Modern humans' early fears of technology often come from literary works, such as the novel "Brave New World" written by the British writer Aldous Leonard Huxley in the early 1930s. This work is still a popular classic today.
The "biotechnology" in Brave New World impressed Francis Fukuyama :Bokanovskification, a way of incubating babies not in the womb but in today's "test tubes"; the drug Soma to give immediate joy; electrodes implanted in sensories to simulate emotions; and the repetitive correction of behavior through the subconscious mind. Once it fails, various artificial hormones are applied, all of which give the book a particularly chilling atmosphere.
If Huxley had lived to this day, he would have been surprised that the subsequent technological progress of mankind had actually far exceeded the imagination and presuppositions in his novels. Gene-edited babies, genetically engineered animal organs to the human body, brain-computer interfaces, and so on are moving from "whimsical" to reality.
Recently, Google suddenly announced that Google's latest artificial intelligence AlphaFold defeated all opponents in an extremely difficult task, successfully predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins, the basic molecule of life, based on genetic sequences. Google declares: God's password defense line is gradually collapsing! In this regard, there are analysis exclamations, when artificial intelligence and genetic technology are combined, human beings will enter a new era of high wind and waves. This new era means that with the help of artificial intelligence and genetic technology, humans will be able to reshape some tissues and organs, can add missing gene fragments, delete bad gene fragments, and help humans stay away from disease and aging.
Brave New World is moving from science fiction to reality, which has led Fukuyama to reflect on his "final conclusion of history" in the early 21st century. In 2002, 13 years after he proposed the "final conclusion of history," he subverted his previous view in his book Our Posthuman Future: The Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, arguing that "history will not end unless science ends."
Francis Fukuyama acknowledges that the original "final conclusion of history" was not solid, and that the future of liberal democracy faced many challenges, the most serious of which came from modern science, especially the biotechnology revolution.
The end of history with the last man
Author: [Beauty] Francis Fukuyama
Publisher: Guangxi Normal University Press
Produced by: Republic of China
Translator: Chen Gaohua
Publication date: 2014-9
A scientific and technological proposition under the "Fukuyama Doctrine"
Few books have attracted as much attention and controversy as The End of History and the Last Man. In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama Core describes a final state of equilibrium and stability in the process of human modernization. Slavoj Žižek called it "Fukuyama doctrine."
Looking back now, this "historical finale" that emerged at the end of the Cold War is somewhat arbitrary imagination. In 2014, Fukuyama acknowledged in a new preface to The End of History and the Last Man, "During the exciting days of 1989, I was still in the fog about the nature of political development. ”
These "flowers in the fog" are not only manifested in the political field, but also in the understanding of scientific and technological progress. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when information technology and its integration with biotechnology were still in their infancy, the fear of technological alienation was not as pronounced as it is today.
The End of History and the Last Man places modern technology on a high profile when describing the mechanism of historical operation as a continuous progression. Fukuyama commented: "The discovery of the scientific method has given history such a basic, non-cyclical distinction between pre- and post-period periods. And once it was discovered, the progress and unfolding of the modern natural sciences provided a directional mechanism for explaining many aspects of later historical development. ”
The history of mankind in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries draws him to the different dimensions of technology, on the one hand, the acceleration of technological change helped the European powers conquer most of the third world countries, and on the other hand, the spread of technology allowed the third century countries to regain autonomy and national development in the 20th century. "Modern natural science imposes itself on others, whether man cares or not: the vast majority of countries cannot reject the technological rationalism of modernity if they want to maintain national autonomy."
In dealing with his proposition that "history has directionality," he ultimately wants to show that history, as a consequence of the development of modern natural science, is moving in a coherent single direction.
After proposing such a hypothesis, he asked a series of questions: If the discovery of modern natural science leads to a directional history, then nature will have the question: Can it not be invented? Can we not let the scientific method dominate our lives? Is it possible for an industrialized society to return to a pre-modern, pre-scientific society? In short, is the directionality of history reversible?
Fukuyama strives to prove that abandoning science and technology is wrong, and to this end, he also quotes George Miller's film "Stormtroopers" to show how terrible it would be once returned to the pre-scientific era. He also classified the romanticism of the early 19th century, the hippie movement of the 1960s, Khomeini and Islamic fundamentalists, and extremists as anti-technicalists, whose commonality was the intentional exclusion of technology and rationalized society.
In Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Fukuyama found the theoretical origins of modern extreme environmentalism. Fukuyama believed that Rousseau was the first modern philosopher to question the goodness of historical "progress." Rousseau insisted that the changes of history can only plunge man into deep misfortune, and that for man to be happy, he must be freed from the infinite cycle of the monotonous work of modern technology and the need to create, and restore a certain integrity of the natural man.
In this regard, Fukuyama initially tried to prove that Rousseau's rejection of science was wrong, and he aimed to prove that if the domination of the progressive modern natural science is irreversible, then a directional history, and all the other various economic, social, and political consequences that come with it, are fundamentally irreversible. Obviously, in Fukuyama, modern science and technology are guiding and the main tool to promote the "end of history".
Is Fukuyama still a "Fukuyamaist"?
Around 2000, Francis Fukuyama, writing Our Posthuman Future: The Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, acknowledged that in later reflections on the criticism of the 1989 essay "The End of History" for National Interest magazine, "there is only one argument that I cannot refute: history will not end unless science is over." ”
At that time, the background of global science and technology was that on June 26, 2000, scientists from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and China jointly announced that the sketching of the human genome had been completed. Fukuyama noted this huge technological advance and believed that it "will extend to more profound changes." At the beginning of the 21st century, Fukuyama also noticed that many of the techniques that Huxley envisioned, such as ivy insemination, surrogate motherhood, and psychotropic drugs, had basically become a reality.
Once a series of conjectures that once existed only in science fiction works become a reality, the impact on people is undoubtedly huge and unimaginable, and it is clear that Fukuyama has also been greatly impacted, declaring, "At present, we are close to the end of science and technology, and it seems that we are in a milestone period of progress in life sciences." ”
This once again reminded him of Brave New World and became worried about the scientific and technological progress that he had once admired with enthusiasm and admiration. He said that the people in Brave New World may be healthy and rich, but they are no longer human. They no longer have to struggle, they dare not dream, they no longer have love, they cannot perceive pain, they do not have to make difficult moral choices, they no longer have to form families, and they do not have to do anything traditionally related to people. They no longer have the characteristics that give us human dignity.
Francis Fukuyama also quotes the bioethicist Leon Kass as saying: "Unlike human beings who endure disease or slavery, people who have lost their humanity in the manner in Brave New World are not miserable, they do not even know that they have lost their humanity, and worse, even if they do not think so, they have in fact become happy slaves with the happiness of slaves." ”
The development of new technologies has posed a huge challenge to his "final conclusion of history", so he would rather take a huge risk to write this book, "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution", to which he said: "The most significant threat posed by biotechnology today is that it has the potential to change human nature and thus bring us into the 'post-human' phase of history." ”
Fukuyama's "Posthuman" Huxley's Brave New World is equally troubling: human genes are combined with other species, humanity disappears, human concepts are blurred, hierarchies are more hierarchical, and competition is more jungle.
Fourteen years later, Yuval Harari noticed the acceleration of the technological revolution, especially the greater combination of biotechnology and information technology. He believes that the double revolution between the two has caused the human species to encounter the greatest challenge it has ever experienced, and worries that biotechnology and information technology will greatly disrupt the human mental system and even cause collapse.
Although Harari disagreed with Fukuyama's "final conclusion of history," he was more negative and pessimistic about the relationship between scientific and technological progress and humanity, and he even worried that the development of modern science and technology—whether bioengineering, bionic engineering, or inorganic life engineering—created technical possibilities for a small number of people to provide this sense of superiority.
Whether human technology can eventually lead to an ideal "end point" and whether it can serve the equal goal of the majority, Fukuyama is no longer as firmly optimistic about technology as he was when he wrote "The End of History and the Last Man". He felt that state power should regulate biotechnology and that the new regulatory regime should be strong.
Someone noticed his subtle change. In October 2014, the British newspaper The Guardian invited readers online to ask a question to the philosopher Slavoj Žižek. In response to a question, Žižek said: "It is very interesting that even Fukuyama himself is no longer a Fukuyamaist, and he admits that The End of History is outdated. ”
Žižek listed many of the major problems facing humanity today, calling them "a series of potentially catastrophic problems and confrontations", such as the ecological crisis, the financial crisis, the intellectual property crisis, and highlighted a human conundrum: Who will control biogenetic technology?
Žižek argues that the future of the human world will be like the scene in the American movie Elysium. Elysium is about the world of 2159. By then, the world had been cut apart into two spaces, with the rich living on the pollution-free man-made space station Elysium, while the poor languished on a waste-laden, overpopulated planet. There is a channel of communication between the two spaces. However, Rhodes, the ruler of Elysium, played by Judy Foster, strictly forbade the poor to immigrate to Elysium.
Fukuyama changed his tolerant attitude toward the information technology revolution
Fukuyama's "Prescription"
Like Harari, Fukuyama's departure from a wariness of modern technology was more based on defending the "final conclusion of history" he had constructed, and even though in 2014 Francis Fukuyama admitted that he was still in the fog when he wrote a new edition of his controversial "The End of History and the Last Man," he emphasized: "I think my fundamental ideas are still basically correct." ”
But many observers argue that 15 years after Fukuyama's "Final Conclusion of History" was published, it was capitalism itself that was in serious crisis. In terms of the impact of technological progress alone, Fukuyama later acknowledged that while information technology innovations had decentralized power, they had also undermined low-skill jobs and threatened the existence of a broad middle class.
Going further into biotechnology, he said: "The future of biotechnology will mix the enormous potential benefits with tangible and apparent, intangible and subtle threats. In the face of the threat, Fukuyama believes that the answer is clear: state power should be used to regulate it. And if it proves to be beyond the jurisdiction of a state's powers, it needs to be regulated on an international basis.
In his view, it was a middle way, because in making technology still serve humanity rather than becoming its master, it was neither possible nor possible to prohibit promising research.
To that end, he even criticized the wave of deregulation of the economy that has been unleashed around the world over the past three decades, spreading from aviation to communications and even further reducing the size and jurisdiction of governments. "This reflexive aversion to regulation is one of the main obstacles to placing human biotechnology under political jurisdiction," he argues. At this point, the defender of liberal democracy also showed more or less contradiction.
But in His book Our Posthuman Future: The Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution, he was open-minded about information technology, arguing that it brought many social advances while the associated harms were minimal.
But by early 2021, Fukuyama had changed his tolerant attitude toward the information technology revolution. In Foreign Affairs at the beginning of the year, he wrote an article calling for saving democracy from technology and ending the information monopoly of large Internet companies.
At this time, the world is still shrouded by the new coronavirus epidemic, and the United States is deeply involved in the epidemic. Fukuyama notes that the U.S. economy is undergoing many changes, the most notable of which is the growth of large Internet platforms. "During the COVID-19 pandemic, as people's daily lives shift more online, Amazon, Apple, Face-book, Google, and Twitter, which were already powerful before the COVID-19 pandemic, have become even stronger."
Internet technology has brought convenience to people, but Fukuyama cautioned that the emergence of such dominant companies has also sounded the alarm for humanity, and its huge economic strength and strong control over political communication are worth vigilance.
Many of the events that have taken place in the past few years, including digital monopolies, the misuse of big data, and especially the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign in the form of information warfare on social networks, have made Fukuyama worried about the disruption of market competition by large Internet companies and the threat of traditional power operations. He noticed that unlike traditional companies, large Internet companies do not compete for market share, they compete for the market itself, and they can easily disrupt competition and distort the market.
More notably, "the political harm caused by these platforms is more serious than the economic harm." Fukuyama said: "These platforms have accumulated so much power that they may consciously or unconsciously sway elections." Harari is also concerned that big data algorithms could lead to digital dictatorships, which he believes should be when all power is concentrated in a small group. When the elite is in the hands of the masses, most people are not only exploited, but also insignificant.
In the past few years, governments have further increased their control of the information technology field, for example, the European Union has tried to implement antitrust laws on these large Internet platforms, and the United States has gradually changed its moderate attitude, starting in 2019, the United States has opened antitrust investigations against the four major technology Internet giants of Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook, and filed antitrust lawsuits against the four major companies.
In Fukuyama's view, the most significant way to restrain the power of large Internet platforms is still to increase market competition and government supervision. But in terms of increasing market competition, he pessimistically sees that neither the United States nor the European Union is likely to split Facebook or Google in the same way that Standard Oil and AT&T split.
At the level of strengthening government regulation, he faces a more difficult problem, pessimistically saying that in a polarized country like the United States, regulation is unlikely to work. Citing the heyday of broadcast television as an example, the Federal Communications Commission adopted the principle of fairness, requiring the Internet to maintain "balanced" coverage of political issues. Republicans, on the other hand, claim that these networks are unfair, that they are biased against conservatives, and that the FCC repealed this principle of fairness in 1987 under their relentless attacks.
After the Trump era, American society has become more divided and polarized, and the chaos and monopoly formed around information technology, big data and social media has accelerated further polarization in the United States. Therefore, Fukuyama said helplessly: "Today, there is a lot of controversy about whether to block a certain tweet from the president, regardless of what the regulator makes." ”