Reason Magazine - Topics > Science

The End of Humanity: Nukes, Nanotech, or God-Like Artificial Intelligences?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:15:00 EDT

Oxford, England—The Global Catastrophic Risks conference sponsored by the Future of Humanity Institute concluded on Sunday. Participants were treated to a series of presentations describing how billions of people could potentially bite the dust over the next century. The possible megadeath tolls of both natural and biotech pandemics were considered. The chances that asteroids, comets, or gamma ray bursts from a nearby supernova could wipe out humanity were calculated. The old neo-Malthusian threats of overpopulation, resource depletion, and famine were trotted out. But these risks to future human well-being paled in comparison to one main menace—malicious human ingenuity.

Human ingenuity forged the still massive arsenals of nuclear weapons held by the United States and Russia. And as the conference participants made an argument that human ingenuity is on track to craft nanotech fabricators that can make essentially any product, including weapons of mass destruction, at essentially no cost, not to mention a self-improving artificial intelligence possessing god-like powers to pursue its own goals.

First, let's consider the nuclear threat. Joseph Cirincione of the Ploughshares Fund pointed out the good news that the world's nuclear arsenals have been cut in half-down from 65,000 to 26,000 since the height of the Cold War. However, the U.S. retains 10,685 nuclear bombs and Russia is estimated to have around 14,000. Of those, 4,275 in the U.S. and 5,192 in Russia are active. Both countries maintain 2,000 weapons on hair-trigger alert, ready for launching in 15 minutes or so. Cirincione offered a couple of scary scenarios, including one in which there is an unauthorized launch of all 12 missiles from a Russian submarine containing 48 warheads with about 5 megatons total destructive power. Such an attack would kill 7 million Americans immediately. A retaliatory American attack aimed at several hundred Russian military assets would kill between 8 and 12 million Russians.

With regard to the possibility of an accidental nuclear war, Cirincione pointed to the near miss that occurred in 1995 when Norway launched a weather satellite and Russian military officials mistook it as a submarine launched ballistic missile aimed at producing an electro-magnetic pulse to disable a Russian military response. Russian nuclear defense officials opened the Russian "football" in front of President Boris Yeltsin, urging him to order an immediate strike against the West. Fortunately, Yeltsin held off, arguing that it must be a mistake.

A global nuclear war scenario in which most of both Russian and American arsenals were fired off would result in 105 to 230 million immediate American deaths and 28 to 56 million immediate Russian deaths. One of the effects of such an attack would be a rapid cooling of global temperatures as sunlight was blocked by dust and smoke. Cirincione argued that even a nuclear war limited just to bitter enemies India and Pakistan could produce enough dust and smoke to lower global temperatures by one half to two degrees Celsius, plunging the world back to the Little Ice Age.

The good news is that Cirincione sees an opening for negotiations to totally eliminate nuclear weapons. He pointed to an initiative by the "Four Horsemen of the Un-Apocalypse"; that is, by former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), and former Secretary of Defense William Perry that aim to eliminate nuclear weapons completely. In fact, both of the presumptive major party presidential candidates, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), have explicitly endorsed the idea of global nuclear disarmament. Cirincione argued that a commitment by the declared nuclear powers would have the effect of persuading countries like Iran that they did not need to become nuclear powers themselves.

Cirincione danced around the question of what to about Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, pointing out that its nuclear facilities are hardened, dispersed, and defended. Cirincione asserted that the U.S. has 5-day and 10-day plans for taking out Iran's nuclear facilities, but he noted that such plans don't end the matter. Iran has moves too, including trying to block oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz, revving up terrorist attacks in Iraq, and even aiding terrorist attacks in the U.S. Cirincione claimed that that the Iranians are still five to ten years away from making a nuclear bomb. On a side note, Cirincione admitted that he initially did not believe that the Syrians had constructed a nuclear weapons facility, but is now convinced that they did. The Syrians hid it away in a desert gully, disguising it as an ancient Byzantine building.

Terrorism expert Gary Ackerman from the University of Maryland and William Potter from the Monterey Institute of International Studies evaluated the risks from two types of nuclear terrorism—the theft of nuclear material and the construction of a crude bomb and the theft of an intact nuclear weapon. They set aside two lower consequence attacks: the dispersal of radiological material by means of a conventional explosion and sabotage of nuclear facilities. Could non-state actors, a.k.a., a terrorist group, actually build a nuclear bomb? Potter cited an article by Peter Zimmerman in which he estimated that a team of 19 terrorists (the same number that pulled off the September 11 atrocities) could build such a bomb for around $6 million. Their most challenging task would be to acquire 40 kilograms of highly enriched uranium (HEU). There are 1700 tons of HEU in the world, including 50 tons stored at civilian sites. Potter acknowledged that intact weapons are probably more secure than fissile material.

Ackerman noted that only a small subset of terrorists has the motivation to use nuclear terrorism. "So far as we know only Jihadists want these weapons," said Ackerman. Specifically, Al Qaeda has made ten different efforts to get hold of fissile material. Ackerman told me that Al Qaeda had been defrauded several times by would-be vendors of nuclear materials. Just before the September 11 atrocities, two Pakistani nuclear experts visited Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, apparently to advise Al Qaeda on nuclear matters. One possibility is that if Pakistan becomes more unstable intact weapons could fall into terrorist hands. Still, the good news is that intercepted fissile material smugglers have actually been carrying very small amounts. Less reassuringly, Potter did note that prison sentences for smugglers dealing in weapons grade nuclear material have been less than those meted out for drunk driving.

One cautionary case: Two groups invaded and seized the control room of the Pelindaba nuclear facility in South Africa in November, 2007. They were briefly arrested and then released without further consequence. Both Ackerman and Potter agreed that it is in no state's interest to supply terrorists with nuclear bombs or fissile material. It could be easily traced back to them and they would suffer the consequences. Ackerman cited one expert estimate that there is a 50 percent chance of a nuclear terrorist attack in the next ten years.

While nuclear war and nuclear terrorism would be catastrophic, the presenters acknowledged that neither constituted existential risks; that is, a risk that they could cause the extinction of humanity. But the next two risks, self-improving artificial intelligence and nanotechnology, would.

The artificial intelligence explosion?

Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky began his presentation with a diagram of the space of possible minds. Among the vast space of possible minds, a small dot represented human minds. His point is that two artificial intelligences (AIs) could be far more different from one another than we are from chimpanzees. Yudkowsky then described the relatively slow processing speeds of human brains, the difficulty in reprogramming ourselves, and other limitations. An AI could run 1 million times faster, meaning that it could get a year's worth of thinking done in 31 seconds. An "intelligence explosion" would result because an AI would have access to its source code and could rapidly modify and optimize itself. It would be hard to make an AI that didn't want to improve itself in order to better achieve its goals.

Can an intelligence explosion be avoided? No. A unique feature of AI is that it can be a "global catastrophic opportunity." Success in creating a friendly AI would give humanity access to vast intelligence that could be used to mitigate other risks. But picking a friendly AI out of the space of all possible minds is a hard and unsolved problem. According to Yudkowsky, the unique features of a superintelligent AI as a global catastrophic risk are: There is no final battle, or an unfriendly AI just kills off humanity. And there is nowhere to hide because the AI can find you wherever you are. There is no learning curve since we get only one chance to produce a friendly AI. But will it happen? Yudkowsky pointed out that there is no way to control the proliferation of "raw materials," e.g., computers, so the creation of an AI is essentially inevitable. In fact, Yudkowsky believes that current computers are sufficient to instantiate an AI, but researchers just don't know how to do it yet.

What can we do? "You cannot throw money or regulations at this problem for an easy solution," insisted Yudkowsky. His chief (and somewhat self-serving) recommendation is to support a lot of mathematical research on how to create a friendly AI. Of course, former Sun Microsystems chief scientist Bill Joy proposed another solution: relinquishment. That is, humanity has to agree to some kind of compact to never try to build an AI. "Success mitigates lots of risks," said Yudkowsky. "Failure kills you immediately." As a side note, bioethicist James Hughes, head of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, mused about how much longer it would be before we would see Sarah Connor Brigades gunning down AI researchers to prevent the Terminator future. (Note to self: perhaps reconsider covering future Singularity Institute conferences.)

The menace of molecular manufacturing?

Next up was Michael Treder and Chris Phoenix from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology. They cannily opened with a series of quotations claiming that science will never be able to solve this or that problem. Two of my favorites were: "Pasteur's theory of germs is a ridiculous fiction" by Pierre Pachet in 1872, and "Space travel is utter bilge," by Astronomer Royal Richard Woolley in 1956. Of course, the point is that arguments that molecular manufacturing is impossible are likely to suffer the same predictive failures. Their vision of molecular manufacturing involves using trillions of very small machines to make something larger. They envision desktop nanofactories into which people feed simple raw inputs and get out nearly any product they desire. The proliferation of such nanofactories would end scarcity forever. "We can't expect to have only positive outcomes without mitigating negative outcomes," cautioned Treder.

What kind of negative outcomes? Nanofactories could produce not only hugely beneficial products such as water filters, solar cells, and houses, but also weapons of any sort. Such nanofabricated weapons would be vastly more powerful than today's. Since these weapons are so powerful, there is a strong incentive for a first strike. In addition, an age of nanotech abundance would eliminate the majority of jobs, possibly leading to massive social disruptions. Social disruption creates the opportunity for a charismatic personality to take hold. "Nanotechnology could lead to some form of world dictatorship," said Treder. "There is a global catastrophic risk that we could all be enslaved."

On the other hand, individuals with access to nanofactories could wield great destructive power. Phoenix and Treder's chief advice is more research into how to handle nanotech when it becomes a reality in the next couple of decades. In particular, Phoenix thinks that it's urgent to study whether offense or defense would be the best response. To Phoenix, offense looks a lot easier—there are a lot more ways to destroy things than to defend them. If that's true, we should narrow our future policy options.

This concluion left me musing on British historian Arnold Toynbee's observation: "The human race's prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves." I don't think that's right, but it's worth thinking about.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

Will Humanity Survive the 21st Century?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Oxford, England—"The good news is that no existential catastrophe has happened," declared Nick Bostrom. "Not one. Yet." Bostrom, director of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute opened what he thinks might be the first ever conference to comprehensively consider the gamut of Global Catastrophic Risks. By existential catastrophes Bostrom means that humanity has survived extinction so far. However, he quickly pointed out 99.9 percent of all species are extinct. Bostrom cited the Toba super-eruption 73,000 years ago which may have produced a global winter that reduced the population of human ancestors to fewer than 500 fertile women (though some disagree). Our Neanderthal relatives died out between 33,000 and 24,000 years ago. In Our Final Hour, Lord Martin Rees predicted that there was only a 50 percent chance that our civilization would survive to 2100.

Bostrom justified the broad topic of global catastrophic risks by pointing to common causal links, e.g., super-volcanoes, asteroid strikes, and nuclear wars all have the potential to produce disastrous global cooling. Catastrophic scenarios also present common methodological, analytical, and cultural challenges. And, argues Bostrom, a wider view of potential catastrophes is necessary for the adoption of proper policies and informed prioritization. To assist in this effort, the conference is launching the eponymous volume, Global Catastrophic Risks.

Bostrom did note that people today are safer from small to medium threats than ever before. As evidence he cites increased life expectancy from 18 years in the Bronze Age to 64 years today (the World Health Organizations thinks it's 66 years). And he urged the audience not to let future existential risks occlude our view of current disasters, such as 15 million people dying of infectious diseases every year, 3 million from HIV/AIDS, 18 million from cardiovascular diseases, and 8 million per year from cancer. Bostrom did note that, "All of the biggest risks, the existential risks are seen to be anthropogenic, that is, they originate from human beings." The biggest risks include nuclear war, biotech plagues, and nanotechnology arms races. The good news is that the biggest existential risks are probably decades away, which means we have time to analyze them and develop countermeasures.

A small, and rather dapper audience gathered in the Rhodes Trust Lecture theatre at the Said Business School in Oxford to listen to Bostrom and keynote speaker, Sir Crispin Tickell, expound on the end of the world. Tickell, it turns out, is mostly an old-fashioned Green catastrophist. The main problems he sees are overpopulation and dwindling resources, with climate change thrown in for good measure. As far as I could tell, Tickell thinks that everything started going downhill with the invention of farming, and forget about the horror of the Industrial Revolution! Doom lurks in six big issues for Tickell: overpopulation, land degradation, freshwater shortages, climate change, fossil fuel energy generation, and biodevastation of species. He later mentioned a seventh factor, the curse of dangerous new technologies.

I won't deal here with all of Tickell's challenges, but it is interesting that he did admit that fertility rates are falling around the world. In addition, he claimed that since we are "close to running out of freshwater," that water wars could dominate the 21st century. Thus Tickell propagated the stale water wars meme that most empirical evidence has shown to be false. Transboundary water cooperation rather than conflict is the norm. "The simple explanation is that water is simply too important to fight over," Aaron Wolf, the Oregon State University professor who heads up the Program in Water Conflict Management, told Reuters.

While a massive reduction in biodiversity would be a tragedy, at least some researchers don't believe that biodiversity losses pose an existential threat to humanity. For example, Martin Jenkins from the United Nations Environment Program argues that even if the dire projections of extinction rates being made by conservation advocates are correct, they "will not, in themselves, threaten the survival of humans as a species." He adds, "In truth, ecologists and conservationists have struggled to demonstrate the increased material benefits to humans of 'intact' wild systems over largely anthropogenic ones [like farms].... Where increased benefits of natural systems have been shown, they are usually marginal and local."

Tickell indulged in the conceit of looking back 100 years to see how the world got to its happy state in 2100. By then, he foresees a more globalized world linked by instantaneous communications networks, where human numbers in cities will be reduced, not least because human population will have fallen to 2.5 billion. Communities will be more dispersed, agriculture will be more local, energy and transport will be decentralized. Quite idyllic. Except for the communications networks, Tickell's world in 2100 sounds a lot like 1950 when world population was 2.5 billion and Sir Crispin was a green youth of twenty. Nostalgia?

During the question period, Tickell owned up to being something of a neo-Malthusian and was eagerly looking forward to reading Paul and Anne Ehrlich's new book, The Dominant Animal. Tickell reported that he had heard that Ehrlich writes in this new book that he got his timing wrong on when the "population bomb" would finally explode. Later over a glass of wine, I pointed out to Tickell that this is exactly what Ehrlich told me when I interviewed for him for an article in Forbes magazine back 1990. I'm sure that he was sincere when he said that he was sorry, but he had suddenly remembered that he had an urgent appointment elsewhere. About Ehrlich's new book, Crispin admitted, "I thought to myself, 'Ho, ho, the Neo-Malthusians rise again.'" Alas, they always do.

Tomorrow, the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risks will have more edifying (and frightening?) presentations on proposals for recovering from social collapses occasioned by catastrophes; how to rationally consider the end of the world; how to avoid Millennialist cognitive biases; how to insure against catastrophes; how ecological diversity could affect human prospects; and the tragedy of the uncommons.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

TEOTWAWKI!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Oxford, England—People have long been fascinated by the end of the world. Some interpretations of Hindu scripture suggest that the world will end with the imminent conclusion of the current Kali Yuga cycle. Some New Agers believe that the world will undergo apocalyptic changes as the Maya Long Count calendar comes to an end on December 21, 2012. Some Christian End Timers believe that the period preceding the Day of Judgment described in the Book of Revelation is now upon us. Religious believers are not alone in their fascination with doomsday. Secular catastrophists predict environmental doom or worry about calamity raining down on us from outer space.

This week the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, headed by bioprogressive philosopher Nick Bostrom, is convening a conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. The Institute's work focuses on how radical technological developments such as nanotechnology, artificial intelligence, and life-extension treatments will affect the human condition. One of the Institute's research programs is global catastrophic risks which mulls questions like: What are the biggest threats to global civilization and human well-being? Will the human species survive the 21st century?

The savants gathered here in Oxford will consider a wide variety of potentially apocalyptic risks. For example, Michelangelo Mangano from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will explore the possibility that certain scientific research—e.g., the Brookhaven Lab's high energy experiments that might produce a black hole—could inadvertently destroy the world. Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix from the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology will discuss how the advent of molecular manufacturing could lead to massive economic and social disruptions, including a new arms race, the spread of tyranny, and dangerous environmental degradation. At the cosmic level, the Technion Institute's Arnon Dar will look at the devastation that a nearby supernova could wreak, and astronomer and author William Napier will evaluate the chances that the earth might soon suffer an asteroid strike. Whether future advanced artificial intelligences will think of us as pets or pests will be pondered by Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence research fellow Eliezer Yudkowsky.

In addition to the more exotic risks noted above, the conferees will also be discussing the prospects for nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. More reassuringly, Princeton University Program on Science and Global Security fellow Ali Nouri is apparently set to argue that trends in biotechnology are making it less likely that bad guys could unleash a man-made plague. On an even happier note, technoprogressive bioethicist James Hughes will discuss how to avoid cognitive biases toward over-pessimism and over-optimism. And Steve Rayner, director of Oxford's James Martin Institute (which is co-sponsoring the conference), will point out that much contemporary doomsaying shares cultural characteristics with earlier superstitious predictions of imminent catastrophe.

The whole cheery conference kicks off this evening with a talk by Sir Crispin Tickell entitled, "Humans: Past, Present and Future." Apparently Tickell buys into the whole litany of environmentalist doom. However, he thinks that doom can be avoided if we "radically change our thinking on global governance" and pursue some "interesting" technological options.

This is the first dispatch from the Oxford conference on Global Catastrophic Risks. Since the conference runs through the weekend, future dispatches will report various gloomy presentations chiefly as blog posts at reason online. I will finish up coverage of the conference with my science column next Tuesday.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: The Future of Humanity Institute is covering my travel expenses for the conference; no restrictions or conditions were placed on my reporting.

Attack of the Super-Intelligent Purple Space Squid Creators

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Below is a slightly cleaned up version of my remarks this past Saturday during the FreedomFest 2008 debate: “Is There Scientific Evidence for Intelligent Design in Nature?” The debate took place between Discovery Institute intelligent design proponents Stephen Meyer and George Gilder and evolutionary biology proponents Michael Shermer, the executive director of the Skeptic Society, and me.

Let me begin by acknowledging that the Discovery Institute website states: "Unlike creationism, the scientific theory of intelligent design is agnostic regarding the source of design and has no commitment to defending Genesis, the Bible or any other sacred text." So far so good.

Near the end of the silly new anti-evolution film, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed—in which fellow panelist Steve Meyer appeared—host Ben Stein asks Richard Dawkins, who is arguably the best-known living evolutionary biologist on the planet, if he could think of any circumstances under which intelligent design might have occurred. Incautiously, Dawkins brings up the idea that aliens might have seeded life on earth; so-called directed panspermia. This idea was suggested by biologists Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel back in the 1970s. In the film, Stein acts like this is a great "gotcha," like it's the silliest thing he's ever heard. Of course, the irony is that this is precisely what proponents of intelligent design are claiming—that a higher intelligence has repeatedly created life on earth.

So, since our esteemed opponents are agnostic with regard to the "source of design," and because intelligent design cannot rule out the hypothesis that super-intelligent purple space squids are not the "source of design" of life on earth, I will provisionally accept that hypothesis for the remainder of my talk.

As I understand it, intelligent design proponents—such as our distinguished Discovery Institute panelists here—fully accept the fact that the earth is around 4.5 billion years old and that some form of life has existed on earth for about 3 billion or so years. If that is the case, it would seem the record shows that the intelligent designers—which I am hypothesizing are super-intelligent purple space squids—evidently spent more than 2 billion years tinkering with single-cell algae and bacteria before they got around to creating multi-cellular species. Do intelligent design proponents have a theory to explain that? Were the space squid creators just lazy?

In addition, the record clearly shows that when more complex forms of life were created by super-intelligent purple space squids, they apparently arranged their creations in a specific order. Why did the purple space squids arrange the fossils in a sequence in which fish appear before amphibians which appear before reptiles which appear before mammals? And why did the purple space squids arrange 390 million years ago for the first amphibians to resemble Crossopterygian fish that were also alive at that time? These first amphibians had such characteristics as internal gills, fish-like skull bones, and—interestingly—eight digits just as the Crossopterygian fish did. Apparently our intelligent purple space squid creators (or whoever) found eight digits displeasing, and simply eliminated the extra three digits after they killed off the early amphibians and individually created thousands of later species of amphibians with only the now standard five digits.

Interestingly, the fossils of early reptiles—which the purple space aliens apparently created around 300 million years ago—were still rather amphibian-like in their overall structure. Their legs were splayed out sideways, bellies just barely lifted from the ground, tails dragging behind—in short, a salamander-like gait. Eventually, the creator aliens chose to produce tens of thousands of new reptile species which differed considerably from the old sticks-in-the-mud amphibians. Among their creations were much grander reptiles such as the impressively armor-plated stegosaurus (145 million years ago), and the massive apatosaurus (formerly brontosaurus), which measured 75 feet long and weighed 25 tons, and of course the largest land predator ever known, the 7-ton, 43-foot-long tyrannosaurus rex (65 million years ago).

Another puzzle—why is it that the super-intelligent purple space squid creators made the earliest mammals share so many characteristics with the therapsid reptile species that lived alongside them? Interestingly, researchers have now pieced together how the purple space squid created the mammalian inner ear over a period of 70 million years from reptilian jaw bones.

Starting with the mammal-like reptile Sphenacodon 270 million years, ago, purple space squid creators evidently spent the next 70 million years tinkering with the hinged reptilian jawbones. The squids shrank the bones, moving them back toward the ear holes in the skulls of some of the thousands of increasingly mammal-like species that squids were busy individually creating. Eventually the purple space squid creators ended up after 70 million years making a tiny mammalian-type critter called Hadrocodium which had a single jawbone (like mammals do today) and three middle-ear bones (like mammals do today). I am sure that intelligent design proponents will shortly explain why apparently intelligent purple space squid creators (or whatever creators they prefer) used this pathway for creating inner ear bones. Since, by definition, the purple space squids are intelligent and should know what they want in advance—what ID proponents call "complex specified information"—why did they piddle around so long and why not instead just create species with inner ear bones without generating a series of creatures through slow intermediate steps?

Which brings me to an even bigger puzzle—why, after going to all the trouble to finally populate the earth with millions of magnificent species, did the purple space squid creators (or whichever creator design proponents prefer) apparently allow either a five-mile wide asteroid to hit the Earth, or a huge outbreak of volcanic eruptions, or both, to wipe out at least 50 percent of the species—including the dinosaurs—living 65 million years ago? In fact, something worse occurred 250 million years ago when some event, possibly also an asteroid strike, destroyed 95 percent of all living species.

Of course, there is an alternative hypothesis that intelligent design proponents—such as the distinguished representatives from the Discovery Institute on the panel here—might fruitfully want to explore. That hypothesis is that the purple space alien squid creators actually caused asteroids to strike the earth in order to wipe the biological and ecological slate clean so that they could start over.

Perhaps like a thrifty artist who whites out an earlier painting on a canvas in order to create a masterpiece, the purple space squids destroyed most of life on earth in order to make room for new creations. Interestingly, the creator squids seem subject to a strange kind of creative conservatism. Their new, post-extinction, individually created species looked very much like earlier created species that apparently survived the massive extinction events. What hypothesis do intelligent design proponents offer to explain this interesting observation of creative conservatism? Purple space squids appear to be progressive creationists: They bring species into existence over and over again, forming each species so that it bears a striking resemblance to a species that has just gone extinct.

I have been using the phrase individually created species throughout my talk. Why? Because intelligent design proponents—such as Steve Meyer and George Gilder here on the panel—insist that micro-evolution, which I take to mean any evolutionary change below the level of species, cannot lead to macroevolution, which I take to mean any evolutionary change at or above the level of species—which means at least the splitting of a species into two new species.

Since micro-evolution, according to ID proponents such as Steve and George, cannot lead to the creation of new species, then the purple space squid creators (or whomever) must create each new species individually. Trying to figure out how super-intelligent space alien creators go about creating individual species would be a fascinating question for intelligent design researchers to look into. Do the squid creators somehow tweak genes while embryos are developing in their eggs or in their mother's wombs? Or do they work at the level of sperm and eggs before conception? Would the space squid creators use radiation to do this? Or chemical mutations? Or errors in genetic transcription? What's their favorite method for producing new species? And most crucially, how would whatever processes the purple space squid have used to create tens of millions of new species over billions of years differ from the natural processes suggested by evolutionary biology?

And there is yet another puzzle. Conservative super-intelligent purple space squid creators apparently recycle genes over and over again in new species. Biologists have found that many genes are like Animal Kingdom cassettes or Lego blocks: They can be mixed and matched across vastly different species. For example, biologists have shown that a gene crucial to building a fruit fly's eye—the Pax-6 gene—will trigger eye development in a frog and a mouse.

In addition, now that both the human and mouse genomes have been sequenced, researchers know that 99 percent of mouse genes are similar to those found in humans. Even more amazingly, 96 percent of the genes in both mice and men are present in the same order on their different genomes. Why would this be? A fascinating question for intelligent design researchers to answer is what constrains the super-intelligent purple space squid creators (or any other intelligent creator) to use the same genes over and over again in millions of species?

And here's another minor curiosity: Why did the purple space squids design humans so that we need to eat foods like oranges that provide us with vitamin C? Without vitamin C people die of the deficiency disease scurvy. It turns out that the super-intelligent squids created nearly all other mammals so that they have genes—including the GLO gene—that synthesize this vitamin in their livers. Biologists have discovered that when the purple space squids created us, they for some reason left a broken remnant of the GLO gene in our genomes. There is one group of mammals that share our inability to make vitamin C —orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and macques all have broken GLO genes. Even more interestingly, biologists have found that gorillas and chimpanzees have exactly the same errors in their GLO genes that people do. So why did the purple space squids create those species along with us with exactly the same errors so that they and we could not produce vitamin C?

One other consideration: Are the intelligent designers—the super-intelligent purple space squids—finished creating new species? Are they resting from their creative labors for now? What evidence would show that intelligent designers are still at work creating new species around us? And how would we know?

The point of the foregoing is that intelligent design proponents do not have good answers to the questions I have posed. But evolutionary biologists do. In his new book, Only a Theory: Evolution and the Battle for America's Soul, Brown University biologist Kenenth Miller argues, "Design rests ultimately on the claim of ignorance, upon the hope that science cannot show evolution to be capable of producing complex organs, assemblies of molecules, or novel biological information. If evolution cannot achieve that, the argument goes, then design must be the answer.

"Since any field of biology, including evolution, is filled with unsolved problems, intelligent design can be invoked as the default explanation for any one of them," adds Miller. "The hypothesis of design is compatible with any conceivable data, makes no testable predictions, and suggests no new avenues of research."

Ultimately, the intelligent design hypothesis just leaves everything up to the ineffable whims of the moral equivalent of super-intelligent purple space squids or whoever else is the alleged "source of design."

One addendum: During his presentations, Gilder claimed several times that evolutionary biology somehow undermined the notions of freedom and economics. He just couldn't seem to get his head around the concept of bottom-up order. This so frustrated me that I eventually quipped, "Intelligent design is to evolutionary biology what socialism is to free-market economics."

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: I want to gratefully confess that I took many of the arguments I used in the debate from Kenneth Miller's interesting new book.

Does the Invisible Hand Need a Helping Hand?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:10:00 EDT

Remember how you reacted to your micromanaging boss in a past job? He was forever looking over your shoulder, constantly kibitzing and threatening you. In return, you worked as little as you could get away with. On the other hand, perhaps you've had bosses who inspired you—pulling all-nighters in order to finish up a project so that you wouldn't disappoint her. You kept the first job only because you couldn't get another and because you needed the money; you stayed with the second one even though you might have earned more somewhere else.

In the June 20 issue of Science, Samuel Bowles, director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute, looks at how market interactions can fail to optimize the rewards of participants—e.g., the micromanager who gets less than he wants from his employees. For Bowles, the key is that policies designed for self-interested citizens may undermine "the moral sentiments." His citation of the "moral sentiments" obviously references Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which Smith argued that people have an innate moral sense. This natural feeling of conscience and sympathy enables human beings to live and work together in mutually beneficial ways.

To explore the interaction of moral sentiments and self-interest, Bowles begins with a case where six day care centers in Haifa, Israel imposed a fine on parents who picked their kids up late. The fine aimed to encourage parents to be more prompt. Instead, parents reacted to the fine by coming even later. Why? According to Bowles: "The fine seems to have undermined the parents' sense of ethical obligation to avoid inconveniencing the teachers and led them to think of lateness as just another commodity they could purchase."

Bowles argues that conventional economics assumes that "policies that appeal to economic self-interest do not affect the salience of ethical, altruistic, and other social preferences." Consequently, material interests and ethics generally pull in the same direction, reinforcing one another. If that is the case, then how can one explain the experience of the day care centers and the micromanager?

Bowles reviews 41 behavioral economics experiments to see when and how material and moral incentives diverge. For example, researchers set up an experiment involving rural Colombians who depend on commonly held forest resources. In the first experiment, the Colombians were asked to decide how much to anonymously withdraw from a beneficial common pool analogous to the forest. After eight rounds of play, the Colombians withdrew an amount that was halfway between individually self-interested and group-beneficial levels. Then experimenters allowed them to talk, thus boosting cooperation. Finally, the experimenters set up a condition analogous to "government regulation," one where players were fined for self-interestedly overexploiting the common resource. The result? The players looked at the fine as a cost and pursued their short-term interests at the expense of maximizing long-term gains. In this case, players apparently believed that they had satisfied their moral obligations by paying the fine.

While this experiment illuminates how bad institutional designs can yield bad social results, I am puzzled about why Bowles thinks this experiment is so telling. What would have happened if the Colombians in the experiment were allocated exclusive rights to a portion of the common pool resources—e.g., private property? Oddly, Bowles himself recognizes this solution when he discusses how the incentives of sharecropping produced suboptimal results. He recommends either giving the sharecropper ownership or setting a fixed rent.

In fact, Bowles recognizes that markets do not leave us selfish calculators. He cites the results of a 2002 study that looked at how members of 15 small-scale societies played various experimental economics games. In one game, a player split a day's pay with another player. If the second player didn't like the amount that the first player offered, he could reject it and both would get nothing.

The findings would warm the hearts of market proponents. As Bowles notes, "[I]ndividuals from the more market-oriented societies were also more fair-minded in that they made more generous offers to their experimental partners and more often chose to receive nothing rather than accept an unfair offer. A plausible explanation is that this kind of fair-mindedness is essential to the exchange process and that in market-oriented societies individuals engaging in mutually beneficial exchanges with strangers represent models of successful behavior who are then copied by others." In other words, as people gain more experience with markets, morals and material incentives pull together.

Interestingly, neuro-economics is also beginning to delve deeper into how we respond to various institutions. In one experiment done by Oregon University researchers, MRIs scanned the brains of students as they chose to give—or were required to give—some portion of $100 to a food bank. The first was a charitable act and the second analogous to a tax. In both cases, their reward centers "lit up," but much less so under the tax condition. As Oregon economist William Harbaugh told the New York Times, "We're showing that paying taxes does produce a neural reward. But we're showing that the neural reward is even higher when you have voluntary giving."

Bowles, with some evident regret, observes, "Before the advent of economics in the 18th century, it was more common to appeal to civic virtues." Bowles does recognize that such appeals "are hardly adequate to avoid market failures." How to resolve these market failures was the subject of Smith's second great book, The Wealth of Nations (1776), where he explained: "By pursuing his own interest (the individual) frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it."

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

An Emergency Cooling System for the Planet

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 16:30:00 EDT

Last week, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) held a conference that asked if geoengineering was a feasible solution to lower our planet's temperature, at least temporarily. The question is what to do if man-made global warming turns out to be a serious problem? At AEI, climatologist Tom Wigley from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado defined geoengineering as the deliberate modification of the earth's short wave radiation budget in order to reduce the magnitude of climate change. In his presentation, Wigley looked mostly at two possible approaches to geoengineering: injecting sulfate or other aerosols into the stratosphere, and changing the reflectivity of clouds.

Why consider geoengineering in the first place? As Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs wrote in Scientific American in April: "[O]ur current technologies cannot support both a decline in carbon dioxide emissions and an expanding global economy. If we try to restrain emissions without a fundamentally new set of technologies, we will end up stifling economic growth, including the development prospects for billions of people."

So if we don't want to perpetuate poverty in the name of preventing climate change, geoengineering may be our way out. Why? Because geoengineering would provide more time for the world's economy to grow while inventors and entrepreneurs develop and deploy new carbon neutral energy sources to replace fossil fuels. Wigley also noted that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is a tremendous global collective action problem. It seems unlikely that fast-growing poor countries like India and China will agree cut back on their use of fossil fuels any time soon. If that's the case, then emissions reductions in rich countries would have almost no effect on future temperature trends. Geoengineering could give humanity more time to resolve this collective action problem, too.

So let's take Wigley's second proposal first—changing the reflectivity of clouds. Researchers know that this can be done because it already happens with ship tracks. Ship exhaust over the oceans injects particles into the atmosphere that serve as cloud condensation nuclei, creating clouds in the wakes of ships. Ship exhaust produces and brightens clouds so that they cool the planet by reflecting sunlight back into space, but only by a little bit. However, recent modeling research by University of Edinburgh engineer Stephen Salter and his colleagues calculates that doubling the number of cloud condensation nuclei would more than compensate for any warming associated with a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This could be accomplished by having ships deliberately inject seawater into the atmosphere where salt particles would serve as extra cloud condensation nuclei.

In 2006, Chemistry Nobelist Paul Crutzen proposed injecting sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space (an idea discussed by reason contributor Gregory Benford more than ten years ago). This might be done with giant cannons. Crutzen argues that it would cost between $25 and $50 billion per year to shoot enough sulfate particles into the stratosphere to reduce incoming sunlight by 1.8 percent. This would be enough to counter the predicted warming produced by doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide. An earlier study by Yale University economist William Nordhaus estimated that the sulfate injection proposal would cost about $8 billion per year. This compares nicely with the $125 billion per year Nordhaus calculated it would have cost the U.S. to implement the Kyoto Protocol.

Wigley spent most of his time at AEI discussing the possible risks involved with the sulfate injection proposal. Wigley argued that sulfates injected into the stratosphere would be equal to only about 10 percent of those humanity already injects into the lower atmosphere, so this wouldn't greatly boost acid rain. In April, a study by some of Wigley's National Center for Atmospheric Research colleagues found that injecting sulfates would further deplete the ozone layer that shields the earth's surface from damaging ultraviolet light. Wigley simply noted in passing that even more recent research suggests that the damage to the ozone layer will be less than the April study estimated.

Stratospheric sulfate injection might also change rainfall patterns, perhaps reducing precipitation from the monsoons on which millions of Asian farmers are dependent. In response to these worries, Wigley noted that stratospheric sulfates might reduce the intensity of monsoons by two to three percent which contrasts with a current monsoon variability of 30 percent.

But one big problem that sulfate injection would not solve is the continuing acidification of the ocean that is occurring as extra carbon dioxide from the atmosphere dissolves into the seas. This acidification could eventually pose problems for creatures such as mollusks and corals that use calcium carbonate to grow their shells and skeletons.

What is the safe level at which to stabilize carbon dioxide? The current greenhouse gas concentrations are equivalent to 385 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide, up 100 ppm over pre-industrial levels. In the past some researchers suggested that stabilizing concentrations at 550 ppm would avoid the most serious effects of global warming. Now other researchers are arguing that we have to get back to 350 ppm. Wigley sees no signs that humanity is on a track to stabilize carbon dioxide concentrations at 550 ppm. Consequently, he believes that we will have to resort to geoengineering as a way to buy the time humanity needs to figure out how to cut carbon dioxide emissions. He foresees an effort to ramp up stratospheric sulfate injection over 75 years to counter the climatic effects of rising carbon dioxide concentrations.

Stabilization can only be achieved by cutting current carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent. This means implementing highly unpopular policies of carbon rationing and higher energy prices. So some climate change researchers and environmental activists worry that the public and policymakers will see geoengineering as way to avoid making hard decisions. "If humans perceive an easy technological fix to global warming that allows for 'business as usual,' gathering the national (particularly in the United States and China) and international will to change consumption patterns and energy infrastructure will be even more difficult," writes Rutgers University environmental scientist Alan Robock.

Perhaps. But that is not an argument against pushing ahead with a vigorous research program on geoengineering responses to climate change. Insisting on cuts in carbon dioxide emissions is like trying to require a healthy diet and exercise regimen to prevent heart disease. But when you have a heart attack, you are happy to have a bypass surgeon handy.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Carbon: Tax, Trade, or Deregulate?

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

On August 11, 2005, Ronald Bailey, reason’s science correspondent and the author of such enviro-skeptic books as Eco-Scam: The False Prophets of Environmental Apocalypse, wrote the following words at reason online: “Anyone still holding onto the idea that there is no global warming ought to hang it up. All data sets—satellite, surface, and balloon—have been pointing to rising global temperatures. In fact, they all have had upward-pointing arrows for nearly a decade.”

Although there are still plenty of free market thinkers who aren’t yet ready to “hang it up,” the center of the debate has shifted in recent years from contested science to proposed policy. And with the prospect of an anti–global warming crusader—either Barack Obama or John McCain—joining forces with a Democratic Congress carrying years of pent-up environmentalist frustration, significant new global warming regulation isn’t a matter of “if” but “how much.”

Assuming that humanity is contributing to the carbon-fueled warming of the planet, what, if anything should governments do? That question, it turns out, is just as contested among skeptics of environmental hysteria as the famous “hockey stick” graphs in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth. So we discovered last October, when we matched Bailey on a climate change panel with Lynne Kiesling, a senior economics lecturer at Northwestern University (and former director of economic policy at the Reason Foundation) and Fred L. Smith, president and founder of the pro-market Competitive Enterprise Institute, which in 2002 published a Bailey-edited book entitled Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths.

Bailey painfully concluded that climate change “is a real problem” and reluctantly favored a tax on carbon. Kiesling pointed to the difficulty of assigning property rights to the atmosphere and tentatively came out for a “cap and trade” system of creating a market for pollution credits above a government-imposed ceiling. Smith robustly rejected both ideas in favor of private innovation. The debate, held at a reason-sponsored conference in Washington, D.C., was moderated by Matt Welch.

Click here to watch Lynne Kiesling, Ronald Bailey and Fred L. Smith debate climate change at the at the Reason in DC conference.

Lynne Kiesling: From an economic perspective, the problem of climate change is twofold. First, there are incomplete and uncertain property rights in the air. It’s ludicrous to imagine us each walking around with a bubble over our heads so that we can only breathe and use the privatized air sphere around us. Second, there’s a large number of affected parties. In the limit, some would argue the entire planet is affected.

When a common-pool resource is shared by millions of diverse individuals, defining the use rights over that resource is really hard and costly. This is the kind of situation in which decentralized market processes have trouble even emerging. In this imperfect world, we’re considering two imperfect alternative policies: a carbon tax and cap and trade.

Our experience with common-pool resources, ranging from agreements to share the team of oxen in the medieval village to the development of the sulfur dioxide acid rain program in the 1990s, tells us that effective policy focuses on reducing transaction costs and better defining property rights so that private parties can engage in mutually beneficial exchange. That’s the logic behind the carbon cap-and-trade policy.

Like all policies in such a complex area, it’s got problems itself. How do you allocate carbon permits? There’s the knowledge problem: How do we know how many carbon permits is the right number? Also, as a policy instrument, it’s prone to political manipulation. Electric utilities are already seriously jockeying to make sure they’re playing a part in getting the rules written and that they’re involved in determining the allocation mechanisms if such a policy comes into place.

Another problem is that unlike with sulfur dioxide, the likely participants are really heterogeneous. When we were dealing with sulfur dioxide, it was mostly large-scale central-generation power plants, a pretty homogeneous bunch.

A carbon tax is also prone to some of these problems, particularly the knowledge problem and the political manipulation problem. The benefits to a permit market that have been shown in other situations are that defining property rights and reducing transaction costs does a better job of taking advantage of diffuse private knowledge. It’s also more likely to induce the process that’s at the foundation of economic growth, which is innovation. So I tend to come down on the side of cap and trade, although it’s not a ringing endorsement.

People are already doing this voluntarily. I encourage you to look up a group called the Chicago Climate Exchange, or CCX. CCX is a global carbon permit financial market, and it’s got a nice portfolio of instruments. They’ve got spot permit markets. They’ve starting to do futures now. The entrepreneur behind this, Richard Sandor, has also talked about doing funky derivatives. The participants got together voluntarily and negotiated to determine the number of permits that they were going to have. There were participants on both sides—carbon producers and carbon sinks—so you had this multilateral stakeholder negotiation to determine the number of permits in the market.

Finally, I think most people fail to realize that the abysmal job we do of pricing electricity contributes substantially to our energy use. The only resources that are priced as badly as electricity in our economy are highways and water.

Retail competition and choice for consumers would increase the offering of time-differentiated dynamic pricing, which shifts resource and electricity use across time. Research shows that this promotes conservation and more efficient use of electricity, increases offerings of green power to consumers who want to choose a green power option, and increases the incentives to develop and adopt technologies, such as price-responsive appliances, that enable private individuals to control their own energy use.

So the message from me is this: It’s a complicated, imperfect world, and the policies we can adopt that induce innovation and harness diffuse private knowledge will be the most effective for this long-term problem.

Ronald Bailey: Before we began this session, Fred Smith asked me would it be all right if he referred to me as a commie symp. I think that might be a little harsh. I hope I can persuade you of that.

I stand before you as somebody who’s been reporting and writing on environmental issues for over 20 years. To the extent that I’m known at all, I’ve been known as someone very skeptical of all kinds of environmentalist dooms. My first book was called Ecoscam: The False Prophets of Ecological Apocalypse. It pains me to have concluded, following the scientific data, that one of the dooms is a real problem.

As Lynne very ably pointed out, one of the problems with global warming is that it exists in a commons—that means the atmosphere is very hard to divide up and make into private property.

When you have an environmental commons, we typically have two ways of handling that problem. One is that we privatize it. In many environmental issues, we’re moving in that direction. Fisheries, for example, are being privatized. Forests are being privatized. Water resources can be privatized as well.

The problem with air pollution—and global warming is a form of air pollution—is that I don’t see a good, easy way to privatize it. The transaction costs are too large. And if you can’t privatize it, you have to regulate it. So now the question is: What’s the least bad way to regulate? And that is why I’ve come out in favor of a carbon tax.

As a good libertarian, I thought I would like cap and trade. The problem is I’ve been watching the European attempt to do this, and it’s a complete disaster. The governments, not surprisingly, cheat constantly. Their carbon market collapsed a year ago because the governments allocated more permits for carbon emissions than were necessary to cover what was being emitted, so naturally the price went to zero. And if the Europeans can’t pull this off, how could you expect the world to pull this off?

I understand the diffuse knowledge problem—how markets can and, in fact, do marshal that kind of information in very good ways. The problem is that there’s no baseline for the rest of the world.
Idiotically, the Kyoto Protocol set it at 7 percent below what was emitted in 1990 for the 36 countries that signed the treaty. Well, how are you going to do that for China and India? We don’t know what they’re going to be emitting in 30 years. So I come out in favor of the tax because you have a baseline. You have a way of internationally monitoring that. The baseline is a zero tax and from that, you can build up. You could start the tax low and, as you gain more information about what the atmosphere is likely to do, you could adjust the tax over that time.

For consumers, for inventors, for innovators, a tax offers price stability in a way that the cap-and-trade markets don’t. For example, in the sulfur dioxide market, sulfur permits have ranged in price from $50 a ton to over $1,000 a ton. And for sulfur dioxide, it’s a smaller market. A carbon market would encompass the world.

Fred L. Smith: What’s the best way of addressing whatever risks there are in global warming? Should the risk of catastrophic global warming justify abandoning our general preference for freedom over coercion? Should we free market advocates champion carbon taxes or carbon rationing, some form of suppressing energy use, or should we favor economic liberalization?

We’ve been working on that issue for two decades now. In that early period, I noticed that the catastrophists, the global warming alarmists, had to have answers to three questions positively.

First: Does the science indicate significant evidence of imminent catastrophe? That is, is the earth warming significantly in a human-relevant way? Is the 0.7 degree centigrade increase over the last century offset or not by the 1,800 percent increase in wealth over that same period?

Second: Is the warming impact negative or positive overall? I note in passing that more people seem to retire to Florida and Arizona than Lake Woebegone.

Third: Can the political tools now available realistically restrict carbon use? We may endorse economic suicide. Europe may join us, but should we expect India and China to go back to the Stone Age just because of our political elites?

Over the last decade, I think the evidence for all those questions has moved against the global warming catastrophists. There is evidence that there has been some warming, moderate amounts, but the idea that we’re facing imminent catastrophe has weakened. Our ability to do anything about CO2 increases for the next half-century is now obviously nonexistent. And the tensions we could create by pushing the world into some form of energy rationing, I think, are underestimated. Recall that in World War II, one of the incidents that pushed the war party into power in Japan was an energy boycott on that Asian nation. We are going to do that again with China. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Shouldn’t we be asking whether the risks of global warming are more or less than the risk of global warming policies?

The costs of energy rationing are not trivial. Energy is what makes it possible to have mobility, to have labor-saving technology, to have lives that are comfortable, to have hope for the future. Energy rationing would lead to slower economic and technological growth, a darker, less human-friendly world. The trillions we’re talking about spending over the next generations on global warming could go to much better causes, could save lives and inspire hopes today.

But we’ve been told—we’ve heard it from Ron, at least—that we must do something. Perhaps. But why must that something be the expansion of state power over our lives? Why do we limit ourselves to taxes or rationing? There are other alternatives out there.

We could do some more R&D. We could mitigate. What about mirrors in space? What about fertilizing the oceans? Those of us who have looked at NASA and so forth are not overly enamored with government’s ability to underwrite those kind of policies, but we should be equally optimistic about government’s attempt to tax in this academic-blackboard economic way.

Resiliency is what we should be talking about. Not whether taxes or quotas are the better way to suppress freedom, but how we can use the global warming concerns to advance an agenda of freedom. How do we find ways of accelerating economic and technological progress? How do we liberalize the economies of the world? How do we expand the institutions of liberty even into the air sheds?

We can free biotechnology. I’m sure Ron and I both agree with that. If the world is hotter, colder, wetter, drier, we’re going to need the ability to modify our crops much more than we have today. Freeing biotechnology from the regulatory straitjacket it’s in today would be a way of doing that.

As Lynne said, we could complete the job of freeing our electricity system, not just for pricing electricity but also for incentivizing the grid to be smarter and more robust so we can free the trapped electricity that sits idle throughout America. Move fire, storm, and other insurance out of the government subsidy range and put it back into the private sector so we can guide people away from living in high-risk areas.

Unilateral free trade. Extend property rights to water. Liberalize energy exploration. Cuba can drill off the coast of Florida; why can’t America? Where is nuclear power? Certainly Al Gore hasn’t mentioned it. Eliminate the corporate income tax. Accelerate the turnover of capital goods and equipment. That would mean a much more efficient world to live in.

Our agenda is the agenda of freedom, not the agenda of some form of a rational economic suicide pact.

It is understandable that many people grow weary. I know people very close to me who have grown weary in this fight. We get a bit depressed when we realize that logic is for losers in the political process. It’s hard to be the dissident at the cocktail parties. Any of you who have had the situation where your friends look at you and shake their heads sadly and walk away know how hard it is, but our challenge remains to speak truth to power, to find ways to make good policy good politics.

I chaired a global warming panel in Bucharest earlier this year. There are some European think tanks that have withdrawn from this battle also. It’s too costly, they say. It’s too difficult to resist the consensus. We have to give up a little bit. To them, I’ll argue as I do to you today, that we must fight; we must continue to risk. The loss of freedom in the global warming debate is far too great. That is our duty. That is our challenge.

For events of this type have happened before. In August 1914, European nations found themselves trapped in a consensus, a set of entangling treaties that forced them to move in an inexorable way towards disaster, towards World War I. Edward Grey, the British foreign minister, noted, “The lamps are going out all across Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”

Today, fears about global warming are pushing the world towards disaster. This time the threat is not just to the lamps of Europe but to the lamps of the world. Energy suppression, if it happens, might last for many lifetimes.

Statist intellectuals still dominate the global warming debate. We economic liberals are few, but we few are the thin line resisting those who would return us to the Dark Ages. This is not any time to go wobbly.

Matt Welch: Lynne, could you speak to Ron’s critique of cap and trade? Is it basically a great idea in theory that you’re wishing might work someday 20 years in the future? Is Europe really a catastrophe, and what’s keeping it from working?

Kiesling: Just because Europe can’t implement this doesn’t mean the idea is bad. The E.U. carbon scheme is a poster child for what can happen when you have too centralized and too politically motivated a process for allocating the permits. The E.U. decided how many permits each country would have, then each country then got to allocate them among their industries as they saw fit. This was the most politicized process imaginable. With a good market design and good testing and good analysis, we could do better.

It does highlight the important fact that political manipulation is going to happen in whatever policy we choose. But I wouldn’t throw the idea out just because the E.U. can’t do it. There’s a lot of stuff the E.U. does really badly.

Smith: I have one strong procedural difference with both Ron and Lynne on this. The argument is that when you have a common property resource, your choices are either to privatize that resource, move towards institutions of liberty, or politicize it in some enlightened way as Lynne and Ron have talked about. But Ronald Coase said there’s always a third option, that the costs of transaction in that area are much higher than the failure to have transaction in that area and therefore we should allow evolution to proceed and see what creative solutions emerge. That is basically what we should be doing in the global warming area.

European taxes are just as bad as European cap and trade, and American taxes aren’t anything to write home about either. The idea that a tax policy will emerge through the political process unsullied is unlikely. Energy taxes in Europe and the United States are already a mess. If we raise them, they’ll be a bigger mess.

Bailey: One of the problems is that the new energy technologies are very unlikely, in my judgment, to arise merely because we ignore carbon dioxide. If it were already easy to create low-carbon energy, inventors would have done it. It would be here now.

If you look at the projections from the International Energy Agency, the amount of energy the world will be using in the next 30 years or so is going to get much vaster. China is building one coal-fired plant a week, and they’re probably going to ramp it up to two a week. Those plants are going to be there for 50 years. If you think that carbon dioxide is a problem now—

Smith: And if you think energy rationing—

Bailey: Fred, when we privatize a forest, is that lumber rationing? When we privatize the fisheries, is that fish rationing? We have people pay for what it is that they use.

If you could persuade me, which you have failed to do with your rhetoric, that we can in fact repair to markets to get this done, I would be more than happy to do that. I don’t want the lights of the world going out. But I also wonder, by the way—this is a question you’ve never answered when I’ve asked you several times—what temperature rise over the next century would in fact cause you to worry about humanity’s ability to adapt?

Smith: Over 20 degrees, certainly.

Bailey: How about—

Smith: Not 0.7.

Bailey: Not 0.7, but 6.

Welch: Ron, you mentioned at the beginning, sort of in jest, that it pains you to come to the conclusion that global warming is a problem. Is that a scientific approach, to be pained by the results? Has there been a mind-set to debunk when looking at this issue, and has that caused conclusions that were wrong?

Bailey: Yes, in some cases. I did not want this information to go in that direction. And I had good reason, given my career, to expect that it wouldn’t. The environmentalists have been wrong about the population problem. They were wrong about trace exposures to synthetic chemicals causing cancer. They were wrong about running out of natural resources. I’ve happily and joyfully reported this for years and annoyed a lot of people.

I, against my values, have decided that this is a problem. I would really like to be persuaded that classical liberalism and markets and so forth have a way of solving this problem. I’m still waiting for Fred’s proposal. I don’t think it can be done voluntarily around the world. The voluntary carbon markets are tiny—

Kiesling: It’s very unscaled.

Bailey: Right. And if you don’t have an economic incentive to participate in those carbon markets, like a tax or like a cap-and-trade permit, most people aren’t going to do it. Why would they? Why would they spend money that they don’t have to spend?

Kiesling: In this case of Chicago Climate Exchange, the biggest participants are Ford Motor and American Electric Power—the largest coal-fired generation owners in the country. So for them, it’s a strategic action. They’re hoping to forestall regulation but also it’s a P.R. and reputation capital building exercise.

Smith: I think one of the problems our movement has is we’re a think tank movement. We believe that if we just go out and talk to everybody for a few hours they’ll become libertarians. That’s not a wisely thought-through process, and it misses the whole point. Most people are—have to be—rationally ignorant. Our challenge is to make them understand that for their values, freedom is better than coercion. It’s why I think we have to recognize that where there are risks of global warming, there are also risks of global warming policies. I see nothing in Ron that represents any understanding of that balancing.

Welch: Following up on that, Fred, do you see some kind of political market value therefore in, for lack of a better word, Al Gore jokes? Is that a way to get the message across because at some point you realize you just want people to feel that they’re all part of the anti–Al Gore team more than being persuaded by your logic?

Smith: Ridicule is a very important tool. It’s one that has to be wielded very carefully. The difference between ridicule and being mean is very close, and I think sometimes libertarians are far too easily led into being mean. We win the debate and we lose the audience. I think ridicule by other people is damn useful. Every time liberals make fun of Gore, I love it. When we make fun of Al Gore, I get very nervous.

Bailey: And then you make fun of Al Gore.

Audience question: Ron, what entity would collect the carbon tax? Local government? Federal? The United Nations? And what would that money be spent on and how would it reduce actual CO2 usage?

Bailey: No, it would not be a U.N. tax. I’m channeling William Nordhouse, the Yale economist who does a lot of work in this area. Basically it would be a globally harmonized tax, but the money would be collected by each country and spent by the governments in each country.

In the ideal world, you would recycle that money by reducing other taxes, so the overall tax level in the country would not increase. What you would be doing is incentivizing people to conserve energy but also incentivizing people to innovate, to find new ways to produce energy that people would want using low-carbon technologies or carbon-sequestering technologies.

It’s a deep, dark secret, but back in the 1970s, during the glorious era of the Jimmy Carter administration, I was a regulator for three years.

Kiesling: You’ve seen the dark side.

Bailey: I’ve seen the dark side. I worked for the world’s most boring regulatory agency, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Kiesling: I knew he was going to say FERC when he said “boring.”

Bailey: And I think I understand some of the problems that go with regulation. My intellectual disdain for government was honed into a white-hot hatred after that experience. One of the things I got to regulate was the synfuels plant that you may all remember was being built in North Dakota. At the time, it was the world’s largest construction project. It cost $2.1 billion to build. It never produced any natural gas of any sort. That money, by the way, would have grown at 5 percent interest to $6.5 billion had it not been wasted.

Government does not innovate. So by creating a carbon tax you would encourage private people to marshal the information in response. So carbon tax is a price, to figure out better ways to make energy, low-carbon energy. I don’t know what those energies will be. I’m sure the government doesn’t know either, and I don’t want them wasting the money doing it.

Smith: I should point out that we have that experiment going on today. Europe—500 million people—experiences gasoline taxes in England of $8 a gallon. We experiment with $2.50, $3 a gallon. Yet one doesn’t find these new technologies rushing out of Europe. How high does—

Kiesling: Actually, that’s incorrect. All of the new diesel engines—

Smith: Oh, no. Diesel has nothing to do with the economics. Diesel has to do with the low tax of diesel and the fact that the air pollution laws don’t ban diesel in Europe. It’s not the energy taxes. It’s regulatory policy.

Bailey: So, Fred, are you saying that human beings are not clever enough to come up with low-carbon energy?

Smith: I’m saying that technocratic social engineering projects aren’t the best way to free the creative energies of mankind.

Bailey: Unfortunately, Fred, you haven’t shown a path for evolution to this. I’m sorry. I realize that you believe that somehow the invisible hand will take care of a commons problem always, but commons problems are solved by creating property.

Smith: Government.

Bailey: And the government helps create property, defends property. It’s an institution.
It’s not a great institution. Right now all the big emitters are coming to Washington and begging for free permits so they can get tons of money, basically, and extract it from our pockets—which is another reason I don’t like cap-and-trade systems. They want the government to create an asset for them worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

Welch: I have to impose my liberty here. The panel will be in the back alley after this, but the rest of us have to go to lunch now, which is next door.

Flunk This Movie!

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:00:00 EDT

“This is not a religious argument,” Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman asserts in the new anti-evolution propaganda movie, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Yet the film is free of scientific content: It gives no scientific evidence against biological evolution and none for “intelligent design.” Instead, host Ben Stein spends most of the movie asking various proponents of evolutionary theory for their religious views.

The film begins with moody shots of Stein backstage before he addresses an unidentified audience on the alleged suppression of scientific research in the name of Darwinian orthodoxy. Stein stalks onstage and suggests that we are losing our scientific freedom.

As evidence, Stein trots out a small parade of martyrs. In 2004, Richard Sternberg, then editor of Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, published an article by Stephen Meyer arguing that the “Cambrian explosion” 570 to 530 million years ago in which most of the body types of animals developed was evidence for intelligent design.

Many of Sternberg’s colleagues reacted with dismay, and the journal retracted the article. In the film, Sternberg says he lost his office at the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History, was pressured to resign, and had his religious and political beliefs questioned. Yet he still has office space in the museum and has been reappointed for three more years. True, some of his colleagues might not want to hang out with him anymore. But that is a far cry from the grim black-and-white shots of Soviet armies and concentration camps featured in the film.

In 2005, George Mason University did not renew a teaching contract with Caroline Crocker, an adjunct biology lecturer who believes in intelligent design. She tells Stein that she only wanted to teach students to question scientific orthodoxies: “I was only trying to teach what the university stands for—academic freedom.” Since George Mason let her go, she says, she can no longer find work.

Interestingly, Crocker delivered the same offending lecture at a local community college later. It didn’t turn out to be a “balanced” presentation of evidence for and against biological evolution. Why not? “There really is not a lot of evidence for evolution,” she says.

An assistant professor of astronomy, Guillermo Gonzalez, was denied tenure at Iowa State University in 2007. In 2004 Gonzalez co-wrote The Privileged Planet, which argues the Earth was precisely positioned to enable researchers like him to make scientific measurements. An Iowa State colleague, Hector Avalos, neatly skewers this conceit: “This rationale is analogous to a plumber arguing that if our planet had not been positioned precisely where it is, then he might not be able to do his work as a plumber. Lead pipes might melt if the Sun were much closer. And, if our planet were any farther from the Sun, it might be so frozen that plumbers might not exist at all. Therefore, plumbing must have been the reason that our planet was located where it is.”

Did Gonzalez fail to get tenure because of his views? The university denies it, but my guess is he did. On the evidence of The Privileged Planet, Guillermo’s colleagues could reasonably worry that his views weren’t likely to lead to fruitful research results.

The most egregious part of the movie is the attempt to link evolution with Communism and Nazism. The claim that Communism was motivated by Darwin is just silly. Official Soviet biological doctrine was Lysenkoism, and Russian Darwinists were denounced as “Trotskyite agents of international fascism” and thrown into the Gulag for their scientific sins.

And Nazism? In the film, the mathematician David Berlinski says, “Darwinism is not a sufficient condition for a phenomenon like Nazism, but I think it was a necessary one.” Berlinski is suggesting that scientific materialism undermines the notion that human beings occupy a special place in the universe. If humans aren’t special, goes this line of thinking, then morals don’t apply.

But people through the millennia have found all sorts of justifications for murdering each other, including plunder, nationalism, and, yes, religion. Meanwhile, insights from evolutionary psychology are helping us understand how our in-group/out-group dynamics contribute to our disturbing capacity for racism, xenophobia, genocide, and warfare. The field also offers new ideas about how human morality developed, including our capacities for cooperation, love, and tolerance.

At one point in the film, the science studies gadfly Steve Fuller archly poses the question: Which comes first, worldview or evidence? Fuller aims his question at the proponents of evolutionary biology. As this dreary film itself makes it painfully clear, the question is far more relevant to the supporters of intelligent design.

Ronald Bailey is reason’s science correspondent.

Energy Wedgists versus Technology Breakthroughists

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 15:00:00 EDT

This week the U.S. Senate is debating the Climate Security Act, a piece of legislation which would require the country to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 4 percent in 2012, 19 percent in 2020, and 71 percent in 2050 below what they were in 2005. The act rations the emission of greenhouse gases produced by burning fossil fuels by issuing an ever declining supply of emissions allowances. Emitters such as electric power generators, coal, oil and natural gas companies, and energy intensive industries like steel and cement manufacturers will be able to buy and sell the government-issued permits. This trading puts a price on greenhouse gases. The idea is that as energy produced from climate-damaging fossil fuels becomes increasingly expensive, industries, researchers and entrepreneurs will be encouraged to develop new climate-friendly, low-carbon and no-carbon energy technologies. But will this happen?

First, let's consider just how big a technological challenge it will be to cut greenhouse gases by 70 percent. Former General Electric executive Don Dears provides some sense of the size of the challenge when he points out that an 80 percent cut means reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from about 6 gigatons (1 gigaton = 1 billion tons) today to 1 gigaton by 2050. One gigaton is the amount the U.S. emitted around 1920, when there were just 100 million Americans.

Now let's widen the focus to include cuts that the whole world will need to make in order to stabilize concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Currently, the world emits about 26 gigatons of carbon dioxide. In 2007, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projected that by 2030 carbon dioxide emissions will rise by 57 percent to 42 gigatons per year. Climate researchers estimate that in order to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide at 450 parts per million (ppm) (where there's a good chance that average temperatures would increase by less than 2 degrees Celsius) emissions must be cut by 80 percent from current levels by 2050. This means that the world will have to produce considerably more energy while emitting only 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide annually. If IEA estimates of future energy demand are accurate, this implies that the world would have to find the equivalent of 37 gigatons of carbon-free energy by 2030.

So just how big is a gigaton? Cutting a gigaton of carbon dioxide is equivalent to replacing 1,000 conventional 500-megawatt coal-fired electric generation plants with zero-emission plants. Zero-emission might mean coal-fired plants using carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies, perhaps costing as much as $80 per ton. By some estimates, CCS would increase the cost of producing electricity by 25 to 40 percent. Cutting another gigaton would be equal to building 500 one-gigawatt nuclear power plants. The world currently has 439 nuclear plants in operation. One gigaton more would require increasing the number of windmills operating in the U.S. by 150-fold, or increasing solar photovoltaics by 10,000-fold. It would take farming an area 15-times the size of Iowa to produce the biomass to replace 1 gigaton of carbon dioxide emissions.

The energy technology debate among those who are concerned about the dangers of man-made global warming divides into two camps—wedgists and breakthroughists. Wedgists are deploying the concept of "stabilization wedges" devised by Princeton University researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow. They define a stabilization wedge as the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 1 billion tons of carbon per year by mid-century (1 billion tons of carbon is equivalent to 3.7 billion tons of carbon dioxide). In their analysis, each wedge of reductions is achieved using already commercialized technology, generally at much larger scale than today. The goal is for the world to emit no more greenhouse gases than we do today by mid-century and then steeply cut emissions to near zero in the last half of the 21st century.

Some proposed stabilization wedges include increasing the fuel economy for 2 billion cars from 30 to 60 miles per gallon (mpg); decreasing car travel for 2 billion 30-mpg cars from 10,000 to 5000 miles per year; deploying 2 million one-megawatt windmills occupying 74 million acres; building 700 one-gigawatt nuclear power plants; installing 2000 gigawatts of photovoltaic power on 5 million acres; and planting more than 600 million acres with biofuel crops.

Breakthroughists argue that the wedgist approach is a technical and political non-starter. In 2002, a number of leading energy researchers argued in Science that current on-the-shelf technologies cannot supply low-carbon energy at an acceptable cost. One of the co-authors, MIT engineer Howard Herzog, declared, "To reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our energy systems while maintaining energy prices at comparable levels to today will take revolutionary change as opposed to evolutionary change."

More recently, passionate breakthroughists like Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger claim that studies show that carbon dioxide emissions would have to be priced at around $100 per ton between 2010 and 2030, rising to $160-200 per ton between 2030 and 2050, to achieve deep cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. Thus they argue that the wedgists are framing the energy challenge "as a forced choice between poverty and environmental ruin. With a choice like that, it is no surprise that the world has failed to make real strides towards a cleaner energy future." They add, "If policymakers limit greenhouse gases too quickly, the price of electricity and gasoline will rise abruptly, triggering a political backlash from both consumers and industry."

Breakthroughists point out that polls regularly find that people around the world are unwilling to pay much more for green energy. In addition, higher energy prices would mean that more than a billion poor people in developing countries will have to wait even longer to gain access to modern fuels.

So breakthroughists Nordhaus and Shellenberger are proposing "a ten-year, $300 billion public investment into accelerating the transition to a clean energy economy. The goal of the program is to bring the price of clean energy down to the price of coal and natural gas as quickly as possible." Even breakthroughists agree that the price of energy produced using fossil fuels must increase at least somewhat in order to encourage energy suppliers to switch to whatever new breakthrough technologies are developed. Wedgists like Climate Progress editor Joseph Romm dismiss such breakhthroughist proposals as wishful thinking. Romm asserts that ramping up energy supply breakthroughs would take decades and that the climate change problem is too urgent to wait for such breakthroughs to emerge.

Although the Climate Security Act does direct some spending towards low-carbon energy research, it is basically a wedgist scheme. If something like it is adopted by the next presidential administration, we will find out which side is right. If the wedgists are correct, cutting carbon dioxide emissions will produce a modest increase in energy prices resulting in the deployment of a wide variety of readily available low-carbon energy sources over the coming decades. If the breakthroughists are right, energy prices will soar provoking a political backlash. In which case, perhaps one need only peer across the Atlantic to the spreading protests against higher fuel prices in Europe to see the future.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Triumph of the Pill

jsamuel@reason.com (Juliet Samuel) — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 07:00:00 EDT

This past January, the prestigious science journal Nature conducted an online survey asking how many of its readers (who are primarily scientists and academics) had ever used "cognition-enhancing drugs," or brain dope. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the informal survey of 1,400 readers found that "one in five respondents said they had used drugs for non-medical reasons to stimulate their focus, concentration or memory." Moreover, Nature found that "a high four-fifths thought that healthy adults should be able to take the drugs if they want to."

In the absence of any large-scale studies measuring illicit prescription drug use among professionals, these results provide a highly suggestive counterpoint to the increasing hysteria over the abuse of "study drugs" by college students. After all, if some professors are doping up before hitting the books, why shouldn't undergrads do the same?

In fact, over the past decade, prescription stimulants such as Adderall and Ritalin—which are typically used to treat Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD)—have become increasingly available on college campuses. While studies disagree on the prevalence of stimulant "abuse" (that is, non-prescription use) among college students, the numbers suggest that anywhere between five and 15 percent of undergraduates have illicitly used such drugs to improve their academic performance. And while college health officials and various government scolds decry this trend as evidence of "drug abuse" by America's best and brightest, the reality is far from alarming.

Part of the growing concern about stimulants comes from the explosion in legal prescriptions doled out to kids. Between 1993 and 2003 the number of children's doctor's visits resulting in a stimulant prescription jumped from 2.7 million to 6.6 million. Over 10 percent of 10-year-old boys in America are now prescribed some kind of drug to control their unruly behavior, and the average starting age is getting lower. Parents are increasingly told that doping their little ones will make the children happy and successful. In 2000, psychiatrist Peter Breggin testified before Congress that, "Teachers, school psychologists, and administrators commonly make dire threats about their inability to teach children without medicating them." This trend is certainly worrying, not least because the long-term effects of regularly administered stimulants are as yet little understood.

So there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about child doping, particularly given the growing frequency of ADD diagnoses. But what about the strategic use of the same drugs by consenting adults, particularly college students? As usual, the law gets it backwards: While it is perfectly legal to feed—even force feed—Ritalin to a child, unsupervised use by knowledgeable grownups is a crime.

At the same time, it is remarkably easy to score prescription brain drugs at many of America's most prominent universities. A quick survey I conducted of stimulant-using students at Harvard reveals that it's possible to obtain a Ritalin prescription after one 20-minute consultation with a psychiatrist. One student, a sophomore who wishes to remain anonymous, obtained a script for amphetamine salts after just two appointments. He's pretty sure he doesn't have ADD, and he definitely never lied about or exaggerated his symptoms, which featured insomnia more prominently than the ADD hallmark of distractibility. Yet his psychiatrist readily prescribed the drugs. "It's not as if there's some medical authority making this decision for you," he told me afterwards. "Any reasonably capable person could walk out of there with just about whatever [drug]."

Still, there is widespread alarm about the possible health problems arising from unsupervised dosing. "Put the pills in the wrong hands and the results can be dangerous," NBC News warned. Henry Chung, Director of the New York University Student Health Center has warned that, "Students may have some kind of manic reaction or a seizure that could occur from taking these medications." For high doses, Chung is correct. But today's performance-enhancing undergraduates exhibit more responsibility than Chung realizes. One NYU senior I spoke to says it's mainly a case of "every now and again for finals. I don't know anyone who abuses Adderall or Ritalin." Moreover, "because they're prescription you can find out so much about them so you know how you can take it safely."

There is also the claim that student dopers—like testosterone-injecting athletes—are cheating because college is a competitive environment in which participants are obliged to play fair. Of course, this argument ignores the fact that most of the abilities being enhanced by such drugs are already unequally distributed (due to a mixture of biological and socioeconomic factors). Why is doping to achieve "normal" functionality a permissible act for ADD sufferers, but wrong for those seeking better grades or greater knowledge?

As the Nature survey suggests, responsible and successful adults dope up for a variety of professional reasons. There is no evidence that student doping is more dangerous or widespread than that done by their professors. Yet many university authorities are nonetheless determined to close Pandora's box. Unlike their Harvard counterparts, for example, students at the University of Michigan typically have to go through $1000 worth of psychometric tests before psychiatrists are willing to prescribe them any neuro-enhancing drugs. And doctors, of course, are loath to relinquish their power over patients.

It's time for such authority figures to admit that performance-enhancing drugs are already part of everyday life for a great many rational, healthy adults and that their use can no longer be dismissed under the title of "abuse" or "cheating."

Juliet Samuel is a writer living in Boston.