Author Ray Bradbury, famous for his dystopian visions of America's future, once called science fiction "the art of the possible." With the powerful effects of phenomena like Kurzweil's law of accelerating returns which states that information technology increases exponentially in power while simultaneously decreasing in size and cost showing up more and more obviously in our daily lives, it often feels as though the possible and the inevitable are converging.
Think of Stanley Kubrick's blockbuster classic "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) co-written by esteemed sci-fi author Arthur Clarke. To audiences back in the late '60s, the notion of a spaceship computer responding to verbal commands would have seemed about as farfetched as the idea that such a computer would have emotions. Today, we issue oral instructions to our iPhones without so much as batting an eyelash.
As exponential advances in technology allow our lives to increasingly resemble the sharpest science fiction of previous eras, we also begin to face some of the same moral problems raised by those prescient works. I'm not, of course, talking about Stanley Kubrick and the emotional frailty of our computers; instead, I'm referring to Clarke's cautioning about the way technology affects our interpersonal experiences. Science fiction isn't merely about understanding machines it's also about understanding ourselves, as advances in science can fundamentally alter our perceptions of such basic things as entertainment, human rights and authority.
In a 2010 New York Times feature on predicting the future, Ray Kurzweil, of Kurzweil's law, said, "It's not just electronics and communications that follow [an] exponential course, [it's also] health, medicine and its related field of biology." Last weekend's New York Times Magazine attested to this kind of exponential progress with a fascinating story on the condition of psychopathy, a disorder that is now understood better than ever thanks to modern brain imaging techniques. Characterized by an excess of aggression and a dearth of empathy, the disorder is increasingly believed by experts to be "a distinct neurological condition." Additionally, there is mounting evidence that psychopathy can be reliably diagnosed in children, perhaps even as young as five years old.
Due to significant anomalies in their brain structures, psychopaths tend to be extremely manipulative pathological liars, who use violence to satisfy their desires and seldom feel remorse afterward, according to The Times. As Paul Frick, a psychologist at the University of New Orleans, said, "They don't care if they hurt someone's feelings ... If they can get what they want without being cruel, that's often easier. But at the end of the day, they'll do whatever works best." As a result of this combination of characteristics, psychopaths account for 15 to 25 percent of the offenders in American prisons, even though they only constitute about 1 percent of the overall population. Neuroscientist Kent Kiehl estimated that they cost society $460 billion per year. And, while not all children with anti-social tendencies grow up to be psychopathic adults, a significant portion do nearly half, in one study.
Furthermore, while advances in science have improved diagnosing psychopathy in children, they have not, as of yet, yielded any sort of reliable treatment for the disorder. Thus, we may one day find ourselves in a situation where we know perhaps by some genetic marker which children are highly likely to grow up and commit crimes but are essentially powerless to alter the course of their lives through constructive therapy. This scenario calls to mind the movie "Minority Report" (2002) in which gifted individuals can predict violent crimes before they happen, enabling the police to preemptively arrest the perpetrators in slow motion. What would we do with a child whom we know may commit violent crimes as an adult?
Ultimately, whether we are psychopathic killers or empathetic charity workers, we are all slaves to our genetics or, more accurately, to the interactions between our genetics and the circumstances into which we are born. As this fact becomes ever more obvious, it will have serious implications for our justice system, which hinges on ideas like "intent" and "right and wrong" that have less and less validity in our modern, scientific understanding of ourselves. We sometimes ask, rhetorically, "How can you judge someone for the way that he or she was born?" The logical next step might be, "How can we judge someone at all?"
