Made By It, Undone By It?

A couple of weeks ago the debate show Qipa Shuo ran a motion: if there were a technology that could, with one press of a button, synchronise all knowledge to every person in the world at once, should we support it? One argument from the opposing side was that because it reaches everyone, it would be terrible if bad people came into possession of that knowledge. The proposing side answered: we cannot tell good people from bad in advance, and if the worry is that bad people getting knowledge will harm society, then should we not have universal education either?

Yesterday’s news made me understand how deep that motion really is. Neither support nor opposition is quite adequate, because the real world is not a black-and-white division — it is a transformation from quantitative change into qualitative change.

One press to enlightenment? One cut to become a demon?

Some people are radical, some conservative. As we keep raising the quality of education, as more and more people can reach the most advanced science and technology, as more and more scientists and engineers make technology accessible so that it can be done conveniently in a small laboratory — outliers become that much easier to produce. At the Battle of Red Cliffs, Cao Cao’s army chained its warships together to withstand the wind and waves; had they been broken into small boats, some would certainly have been fast and some would certainly have capsized.

Twenty years ago we were saying that the twenty-first century would be the century of the life sciences, and a great many excellent people poured into the field — which later produced the joke:

Mathematics is the fire that lights the lamp of physics; physics is the lamp that lights the road of chemistry; chemistry is the road that leads to the pit of biology.

Twenty years on, immunotherapy, gene editing and other new techniques have entered public view — not only because they are new, but because they genuinely bring new hope for treating disease and for the long-term security of human life. We keep wanting to lower the difficulty of running an experiment and raise its certainty, and we want more people to take part in the research. We do not control participation the way nuclear testing was controlled decades ago; we hope instead to limit the use of these technologies through regulation and standards — much as, learning the lesson of thalidomide, we hope to control the risk of a new technology through rigorous clinical trials. And at the same time, we encourage more people to join in developing it.

But the larger the wood, the more kinds of bird. Once a technology can be carried out in a small laboratory, breaching the so-called boundary becomes far more likely. Technology, and the democratisation of technology, is a direction everyone seems to agree on and work towards — and yet today we do not appear to see clearly what long-term effects that direction can bring.

Last night, my friends’ concern for humanity’s long-term safety seemed to outweigh most short-term problems. Human society, the world around us, has never been perfect. Far too many people suffer enormous losses through the failings of others. Every morning there are traffic accidents caused by recklessness; we always hear that some factory has exploded, or that armed conflict has broken out somewhere; even the economic crisis that arrives every few years brings unrecoverable disaster to who knows how many. We worry about these things, we condemn them, we argue about them — but we seem to believe they are local, controllable, and will eventually end. Only this time the effect is permanent, the outcome unknown and uncontrollable. Pandora’s box has been opened.

Pandora’s box was opened long ago.

Its reverse side is greed and ignorance; its front is curiosity and fearlessness. When we press forward down the road of curiosity, we cannot truly strip away our own reverse side. The long-term impact of today’s science and technology may already be well beyond what humans can predict. We used to believe a machine would need twenty years to beat humans at Go; AlphaGo’s arrival in 2016 set off a fierce public argument about whether machines would replace people. Today, a news item about the birth of “Lulu” and “Nana” has shaken the research world and the world outside it alike.

Why did we not effectively prevent it beforehand? Perhaps because we always believe unconditionally that people are conservative and good — even though history keeps telling us that when 99% of people are, the 1% of exceptions will always bring us a surprise, or an outrage. And on the other side, we cannot accurately estimate the impact of technology; our understanding of society, a nonlinear complex system, is nowhere near sufficient. Most people cannot see the essence of today’s most advanced technology, even as we hear about artificial intelligence, quantum communication and gene editing every day. We cannot accurately foresee the effects they will have in five or ten years, good or bad — because we do not understand them. And on the other side again, even the technical experts cannot accurately estimate what the spread and application of a technology will do to society.

So what is the solution? It is hard to say. But at the least, I hope we can have as correct an understanding of the positive and negative sides of our own work as we did in the thalidomide case decades ago — though this time it is likely to be more complicated. I hope each party can offer a valuable judgement from its own professional standpoint, and eventually a solution.

This year Dying to Survive drew a wave of attention: patients buying drugs through non-compliant channels in order to survive and get treatment. A few days ago someone told me that a drug a friend of his is researching, though not yet approved, is already being used to treat some cancer patients. I have even heard of people studying treatments at home in order to treat a relative. I am not commenting on whether these stories are true, nor calling any single event purely good or purely bad. One face is the Buddha’s, the other the demon’s. What we need to think about is where, in these cases, the line between good and harm actually lies. Think that through, and we can go further.

Ethics is a question we would like to take seriously, and we do not want our own recklessness to endanger humanity as a whole. We also want technology to develop faster. And on yet another side, to borrow the title of an essay by Cao Zheng: do not challenge human nature. So how do we balance the three? The birth of gene-edited babies has been carried into public view, perhaps because the person responsible misjudged what the event would mean. That is a good thing. But if we really care, we need to think further ahead — otherwise technological progress plus natural fluctuation may bring us a good many more “surprises”.