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But as Zócalo’s California columnist and democracy editor Joe Mathews, who moderated the event, reminded the audience, the ideas that come out of the state aren’t all good. Sure, some are “earth-shatteringly great”—like the earthquake early warning system—but others are “apocalyptically dangerous”—American scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer spent many years at UC Berkeley and Caltech before developing the atomic bomb.

XPRIZE Foundation CEO Anousheh Ansari, Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) president and CEO and retired Chief Justice of California Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, and founding director of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace California Center Ian Klaus joined Mathews on stage for the conversation, which was co-presented by CalMatters.

XPRIZE, the nonprofit that organizes multi-million-dollar competitions to support scientific innovation that benefits humanity, is itself a California idea, Mathews pointed out. He asked Ansari to speak about the inspiration behind the XPRIZE.

Back in 1994 when the first XPRIZE for space exploration came together, the idea was to set a bar for innovators that was “audacious but achievable,” said Ansari.

It took 10 years for Mojave Aerospace Ventures to win that first $10 million purse by being the first private organization to reach space on a reusable, crewed spaceship twice within a two-week period. But it proved to be an industry game changer, and “reduced the cost of access to space exponentially,” said Ansari.

Moving on to Cantil-Sakauye, Mathews asked, what does PPIC do? “Produce ideas? Inspire ideas? Refine ideas? Keep the crazy ideas off the road and keep them from ruining the state?”

“All of the above,” Cantil-Sakauye answered.

“I call us a research think tank-plus,” she continued. “We do a lot of outreach. We do a lot of public events. We do a lot of convening of diverse voices. We like a good civil rumble in a safe space to find out what are the issues, [and] what should our researchers look at?”

Finally Mathews turned to Klaus, who explained what the oldest think tank in America dedicated to international peace is up to in California. Peace “isn’t a California idea,” Klaus said, but “it’s one that resonates here.”

The panelists then discussed what’s in the water in California that inspires so many bold ideas.

There’s a notion here, Ansari observed, that failure is not a bad thing. “Experimentation happens and that’s where you have innovation,” she said. “That’s why you get some unique, extraordinary ideas coming from California.”

Cantil-Sakauye echoed Ansari on Californians’ lack of “fear of failure,” adding that California’s great diversity contributes to this trait as well. There’s “no fear of speaking up and trying ideas and not being so self-conscious about being out there and being who you can be because it’s so diverse,” she said of the state.

Klaus concurred, adding, “The movement of ideas and the movement of people and the movement of goods is something that we’re all engaged with. That leads to a comfort in being wrong. With things that are different. And having to be on the edge.”

But are we too eager to fail—do we push ourselves too far with our ideas? Mathews asked the panel. He pointed to the artificial intelligence boom coming out of Silicon Valley today as one example.

“It comes down to whether we choose to be responsible about how we innovate,” said Ansari. She called for more regulation to help create the guard rails the tech industry needs for healthy innovation.

“The guard rail for me is litigation,” Cantil-Sakauye said. “I worry that our policymakers, our courts will never catch up with technology.” She recalled a time “when courts had computers and didn’t know what to do with them and put them in corners because they just didn’t want to plug them in and figure them out.” But she was optimistic that California’s love of intellectual property and regulatory action might act as meaningful guardrails for A.I.

During audience questions, the panel was asked about Hollywood films that have inspired great ideas. Mathews spoke about the impact of the film Born in East L.A., inspired by the true story of an American citizen who’s deported to Mexico, on the state’s concept of immigration.

They also discussed California trends they’re looking toward for innovation. “I’ve seen a boom in climate tech and conservation tech,” said Ansari.

One of the final questions of the night began with an observation: A lot of innovation comes from so-called outsiders, like people with disabilities. But these same people can often feel alienated and unengaged from big conversations. “How do we do a better job engaging and harnessing those voices to be part of the solution?” the audience member asked.

“In my experience, belonging is local,” said Cantil-Sakauye. “It’s neighborhood- and community-based.” We need to start civics education and engagement in elementary school, she said, and bring together “diverse groups of students on projects with adult volunteers in the community,” like working together to clean up a park. “It starts small,” she said, “but that’s where agency comes from. And that’s where inspiration together comes from.”

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The smartphone has become a modern Swiss Army knife: driver’s license, e-payment device, camera, radio, television, map, blood pressure monitor, workstation, babysitter, pocket AI, and general gateway to the internet. And now consumers are leaving their smartphones behind to sport lightweight smartwatches with equivalent functionality. With every update, our devices inch closer to us—our bodies, our minds. From the handheld, to the wearable, to the … What next?

Nearly 20 years ago, in 2006—before X, Amazon Web Services, iPhone, Fitbit, Uber, or ChatGPT—M.G. Michael was faced with a similar question. He was guest lecturing on the “Consequences of Innovation” at the University of Wollongong in Australia, focusing on emerging technologies in security. A student asked: “So then, where is all this surveillance heading?”

For a couple of years already, we had noticed hints of an ultimate destination in patents, pilots, and proposed products and services: chips implanted inside the human body to identify people and offer them digital services on demand. Hardware placed in the arm might let one pay at the checkout simply by waving a hand, or allow a first responder to scan a patient’s vital signs and medical records in an emergency. Such implants brought with them a perceived increase in security. They remained inside the body, hidden from view, and could not be stolen, or accidentally left behind.

M.G. searched for a word that would summarize what he was seeing emerge in these fields, and all around us. He imagined a coming together of Orwell’s Big Brother, microchip implants, radio frequency identification devices (RFID), Global Positioning Systems (GPS), apocalypticism, and Nietzsche’s idea of the ultimate, superior, progressed human form, the Übermensch. On the spot, he called it “uberveillance.” The neologism soon entered the lexicon.

Uberveillance is fundamentally an above and beyond, exaggerated, almost omnipresent 24/7 electronic surveillance. It is not only always on but also always with you. Like an airplane flight recorder, a personal “black box.” Or, if you prefer, it is like Big Brother on the inside looking out.

This kind of bodily and hyper-invasive monitoring is not risk-free, and won’t necessarily make us safer and more secure. Omnipresence in the physical world does not equate with omniscience. Despite their tremendous data gathering capacities, there is a real concern that implantable devices will breed misinformation, misinterpretation, and information manipulation, all of which may lead to misrepresentations of the truth.

In our original conception, uberveillance was multidimensional. A tiny RFID transponder, implanted in the arm, would connect with sensors such as accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers. Uberveillance would use GPS and other technologies to allow designated authorities to understand the who, where, when, why, what, and how. We imagined government authorities would use it in the context of civilian, commercial, or national security—as a find-me alert. For example, monitoring people living with dementia or on extended supervision orders; tracking suspects in crimes, parolees, or notable public figures or dignitaries; and allowing access to secured buildings or rooms.

Yet despite the perceived benefits, even in the early 2000s, we couldn’t ignore the sinister undertones. How far would this go? Was uberveillant technology too alluring—difficult to resist because of its ease of use? What if it did not always work as it should, proving subject to tampering, data bias, and inference?

Constructing a verifiable digital end-to-end cyber-physical-social reality is impossible. There is no substitute for real life. Recorded data—incomplete, from multiple sources and without necessary quality checks—are not always accurate. Global positioning coordinates may lack precision when tall buildings obstruct a line-of-sight between the handheld or wearable technology and satellites. There are black spots in networks when an individual leaves an urban space, or moves between locations.

Furthermore, uberveillant systems leave out context. An image of an altercation may seem to provide evidence that implicates an individual, but snapshots of moments prior may show that they were acting in self-defense. Near real time is not real time. This is the great flaw in uberveillance.

Without capturing context, an accurate chronicle of activity is unattainable. And a flawed chronicle of activity can be devastating. GPS coordinates with a lag may tie a user to a suspicious event; facial recognition algorithms may identify a passerby as an individual of interest; implants that have been spoofed may appear in multiple hit lists, cloaking the identity of the bona fide individual at a given location; and biometric data could be interpreted to indicate distress when a subject may simply have been in reflection.

Your cell service provider or smartwatch manufacturer might assure you they’ll only use your data for research. But they may also inform you they have no control over how their partners might use the biometric and other data downstream. Your wearable data could end up in an AI model one day, or used by a prospective employer during a hiring process, or be presented as evidence in a court of law. The wrong data might render you unemployable, uninsurable, and ineligible for government benefits. In an instant you could become persona non grata.

Uberveillance advances the idea of “us” versus a series of “thems”—data brokers, Big Tech companies, government agencies, hackers, secret intelligence, first responders, caregivers, and others. In doing so, “they” have power over how others perceive us and use our data, potentially building multiple black boxes containing intricate profiles—limited accounts of what makes us “us.” This technology is not free, and will not set us free.

Today, as in 2006, this strikes us as technology’s natural trajectory. From the moment the first programmable general purpose digital computer, the ENIAC, was dubbed “an electronic brain,” it was always going to fuse with the body at its ultimate technological potential.

The paradox of all this pervasive vigilance is that the more security we hope for, the less we get.

“Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull,” Orwell ominously wrote in 1984. And yet uberveillance threatens that too: An embedded “smart” black box in the human body would encroach on a last fragment of private space. An internal closed-circuit television feed could bring about the most dehumanizing of prospects—a total loss of control and dignity, if used to surveil thoughts, rituals, habits, activities, appetites, urges, and movements. Such dystopian scenarios are no longer sci-fi imaginings alone.

This has ontological implications, directly to do with the nature of being. It could represent the consequential deconstruction of what it means to be human, to have agency, and to make choices for oneself. If uberveillance is to expand and forge ahead on its current path, the scenarios are countless and potential consequences staggering. At that point, we will have surrendered more than just our privacy.

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Would it be a population of about 30,000? By that definition, two of the three local leaders on the panel—former West Sacramento mayor Christopher Cabaldon and Coachella councilmember Megan Beaman Jacinto—live in communities of approximately 50,000, and would not qualify.

Gonzales city manager René Mendez, whose Central Coast town has a population of just 9,000, said that more important than a number is the necessity of fostering “connections and intimacy” among the people who live there. Though he’d be hard-pressed to consider a community of 30,000 a small town, he said, a town or city with a population the size of West Sacramento and Coachella can still feel intimate—and thus, by that definition, be a “small town.”

Jacinto and Cabaldon agreed that the “small town” designation is relative, noting that it depends where you are. Hewing closer to Mendez’s definition, Cabaldon said that you know you’re in a small town if a fellow resident comes to a city council meeting and you know them not from the organization that they’re representing but because of a different relationship—through something like school or church or the neighborhood.

Marcum, the moderator, quoted Aristotle, who considered a place the right size if “the citizens should know each other and know what kind of people they are.” Turning to Mendez, she asked, “Does Gonzales meet that criteria?”

Unequivocally, “yes,” Mendez replied. The city even refers to its way of doing things as “the Gonzales way,” which he clarified, “doesn’t mean you always agree, just that you’re together, and you’re able to work through some issues.” That comes with downsides, too. For instance, Mendez was working to unveil a new multifamily housing project. A week before its unveiling, the community came out against it—with friends, relatives, and teachers all reaching out directly with unanticipated concerns. “It was a very uncomfortable conversation, but we worked through it,” he said, one that was discussed with emotion everywhere from the liquor store to the barber shop to the post office.

Cabaldon noted that West Sacramento—which nearly doubled in size over his two decades in office—wants “to be a small-town vibe with big-city amenities.” The challenge he found was that “the interconnectedness that we feel isn’t always completely real.” It can be easy to go to certain places and meetings and think you’ll see everyone, but then you miss communities within the community. “I wasn’t really running into recent immigrants from Laos, folks from the Ukrainian community,” he recalled.

This is the similar to one of the challenges facing Coachella, which is currently about 97 percent Latino. The city has doubled in population over the past 15 years and continues to grow, which makes for challenging city planning, said Jacinto. “There is a way of thinking in Coachella—that I share to some extent—which is, as we develop Coachella into the future, we want to ensure that it’s preserving spaces and culture and history for the people that live there now,” she said. “At the same time, about 70 percent of our city is undeveloped, so to speak, agricultural land that’s really ripe for development.” This land could mean opportunities—or challenges that push residents out. Neighbors hold different possible futures for the city in many directions, from the wealthier, larger cities of Indian Wells, Rancho Mirage, and Palm Springs to the working-class neighborhoods of incorporated communities in the more rural eastern Coachella Valley. “We have to be really careful in balancing [our] thoughts and dreams,” said Jacinto.

Turning to Cabaldon, Marcum asked, “Did [West Sacramento] want to be Sacramento, or did it always say, we want to keep an identity as a separate thing that we are?”

Both, said Cabaldon—residents wanted amenities and improvements, but they also didn’t want change. “Very few small towns want to grow just to grow,” he said. Regarding neighboring Sacramento, he noted that anyone who wanted to move there could, but as a politician, he got to have the best of both worlds. “I can draft behind the big cities when it matters and focus on maintaining and building out a small-town place,” he said. If you want to do something, even about a problem as big as climate change, you can open your office door and yell to your colleagues and make a plan. Which isn’t to say small towns are perfect. He joked that you could also have a situation where, say, there are four city councilmembers total—and one hates another because he stole his high school prom date. (When asked if this was a true story, Cabaldon laughed and said he was not referring to the current city council.)

“You don’t have to go through a lot of hoops to get something done,” Mendez joined in, speaking to a plus of small-town governance. “The key is to have partnerships.” In Gonzales, the youth council galvanized the community to figure out how to help young people facing mental health issues during the pandemic. Acting on the recommendations of these local teenagers, he said, the city council and school board came together to create a wraparound mental health approach and fund a social worker to support young people in crisis.

On the other end of the spectrum, small communities are often under-resourced and underrepresented in government. “Can you talk about how small is maybe too small and what the challenges there are?” asked Marcum.

In addition to working within Coachella, Jacinto advocates for unincorporated communities in the eastern rural Coachella Valley. These places, which exist primarily because farmworkers couldn’t find affordable housing elsewhere, lack basic resources like clean drinking water and septic systems. They’ve been forced to innovate, developing some of the state’s first point-of-use community water filtration systems and new regulations for mobile home utilities.

Small size necessitates and often facilitates innovation, the panelists agreed. Gonzales recently made universal broadband free to all its residents, and West Sacramento instituted universal preschool 18 years ago and has made free college tuition possible for every high school senior.

“In a smaller town you can imagine actually solving a problem,” said Cabaldon. “In a bigger city, it’s, ‘Let’s adopt a 25-year plan to do X.’” Small-town leaders know they can’t leave anyone behind, he joked, because you might run into that person at a soccer game next weekend.

Marcum then turned the discussion over to audience questions, submitted via a live YouTube chat.

One person wanted to know: How can you create a cultural center for a town?

Mendez said it’s about watching where your community gathers and what places they revolve around. “It’s observing your community, listening, and then you try to activate around that,” he said. In Gonzales, for example, they passed a sales tax to fund a new community center near the school—because it was identified as a place where people were already going.

Another viewer asked: What was the most innovative thing the panelists had seen come out of a small town?

Jacinto said that Coachella was “the first city in the nation to ban private prisons” and also the only place that instituted “hazard hero pay for farmworkers” in the pandemic—an extra $4 an hour for four months.

Viewers also wanted to know how to keep and attract young people to small towns. Creating extension campuses of larger higher educational institutions, said Mendez and Cabaldon, has been helpful.

Listening to the panelists discuss the reasons why people want to come or return to small towns, Marcum noted near the end of the discussion that it felt like the panelists were covering the things that make life good. Summing it up, she said: “You need basic necessities, you need opportunity that makes your children come home, you need fun, you need a place to live, and you need a place where everybody meets.”

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On Tuesday, University of Pennsylvania sociologist Steve Viscelli, author of The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, visited Zócalo with Issues in Science and Technology senior editor Lisa Margonelli to consider how automated trucking might transform American life.

The Twitter Live conversation explored the promise of automated trucking—from potentially eliminating thousands of trucking-related deaths and injuries to making shipping much faster and cheaper to improving the industry’s outsized impact on the environment. For instance, Viscelli noted that automated trucks can accelerate and brake more efficiently than human drivers, and they can be designed for specific uses to make their trips even more energy efficient (unlike trucks that must vacillate between city and highway driving). And automated trucks have capabilities like “platooning,” where self-driving trucks travel close together in aerodynamically efficient packs.

But for all of automated trucking’s promises, there are as many questions about labor protections for the humans who will still be needed in the cockpit. Increasing automation has been harmful for drivers as a whole, Viscelli explained. From new surveillance measures imposed on drivers to the steep decline in truckers’ pay following deregulation of the trucking industry in the 1980s, the last few decades have been hard for those behind the wheel. “Essentially we’ve seen 40 years of technology deskilling the job and making it worse,” Viscelli said.

Viscelli, who spent six months as a long-distance truck driver himself, described the intense lifestyle and learning curve of the job. “You’re out on the road for two to three weeks at a time at least, you’re working sometimes in excess of a hundred hours a week—your entire day, 24 hours a day, is timed to the loads that you’re hauling,” he said. Speaking to the future of trucking, Viscelli concluded, state and federal lawmakers must work to protect workers and develop a comprehensive set of policies that respond to what we want our freight system to look like.

Quoted with Steve Viscelli:

“We would not be talking about self-driving trucks right now if it had not been for DARPA, and for the Defense Department’s interest in self-driving trucks. This is technology that sits on decades of investment in computer science and sensors and other sorts of technologies that are vital to this that were made possible through public funding. … [Today] we’re essentially looking at these threats to truckers’ jobs that resulted from our tax dollars being used to solve a military problem, and now that it’s ready for potential commercialization, of course the private sector has stepped in to try to bring these things to market, and of course, profit for themselves off it.”

Watch the full conversation below:

We’re live! Join Zócalo and @ISSUESinST to discuss “How Will Robot Trucks Change American Life?” with @LisaMargonelli and @SociologyatPenn prof Steve Viscelli: https://t.co/FsJpI6Ljgy

— Zócalo Public Square (@ThePublicSquare) January 19, 2021

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“The premise of this whole conversation is that higher education needs to be transformed,” said the evening’s moderator, Jennifer Ruark, deputy managing editor of The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Why,” she asked, “is there such a deep and extensive need for change?”

Arizona State University President Michael M. Crow voiced his concern about the classism that’s infected America’s colleges and universities. “One of the things we have messed up in higher education is that we have allowed ourselves to be socially hierarchically structured in a ranked system of status,” said Crow, who is also the co-author of The Fifth Wave: The Evolution of American Higher Education. “That is deeply and negatively impacting our society and it affects everything, and so we’ve got to figure out how to fix that.”

If one of the problems, Ruark said, is that the current system is built to reinforce competition among colleges instead of collaboration, “how do you overcome those forces in order to collaborate more?”

“There are enough seats in American higher education for every student who is qualified,” said Pomona College President G. Gabrielle Starr. She pointed to the common application, which allows students to apply to many colleges easily, as one example of how colleges have created an artificial sense of scarcity. “What we have to do is protect the ability of every kind of institution to fill those seats and give the best education. That is really my concern,” she said.

Joseph I. Castro, the former president of Fresno State and newly minted chancellor of California State University (CSU)—and a first-generation college graduate himself—agreed. “I do think there is a place for students who want access to higher education. We just need to work together to ensure that those who are place-bound, like those I used to serve in the Central Valley, that they have a place to go.” Castro said.

One of his goals is to enroll more first-generation students and families in the CSU system. “There are so many … in California and throughout the country that have not yet been touched by higher education.” But he is concerned about the pipeline to get them there. “I worry a lot about men of color.” he continued. “Because even as we’ve seen more students of color come to CSU, the number of males of color have not increased, and I do think that has something to do with how we’re educating our students in K–12.”

In what ways, Ruark asked the panelists, has the pandemic made them rethink higher education?

Starr said that Pomona professors have told her that the past 10 months have given them a better sense of who their students are. “They see their students in their homes, where they study,” she said. “You learn so much more about a student by being where they are rather than the student having to be where you are.”

Castro spoke to the hardships experienced by students, faculty and staff. “I can feel the stress,” he said. On the other hand, he added, CSU has also found new ways forward. “We’ve basically pivoted 80,000 courses virtually in just a few days,” he said—a “silver lining” to the pandemic.

Crow also spoke to the way the pandemic’s challenges have stretched ASU to grow. “We’re not even the same institution we were a year ago,” he said. “I’m optimistic about the ways in which we can be even more innovative in the future after going through this experience.”

A robust audience question and answer session—with questions submitted via live chat—addressed a range of issues. Why, asked one audience member, does America lag behind other countries in social mobility—and have colleges elsewhere done a better job of addressing this problem? “There’s a tremendous system of social mobility [in America], but one that has been lagging as our economy has become more mature and aged,” said Crow, referring to the last 40 years. “We have to go back and rethink this.”

Another audience member asked whether there’s a path to one California higher education system, to which Castro replied, “I am seeing silos break down.”

Ruark wrapped up the evening by asking the panelists a hypothetical: If you could wave a magic wand, what’s one change you’d make in higher education?

“No more rankings based on inputs,” said Crow. Changing the way schools are evaluated would create “massive change.”

Castro called attention to the thousands of Dreamers across the country who have remained in the U.S. thanks to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program and lack the financial support necessary to access higher education. “On top of my list is support for our Dreamers,” he said.

Starr finished off the wish list by touching on another group in need of more support: community college students. “[I’d] make it as easy as possible for students to go from community colleges to four-year colleges across every single state,” she said, “so that they can begin to maximize their educational attainment.”

The post Can America’s Status-Obsessed Universities Figure Out a New, More Inclusive Way Forward? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On Tuesday, former DARPA director Arati Prabhakar, who is the CEO and founder of the new nonprofit Actuate, visited Zócalo with Issues in Science and Technology editor-in-chief Daniel Sarewitz to discuss what it takes to create society-changing leaps forward in innovation and technology and overcome one of the most challenging periods in our nation’s history.

Their conversation ranged from the U.S.’s strength in biomedical research and its speed in developing a COVID-19 vaccine, to the tradeoffs between new knowledge created by data collection at scale and its accompanying ethical problems.

Central to the discussion was Prabhakar’s emphasis on redefining the purpose of innovation, which she argues should not only be tasked with creating new products and services, but also implementing changes in practice and policy. She stressed the need to focus research and development efforts toward societal problems, citing the potential for new data architectures capable of preserving privacy while still remaining useful in a research capacity as one example.

After the panelists discussed the DARPA philosophy of solutions-focused research and development—an area of relative weakness for the U.S.—Prabhakar outlined why, in our current innovation landscape, philanthropy may be more effective than current market-driven and governmental approaches to solve for our most pressing societal challenges, such as access to education and healthcare and climate change.

In closing, Prabhakar shared what she considers to be the most essential—and most challenging—element to groundbreaking innovation: creating opportunities for innovators to reflect on, and solve for the ethical and societal implications of the technologies they develop.

Quoted with Arati Prabhakar:

“Our innovation system is very good at doing national security, biomedicine, basic research at universities, information technology. That’s what the half a trillion dollars a year of R&D in the U.S. is just cranking at. And none of those problems or challenges have gone away—it’s all stuff that needs to happen. But what does that have to do with the problems that we weren’t innovating for, like access to opportunity or public health or all the dark issues that come with the glamor and wonder of the information revolution—from trust to privacy—to issues like climate change. The massive number of issues that are going to determine how our story turns out. Innovation isn’t going to single-handedly solve any of these, but it’s hard to see how we’re going to succeed at these challenges without innovating.”

Watch the full conversation below:

Join us and @ISSUESinST to discuss “Can Innovation Really Solve Society’s Problems?” with @ActuateOrg founder Arati Prabhakar and ISSUES editor-in-chief Daniel Sarewitz. https://t.co/O9ee8U6Y3l

— Zócalo Public Square (@ThePublicSquare) December 8, 2020

The post Can Innovation Really Solve Society’s Problems? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The first successful de-extinction occurred long before the advent of CRISPR. The Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica), a type of wild mountain goat commonly known as a bucardo, once was a common sight in the French Pyrenees and northern Spain. By the late 19th century, hunting had reduced the species to fewer than 100 individuals. When the last one, a female known as Celia, died in January 2000, the Pyrenean ibex joined the estimated 5 billion species that have become extinct since life arose on this planet. But in this case, three years later, on July 30, 2003, a team of French and Spanish scientists gathered around a pregnant domestic goat and delivered by cesarean section a live kid genetically identical to the extinct bucardo. For the next seven minutes (after which the animal died from respiratory failure), the Pyrenean ibex was extinct no more.

The extinct bucardo was returned to life through the well-established technology of cloning through nuclear transfer. This technique, in which a cell containing the complete genome of the extinct species is inserted into the egg of a living animal, was used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996. But now, with CRISPR, de-extinction does not require a live or frozen cell from the extinct species. Instead, all scientists need are organic remnants—such as pieces of bone—that contain fragments of DNA. Those fragments allow geneticists to discover the complete genome of the extinct animal (a process scientists refer to as “sequencing”). Once they have this “recipe” for the extinct species, CRISPR enables scientists to edit the DNA of its closest living relative to create a genome that, as edited, approximates the genetic code of the extinct species. Think of the living animal’s DNA as version 2.0 of a piece of software: the goal is to get back to version 1.0. You compare all of the millions of lines of code to spot differences, and then painstakingly edit the lines with differences to restore the code to its original state.

Once the DNA has been edited to reintroduce the key traits of the extinct plant or animal, the edited DNA is inserted into the nucleus of a reproducing cell. The resulting individual may not be genetically identical to the extinct species, but the key traits that made the extinct species unique are reintroduced, and the resulting animal or plant has the potential to be the functional equivalent of its extinct relative. So, for example, the scientists working on the de-extinction of the woolly mammoth (which last roamed the Earth about 4,000 years ago) are starting with the DNA of an Asian elephant, and then using CRISPR to reintroduce the traits that made the woolly mammoth unique, such as the metabolism, subcutaneous fat, and shaggy coat that allowed it to survive in the sub-Arctic tundra.

But why do this? Most proponents of de-extinction make an argument based on ecological restoration. For example, large herbivores such as the woolly mammoth played a critical role—through trampling, grazing, and fertilization—in the maintenance of the grassy cap that insulated the permafrost of the great northern tundra. When these large grazing beasts disappeared, the grassy cap declined, allowing the thawing of the permafrost below and consequential release of massive volumes of previously trapped greenhouse gases, significantly accelerating global warming. To reverse this effect, Russian scientists in a remote part of Eastern Siberia are working on an effort called “Pleistocene Park.” Their vision is a restored Mammoth Steppe—a place where the Siberian permafrost is again insulated by treeless grasslands extending to the horizon in all directions, on which vast herds of wild horses, bison, and de-extincted mammoths graze in symbiotic partnership with the restored cold-weather savanna.

Another de-extinction currently being attempted for purposes of ecological restoration is that of the passenger pigeon, once North America’s most abundant bird species, with billions of individuals as late as the 1870s. The entire population was shot, netted, hunted, or otherwise slaughtered by humans. In 1914, the last individual, Martha, died in a Cincinnati zoo. The consequences of the rapid extinction of a keystone species at this scale are not precisely understood, but we know enough to expect them to be widespread and profound. For example, the loss of the passenger pigeon caused disruption of the forest regeneration cycle and significant declines in forest health. It also may have precipitated the proliferation of Lyme disease. “Re-wilding” proponents such as Stewart Brand’s Long Now Foundation also point out that any de-extinction enhances the biodiversity that is the foundation for healthy ecosystems.

One of the other justifications for pursuing de-extinction is a moral one: possession of the power to bring back lost species implies a moral duty to use that power, at least in the case of species whose extinctions were caused by human beings. In other words, we have a duty to right our prior wrong. It is notoriously difficult to estimate the number of species whose disappearance can be blamed primarily on human interference. But all scientists agree that humanity’s greed, recklessness, and negligence have greatly accelerated the natural pace of extinction, harming both the planet and ourselves.

The enthusiasm of de-extinction’s supporters is nearly matched by the skepticism of its detractors. Many of the issues are practical, such as doubts that man can create populations with sufficient numbers and genetic diversity to be sustainable in the wild; concerns that the de-extincted animals are neither genetically identical to the extinct species nor benefit from the non-genetic drivers (such as parental nurturing) that determined their behaviors; and arguments that plants and animals created based on ancient genomes will not flourish in contemporary conditions. For example, the passenger pigeon, if revived, would face a world in which the American chestnut, which provided a major part of its habitat and food, has disappeared.

Conservation biologists are split on the matter. Some argue that belief in the possibility of de-extinction creates a moral hazard, opening the door for those benefiting economically from the destruction of habitat to argue that even if a species is lost, it can always be “brought back.” Others simply say that in the current era of human-caused mass extinction, society should prioritize those endangered species that can be saved rather than dreaming of returning lost ones to life. They argue that CRISPR, instead of being deployed for de-extinction, should be used to increase the genetic diversity of a surviving endangered population, increasing its odds of survival.

One thing is certain. Like the gift of fire to humanity by Prometheus, the cat is out of the bag. Efforts by governments and NGOs to limit or control use of genetic technologies—such as the 2020 guidelines issued by an international commission convened by the U.S. National Academy of Medicine, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and the U.K.’s Royal Society—are unlikely to deter further experiments involving the editing of the heritable human genome. What scientists can do, at least some, somewhere, will do.

And why do I argue that the result may be the most important thing to happen on the planet for 4.5 billion years? Since the dawn of life on Earth, species have developed through the process of random genetic mutation followed by natural selection—by evolution. But from this moment forward, that has changed. CRISPR-Cas9 gives us the ability to hack evolution. Rather than waiting for mutations to occur randomly, we can amend our genetic inheritance (or that of the other life forms). This means the substitution of human desire and choice for the process of natural selection. Is this inevitably the disaster that many predict?

Humanity has a long tradition of making interventions designed to improve, restore, and steward the natural world. Virtually no agricultural or horticultural species has been unaffected by hybridization, and most of those altered plants are now valued citizens of the natural world. Wheat, grapefruit, and peppermint all resulted from interspecies breeding (as did, on other branches of the tree of life, cattle, bison, African bees, and honeybees). Genetic editing is, without a doubt, a new and different tool, but the result, species created by man (rather than by the operation of natural selection), is not.

Those instinctively suspicious of these types of interventions in nature tend to view the natural world as static. But we now understand that nature is not some stable, passive stage on which the dance of life plays out. Instead, the relationship between an environment and the life it hosts is highly interactive. Species adapt to their habitat and then change it. From the moment Homo sapiens emerged during the Middle Paleolithic, we inserted ourselves into this dance by transforming habitats and the organisms they supported. Population growth and technology mean that the scale of our impact is now global. By the act of conceiving the current geological era as the Anthropocene, where human activity is the dominant influence on the planet, we have started to come to grips with the fact that we are now the creator, and no longer merely the created. It’s a responsibility that cannot be dodged. Human moral and ethical frameworks must catch up to our technology. Will we use our power in selfish, shortsighted, and reckless ways—or instead dedicate ourselves to deploying the new technologies to mitigate our past wrongs and reestablish a healthy Earth?

Of course, caution is always important. But too often, timidity and hostility to progress disguise themselves under the guise of prudence. If tools like CRISPR allow us to replace keystone species like the woolly mammoth and passenger pigeon in order to keep greenhouse gases in the tundra or to restore healthy ecosystems, then we should use them. We cannot escape choice through inaction. Now that we have the technology for de-extinction, the failure to use it to heal the planet is also a choice for which we will be held accountable by future generations.

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