face much greater threats to their continued existence than they have in the
past for the simple reason that humans have developed powerful abilities to change the environment and
to cause the death of other species. Humans also have developed and continue to develop various abilities
to cause the death of fellow members of their species. Of course humans have also demonstrated the
willingness to use those abilities. Well, the features of human nature that are the source of that willingness
are not going away (unless we do genetic engineering to change human nature - which probably will
happen). At the same time, the ability of humans to cause the death of fellow humans looks set to increase
quite dramatically as a wide array of technologies advance.
Let us take nanotechnology as an example. Nanotech assemblers are held out to eventually
provide us with the ability to build anything cheaply and easily. Well, the ability to build anything
includes the ability to build nuclear weapons. It may also include the ability to create new species that can
out-compete existing species. There are recent historical precedents for how that could play out. Humans
in the last couple of hundred years have moved species from various parts of the globe to other locales
where they have never existed before. Introduced predator species in Australia, Hawaii, and other locales
are killing existing species that have no evolved defenses for dealing with those predators. Some species
are being completely wiped out by human-introduced species. It is not unreasonable to think there is a

2. chance that some humans could manage to create a life form that has the potential to so change the
environment of the globe as to cause the extinction of the human race as well.
The basic question that any debate about the future dangers of technology has to answer is
whether the net effect of likely technological advances in the 21st century will favor the offensive or the
defensive. Optimists assume that the kinds of dangers generated by technological advances be offset by
even greater abilities to create systems to protect us from these dangers. But that assumption cannot be
proven and there are very plausible arguments against it.
Barring a natural disaster or total collapse of industrial civilization humans are going to become
so much more powerful in this century and will become so much more capable of changing their own
environment that any argument about the risk of humanity's extinction that is built from historical data of
average species longevity is hopelessly naive. Arguments from historical data have embedded in them the
assumption of a low probability that in any time period there will be a huge change in the environment of
a species. But that assumption does not hold for humans in the next 100 years. We will gain many new
capabilities to affect our environment. We do not know whether we will use those abilities wisely enough
to avoid our own extinction. It would be unwise hubris to assume that we will.