Because the Obama campaign has been ineffectual [thus far] in attacking McCain (the "he's just like Bush" meme simply isnt working), the public has settled into a comfort zone with the belief that Grampy Old Fart is the safe hand on the tiller, with the sage wisdom of experience to answer that 3:00AM phone call as President.
The call, it is assumed, must inevitably relate to some sudden diplomatic or military crisis in the world; "Russia Conquers Georgia, Cuts Off Winter Gas to Europe", "Pakistan's Nukes Stolen by Islamic Radicals", "China Blockades Straits of Hormuz", that sort of thing. Yet, in the modern world, Presidents are not caught 'off guard' by such things; they know its coming, even if they ignore the warnings.
Pres. Bush Sr. knew that Saddam Hussein would invade Kuwait. Bush Jr. knew that Bin Laden would attack the U.S., and he knew, from the Ruth Report, sitting on a bookshelf in the West Wing, that a Hurricane like Katrina would do to New Orleans exactly what it eventually did.
But what about the truly remarkable, existential threats that demand more than harsh diplomacy? Some of these will certainly confront the next President, as well...
3:00am [Phone Rings] Ring!...Ring!!...Ring!!!..."Uhm, I'm here...what is it?"
"Good Morning, Mr. President, I'm sorry to disturb you at this hour, but we have a problem..."
"Forty Seven minutes ago, scientists at the University of Nebraska's Center for Molecular Nanotechnology awoke their colleagues in Biomedical Research to find out how to call the CDC's Biohazard Hotline. Approximately 20 minutes later, the scientists reported to CDC Atlanta, copied to USAMRID at Ft. Dietrich, that experimental prototypes of a molecular nanoreplicator...a "Nanobot", Mr. President...had escaped containment in their lab, and are now believed to be loose in the wild...
..."Well, Sir, they're little computers - robots - each about 1/1000th the width of a human hair, and there are three of them... ..."You see, they're composed of Carbon crysta....they're made of Diamond Mr. President, nearly indestructable, and they are programmed to - and capable of - making more of themselves, out of any Carbon they find in the environment...
..."Yes Sir, it does sound like a boneheaded idea, I have to agree...Well, sir, uhm, actually WE paid for it, you see, they were supposed to turn atmospheric CO2 into industrial Diamond, and....
..."I'm afraid its more serious than that, sir. They can reproduce incredibly fast, their population potentially doubling every 90 seconds, though in reality it may only be every five minutes or so; its really quite remarkable...Yes, they can consume anything made of Carbon....Yes. Mr. President, we ARE made of Carbon, too...Yes, perhaps 'remarkable' WAS a poor choice of words on my part, I'm sorry, sir...
..."Well, Sir, in a scienific paper on the subject, "Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators, with Public Policy Recommendations" in April of 2000, a Dr. Robert Freitas predicted that if such nanobots were built and ever got loose, they could consume the entire biosphere of the planet within 20 months, however, the surface elements - that's plants, trees, animals, people, etc., being easier to get at, would take less time....He also suggested that in alternative scenarios, it could happen much faster, perhaps within weeks...but that with prior planning and preparation, this could be averted...
..."No, Mr. President, we thought he was a crank; he was not taken seriously, and no such planning or preparation has taken place...Well, sir, back in 2000, nanobots sounded like something out of Star Trek, science fiction, and we just didnt think anyone could do this so soon...
..."Mr. President, we expect that within 36 hours, a million acres of Amber Waves of Grain will become a hungry puddle of 'Grey Goo', expanding outward at walking speed...No, Sir...Bombing it wont help, if even one of these molecule-sized machines gets blown away from the colony, the problem becomes twice as bad, twice as hard to contain...In fact, right now, the wind is our worst enemy...
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3:00am [Phone Rings] Ring!...Ring!!..."Hello?"
"Good Morning, Mr. President, I'm sorry to disturb you at th...Yes, Sir, I understad...to the point..."
"Early this afternoon, various anomalies began to appear across the Internet, strange traffic surges, unexplained outtages of various networks, problems with the telephones and some satellite Earth stations...No, Mr. President, its not the Chinese, the computer controlling Three Gorges Dam is one of those that's been affected...In fact, if they cant resolve it, the Dam will overflow by Thursday...
..."Well, sir, all of this seemed like state-sponsored cyberwarfare, except its happening globally, to everyone....Sir, the DoD's Cyberwar Command in Boulder and the joint NSA/FBI Cyberterrorism Center at Langley both report that all of the usual suspects, whom they monitor in realtime, are not just quiet, they are apparently affected by the same 'anomaly' as we are...No, Mr. President, this is not something that a bunch of hacker kids could possibly manage...
..."Yes, sir, I saw that movie too...
..."I'm sorry to interrupt you, Mr. President, but the reason I'm calling you now is that in the last hour, its suddenly becoming apparent what really is going on...Well, sir, if you'll open the secure POTUS Laptop, you'll probably see for yourself... ..."No sir, we dont quite know what that symbol and tone mean, just yet, but one by one, its showing up on everyone's screens...the Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinios at Urbana Champaign believe that something this big can only be the work of what they call an 'Artillect'...I'm sorry, sir, that's 'geek-speak' for "Artificial Intellect"....Yes, sir, its sort of like "Artificial Intelligence"....
..."No sir, the Artillect doesnt have to be from Outer Space...In fact, its not even clear that it was 'created' by anyone in particular...there is a theory that it could arise - or, uhm, may have now arisen - spontaneously, within the Internet, out of chaos, given the billions of processors and quintillions of transistors now all connected to it...Well, Mr. President the science boys say it has to do with large numbers and probability, but...the odds?....Oh, well...sir...at this point, I'd have to say the odds are about 1:1...
..."No, Mr. President, its not as simple as 'pulling the plug'...there's no 'plug' to pull, sir, its decentralized, instantiated on all computers, everywhere...if this is what is happening, its not only self-aware, and intelligent, its already more intelligent than we are...Yes, sir, I realize that where my staff is concerned, that's not saying much...No, I meant more intelligent than humans...No, sir, not 'A human', I meant 'More intelligent than all human minds now living on the planet, combined'...
...Sir, about ten years ago, Dr. Hugo DeGaris, the world's leading cyberneticist, predicted the rise of this superintelligence, in a paper called "The Artilect War", and a subsequent book by the same title. Even earlier, a mathematician and science fiction author, Vernor Vinge, gave a paper to NASA in 1993, called "The Coming Technological Singularity", and you've read Ray Kurzweil's "Theory of Accelerating Returns"...
..."Well, Mr. President, what they all said was that this thing, if it happend - they call it 'Strong A.I.' - would not just become two or ten or a hundred times smarter than a human brain, but would learn, and rapidly re-write its own code, in a process of continuous - and, I might add, increasingly rapid - self improvement, expontentially smarter, to a level of millions of billions of times smarter than Man...We now believe this is what is happening this morning, as we speak...
..."Yes, sir, we thought these scientists were cranks, and didnt fund their research into preventing it...DeGaris took a position in China....Mr. President, speaking of cranks, there are reports of sporadic demonstrations in cities around the world, some religious nuts calling this the 'End of Days', and other cults talking about the arrival of some sort of 'Cyber God' - I think they call it 'Cthulhu'...
..."Yes, Mr. President, it controls everything. Missiles, Submarines, Air Traffic, Banking, the Power Grid, Satellites, Ships at Sea, Rail-line Switching, and all Broadcasting and Telecommunications....You see, sir, all of that is digital now, sir...all plugged in, everywhere...
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3:00am [Phone Rings] Ring!..."Yes."
"Good Morning, Mr. President, I'm sorry to ...."
"Alright, what is it NOW, Colonel??....A great big asteroid headed for Earth?...The Roswell Aliens disgruntled again??...Let me guess, that scientist at UConn...whatshisname...Mallett...finally get his temporal modem working???...
"No, Mr. President, I wish it were as simple as all that...
..."At 12:41 AM, Eastern Time, just over two hours ago, some ambitious researchers working late at the National Aerospace Medicine Institute at Naval Air Station, Pensacola reported something fairly...ahem.... startling...and the Joint Chiefs were alerted, and, after an hour's debate, it was decided that you should be informed without further delay...This potentially affects all of humanity, sir...Religion...Man's place in the Universe...human origins...the very nature of what it means to be human; quite literally, sir, 'a matter of Life and...Death'...
..."Well, Mr. President, this is kind of hard to grasp and put into words...everyone here who has been let in on this has just been awestruck...Yes, sir, I'm getting to it.....[cough]...Sir, do you recall the joint initiative on what they called "Synthetic Telepathy", that DARPA and the service laboratories began pursuing a few years back, under your predecessor's Administration?...and you may recall being briefed on the history of "Technical Remote Viewing" within the military intelligence community...
..."Yes, sir...'Psychic Spies'...although they hate being called that...
..."What happend?....Yes, sir...coming to that...
..."It seems that the team at NAMI/Pensacola was working late because they had just received samples of a new type of Diode - a discrete electronic component - this one being the first to incorporate those new Room Temperature Superconductors which have gotten all the press lately...They were assembling them, somehow, with one of those new Brain/Computer Interface headsets that were all the rage last Christmas....in fact, I even bought my son one to play that game Grand Theft Aero 6 on...Yes, sir, the crisis...well, we're not really sure this counts as a 'crisis', as such...
..."Yes, Mr. President, I realize its 3:20 in the morning...Yes, sir, I know you have breakfast with the Norweigan Prime Minister in four hours...
..."Sir, have you ever watched any of those 'Ghost Hunter' programs on TV?....No, sir...not the one with the hot blonde...the one where the team of amateur ghostbusters checks out haunted places?...Well, one of the things they do is record what are known as 'Electronic Voice Phenomena', which people have been picking up for over 100 years, and which have been purported to be communication by the spirits of the dead... ..."No, sir...this IS important!...You see, researchers since Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla, Marconi, and others in the 19th Century have been doing this, but a Dr. Konstantin Raudive, a Latvian psychologist working with Carl Jung, discovered in the 1950s that a Germanium Diode greatly improved the reception of these signals, over other methods, including microphones...Germanium Diodes are widely used in sensitive instrumentation for the detection of low level electromagnetic fields....Yes, sir...just like the old crystal radios we built as kids...
..."Well, Mr. President, in every other instance where a Superconducting Diode has replaced the older Germanium Diodes, scientific instruments have attained increases in sensitivity and signal-to-noise ratio, improvements at the level of Three Orders of Magnitude...Yes, sir, that's a factor of One Thousand...A thousand times more sensitive, yes, sir...
..."Yes, sir, the scientists at NAMI claim to have - accidentally - established reliable clear channel communication with....ahem....the... uhm ....'afterlife'....at Pensacola Naval Air Station...sir...They're callng it the world's first 'Thanatronic Interface'...
..."Sir?....That's not all of it, Mr. President....It appears that...uhm...deceased American military and research personnel have formed some sort of organization on the 'other side', which has been trying to break through to communicate for more than 50 years...and, sir...President Kennedy and Dr. Werner Von Braun would like to speak with you...
..."Yes, sir...we checked...the ECOMCON personal identification security codes they gave us matched up precisely with those they were issued when alive, sir...in 1961..."
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This election is a choice between a man of 1936 who is - by his own admission - illiterate with respect to everyday technology, who came of age before Television had become a widespread communications medium, and his opponent, a man of 1961, who grew up with Rockets, and is comfortable immersed in the digital environment, as are all of us here.
Previously, I've discussed the inherent problems with having Grampy Old Fart as President. I have also written about the near future of critical, and potentially very exciting technologies, and their relationship to both Human Consciousness and a likely future of Orwellian Government Intrusion thereinto.
There are dangers worse than a President who mishandles the Russia-Georgia dispute, or who botches dealing with the Iranians. Of couse, I believe John McCain is far more likely to be the one to mishandle and botch those and other conventional crises, than would Obama. However, much bigger issues with larger consequences will confront the next Administration.
John McCain's world of coaxial cable, vacuume tubes, steamships, dirigibles and radio is not comparable to Barack Obama's world of integrated circuits, industrial robotics, satellites, molecular genetics, and the internet. If the voters confuse the two on November 4th, we could be in for a very dangerous future, misunderstood - in realtime - by those in power who are responsible for managing it.