Visions of Other Worlds

Dec. 14, 2005

You don’t hear much about alien abduction these days, but in the ‘90s weird tales of body-poking mischief by creepy E.T.‘s were all the rage.
Remember “Communion” by Whitley Strieber? It was a “true story” bestseller that started with a bang in the night. Strieber and his family were staying in a remote cabin in upstate New York during Christmas of 1985, oblivious to sightings of large, unidentified objects floating around the night sky. On Christmas night, Strieber discovers spooky humanoids creeping into his bedroom. Frozen with fear, he realizes that he isn’t dreaming before he blacks out and is spirited away for six lost hours. Only later, under hypnosis, does Strieber discover that aliens have been playing hokey-pokey with him all night long for some sinister purpose.
During the course of interviewing other abductees, Strieber discovers that the aliens seem to be collecting eggs and breeding with ladies who will soon end up sharing their stories on “Oprah” or “The Jerry Springer Show.” Abductees report seeing creatures which are half-human, half alien, peering over them on the operating tables aboard the space ships.
At the end of one book, Strieber intones darkly that if it’s true that aliens are breeding with human beings, then his would be the most important book ever written, thanks to the warning it provides.
Indeed, that would be true, except that no one has seen any little green people lately this side of the mosh pit at a Disturbed concert. Along came the 9/11 attacks and the War on Terrorism and -- poof! -- the whole alien abduction thing disappeared in a cloud of fairy dust.
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Some people can’t resist a spooky scenario. It’s claimed, for instance, that 25% of Americans believe they’re going to fly off to heaven in their birthday suits at any moment in the so-called Rapture, an event based on the biblical Book of Revelations.
Those folks are going to look pretty silly standing around bare-naked in heaven, wondering who‘s going to feed the dog and cat back home. The good news, however, is that there‘s no such Rapture with naked flying people described in the Bible; it was apparently invented by the bestselling author of the “Left Behind“ series to coax gullible fundamentalists out of their cash... and perhaps their skivvies.
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Another kooky theory is that of the Singularity -- the point at which our machines will become our masters by becoming smarter than us.
In 1999, visionary inventer Ray Kurzweil wrote a book called “The Age of Spiritual Machines,” in which he claimed that at some point in the near future, our computers will attain artificial intelligence (AI) and transform the world overnight. Sort of like SkyNet in the “Terminator” films or the machines in “The Matrix,” only instead of tossing people into a meatgrinder, the new AI’s would presumably be wise and gentle shepherds of the human race. They‘ll teach us childlike simps how to cure cancer, live forever and build starships.
The moment in time called the “Singularity” is supposed to happen within the next 20 years or so -- possibly as soon as 2005. But while it‘s true that many people are dumber than their toasters (and certainly not as smart as their TV channel changers) there seems to be no sign of the Singularity occurring anytime soon.
So Kurzweil has written a new book: “The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.” In this one, Joe Lunchbucket literally becomes his lunch bucket -- half human, half machine and way brainier than the lug who used to work on the assembly line before he become a cyborg with a genius I.Q.
Well, we’ll see. The book makes a lot of interesting points, but here’s the thing: despite all of the electronic gadgets invented over the past 50 years, the average person today doesn’t seem to be five cents smarter than the citizens of 1955. In fact, despite 500-channel TV, round-the-clock cable news, the Internet, robot vacuum cleaners and talking cell phones, we’re hardly a bunch of geniuses in the making.
For proof of that, consider that no one’s looking for a Stephen Hawking-style brainiac to be president. What we’d rather have in charge of the world’s largest army is a guy who looks good clearing brush on his ranch. A guy who wears cowboy boots with his tux and talks aw-shucks-like to reg’lar folks when he’s not hob-knobbing at fundraisers with his fancy friends off-camera.
That’s about how smart we are. You can imagine Kurzweil’s super-smart AI robots throwing up their mechanical arms in dismay.
But let’s suppose that Kurzweil’s utopia came true and the human race suddenly was hyper-intelligent, nearly immortal, and half machine. What a disaster.
That’s because being intelligent doesn‘t translate into being nice.
History is full of intelligent but evil people who did vast harm: Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Adolph Hitler, Mao Zedong, Stalin -- all were geniuses at manipulating people. Charles Manson was intelligent enough to brainwash a gang of middle-class hippie chicks into running around suburban L.A. on a murderous spree.
Does anyone want an android version of a super-intelligent Charles Manson turning up at their door with his homemade nerve gas or nuclear suitcase bomb? How about a few million of them?
We’d better hope the aliens land or the Rapture carries us off to the Great Upstairs before the Singularity takes place. You can, after all, be too smart for your own good.