“Gattaca’s” protagonist is an “Invalid” masquerading as one of the elite. Vincent (Ethan Hawke) is really a “faith child,” a product of the old-fashioned genetic lottery, and his near-sightedness and other imperfections doom him to a life of cleaning toilets. But Vincent Has A Dream — he wants more than anything to be navigator on a spaceship to Titan, Saturn’s moon. So, with the aid of a black-market specialist in “borrowed ladders” — genetic identities for sale — he hooks up with Jerome Morrow (Jude Law). Jerome has a perfect gene map, but something’s gone wrong with his life anyway; an auto accident turned him into an alcoholic in a wheelchair, and now he’s willing to sell his genetic identity to Vincent as long as Vincent keeps him in booze.

Which turns out to be a lot tougher than just, say, forging a signature. Vincent and Jerome wind up as roommates — with Jerome stockpiling his blood and pee in basement refrigerators and Vincent resorting to elaborate rituals of depilation and skin-scraping to remove traces of his own genes. Vincent passes himself off as Jerome well enough to make it into the inner sanctum of the Gattaca Corporation, a fortress of the super-elite that runs the space missions Vincent yearns to join. (Gattaca’s name is derived from the four letters of DNA code — GTCA.) But days before his launch, a murder inside Gattaca leads to investigations that threaten to unmask his ruse.

“Gattaca” is at its best as a suspense film in which Vincent keeps barely eluding detection. He makes it harder on himself by starting a romance with a coworker named Irene (Uma Thurman); returning from a date, they hit a police roadblock, and Vincent must ditch his contact lenses or be exposed. A moment later, Irene is beckoning him across a crowded freeway to watch the sun rise over a sea of solar panels. All he can see now is blurred headlights; he charges through the traffic anyway, in a montage that’s more artfully suspenseful than the kind of shootouts that are more standard science-fiction fare in Hollywood today.

Implausible in countless ways and wooden for long stretches, “Gattaca” at least never collapses into a special-effects barrage or erupts in long, choreographed explosions; it sticks carefully to its pristine vision. Writer-director Andrew Niccol, a New Zealander who apprenticed as an ad man, eschews Hollywood-futurist clichis for a timeless classical look — the nightclubs are 1940s throwbacks, the offices canyons of wood and marble. No fins anywhere.

The Gattaca company itself is, however, more than a little ridiculous. With everyone perfectly groomed, checking in each morning past blood-testing turnstiles, marching around in identical dark-blue suits and keeping an earnest demeanor, the place is like a cross between a futuristic advertising agency and an Anglophile boarding school (it’s as if Hawke had never left “Dead Poets’ Society”). And though the Gattacans are supposed to be supergeniuses as well as superhunks, their workplace comes off like a secretarial pool: “You keep your workstation so clean — and not one error in a million keystrokes,” murmurs Vincent’s boss (a pompous Gore Vidal, who looks vaguely puzzled to be on the set).

It’s hard to see why anyone would struggle as hard as Vincent does to join a club so glum. Jerome, an upper-crust British lush straight out of “Brideshead Revisited,” is supposed to be the guy whose spirit was broken — but he’s the only character with any wit or spunk. At one point, he pukes up his guts after a boozy overindulgence, then asks Vincent, “Do you want this? I’ll save some for you.”

Vincent’s relationship with Thurman’s Irene never really goes anywhere; “Gattaca” is much more interested in the repressed homoerotics of his “Odd Couple” relationship with Jerome — or the similarly charged nature of his rivalry with a genetically perfect younger brother. But plainly (and despite a brief bedroom scene between Vincent and Irene), no one in “Gattaca” is about to have sex with anyone, male or female. For these obsessive-compulsive neatniks, it would be just too yucky.

Relatively modest and reasonably coherent, “Gattaca” is a pleasant surprise only in the context of the mess Hollywood keeps making of science-fiction story lines. But I wish Niccol had had the guts to push more deeply into themes he only grazes. For all their dress-for-success genetic programming, “Gattaca’s” elites are a strangely neurotic, petulant lot; Jerome, for example, seems to have begun his downward spiral when his athletic prowess won him only a silver medal instead of a gold. Poor boy!

It’s obvious that the “burden of perfection” has spoiled these people — but no one in “Gattaca” besides Vincent seems to have caught on. The film plainly aspires to serious insights into human nature — how our strengths are woven in with our imperfections in an intricate double helix of the spirit. But it doesn’t let most of its characters get to square one in the psychological drama. When they sculpted the DNA for the perfect race in “Gattaca,” somebody left out the gene for self-knowledge.

I was holding forth about this last week at lunch with Hollywood man-about-town Ben Stein, who’s also a freelance writer — as well as an actor, lawyer, economist and host of the new Comedy Central game show “Win Ben Stein’s Money.” I used to try out for shows like this in the futile hope of making some easy, extra cash. No longer!

“There must be a word for this phenomenon,” I mused grandly, “where you actually make more money by turning down work.”

“There is,” Ben said. “The word is ‘temporary.’”

OK, OK, I get the point. But still, I don’t see why people have to knee-jerk into poor-pitiful-you mode as soon as the subject of my occupation comes up.

The mildest version takes the form of worried concern. I should preface this by explaining that last spring I lost my staff job at a local magazine. Thus, the concern. However, since I had set my own hours and worked entirely out of my house while I was employed there — and never stopped writing for other publications — in the big picture this job was basically just a four-year blip in the middle of a dozen-odd years of freelancing.

Admittedly, in the old days, what helped pay the bills was my extra income from a tenant — the modern, slightly less downmarket version of Mother Took in Boarders. But as far as freelance writing goes, I did it before, and I can do it again, as the old World War II song goes. Nevertheless …

“So how are you?” one of the kindlier moms at my daughter’s school asked the other day, brow furrowed. Since I had just finished a crushing schedule of three deadlines that week, which included writing something like 11 hours straight on Saturday, the short answer was: overworked to the point of exhaustion. But this sort of information just does not compute.

“So,” she responded sympathetically, “keeping busy?” Keeping busy? Are there any two words more clueless or patronizing? What I should say, of course, the next time someone wonders if I’m “keeping busy” is: “Well, every morning I begin knitting a very long sock. And then, around noon, I start unraveling it. After all, you’ve got to keep busy! At least, that’s what my court-appointed psychiatrist says!”

But apparently I’ve done too good a job at camouflaging my real personality (rampant egomania combined with snarling, easily provoked impatience) behind a polite smile and sincere, tell-me-more expression. Casual acquaintances have even been known to describe me as “friendly” and “approachable.” I can hear my friends laughing in disbelief at this, but it’s true. The result is that when people, especially men, learn I am a freelance writer, I seem to be wearing a T-shirt that on the back reads, “Kick Me” and on the front, “Let Me Be the Handmaiden to Your Genius.”

Sometimes this takes the form of the dreaded Story Suggestion, because those without ideas naturally assume that everyone else is similarly bereft — and therefore would be only too grateful to get a rare, brilliant notion … for free! Sample suggestions: “Why Don’t You Do a Story On … Racism? … How You Need to Know People in Hollywood to Get Ahead? … My Neighbor Who’s a Character Actor? … Couples Who Prefer Dogs to Children? … Why People Think They’re Invisible When They Pick Their Nose in the Car?”

Actually, I’ve always found that last idea — which, thank you, is my own — pretty compelling, although so far editors haven’t agreed. I just threw it in so you could see what a difference the professional touch makes. Anyway, it’s odd how people who never even seem to read magazines, let alone my particular articles, happen to be such experts on what I ought to be writing about.

“My back is killing me,” complained the beer-bellied, semi-retired book publishing executive I ran into at a snack shop, after I asked how he was. “Say!” he added, a light bulb practically switching on over his head. “There’s an idea for you! Why don’t you do an story on … back pain!” Never mind that a) I’m not a health writer; b) at this point probably a million stories have been written about back pain; and c) they all boil down to four words: “Lose the gut, Buster.”

Recently I was leaving the dog park when a bearded banker I’d met at some neighborhood function asked what I was working on these days. He reminded me that he was a writer, too — he contributed pieces to business journals and the op-ed page — and boy, was it a tough business! Why, oh, why did editors and “number-crunchers” keep trying to interfere with “the creative process”?

“You know,” he added, “I like you; I think you’re sweet. But, to be honest, I don’t read what you write.

“I’m just not interested in gossip or fluff,” he explained, lest I start blubbing in disappointment. “What I do is serious stuff: Business. Politics. City issues. And even (he paused dramatically and cocked an eyebrow) a bit of … investigative reporting.” Here he assumed a debonair, Bob Woodward-as-interpreted-by-Robert-Redford stance, which is quite a feat when you’ve got two bored kids in tow and a cocker spaniel tugging at the leash.

Perhaps misinterpreting just what was inspiring my fascinated gaze, he continued his spiel. “It’s hard to make money at this, though,” he confided. “The last piece I wrote, it took them months to pay me. Hey!” he added. “You don’t seem like a shrinking violet. Have you ever considered going over … to the other side?”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. Satanism? “You mean, like, becoming an editor?” I ventured hesitantly.

“No, becoming an agent! Because someone like me could really use someone like you to get me work and collect payment. And you’ve got contacts, so …” I forget what I said at this point. Possibly the prospect of skimming 15 percent off every $100 piece this banker sold made me so giddy that the rest of the afternoon is just a blurred memory of we’re-in-the-money excitement. Luckily, at that point my own dog had to defecate, so the conversation came to a merciful end.

My friend Sandra Tsing Loh refers to this phenomenon as the “Girlie” factor, in which men, especially when they’re older and thus feel entitled to a certain silverback gorilla status, assume a “sure, Girlie” attitude toward any woman who claims to be a writer. Sandra published a first novel (“If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now”) this spring and a couple of years ago her book of essays, “Depth Takes a Holiday,” was a local bestseller.

But that didn’t stop the bore who strode up purposefully at a party — people scattering in his wake — from grilling her on how she really made a living, between long speeches about how his children were writers too. Why, one of them even wrote a chapter in an engineering textbook!

“And what does your husband do?” the bore asked.

“He’s a studio musician.”

“Oh,” came the twinkly response, “so now we know how the bills get paid!” Finally, he added: “Here’s my card — will you send me your book? I’ll buy you a drink if you do!”

“So,” Sandra said, telling me this story later, “I said, ‘Sure!’ And he bought me a drink. And then I threw his card away.”

But while the media attention is on the president and Kyoto, the real action on global warming is being driven by a little-known body called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC), established 10 years ago and involving more than 2,000 international scientists. The Kyoto meeting is only occurring because IPCC scientists have reached a surprising consensus that global warming is a major potential problem. And the fine print of the Clinton proposal is largely derived from reports written by the IPCC.

One of the key IPCC scientists is Mark Levine, a senior staff scientist and division director at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif., and an international energy conservation consultant who has advised the Chinese government on developing new building and appliance codes.

Salon talked with Levine about the emission reduction targets and what it will take to reach them.

Despite the consensus reached by the IPCC, there are still scientists and climatologists who disagree that there is such a thing as global warming. Recently, economist Thomas Gale Moore of the Hoover Institute wrote in the Wall Street Journal that a warmer climate is a good thing. How worried should we be?

We should be worried even though there is a lot we don’t understand. If we wait until we’re certain about what is going to happen, we could be in deep, deep trouble. But that makes it very difficult politically: How do you take action, in the face of uncertainty, about a problem whose most serious impact would be far in the future?

How far in the future?

In the short run, the average Californian might sense the impact of global warming if we find it’s linked to phenomena like El Niqo. But much more significant and discernible impacts might be expected 25 to 75 years from now. It could affect available water, causing permanent droughts; produce severe or even devastating storms; destroy ecosystems, causing increased desertification; and so forth.

Critics of the IPCC say the main reason it is pushing global warming is to get government grants.

The critics would have a point if scientists behaved like lawyers, and were being paid for what they argued. But most scientists have more integrity than that. IPCC scientists aren’t making money out of this; they often have to work on their own time on IPCC projects.

Including yourself?

I’m on a salary at LBL, but often do IPCC work for which there is no project funding.

The Senate recently passed the Byrd resolution saying we should not reduce greenhouse gas emissions unless other large nations like China and India do so. Is this a fair proposal?

It’s ridiculous. We have been the big emitters, and we have the means and the technologies they do not have. If we want the rest of the world to do something, we have to go first. Give me a break.

Still, critics say, even if we do something, countries like China and India will go right on sending out emissions — even increasing them.

China and India have to grow. The question is whether they will do so with energy efficiency. We can play a huge role in the energy decisions they make, by our example. If we can demonstrate better technology and make it available, they’re going to use it.

How do we know that?

The Chinese have recognized the importance of improving energy efficiency since 1981, when Deng Xiao-peng decided the country would quadruple its gross domestic product in 20 years. His energy experts told him it would be impossible if energy grew as fast as GDP, or even nearly as fast. That’s because energy production is very capital intensive, and rapid energy growth would deprive other essential social and economic investments of capital. So China decided to strive to cut energy growth to half that of GDP growth. The conventional wisdom was that such an equation is impossible, that energy has to grow faster than GDP. But the Chinese have achieved both goals.

There are big payoffs for working with, rather than pressuring, China. Our group, for example, has worked with one of China’s largest refrigerator manufacturers to produce prototypes that would be 45 to 50 percent more energy-efficient than their current ones. We estimate that $100 million — $50 million for education and training, $50 million for rebates to manufacturers — would lead to widespread adoption of the new refrigerators and tremendous energy savings.

Who’s giving them the money?

The Global Environmental Fund is financing the first $50 million, but no one has yet come up with the other half. Helping the Third World develop, adopt and implement appliance efficiency standards, and other similar measures, should be a major focus of American policy.

U.S. automakers have taken the lead in opposing action to avert
global warming. Are industrialists in other countries taking a similar
position?

I was recently at a conference in Japan, and it was striking that
something like 30 separate industry associations were committed to reducing
emission and/or energy use to 1990 levels by 2010. The entire auto industry
in Japan is committed to reducing emissions.

A major concern of global warming revolves around carbon emissions.
The IPCC has predicted major problems if we reach a “two times carbon
world,” that is, 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide, twice the level
of pre-industrial times. We are presently at around 360. How much time do
we have?

Jae Edmonds of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
concludes that
it will be virtually impossible to limit carbon emissions to less than 450
parts per million, but that 550 parts per million might get agreement. He
argues that tighter restrictions would require convincing evidence of the
problem’s seriousness earlier than we are likely to get it. The most
important thing we have to do now, he argues, is to develop technologies to
get us off fossil fuels, and he calculates we have 25 years to do it.

Are you saying a “two times carbon world” is acceptable?

Probably — if we reach that 550 parts per million gradually over
the next 75 years, while beginning now to achieve flat energy growth and
later shifting to a hydrogen-based economy. But if we get there sooner and
we’re still relying on carbon-based fuels, it would be a big problem.

The environmental community is worried that President Clinton may
agree to support reducing carbon emissions to 1990 levels by 2010, rather
than by 2005. How do you feel about this?

If their purpose is to put maximum pressure on Clinton to stop him
from caving, that’s a reasonable posture. If you ask me as someone who’s
knowledgeable about what can be achieved, I think they’re off the mark. We
need to focus on preventing a rise in energy use, by capturing energy
savings out of what exists. This is what we saw from 1973 to 1986, due to a
combination of rising prices, energy efficiency policies and R&D programs
creating new technologies. Since then, energy use has been going up
steadily. What we need is flat energy growth. And we need to move energy
supply from high- to low-carbon fuels, e.g., from coal to natural gas and, over
time, to renewables.

So President Clinton’s position of reducing to 1990 levels by
2010 is
OK?

I would be nervous about setting goals that have no flexibility.
Let’s say the target was set at 1990 levels in 2010, as an example. In my
view, this is a tight target, and very risky if it is implemented with no
flexibility. Flexibility could be achieved by permitting international
trading in carbon emissions and/or through a penalty for emissions
above the target.

And we should put the proceeds from such penalties into helping
developing
countries implement the kind of energy conservation programs we have in this
country: rebates for energy-efficient products, government programs to
develop appliance efficiency standards, programs for schools and hospitals,
state efficiency standards for buildings and so on.

I personally would also give serious consideration to creating a
“feebate”
system for autos. Let’s say the average fuel economy for cars on American
roads is 32 miles per gallon in a given year; a car that gets more
miles per gallon gets a rebate collected from cars getting less than 32 mpg.

We need a one-two punch. The first to stabilize energy growth. But the
real key is to start the R&D to go beyond carbon fuels. Right now we are in
a carbon economy, in which 80 percent of our electricity comes from
carbon-based fuels. We need to substantially reduce that proportion in
the next 25 to 75 years and come to rely on low-carbon fuels.

How do we cause that shift?

You have to invest in a lot of new things and see what works. My
favorite is biomass. Right now, 25 percent of the world’s energy comes from
dead branches, corn husks, plants, anything you can burn — but it’s at very
low efficiency. Imagine if you had a technique that could convert that
energy at 40 percent efficiency, for example, gassify it and put it through
a combustion turbine.

You can’t do that now, but you might be able to in 10 or 20 years.
You also need to try wind power and, over the longer term, photovoltaic
cells that produce energy from the sun. Also fuel cells using natural gas
and hydrogen fuels. I would also support R&D in nuclear energy, particularly
to see if we can solve the problem of nuclear waste disposal. On the demand
side, hydrogen or electric vehicles are an interesting option.

How much money are we talking about here?

Right now the federal government puts $2 billion a year into
applied
energy technology research, of which perhaps only $1 billion is related to
developing non-carbon based energy sources. The President’s Council on
Sustainable Development has recommended another $1 billion. But you don’t
want to add it all in now, because much of it would be wasted. It’s best to
increase the budget by 10 to 20 percent a year. The key is to do the R&D
steadily over a long period. Most of the commercialization costs will then
be borne by industry, over the next 25 years.

Back to big-spending government?

You need some government action. If someone thinks the private
sector is going to solve a public problem far in the future, they’re smoking
something. The private sector will pay attention to the next quarter’s
returns.

There are some encouraging signs from the private sector, like the
Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PGNV).

The reason that the auto industry is working on PGNV is they don’t
want CAFE (fuel efficiency) standards imposed by the government. So a deal
was cut. But if government doesn’t continue to push, environmental problems
are not going to be solved. Companies don’t do it on their own volition.

“Oh my,” said the sympathetic saleswoman. “This is a job for Tweezerman.”

Tweezer who? I stared blankly.

“Tweezerman,” she said, smiling sweetly, “the best tweezer in the world.” Yeah, right. Not only did she want to make a sale, but she looked like the Bride of Frankenstein, with McDonald’s-arch eyebrows. But then again, I looked liked Lon Chaney with a hangover, so I had nothing to lose.

She pulled out a set from behind the counter — they looked like any other tweezers, maybe a bit heavier, more sturdy. Eyes gleaming, she leaned toward me and said, “Now, let’s see what we can do with your eyebrow.”

“Eyebrows!” I snapped back — but she had already started in.

Pluck, pluck, pluck. Her hands worked deftly over my brows. Barely a pinch. “Now remember,” she said, “always pluck in the direction of hair growth. Never pluck against the grain.” Pluck, pluck, pluck. The Frida condition began to subside.

It was love at first pluck, and I was sold. I plunked down $15 and took Tweezerman home. Finally, we were alone. It was the start of a beautiful relationship. Now he’s more than just my beauty slave — he’s my stocky, squat, silent four-inch hero. A better man would be hard to find.

So what makes Tweezerman so special? I had to find out. While all tweezers, I learned, have four parts — legs, a spot weld to join them, tips and a gripping platform — Tweezerman has tips that are hand-filed, not machine-filed. This makes his grip strong and precise.

I started checking out Tweezerman’s background. He was born in Glen Cove, Long Island, and, as it turns out, has many relatives. There are Teen Tweeze (priced for a teen’s budget), Needletweeze (for ingrown hairs), Splintertweeze (for adult-size splinters), Mommy Tweezer (for wee-one’s splinters) and Tick Tweezer (to remove disease-carrying ticks). There’s also a nose tweeze that looks like the Hubble telescope, but that’s another story. Tweezerman Corporation’s motto is “We aim to tweeze,” and they do — to the tune of 1 million tweezers a year, representing 30 percent of the company’s $15 million annual revenue.

OK, OK — I’d met the Tweezer clan, but where was my new beau’s dad?

“It’s Dal,” the voice on the other end of the phone booms in a thick Scorsesean grunt. I’m on the phone with Dal Lamagna, Tweezerman’s CEO. I ask him the usual questions, like how’d you get the idea for this product, how many do you sell, what new products are you planning. In return, he tells me how much he loves being in the bathrooms of beautiful women all over the country.

I do not ask for more detail. Instead, I throw him a hardball.

“Why Tweezerman?” I ask. “I mean, why not Tweezerlady? Tweezerbabe? Tweezergal?”

“OK — you want the true story? The really true story?”

I was getting excited. Maybe I had stumbled on a conspiracy — Tweezergate!

Lamagna’s voice dropped. “I thought I’d be cool and call my line of tweezers Dal Lamagna — you know, like Yves St. Laurent or Pierre Cardin. So I put ‘DL’ on my tweezers and was going around to beauty salons, trying to sell them. Well, one day, I overheard the hair dresser yelling in the back — ‘Hey, here comes the tweezerman.’” So Tweezerman it was.

Once Tweezerman moved in, our relationship deepened. In the last few months, he has cleaned dustballs the size of Kansas out of the rollers in my computer mouse, retrieved my cat’s favorite catnip toy from the air intake vent and rescued my earring from the bathroom drain.

But in the end, I’ve learned Tweezerman has an even higher calling; he’s the perfect partner in procrastination. Can’t think of that next clever turn of phrase? Can’t figure out a brilliant ending to a piece? It doesn’t matter — Tweezerman gives you the perfect escape.

In fact, I hear him calling right now.

The Net is where the intelligent action will be. In the Dysonian schema, fragments of software replicating across the Internet are analogous to strings of DNA replicating in living cells. Evolutionary pressure provides the drive: What works survives; what doesn’t gets deleted, either by us or on its own.

So be prepared — there’s a new primordial soup in town, bubbling over with restless code, seething right toward the boiling point of sapience. And this new sapience won’t be purely digital; the emergent new order will be defined by a commingling of the silicon and the biological, by a collective merging of human and hardware. That’s both a promise and a threat.

Dyson was to the computer manner born. As a child he grew up on the campus of the Princeton-based Institute of Advanced Studies, where his mathematical physicist father, Freeman Dyson, hobnobbed with such luminaries of the computer world as John von Neumann, and where abandoned fragments of the earliest known computers rusted away in nearby barns. Dyson’s sister, Esther, is the publisher of Release 1.0, a pricey newsletter that reports from the cutting edge of current digital developments.

Freeman Dyson is perhaps most famous for his theory that all intelligent species will inevitably progress to a point where they enclose their home sun with a vast shell — a “Dyson sphere” — in order to maximize living space. On their face, George Dyson’s theories about emergent global intelligence might sound equally fantastic. No matter how persuasive the arguments, it’s never clear how routers, high-speed telecommunication lines and torrents of data add up to a new intelligent species.

But that doesn’t harm the book, because “Darwin Among the Machines” is as much a work of history as of speculation. In a phone interview from his kayak repair workshop in western Washington state, Dyson himself called it “a catalog of beginnings.” Dyson explores the roots of computer design, of distributed networks and of the very concepts of artificial intelligence and even evolution.

It’s a sound strategy. Just attempting to define terms such as “life” or “intelligence” can confound the most brilliant of minds. Since, as Dyson notes on several occasions, the only thing that can truly describe a complex system is the system itself, it makes sense to focus one’s attention on first steps, rather than the goal line.

“You can only sort of hint at things,” says Dyson. “How do you explain the explanations? You have to rely a great deal on analogies … But what it all comes down to is that the more we understand about the way our brains work the more we find that evolution has a lot to do it.”

And we also find, when we start at the beginning, that there is nothing new under the sun. From the earliest days of evolutionary theory, Dyson shows, fascinated observers speculated on the possibility that the same evolutionary laws that determined natural development might also shape emergent machine intelligence. As early as 1865, Charles Darwin’s contemporary Samuel Butler wrote that “although we grant that hardly any mistake would be more puerile than to individualize and animalize the at present existing machines … yet we can see no a priori objection to the gradual development of a mechanical life, though that life shall be so different from ours that it is only by a severe discipline that we can think of it as life at all.”

From Butler onward, Dyson traces the history of the notion that it’s possible to bridge the gap between nature and machine. It’s all a matter of changing one’s frame of reference.

In Dyson’s view, complex living organisms evolve out of the symbiotic
cooperation of simpler organisms — “symbiogenesis.” Symbiogenesis “assumes
that the most probable explanation for improbably complex structures
(living or otherwise) lies in the association of less complicated parts.”

“All intelligence is collective,” writes Dyson. “This intelligence –
whether that of a billion neurons, a billion microprocessors, or a billion
molecules forming a single cell — arises not from the unfolding of a
predetermined master plan, but by the accumulation of random bits of wisdom
through the power of small mistakes.”

The Net is the ultimate forum for collective intelligence, as well as
for unlimited experimentation. It has long passed the point, as a complex
system, at which it could be definitively mapped or succinctly summed up.
And every signpost points the way to increasing volatility — toward an
environment in which increasingly mobile and autonomous conglomerations of
code migrate from node to node, constantly mutating and reshaping
themselves in response to circumstantial demands.

Just as natural selection resulted in the range of highly adapted
species existing in the world today, so too will evolutionary pressure
ensure that tomorrow’s mobile code exhibits capabilities that will astound
and baffle us. Indeed, the packet-switching protocols of the Net itself
are, writes Dyson, a “particularly virulent strain of symbiotic code …
Successful code is now executed in millions of places at once, just as a
successful genotype is expressed within each of an organism’s many cells.
The possibilities of complex, multi-cellular digital organisms are only
beginning to be explored.”

The possibilities are not confined to digital limits, either. “The Net
wouldn’t function for a minute if there weren’t all those people sitting at
their desks,” says Dyson.

The Net is as much flesh-and-blood as it is chips and fiber optics.
Humans are indispensable to the new intelligence equation. The emergent
collective intelligence isn’t just hardware and software — it includes us.

And why not? If all of life up to now has been a series of ever more
intricate joint ventures, who is to say this latest synthesis is
unworkable? The principle has been well illustrated; all that’s changed is
the speed at which it can all happen.

“The cooperation between human beings and microprocessors is
unprecedented, not in kind, but in suddenness and scale,” writes Dyson.
“Now, in the coalescence of electronics and biology, we are forming a
complex collective organism composed of individual intelligences.”

Some humanocentric nativists might well be dismayed at the prospect.
They wouldn’t be the first to eye the yoke of the machine with suspicion.
Again, Samuel Butler staked out the territory. In an 1863 essay titled
“Darwin Among the Machines,” Butler noted that “the machines are gaining
ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more
men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them; more men are daily
devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical
life.”

Submission to the machine — from “Frankenstein” to “The Terminator,”
it’s a recurring nightmare. But from Dyson’s symbiogenetic perspective,
Butler misses the point. We’re not necessarily bound to become slaves, but we
could well be partners. We’re all in this together. There is no Net without
humanity, no global intelligence without cooperation.

We could have an important role to play. Then again, we could be written
out of the script.

“For the single-celled organisms, the advent of multi-cellular
organisms, such as the nervous system, was the end of freedom,” says Dyson.
“We’re at that stage now. Whether it is good or bad completely depends on
how you look at it.”

“Sure, we feel threatened,” he adds. “We’re loyal to our own life form.
Americans feel threatened by foreigners, Earthlings feel threatened by
Martians, and protoplasmic forms of life ought to feel threatened by other
forms of life.”

The real danger is not necessarily that machines will grow too smart but
that human intelligence may atrophy. Evolution isn’t necessarily on our
side. Just because we are intelligent now doesn’t mean that we always will
be. Even as we get subsumed into a greater intelligent cooperative,
individually, we may become dumber.

Evolution, argues Dyson, moves forward by constantly dispensing with
unnecessary baggage. He is fond of pointing out that human babies are born
with more neurons than a fully grown adult. As they grow older, they shed
irrelevant neurons, while reinforcing the connections and neural pathways
that make sense.

From babies, Dyson jumps to kayaks. It seems his true passion is
repairing Inuit watercraft. It’s part of a struggle to ensure that the
human race doesn’t get dumber. “There’s a 10,000-year-old tradition
of kayak design which is in danger of being lost,” he says. “I want to
prevent that if I can.”

“To build a kayak,” he writes, “you assemble a skeleton and then give it
a skin that allows it to float, just as the architectural framework of a
computer is fitted, by evolution or by design, with an envelope of code. To
build a dugout, you grow a tree and then remove everything, one chip at a
time, except the boat. This is how nature creates her intelligences, by
spawning an overwhelming surplus of neurons and then selectively pruning
them to leave a network that, if all goes well, becomes a mind.”

The Net is a new spawning ground for software code proto-neurons. There
is no limit to the possibilities it may engender. But we should beware lest
our own intelligence, through willful ignorance or simple inaction, becomes the
part that gets pruned.