N-TALK 丨 Wang Jinkang: Tomorrow's Humanity in Science Fiction Works

Wang Jinkang at the scene of N-TALK "Literature Night".

Today's title of my speech is "Tomorrow's Humanity in Science Fiction Works", but in fact, there is a bit of a steal, because mainly about my personal works, there is a special situation: I am really interested in "Tomorrow's Human", I have published "New Human Quadrilogy", and some other works, such as "Adam's Return", "Superman after 500,000 Years", "Matriarchal Clan in 2127", etc. are all discussing new human beings, so I can't say enough about the "tomorrow's human beings" in my works. I won't say anything else.

The characteristic of science fiction writers is that as grassroots people, they do not stand high in society, but they always like to tiptoe forward, so sometimes they can see things that others can't see. Today, I am invited by Southern Weekend to participate in this event and discuss tomorrow's humanity, which is more cutting-edge and belongs to the topic of tiptoeing forward.

Just now Tan Kai also said that I paid attention to this issue relatively early. As early as 24 years ago, at the Beijing International Science Fiction Convention in 1997, I spoke as a representative of science fiction writers, with the title: The post-human era has arrived. Why do I say that? Because just in 1996 and 1997, there were two important scientific breakthroughs: one was the birth of cloned sheep, and the other was the victory of Deep Blue over chess, the human chess king Kasparov. Why do I value these two the most among the many scientific breakthroughs? First, because sheep cloning involves the most important physiological function of living things — reproduction. Man is alive with four words: live, stay behind. If the mode of reproduction is changed, the physiological function is changed by half. In addition, the breakthrough of artificial intelligence over the chess king challenges the most proud intelligence of human beings, and the reason why human beings can live beyond animals to become the leaders of the world today is because of our wisdom. But human wisdom has been personally challenged when the human chess king is defeated.

I made the point in that statement that science fiction technology is like the flying machine of the Australian natives. In the past, it was mainly aimed at the objective world and changed the objective world, but now it has changed human beings themselves. When did the alienation of human beings by science and technology go from the replenishment stage to the improvement stage? The replenishment phase is when we used science and technology to restore the sick and disabled to the normal level of God's creation. When to upgrade from the complement phase to the improvement phase (to put normal people above God's level of creation), then the post-human era has arrived. It can be said that the post-human era has now begun. I'm just a science fiction writer, and I didn't have much of an impact on society at the time, but I brought it up 24 years ago.

In the invitation I received for the Literary Night, I mentioned "tomorrow's human beings", mentioning human-machine integration, genetic modification, artificial intelligence, etc. In fact, these prospects were covered in my science fiction novels more than a decade or twenty years ago, and now I will talk about my own work.

First, human-machine integration technology. The most important thing about the unity of man and machine is not the unity of the body and the unity of the limbs, but the unity of the brain and the unity of the intellect. Twenty-eight years ago, in my 1993 work The Return of Adam, I described a future in which the genius scientist Professor Qian realized the embedding of chips in the human brain, seamlessly connecting artificial intelligence with natural intelligence to provide assistive intelligence, called the second intelligence. As the initiator, Professor Qian was actually deeply jealous of this technology, so he called on human society in advance to adopt three strict precepts:

Precept one, the brain embedded in the second intelligence must be in a conscious state of the person and confirm itself;

Precept two, the embedded second intelligence must be automatically closed every ten years, at least for a month, so that the embedded person returns to the state of a natural person, as to whether he will open the second intelligence in the future, it is up to him to decide;

Precept three, when pregnant, the husband and wife must be in the state of natural person at the same time, which is to ensure that the robot is always the offspring of the natural person. But even with such foresight, the second intelligence in the human brain is still beyond the control of scientists, and it develops rapidly, in my novels, at a rate of 10 to the 13th power of man. In this way, it quickly crushes natural intelligence, and human beings are actually parasitic by machine intelligence, he is ostensibly human, but the second intelligence in the head has long surpassed natural human beings, and has long been parasitic.

Today, the unity of man and machine, especially the deep unity of consciousness and intelligence, is a slightly taboo topic. But in the long run, this prospect is inevitable.

If the integration of man and machine can improve human memory by a hundred times or easily enter mathematical knowledge without learning, how can people give up such social progress in vain? But on the other hand, that is, I just said that crossing the red line from "replenishment" to "improvement", as long as there is no upper limit in the past, the final result is that artificial intelligence will defeat humans, or "human-machine integration" will defeat humans.

Second, teacher Jiang Bo said about gene editing and improvement technology. Everyone knows He Jiankui of Shenzhen Southern University of Science and Technology, who braved the world to cultivate two cases of human babies with gene editing in the world. Of course, his extremely reckless behavior is indeed worthy of scolding, but in the long run, it is inevitable to edit human genes.

In my 1998 work "Leopard", I wrote about a scientist who embedded the gene of a cheetah in his son's genes, cultivated into a 100-meter super-trapeze, a hero of mankind, and an idol of young women. But because the cheetah gene was in his body, and also brought the leopard's cruel character to him, he finally bit his lover to death when he became ill, and later he himself was killed by the revenge of his lover's cousin.

In this novel, I make the point that the embedding of non-human genes in humans is an absolutely insurmountable red line. Suppose that today a person with an embedded one-in-ten-thousandth of a cheetah gene is an athlete, and the day after tomorrow a cheetah embedded in one-thousandth of a human gene will be on the same stage as a human. Although this is a literary exaggeration, it is actually the real dilemma faced in the development of science and technology: how many people change is not a person, is it 1%, or 50%, 99%? There is no specific line here, but it will definitely be crossed in the future.

I also covered gene editing in Dolphin Man, published in 2003, but more thoroughly. The novel writes: Due to the astronomical catastrophe, the radiation on land is too strong, not suitable for survival, can only live in the depths of the ocean, the remaining human beings have to genetically modify themselves, turn their hands and feet into fins with swimming function, the ear holes can be closed, etc., become sea people, but sea people still can not adapt to the environment. Therefore, they simply grafted the human brain with the body of the dolphin and became a dolphin person, thus establishing a dolphin civilization that advocates nature, loves peace, is highly developed in reason, and completely abandons the industrial civilization. The novel sings a hymn to such a civilization, but it is only the novelist's words, and it is practically impossible to achieve.

Gene editing of human beings is strictly prohibited in human society today. Our study of human beings can only be studied in the embryonic stage, and beyond the embryonic stage, it can no longer be studied, which is a taboo. But in the long run, this cannot be forbidden, and I often say: humans come down from trees, from monkeys to humans, and if they lose their tails, they will cut off their back roads. We can no longer rely on natural evolution to adapt to the environment, but can only choose scientific means to interfere with ourselves, taking a new path different from that of natural creatures. No matter how much humanists fear and hate this path, this prospect cannot be changed.

To give an example, some people say that one of the purposes of He Jiankui's gene editing at that time was to improve human intelligence. If you can really improve people's intelligence, such as 5% or 10%, there will definitely be hundreds of millions of children who have squeezed their heads to sign up for surgery. In the long run, it cannot be changed, because human beings cannot rely on natural evolution to adapt to the environment, and can only rely on scientific and technological means. Of course this is a dangerous road, and I won't say more.

Third, human cloning techniques. The technology of human cloning is strictly prohibited by law and morality, and the United Nations has also adopted a convention, but as long as the cloning of sheep, pigs and monkeys is introduced, it is inevitable that human cloning will eventually be inevitable. In my 1999 novel Hela (later renamed Cancer Man and included in my New Human Tetralogy), I simply took this prospect a step further.

Do you know hela cells? Hela cells are cervical cancer cells taken from a black woman in the United States in 1951, and they have been immortal until now, and the presence of thousands of tons in medical institutions around the world has made great contributions to human medical technology.

I brought in HeLa cells in the middle of the novel, using HeLa cells instead of ordinary cells to clone people. In this way, clones have super physical strength, super intelligence, and even the ability to regenerate organs. At that time, scientists cloned her in order to take her organs and treat her mother. She single-handedly established an independent kingdom in the Brazilian Amazon forest, but in the end she herself ended in tragedy and died because somatic cell reproduction was too fast and out of control.

I once read an article written by Zhao Moumou, a retired famous professor at Tsinghua University, saying that human cloning is a technology, and it should be done. It was really "fearless spirit" that he didn't take into account that cloning would affect human nature. Where does our love come from? The love between men and women is not that God blows the soul into our body, it is not innate, but the biological world has changed from the original asexual reproduction to the two sexes, and after the two sexes reproduce, love and feelings slowly appear, which is a sub-organism and an appendage. If cloning becomes the mainstream of society, sooner or later love will die, just as the eunuch of the past will lose all his beard within a week after surgery. If there are clones, even men are no longer needed, because women are nature's default configuration. My science fiction novel The Last Love (later renamed Matrilineal Clans in 2027) depicts the cloning becoming mainstream, forming a second matrilineal clan. In that society, radical women refused to provide the wombs for the remaining men, and the world's last male scientist desperately studied artificial wombs and artificial eggs to save the dying male race, and finally failed.

It's the plot of the novel, but in real life, I'm not worried about that prospect. Because human cloning is possible, but it will certainly not become the mainstream of society, or even a tributary. Because Nature God chose sexual reproduction as the mainstream of the biological world, it has many benefits, can tolerate mutation, and can adapt to the environment. Monosexual reproduction has been eliminated, then it will not appear again. Therefore, nature will not let human beings take the road of asexual reproduction, cloning is unlikely to appear, but as an auxiliary means of medical treatment, it is still possible to have some kind of cloned organ in the future.

There is also a technique that is generally not mentioned - the physical method of completely artificially arranging ordinary atoms such as hydrocarbons and oxygen, synthesizing them into human DNA, and then multiplying the cells to produce purely artificial real people. This is not a fantasy, because scientists can already assemble the simplest life, viruses, and it is only a matter of time before humans are assembled.

In my 2003 novel Humanoids, I predicted this technology, calling the products of these technologies "humanoids", not human beings, but "humanoids". In the novel, in order to maintain the noble status of natural persons, human society uses technology to ensure that all humanoids have no fingerprints, so as to strictly distinguish them from natural persons; it is also strictly forbidden for humanoids to marry and match natural persons, and it is even more strictly forbidden for humanoids to have children. Since humanoids are unnatural beings, have no fear of death, and have no desire to survive, they are relentless to these decrees and to the status quo of their lives. But among the thousands of normal human beings, there will still be some outliers, some rebels, who bravely and hopelessly challenge this high-tech age of racism. Finally, with the help of benevolent people among some natural people, especially with the tacit help of artificial intelligence, they succeeded, and the newly produced human-like babies in the factory all had fingerprints, and there was no way to distinguish them.

So, is the person developed by this purely artificially assembled DNA a natural life? Should there be the same rights as natural persons? The development of science and technology has at least brought this possibility to us, can our proud humanistic spirit cross this high threshold?

The above-mentioned technologies, gene editing, human-machine integration, human-computer integration, human cloning, artificial humans, etc. are all more forward-looking thinking, and even break through the current scientific ethics. In fact, in my opinion, they are not big enough, and the development of human civilization has faced a taller cliff, and the above prospect is only a few small obstacles in front of that cliff.

In fact, this cliff has already been involved in the middle of the "humanoid" novel I mentioned above, that is, artificial intelligence. Can it truly surpass humanity and become a new civilization, a new life? Can it be imaginative, creative, can it have desires, feelings, self-knowledge (self-knowledge independent of natural existence), beliefs, and so on? I think it's okay. If it can become a new civilization, a new life, it will be an even greater leap. Because the aforementioned technological breakthroughs such as gene editing, human-machine integration, human-computer integration, human cloning, and artificial humans have not departed from the physical ontology of human beings and are limited by the ontology of human objects. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, is completely detached and thus gained greater freedom. Artificial intelligence is revolution, and everything else just said is improvement.

This topic is too big to expand today. But in any case, I think it is necessary to take out the prospect of "artificial intelligence surpassing humans" and put it into the human vision. Because this step is too big, it is a change in the sky. If one day, this prospect overwhelms humanity like a tsunami, then at this time, our concerns about human beings today, such as nuclear war, such as the alienation of human beings by technology (gene editing, human-machine integration), etc., will seem too pediatric, and the two are not an order of magnitude.

Twenty years ago, in 2003, I published an essay in Science Fiction World magazine titled "Can Artificial Intelligence Surpass Us?" 》。 The views I said above were formed 20 years ago, but at that time they were only similar to metaphysical discussions, but since artificial intelligence completely crushed human beings in the high-IQ field of Go, those views, those metaphysical concerns, have already had a texture and become a heavy and hard reality, which is worth repeating today.

Thank you all for listening to my thoughts, thank you!

(Finished by Southern Weekend intern Wang Zhuoying)

Wang Jinkang