It is said that the Catholic Church thinks slowly but surely, taking decades if not centuries to respond to changing historical circumstances and to resolve the moral controversies that result from social change. What happens, then, if the rate of historical change itself speeds up, so that there is literally no time to form a considered judgment before request for the next decision comes along?

We are likely to face a tidal wave of innovation over the coming decade, many of them flowing from the mapping of the human genome, and others from the attempts to construct artificial intelligence. Computers have been doubling in power every 18 months since the 1950s, and this is due to continue indefinitely ("Moore’s Law"). So-called "nanotechnology" will soon replace our present microchips with computers crafted on the scale of molecules and individual atoms. To paraphrase technology pundit Peter Cochrane, by the year 2010 the supercomputer will be on our desks, by 2015 it will be on our wrists, and by 2020 it may well be wearing us.

The dotcommers who (in the bloom of youth) revel in all this change are, naturally, buzzing with excitement. But the levels of stress that we observe around us will carry a high price. Promises of scientific immortality are being held out to a generation whose immune systems are rapidly giving way under the strain. As for the moral dilemmas that will confront religious believers in the next few years, as human cloning and genetic modification begin to come on-line, these will make last century’s arguments over the Pill and abortion seem like a Victorian tea-party. The genetic manipulation of life, combined with the ability to import microscopic machinery into biological organisms, will result in ever-more ambitious attempts to transform human nature: a new Eugenics movement which C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man described as "stepping outside the Tao... into the void", and G.K. Chesterton in What’s Wrong With the World as the destruction of the human family by the "Empire of the Insect".

In an influential speech quoted by Newsweek, top American computer guru Bill Joy recently warned of the unprecedented power of the "GNR" technologies of the new century (that is, Genetics, Nanotech and Robotics). "I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals." He spoke of "knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD)", amplified by the power of self-replication. The most frightening thing about the new wave of GNR technology is the possibility that it will be able to reproduce and repair itself without human assistance. We have had intimations of this with computer viruses. Recent worries about the possibility of nuclear terrorism and of what may happen when GM foods are released into the environment (whether these fears are well-founded or not) are merely a foretaste of what is to come.

Bill Joy is no Luddite, but he thinks we ought to reconsider our single-minded pursuit of economic growth through science and technology. C.S. Lewis, too, wondered if "reconsideration, and something like repentance, may be required". The love of truth has become too entangled with the love of power. What he advocated was a different approach to nature. "The regenerate science I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole." Arthur C. Clark once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Magic is fascinating and exciting, but in our rush to discover a technical solution for every problem we risk forgetting the spiritual whole to which we belong.

Published in The Catholic Herald 5 May 2000