A History of the World (90 page)

Popular culture has been quick to seize on the darker possibilities of this phenomenon for human freedom. If Shakespeare wrote his history plays partly as a warning to Tudor audiences about the future, the Hollywood creators of
The Terminator
,
Blade Runner
,
Matrix
and many other films are warning their twenty-first-century audiences about the possible outcomes of exponential growth in computer intelligence. The merger of the human and the human-built would mean that people could go beyond their frail, biological bodies – in terms not just of how long they live but of how well they think. ‘Our thinking,’ Kurzweil writes, ‘is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. That makes our physiological bandwidth extremely limited compared to the exponential growth of the overall human knowledge base . . . The Singularity will allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains.’
⁵⁷

There are plenty of sceptics, who argue that machines will continue to be useful tools for mankind, perhaps soon driving our cars and trains, cleaning our homes, as well as today’s machines standing in for factory workers or researchers; but they will not achieve consciousness, or threaten our human control of the planet. Jack Schwartz, an American mathematician, forcibly argued that computers cannot, like brains, take ‘relatively disorganized information’ and use internally organized structures to generate actions and thinking in the real world. But he also warns that if AI really is happening, ‘Since man’s near-monopoly of all higher forms of intelligence has been one of the most basic facts of human existence throughout the past history of this planet, such developments would clearly create a new economics, a new sociology, and a new history.’
⁵⁸

Though scientists vigorously debate the meaning of ‘consciousness’ – is it anything more than very integrated and sophisticated neural networks dealing with information? – the proposed Singularity touches the depths of human self-understanding. Technologies are never neutral in their effects, nor predictable. Early telephones were proposed as devices for listening at home to concerts of classical music, while early enthusiasts for the Internet saw it as a worldwide academic library rather than as a place for social networking, politics or porn. Some scientists are starting to turn their attention to whether artificial or machine intelligence can be programmed to be wise, as well as to learn and self-replicate.

The key underlying theme of this history has been the mismatch between growth in mankind’s technical ability to shape the world (in which AI follows on from the growing of fatter carrots, the invention of gunpowder and steam engines) and the lack of development in mankind’s political ability to govern itself successfully. Good government generally leads to technical advance, since free speech, reliable patent law, the ability to make profits and the guarantee of personal security generally encourage inventors. But it does not necessarily work the other way: technical advance does not produce political virtue. Bad government, whether that means oppression, or a heedless enthusiasm for consumption today with no thought for later generations, or merely corruption, is more widespread; and the technological fruits of good government tend to fall into bad hands.

Garry Kasparov played, thought and lost that game in 1997 as a
mercurial, flawed human being. Feng-Hsiung Hsu was right: Kasparov lost not to a machine but to tool-making humans, as human as him, as passionate as him. Later they were able to dismantle the computer they had created with the sole intention of beating him, and put it away. But like nuclear weapons, or the Internet, the biggest technological advances cannot be easily dismantled and set aside. They are handed over to the dangerous and uncertain arena of politics. So it is good to report that Kasparov, having retired from chess, then threw himself into the cause of political reform in his Russian homeland, where he has become a vocal, and apparently fearless, critic of President Putin’s authoritarian government.

A Fair Field Full of Folk

In the late 1300s a clerk from rural England, William Langland, had a vision of the world’s crowded humanity, or as he put it in his Christian poem
Piers Plowman
, ‘a fair field full of folk’. He could never have envisioned just how full the field would get. In his day, there were perhaps twice as many people alive as there had been when Jesus Christ was born. Since 1950, the population has grown at up to a hundred times the speed it grew after the invention of agriculture, and ten thousand times as fast as it did before that. It is now about seven billion, or seven times what it was as the industrial revolution got going.

This is a great human achievement. Those who say there are simply too many of us, too many individual life experiences, have got to imagine wiping out many billions of other human beings (rarely themselves, or their families) – a genocidal vision outdoing any of the maniac rulers described in this book. The huge increase in population in the last century, and continuing in this, is a problem caused by success – by the success of vaccination and clean-water programmes, and of the ‘green revolution’ in agriculture. Without the latter, involving mechanization, new crop varieties, irrigation and fertilizers (after 1940), it has been estimated that mankind would have needed extra farmland the size of North America to feed itself. To put it another way, some two billion people are alive because of it. Yet most observers believe so many billions of humans are too many for the planet to sustain indefinitely; we need too much water, we consume
too much carbon-based energy, and we take over too much land to feed ourselves, for the biosphere to cope.

By far the best-known problem is climate change, the effect of a sharp rise in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This is mainly caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and as a greenhouse gas, it stops the planet cooling itself as efficiently as it needs to, thereby raising temperatures. By how much, and with exactly what effect, are unknown. An increase in ‘wild’ or unpredictable weather patterns may be one of the consequences. Looking at possible projections, this is either a problem rather overstated today and which can be dealt with by greener ways of generating energy; or it is an imminent catastrophe that could make this the last human century. But the scientific consensus tilts towards the alarming end of the spectrum. Another English visionary, the scientist James Lovelock, who pioneered a way of thinking about the Earth as a living entity (it was always a metaphor), speaks for many who are terrified about the possible effects. Unlike Langland, Lovelock talks of the planet suffering ‘a fever brought on by a plague of people’.
⁵⁹

Climate change is only the most discussed of the effects of the vast leap in human numbers. Though the planet is girdled by water, relatively little of it is fresh water and readily available for humans to use for growing food, for drinking and in industry. There are now severe water shortages in many parts of the world, particularly Asia and Africa, as more and more people suck from rivers that grow no larger – or, because of the construction of huge dams, have grown smaller.

The quality of soil is another looming problem. Soil is where the world’s eighty-mile crust of rock meets the atmosphere – where geology meets biology. It is both very thin and utterly precious. The historian J.R. McNeill describes it beautifully: ‘It consists of mineral particles, organic matter, gases, and a swarm of tiny living things. It is a thin skin, rarely more than hip deep, and usually much less. Soil takes centuries or millennia to form. Eventually it all ends up in the sea through erosion. In the interval between formation and erosion, it is basic to human survival.’
⁶⁰
After the breakthroughs of Haber and others (mentioned earlier) across much of the world, the degradation of soils has reached a point where even the intensive use of fertilizer is not improving crop yields. In Africa, food production per head has
actually fallen since 1960; in China, about a third of arable land has been abandoned because of erosion.

Then there are the problems of deforestation and the extinction of species. Humans have always destroyed forests, both because they wanted the wood (a problem for the ancient Greeks, the Nazca and the Japanese, as we have seen) and to expand their farmland. Northern Europe was once covered in trees. But the deforestation of the twentieth century was particularly dramatic, removing perhaps half of the remaining total; and was concentrated in tropical areas, notably the South American rainforests of the Amazon and Orinoco, and in West Africa and Indonesia. The importance of forests for maintaining the health of the atmosphere, and coping with the carbon problem, is now well understood; but these rainforests contain a very high proportion of endangered plant, insect and animal species, which may in turn harbour many useful secrets for human survival. If, as many scientists predict, around 30 per cent of current species become extinct over the next century, then that would be a huge planetary event, another mistake by the clever ape.

Two last problems must be added to this rather woeful litany. Overfishing and the acidification of the oceans are causing an environmental disaster that would be a worldwide scandal if we were able to see clearly below the waves; and it is a disaster affecting an important source of food. Add to this the atmospheric pollution in the megacities that increasingly dominate as human habitations (more than half of us now live in cities), which has caused a huge loss of life, albeit generally in the older and weaker. McNeill estimates a twentieth-century toll from air pollution of up to forty million people, equivalent to the combined casualties of both world wars, or about the same as the 1918–19 flu pandemic.

Like other problems, this was a ‘failure of success’, in this case caused by the arrival of cars, air travel and a lifestyle more materially rich; many of those most affected by pollution have migrated from villages and small towns to the cities, prepared to live in slums, favelas or shanty towns simply to have the chance to exploit the greater opportunities of urban life. Across the globe, the move from the countryside to cities (most dramatic in China and India) is the single biggest migration in human history.

In finishing this history I was greatly tempted to find another subject than ‘the environment’. Warnings of global catastrophe hang over us everywhere, darkening our imaginations. Yet the fourfold increase in humanity during the past century is surely the biggest single piece of news. The fresh problems it throws up cannot be smuggled into other stories, or relegated. It is the final evidence for one of the major themes of this book, mankind’s extraordinary technical intelligence. It is the higher end of the curve that began with fire and hand-axes, moved through the selection of grasses and the domestication of animals, advanced to steam engines and vaccination, and further.

But it also confronts us with the second obvious theme, which is the long lag in our advancing political and social intelligence. Only by doing better here can we solve the failures of success.

The news is not all bad, by any means. Let us return to Steven Pinker, who in
The Better Angels of Our Nature
pointed out that we are far less likely to die violently today than ever before. Overall, early societies had much higher rates of killing than later ones. Some criticized his arguments about the death-rates in hunter-gatherer societies (dealt with earlier in this book), but his statistical evidence from medieval times onward has been generally accepted. The decrease in killings has come about partly because, as states grew larger in size and smaller in number, there were fewer wars between them. Partly it reflects the increase in law and order, especially in cities. Partly, too, it reflects the humanitarian movements of modern times, from the Enlightenment campaigns against slavery and torture to the growing intolerance of domestic violence today. As we get to know more about each other’s lives and live in more heavily managed, crowded societies, we seem to be becoming less violent, and kinder.

Or, to put it briefly, civilization works.

Anyone who has read at all carefully accounts of city life in earlier centuries, or noted the frequency of murders and assaults in so many of the books we have come to call ‘classics of literature’, will feel the force of this. Western-style democracy has not spread in the way post-1989 optimists predicted, but most of the world is more ordered, more curbed and regulated, than ever before. (Smokers, adventurers and others often say, too much so.) If we hold that the first job of government is to protect the lives of its citizens, then surely politics has advanced, rather impressively.

We can add to this some notable successes at the global scale, in disarmament, in bringing war criminals to justice; and in dealing with specific problems such as the outlawing of CFC gases (which thin the ozone layer. Through international agreements from the late 1970s to 1995 these were reduced by 80 per cent, and abolished in the major countries. The United Nations is a slow-moving, pompous and often infuriating organization, but its Universal Declaration of Human Rights still sets a basic standard around which most of the world rallies, at least in theory; and few would really like to see it gone. As individual countries compete for water resources, argue about deforestation, the ice caps and the oceans, and struggle to change to greener forms of energy, international agreements are becoming the essential politics of the new century. Some fail, as did the 2009 UN Copenhagen summit on climate change. Some supranational systems, such as the European Union, have failed to bind themselves into a democratic culture. But we are part of a much more interconnected and mutually aware human family than at any time since the migration from Africa.

We also have some, at least, of the skills we need to deal with the problems caused by our success. Global warming is a profound worry but it is not – probably – our doom. It can be checked. Lovelock is not alone in being a leading ‘green’ thinker who champions nuclear power as a vital way to reduce carbon emissions. It remains to be seen whether the current fashion for wind-farms is passing folly, but there is an increasing range of alternatives to coal and oil. Solar energy holds great promise. Nuclear fusion, though not yet a workable technology, also has great potential. Equally far ahead, though certainly thinkable, are the technologies known as ‘geo-engineering’, including putting reflecting aerosols or shades into space to cool the planet. These would require major new international agreements, since different countries would be differently affected. But history suggests that, with so much of our resources and brainpower concentrated on alternative forms of energy, breakthroughs will come. Any aliens looking down and betting on human ingenuity will not have lost much money so far.