METAMAN

The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism

In this visionary book, Gregory Stock gives us a new way of understanding our world and our future.  He develops the provocative thesis that human society has become an immense living being - a global superorganism in which we humans, knitted together by our modern technology and communication, are like the cells in an animal's body.  Drawing on impressive research, Stock shows this newly formed superorganism to be more than metaphor; it is an actual living creature, which he has named "Metaman," meaning "Beyond and transcending humans."

Simon and Schuster - 365 pages

Comments about Metaman

Stock reformulates the human enterprise in a way that may well cause us to rethink the future of our species.

-Steven Stanley, Member of the National Academy of Sciences; Professor of Paleobiology, Johns Hopkins University, coauthor of Principles of Paleontology.

This is a very level-headed, clear set of concepts about who "mankind" is and where it's headed. A broad book like this requires wide-ranging research and selective thought, but Stock has obviously done an enormous amount of both.

-Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

In a world in which change is threatening, Stock's vision of an evolutionary process holds out great hope ... I believe this book should be required reading for executives and scholars ...

-Howard Stevenson, Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School; author of New Business Ventures and the Entrepreneur.

This book looks at our world in an original and thoughtful way, full of new and interesting insights into our present and future condition.

-John Tyler Bonner, Member of the National Academy of Sciences; Moffett Professor of Biology, Emeritus, Princeton University, author of The Evolution of Culture in Animals.

This book is a marvelous antidote to the gloom and doom predictions of most futurists. Stock's vision of the future is optimistic and appealing and at the same time it resonates with truth and intelligence ... The book created in me an optimism, almost a longing for the future.

-Susan Bryant, Professor of Developmental Biology, UC Irvine, Editor of the Journal of Experimental Zoology

Humanists like to pretend that science operates outside of history, or at best on the margins. Stock's Metaman dissolves that parochial view within the first few pages, laying out a brilliantly lit vision of interrelationships that most of us have never dreamed of ... After reading Metaman, those who create and disseminate art will never think of their calling in the same terms.

-Robert Winter, Professor and Chairman, UCLA Department of Music; author of The Beethoven Sketchbooks.

Metaman is a refreshingly positive alternative to the conventional view of Man and nature ... a bold concept, quite unlike other superorganism or Gaia-like ideas. This book is a thorough, scholarly treatment that deserves to be read and pondered by all of us.

-David Raup, Member of the National Academy of Sciences; Avery Distinguished Service Professor of Geophysical Sciences and Evolutionary Biology, Univ. of Chicago; author of Evolution: Bad Genes or Bad Luck.

Stock describes an amazing future where humans and technology have joined to form a new life form that will ultimately reproduce and scatter through the universe, and yet astonishingly, when we have turned the book's final page, this fantastic vision seems so obvious that we wonder we did not see it before.

-Charles Ide, Chairman of the Department of Molecular Biology, Tulane University; Associate Director, Center for Bioenvironmental Research

A brand new angle of vision on our current situation ... this was a book that made me think and entertain new possibilities.

-William McNeill, Millikan Distinguished Service Professor of History, Emeritus, University of Chicago; author of The Rise of the West: A history of the human community.

Gregory Stock marshals compelling evidence for a superhuman organism as far beyond individual people as people are beyond their component cells. Stock's slow revelation of the contours of this being is thrilling to watch.

-Dorian Sagan, coauthor of Microcosmos.

The book will stand out in sharp contrast to most of the other substantive volumes on the nature of society and man's place in it. It seems likely that Metaman will be the conceptual basis for many people to interpret the confusing changes that impinge upon them from every aspect of society. ... One can recommend this book to any person interested in or concerned about where society is going.

-John Campbell, Professor of Anatomy and Cell Biology, UCLA

Dr. Stock is optimistic and is prepared to look at things from a novel point of view. ... I know of no other author who lifts our hopes for the future without having to assume a changed human nature.

-Marion Levy, Musgrave Professor of Sociology and International Affairs, Emeritus, Princeton University.

Reviews of Metaman

Review

 
From Kirkus Reviews , August 1, 1993
A surprise from bestselling novelty-book author Stock (The Book of Questions, 1987, etc.): a jolting but seductively hopeful perspective on the future of human beings when the species is viewed--along with its culture, fellow species, and technology--as a superorganism. Though by no means original--the idea of society as an organism has its precedents in Lovelock, Teilhard de Chardin, Spencer, and innumerable science fiction novels, all the way back to medieval and ancient Greek thought--Stock's presentation of the superorganism ``Metaman,'' supported by scads of data, a winning style, and a sharp and powerful logic, has the potential to attract readers and believers. Though occupying the same intellectual ground as the Gaia hypothesis, Metaman has differences from Gaia that will strike some as dangerous and some as a welcome corrective to Green ideology. Where Gaia places humanity as one of many components, to be eliminated if its depredations grow too great for the superorganism's good, Stock places humanity at the core and soul of the Metaman superorganism, its purposes of paramount importance. Thus the author makes politically incorrect assertions like ``there are scores of matters more important to humanity than the loss of the snail darter,'' as well as arguments like his contention that individual privacy must yield to the data- collection needs of Metaman. Stock says that Metaman, the collective organism, is the next logical step in evolution, following three major transformations in levels of complexity: from biochemicals to primitive bacteria; from bacteria to animal cells; from those cells to multicellular organisms. With commerce and transport its circulatory system, telecommunications its nervous system, and potential space colonization its reproductive system, Metaman offers a coherent format for our future. Engaging and informative--but whether Stock turns out to be starry-eyed dreamer or hard-headed prophet remains to be seen. (Photographs and line drawings--not seen) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Metaman Explores Society as Organism

by Keith Schengili-Roberts

Picture a world where humans and machines unite, and where the individual is increasingly tied to others through technology. In this world an individual becomes the functional equivalent of an individual cell in a body, creating a global "superorganism". This is the central metaphor taken to the limit in Gregory Stock's book Metaman.

Stock's background is in biology, and from this he draws most of his ideas for the book. Stock sees Metaman as a living entity, drawn together through the actions of people and technology to further the aims of human society as a whole. This superorganism calls upon the planet's natural resources, circulates and processes this material through itself, and then co-ordinates its activities through a complex nervous system comprising telecommunications, computer technology and people.

While this approach to human society and its technology is not a new one, Stock has put things together with an interesting twist. While the author stretches his "global super-organism" metaphor to the limit in places, on the whole it holds up relatively well. Essentially, it gives mankind the responsibility of taking care of the planet, and shaping its future.

The Metaman theory works as an effective argument against the so-called "Gaia theory", in which a living Earth actively manages the living environment. In this scenario mankind is disturbing the fundamental checks and balances that already exist on the planet. Instead of this, Stock sees Metaman as an evolving organism that is, increasingly, actively managing the resources of the world. The choice for humanity is that of global manager: either we accept the responsibility to manage the world or leave things to chance. There are signs that this is already happening -- what used to be called "nature" is now thought of as "the environment", by definition a place that is actively managed, and not left to chance. The author argues that we must take action on issues like pollution and the population explosion if Metaman is to grow and thrive on Earth.

Key roles are played by computers and communications technologies in Metaman. Stock argues that the deepening union between humans and technology is symbiotic in nature, so the old question of which will become the master and which the slave is inapplicable. If the purposes and goals of a global superorganism are to be served, both humans and computers will choose to live together in a co-operative relationship, each helping the other to survive and thrive.

So what are the roles to be played by the rest of the planet's ecology? Basically, the rest of the ecosystem will play whatever kind of role or roles mankind and Metaman as a whole choose. This leads to some disturbing conclusions. This reviewer is unsettled by such comments as "even if half the world's species were lost, enormous diversity would still remain". While Stock is probably right, many ecologists would -- rightly -- say that this is not the point. The purpose of preserving an environment goes beyond the concerns of mankind. Whether Metaman will take these into account over human priorities remains to be seen. Whether or not you agree with all the author says in this book, he does have a way of putting things into a new perspective.

Gregory Stock has put together a well thought-out book on how mankind, technology and the natural resources of the world can work together, and to what end. How the final chapter of Metaman is written is up to us. o

Mankind Unified, Transcended
review by Hans Moravec

Metaman: The Merging of Humans and Machines into a Global Superorganism

A half-billion years ago, a few species of single-celled protozoa stumbled irreversibly from loose social interaction into a tight, specialized interdependence. They became multi-celled metazoa, and human beings are one sort. Metazoa greatly transcend their constituent cells in lifetime, abilities, experiences and even materials (like bone). New kind of beings emerged out of the interactions of the old.

Stock argues that analogously, in the last century, worldwide human activities have become sufficiently specialized, linked and coordinated through advances in transportation and communication to warrant interpreting them as an unprecedentedly potent collective organism he calls "Metaman." Metaman acts through individual market, political and technical decisions, but its large-scale behavior massively transcends them. Materials and energy flow in awesome quantities through its body, from specific sources to specific destinations, via water, road, rail, pipe and cable. Its collective memory is stored in minds, libraries and increasingly electronic data banks. Its nervous system is built of flows of human passengers, physical mail and electronic messages and originating and terminating in human institutions and electronic machinery. It makes decisions on the basis of stored information and collective thought, mostly in a subliminal, distributed manner. Its consciousness might be identified with the mass media, which can quickly focus world attention on a particular issues. It is rapidly spreading from its core in the developed nations to the rest of the planet. As it does, its great control of nearly everything improves conditions for its constituents, who could not imagine going back. Though a single, potentially immortal, entity, Metaman evolves rapidly through internal competition. New devices and methods are created by conscious design, simulation or chance, and sorted out by market decisions. Successful innovations spread rapidly through the whole organism, in active use, and as memories in the libraries. Much of its evolution, for instance improvements in information handling, acts to accelerate the evolution, already perhaps a million times as fast as life's pure Darwinian ways.

Metaman is absorbing and displacing Gaia, the superorganism some see in the global biological ecology. Wilderness areas now exist at the whim of the collective mind, which values the past, but is so pervasive and energetic its every twitch causes change. Metaman's growing capabilities diminish its dependence on Gaia's inflexible supplies, as materials, medicines and food are increasingly devised in laboratories through design or systematic search rather then found in the wild. It is absorbing human cultural diversity, as its material and information flows raise populations to an increasingly high, but relatively homogeneous, state. It is beginning to redesign humans themselves, through artificial parts and genetic manipulations. Metaman anticipates and acts on the future, as national rules on food, water and reproduction, international reactions to disaster, disease, weapons and environmental effects, and even studies on diverting asteroid collisions show. Already it routinely manages events of a scale that might have extinguished prior forms of life.

All this is just the beginning. The processes and institutions that make up Metaman are growing more potent exponentially. Metaman is on the verge of reproducing into outer space, probably in tailored artificial forms that leave biological humans behind.

The book backs up this view of human global civilization with a host of examples, all perfectly sound, drawn mostly from recent science, business and political news, referenced in end notes. Having come to most of the same conclusions myself, I found the presentation convincing. In its light, many losses, biological and cultural, that cause hand-wringing in those focused on the way things were, become merely the birth pangs of something much grander. While a third of present species (a majority of them beetles adapted to tiny tropical niches) and a greater fraction of human languages may become extinct, greater diversity, in the form of machinery, engineered organisms and ways to express more complex thoughts, will grow in their place. Gaia may have been resourceful, but Metaman is more so, as its forays into space witness. An immensely robust, growing organism, Metaman is essentially unstoppable, but our individual choices influence the details of its growth, even as we enjoy its benefits.

Stock concentrates on the robustness of Metaman, able to survive continent-wide plagues, wars, droughts, floods, famines and more subtle dangers. I think he ought to have mentioned the "eggs in one basket" drawback of being a single organism. The most obvious pathology, the threat of world-wide nuclear holocaust, seems to be ebbing, but other systemic catastrophes, hinted at by global depressions, speculative bubbles and nationwide utility breakdowns, may lurk in the internal dynamics, whose totality no one, not even Metaman itself, fully understands. My own confidence in Metaman will be enhanced when there are several of them, across the solar system, or around nearby stars.

Though he hints at many future possibilities, Stock is timid about making long-term predictions. He suggests early on that human beings are likely to be a part of Metaman indefinitely, but later notes there are technologies that will probably totally reshape or replace humans. In my opinion, he greatly overstates the long-term importance of the human form. Metaman evolves so quickly that essentially everything we know, including ourselves, is in the process of becoming history. Old-style humans will not long remain competitive components of the global organism: already we are being squeezed out of productive work by advancing automation. We can hope for a comfortable retirement, or help in restructuring ourselves into something more useful, but our current bodies and minds will increasingly be anachronisms.

Metaman is a well-written book whose point of view, if more widespread, would reduce the number of frightened people angrily tilting at the windmills of a rapidly changing world.

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Hans Moravec is a Principal Research Scientist with the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University. He has been developing spatial perception for mobile robots for two decades, and promises practical results by the end of the third. He is author of Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence (Harvard 1988) and the forthcoming Mind Age: Transcendence through Robots (Bantam 1994), which explore the future non-biological components of the Metaman mind.

Gregory Stock