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“WORLD BANK SHOULD NOT CONSIDER LOANS TO IRAN AT THIS TIME” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H3302-H3306 on May 17, 2000.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
WORLD BANK SHOULD NOT CONSIDER LOANS TO IRAN AT THIS TIME
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Shimkus). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 6, 1999, the gentleman from California (Mr. Sherman) is recognized for 60 minutes.
Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, tomorrow the World Bank meets. We will not have the huge demonstrations of a month ago. No one will be comparing this meeting here in Washington, D.C., to the events in Seattle. But they may play a more important role on whether the World Bank and its sister organization, the IMF, continue to have the support, precarious as it is, of the American people, and whether the World Bank continues to exist and foster in its present form.
Mr. Speaker, I am among the strongest advocates in this House of our foreign aid program, our involvement in the world, and, up until now, our support for the World Bank and the IMF.
Mr. Speaker, just a year-and-a-half ago over $500,000 was spent in a campaign designed exclusively to vilify me personally for supporting the IMF and the World Bank. I continue to support those organizations, yet I am not sure that that support can continue for long, because while I am a proud supporter of world development and of our foreign aid and of our efforts to try to have all of humanity live in dignity, I do not know if I can continue to be a proud supporter of the World Bank.
You see, the World Bank garners its support from the community here in America that supports human rights and the dignity of men and women, and yet it will make a decision tomorrow that will indicate whether it deserves the support of those who are concerned with human rights.
For one case, in one nation, has garnered the imagination of the world when it comes to human rights. I speak of the show trial being conducted in the City of Shiraz, Iran, in which 13 Jews face the absurd charge of being spies for the United States and Israel.
Mr. Speaker, let me first give you and the House some background. The Jewish community in Iran is 2,500 years old. It arose out of the Babylonian captivity after the destruction of the first Temple. It is the oldest Jewish community anywhere in the world except Israel itself.
For 2,500 years Jews lived in peace and in loyalty to whichever regime governed Persia, now Iran. In 1979 the Iranian revolution led to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and since then that Islamic Republic has found it necessary, or at least has decided, to oppress religious minorities. Their treatment of those who practice the Baha'i faith is well-known and is deplorable. For those who have practiced the Jewish faith, some 17 have been killed after trumped-up charges over the last 20 years, roughly one per year. It seems this is a regime that finds it necessary to keep this small Jewish community under control through terror and fear. I say a small Jewish community, because this community, which once numbered over 100,000, has now dwindled to 25,000 as people who have fled their ancestral homelands, homelands that trace their ancestors back for 2,500 years. They have left under the oppression, but 25,000 remain.
But apparently the Islamic Republic of Iran is no longer satisfied with killing one of its Jewish citizens roughly every year, and so about a year-and-a-half ago it went out and arrested 13 and charged them with espionage.
Now, why are these charges so absurd? Well, Mr. Speaker, we have grown up here in the United States, a multi-ethnic country, where people of all backgrounds and all religions are found in every part of our government, including our national security agencies. From the CIA to the Pentagon, our national security agencies look like America. So, anyone of any ethnicity, could, if things turned out wrong, grow up to be a spy.
We have British-American spies, we allegedly have Chinese-American spies, there have been Jewish-American spies, and that is because people of all ethnicities and religions are found in the agencies that contain the most sensitive national security secrets.
Iran is a very different country. No one of the Jewish faith is allowed near anything of national security significance. Now, I know the CIA occasionally makes a mistake, but to think that the CIA would, over a period of years, hire not one, but 13 individuals in Iran, each a member of a tiny group prohibited by their religion from getting anywhere near anything the CIA would want to know, it stretches all credulity to believe that the CIA would do that and that the United States could remain a superpower if that is how it pursued its national security and intelligence efforts.
These charges are not only absurd, but the trials that began less than a month ago are also absurd. They are modeled after the trials of Joseph Stalin, trials devoid of public attendance, trials in which the prosecutor is always the judge, trials in which there is virtually no information, no evidence, except the hollow conclusionary and detailless confessions of coward confessions. Nothing has been proven at trial, except that the defendants are afraid.
The information that they would have had access to would have been only information observable by anyone walking the streets of an Iranian city, and, of course, diplomats of countries, both friendly to and hostile to the Islamic Republic of Iran, walk those streets every day, every month, observing the same things, and with diplomatic immunity while they do so.
So this trial has captured the attention of those in the world who care about human rights. Maybe it is because 13 people are so obviously innocent. Maybe it is because the trials so closely resemble those of the dark ages of Joseph Stalin. Maybe it is because the defendants are a remnant of an historically significant and dwindling community.
But where does this leave the World Bank? The World Bank will consider tomorrow a package of loans to the Islamic Republic, and we are told that these loans will be used for humanitarian purposes. But let us remember that money is fungible. The money the Islamic Republic does not spend on building a sewer system in Tehran can be used to develop weapons, to field an army or to increase the reach of its forces of oppression and interrogation.
Not only that, but this nearly one-quarter of a billion dollars in contracts will go only to those contractors and organizations in Iran tied to the dominant faction of the Iranian government, so not a penny will be spent that does not inure to those who are politically connected to the same government conducting these show trials in Shiraz.
Now, we are told that the World Bank must make its decisions independent of politics, but one cannot ignore the results of a decision to be made tomorrow in Washington, especially when that decision does not have to be made tomorrow. It can and should be deferred.
But beyond the human rights concerns, there is another issue that the World Bank should focus on. It may grow out of the human rights concerns, but it is a separate issue. No financial institution should be allowed to make a loan that imperils the success of the institution itself, and the World Bank, if it makes this loan, is sowing the seeds of its own impairment. American participation in the World Bank is critical to its survival, or at least to its success, and that participation depends upon the consent and acquiescence of a restive American public.
The support for that participation comes from those who care about human rights, and to fund this loan this week is to turn to those in America who care about human rights and declare that the World Bank is on the other side; that the World Bank is happy to be an instrument, an instrument, of oppression.
Now, there are those who will disagree with what the effect of this World Bank loan will be in Iran, but they do not speak with any expertise about what effect this loan will have on America and American support for the World Bank. Those who understand how foreign policy is made in a superpower, where the people are supreme, and most of them do not care very often about foreign policy, those who are involved in foreign policy and in the political process should warn the World Bank, as I do tonight, that a loan of this type undermines and corrodes the very thin pillars of support that the World Bank and the IMF have in the American public.
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If you say no to those Americans who care about the 13 Jews in Iran, if you say no to those Americans who care about human rights, then who will stand up for the IMF and the World Bank when the voices of isolationism and the voices of just spending less money on foreign affairs, when those voices bellow that it is time for America to reduce its commitment?
I am not saying that an approval of these loans will lead to street demonstrations reminiscent of Seattle. It will not. I am not saying that the State Department or the Treasury Department will talk about cutting back its support or participation in the IMF and the World Bank if these loans are approved tomorrow, for there will be no such immediate effect. But those who study how foreign policy is made in a democratic country, where the people are supreme but only a few of them focus on these issues, will understand that over the next 3 years or 5 years or 8 years American support for the IMF and the World Bank are subject to corrosion if this loan goes forward.
Certainly those who are voting at the World Bank tomorrow need to give the World Bank staff a chance to analyze these issues in greater depth, and certainly the loans themselves and the details of the loans need to be reviewed in greater depth than has been done to date. When the World Bank makes a loan, it tries to avoid obvious corruption, knowing that that is not only a waste of its money but a waste of its political capital.
These loans will be under a level of scrutiny beyond those that the public has imposed on any other World Bank decision. Certainly these loans need to be reviewed for efficiency and absence of corruption at a higher level than the World Bank has ever analyzed loans, because here, here, not only does the World Bank stand to see a portion of its quarter billion dollars hijacked and diverted but it has a chance to have each detail of these loans and their expenditures reviewed with the greatest possible public attention, particularly in the United States.
Certainly the board members, the shareholders at the World Bank, would be well advised, let the staff have some time. Let us see whether the details of these loans meet the higher standard than the World Bank, for its own interest, needs to impose on loans that will receive a greater level of public scrutiny than any other loans have ever faced, and let the World Bank staff review whether that institution can long endure and long survive as an organization with the active and enthusiastic support of the people of the United States if it acts precipitously. If the Bank votes tomorrow to ignore these concerns, it takes an irrevocable action or an action that appears to be irrevocable, that could eat away at the fabric of the Bank itself. If instead the Bank votes to delay considering these or if these loans are simply not on the agenda and no one puts them there, then the Bank can consider these actions in light of the concerns I have brought to the attention of this House and I hope to the attention of the Bank shareholders as well.
Permanent Normal Trade with China
Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I was originally scheduled to address the House for only 5 minutes. The House, in its rules, in its wisdom, has instead given me a full hour. Whether that was a wise decision of this body remains to be seen, but it is an hour I plan to use to discuss some other issues, issues that I have not mapped out in detail and so I will apologize to the Speaker if my remarks are not as tightly phrased and as well organized as I would like them to be.
I would now like to address the same subject addressed by the prior speaker, the vote we will deal with on granting permanent most favored nation status to China.
Mr. Speaker, I am pro-engagement. I am against isolationism and I am against protectionism. I am against this agreement. This agreement has enough in the way of disadvantages in three different categories so that any one of those categories of disadvantage is reason enough to vote it down. If it was only for the adverse effect that this agreement will have on human rights in China, we should vote no. If it was only for the adverse impact that this agreement is going to have on American workers and on American exports and on the balance of trade of the United States, we should vote no. And if it was only for the adverse effect this agreement is going to have on our ability to deal with the national security issues that confront us when we deal with China, we should vote no.
Let us first talk about human rights, or let me first talk about human rights.
This deal has nothing in it to protect labor rights, environmental standards, but we are told that the dissidents in China are for this agreement.
Well, most of the dissidents I have heard of are against it. The overwhelming majority of those who have done time in the Chinese gulag are against this agreement, and certainly the overwhelming majority of those who have done time in the Chinese prison system and are free to speak their minds are against this agreement.
For many months, this country debated whether the father of Elian was free to speak his mind while he lived in Cuba, and so we insisted that he come here and announce, with his child and with his new wife, what their views were and what they wanted for their son. And yet, those who questioned the accuracy, the credibility of statements made by someone living under Fidel Castro seem to accept at face value the statements made by people in China today, people who have been subject to interrogation, some, a few, subject to imprisonment before, as if they could not be subject to that again.
There are those in China who have had the courage to stand up in the past who may not want to risk their freedom over this particular agreement and who may, therefore, have made statements consistent with their own freedom, notwithstanding the fact that those same individuals have in the past had the courage to risk imprisonment where they felt the issue more strongly, or where they felt they were at a time in their lives when they were willing to take such a personal risk.
So the dissidents are, for the most part, indecipherable. Some say one thing. Some say another. Some are here in the United States to speak their mind freely and some are subject to imprisonment tomorrow if they say the wrong thing today, but we are told that this agreement is not only supported by the dissidents, and sometimes the word ``dissident'' is confused with this second group that they refer to as the reformers. The reformers are not the dissidents. The reformers are the elements in power in China that we are told want open markets. They may want open markets. There are members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China that want open markets, but wanting open markets does not mean want human rights. Wanting open markets does not mean abandoning the monopoly on power enjoyed by the Communist Party of China.
There may be different factions in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. There may be different factions in the ruling circles in Beijing, but there is one thing that unites them. So-called reformers, so-called hard-liners are united. They want to see the Communist Party maintain its monopoly on power forever. Reformers just want to do it with a different flavor.
There is one group in China that is free to speak their minds. That is the members of the ruling elite, the members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and they have spoken with a loud voice. They have said this deal helps us achieve our objectives. This deal is good for us. It is indeed good for the ruling classes in China. It is indeed in the interest of maintaining the monopoly power of the Communist Party, because make no mistake about two facts: First, the entire ruling elite is unified, dedicated that its most important objective is maintaining a monopoly on power for themselves. They would not enter into this agreement if it, dare I say it, was for all the tea in China if they thought it would shorten for one day the monopoly on power of the Communist Party of China. So first fact, the ruling elite believes this will lengthen its hold on power. Otherwise they would not be for it.
Second, the ruling elite knows a lot more about holding on to power in China than all of the U.S. experts and all of those who have come to lobby us. There are those who say that China will unravel just like the Soviet Union. I hope that is true. Perhaps long-term it is true, but the Soviet Union did not unravel because of trade with the United States. There was very little trade with the United States. There was no WTO membership for the Soviet Union. It was not that every pair of tennis shoes, every toy and half your shirts came from the Soviet Union in 1985. So if we hold up the Soviet Union's unraveling as a model it does not compel us to accept this deal. If we believe that the Communist Party of China at the highest levels understands their own country, understands holding power in their own country, then we will understand that the agreement will help them do just that.
Second, we need to focus on the human rights of Americans. Now I am told that our economy is doing spectacularly well. Well, it is doing well for many people. Unemployment is down, but many of those people who might have been unemployed just a few years ago today are the proud owners of $6 an hour jobs and $7 an hour jobs. These people should be working in the manufacturing sector in America at $20 and $30 an hour jobs. Export jobs to make machinery and aircraft, et cetera, those are very high-paying jobs in the manufacturing sector. But what kind of jobs has the Chinese Government provided? Through their limitation of our exports, they have provided us with a market smaller than Belgium. That is right. We sell less to China than we do to Belgium, and we do not sell very much to Belgium; $13 billion.
Put another way, the trade deficit with China, $70 billion every year and rising, is six times the size of all of our exports.
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If our exports to China doubled, we would hardly know it. Has anyone come to this floor and said, if we could just increase by a bit our exports to Belgium, that there would be dancing in American streets and a revitalization of every American town? I do not think so. But it is unlikely that there will be even a small increase in American exports to China as a result of this deal.
I know that many have come to this floor and said just the opposite, so let me explain why. We in the United States have lived our entire lives under the rule of law. If the government is going to affect anything in the economy, they had better write a law or a regulation and publish it, and in the absence of a law, in the absence of regulation, we have the right to do what we want as individuals and as companies.
We have lived our lives where published law is very important. So we should be forgiven if, for a moment, we believe that the published law in China is of great significance; that if we could just change their published tariff rates, their published quotas, then everyone in China would be free to buy American goods.
China is not a country that lives under the rule of law. China is a command and control economy. In China, you do not start your own airline just because you want to and then buy American planes just because you think they are the best deal.
In fact, when we look at what we are likely to export to China, we see an incredible level of control of the Communist party of China without any need to have published rules.
We sell airplanes. The party controls the airline. We sell telecommunications systems. The party controls all the buyers for those systems. We sell large factories. We are not going to do a large factory in China over the opposition of the ruling elite.
We do not sell little toys on the street corner to individual consumers. We sell big things, big ticket items. How are we going to sell them? We are only going to sell the quantity that the people in Beijing decide they are willing to allow their country to buy.
Two years ago we sold $14 billion worth of goods. Last year they cut us down to $13 billion. With this agreement, they can, without fear, cut us as low as they want, or at least maintain us where we are, while they increase their sales to the United States, or at least maintain them where they are so that we continue to run $70 billion trade deficits forever.
How are they going to do that? Well, there may be no tariff on American airplanes to China, but the board of the airline might vote not to buy our planes. Can that be taken to WTO court? No. Any enterprise is free to buy or not buy. The fact that the government controls the enterprise does not change that, so we sell only what they decide they want to buy. When I say ``they,'' I mean the political elite.
We want to do telecommunications systems, the same thing. But let us imagine that there is an independent business in China. The board of directors is not dominated by the government or the party. This business wants to import $1 billion worth of American goods. They are the best goods. They are going to get them at the best price.
The published regulations say that the business is free to do so. The director of that business receives just one phone call, one phone call saying, Mr. Businessperson, we know you are planning to conclude a deal to buy $1 billion worth of American goods. But, you know, China has always wanted to restrict the quantity of American goods purchased. We have always run this huge trade surplus with America, and the Communist Party wants to continue that.
So Mr. Businessperson, we know you will decide not to buy the American goods. We know you will make the right decision. We know you will help us punish the American people for what the Communist party would call their meddling, what we would call human rights advocacy.
Mr. Businessperson, we know you will make the right decision because you are well educated. We would hate to think you need to be reeducated.
There is not a single importer in China that is not subject to arrest on trumped up charges if that importer decides to buy American goods against the advice, oral advice, of the Communist party of China. American exports to China are not dependent upon changing the published rules. Those are only for our lawyers to read.
Getting more exports to China depends upon changing the policy of the Communist party, a policy that has been discriminating against American goods for a long time, a policy which has caused them to run a $70 billion trade surplus with us and a significant trade deficit with the rest of the world as they deliberately decide to use the money that we pay them for the tennis shoes to buy goods from Europe and Japan and elsewhere.
Why would they change? Are we going to stop talking about human rights on this floor? Are we going to stop our support for Taiwan? Are we going to ignore the rape of Tibet? I hope not.
But that leads to another concern. We have seen an army, an army of businesspeople and lobbyists come to our offices asking us to give China what China wants in the expectation that these lobbyists will get from China what the lobbyists want.
Well, I do not think our businesses are going to get what they want. I think China, having had a 10- and 20-year policy of discriminating against American goods, at least a 10-year policy, will continue that policy and will do it quite well through the mechanism I have described, and does not need published regulations and tariff rates to achieve the balance of payments that they decide to have.
So if this army of lobbyists feels this year that they must do what China wants in order to have access to the Chinese markets, and they do not get that access, they will be back here next year or the year after saying, whoops, looks like American exports to China are still only $13 billion, but we hear through the grapevine that if only America would stop selling weapons to Taiwan, China will start buying our goods. If only America will stop caring about Tibet, China will start buying our goods.
The same army of lobbyists asking us to do what China wants now will find that what China is asking for now is insufficient to garner them that favored status that causes the Chinese enterprises to buy their goods. They will be back asking us to do more. I shudder to think, will we be asked to ignore Chinese proliferation of nuclear technology to countries like North Korea and Iran? Will we be asked to cut off Taiwan and to lay that island, that democratic island, open to possible invasion, or at least blockade?
I do not know, but I will say this, Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from California (Mr. Berman) from the adjoining district has proposed that we add a provision to this MFN deal that says that China would get its permanent most-favored-nation status, but if they blockade Taiwan or if they invade Taiwan, they lose it.
The pro-China forces have been unwilling to embrace that amendment, an amendment which might gather them the votes they need to pass this deal. I worry about a Chinese embassy or I worry about supporters of China unwilling to even say that we should deny China something if they actually invade or blockade Taiwan.
We will have to see how this develops, but if my colleagues care about Taiwan, at least hold out for this: Deny their vote to those who want to permanently open our markets to China with little real access to theirs, withhold their vote until at least we get a provision that says that Taiwan, if invaded or blockaded, that those actions would lead to an end of most-favored-nation status, also called normal trade relations, with the United States.
Now, Mr. Speaker, recently those who support this deal have come up with a couple of Band-Aids. One of those is called ``antisurge'' provisions. It sounds good. It sounds like at least if there was a sudden flood of Chinese goods from a particular sector, perhaps being sold at cost, dumped on our market, that we would have a special provision to deal with it.
Read the provision. The proposal is simply that the United States, if it saw its workers losing their jobs, would not be free to stop the onslaught of Chinese goods. No. But we would be allowed, look at this tremendous grant of power to us, we would be allowed to appropriate money for education programs and retraining programs for our displaced workers.
I never thought that we lacked the power to appropriate funds to provide help for American workers who are in trouble for one reason or another. I do not think we have to thank Beijing for having the power to do so. It would be nice if the importers would give us some of the money we would need for that, but that is not found in the antisurge provisions.
Second, we are given a second Band-Aid. That second Band-Aid is, more reports about human rights in China, Helsinki Commission style reports. Come to my office, I will show the Members all the reports on human rights in China. They take up a lot of room. There are more organizations issuing more reports all the time. They will turn Members' stomachs as to their content.
Since when is it a major concession to know that there will be reports issued in the future? We know there will be reports. The fact that they will be called Helsinki style, who cares? We could have Los Angeles style reports, Vienna style reports, Rome style reports. We could have semi-annual reports, we could have biannual reports. We have reports.
We will get more reports. All it will do is demonstrate the abuses of human rights happening in China, as to which we have granted the Chinese government an absolute guarantee that they will not lose a penny no matter what they do. No matter what they do to the practicing Christians, Buddhists, and Muslims; no matter what they do to the people of Tibet, they will be hit only with a report. They will not lose access to a single sale of a single pair of tennis shoes in the United States.
So, Mr. Speaker, I turn, as I have already foreshadowed it, to the third reason that we should oppose this deal. Not only does it ensure more power and more tenacity to the Communist party in China, not only does it limit our access, or does it fail to eliminate limits to our access to their market, but finally, it ties our hands when national security issues come up, because if China does something, whether it is providing nuclear weapons or their technology to Iran or blockading Taiwan, our choices will be only twofold. We can declare war, which I do not advise, or we can mail them a scathing report.
Right now we have the most valuable tool. We do not have to just eliminate most-favored-nation status, we can condition it or we can reduce it. Under most-favored-nation status, for example, and I will just use these numbers for an example, not because they are accurate, a country without most-favored-nation status might face a $10 per pair tariff on tennis shoes. China, because it has most-favored-nation status this year, is entitled to bring those tennis shoes in for a $1 tariff.
We in Congress could react to anything China does that threatens the national security of ourselves or our allies by raising that tariff from $1 to $2 or $3 or $4, or eliminating all most-favored-nation status and having it go to $10.
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We have the tools; 43 percent of all Chinese exports come to the United States, and if we can modulate that, if we can impair slightly, or more than slightly, their access to American markets, then we have an abundance of tools to deal with whatever China might do that is offensive to our national security interests.
If, instead, we grant them Most Favored Nation status forever, we lose those tools, and our choices are either war or a scathing letter.
Mr. Speaker, there is one thing on which I agree with the proponents of this agreement; it is better than the status quo. Today we have a
$70 billion trade deficit with China, and this contract, this deal makes it permanent; not a real accomplishment. It is the most lopsided trading relationship in the history of life on earth, a trade deficit six times as large as our exports.
If we were to just continue what we have been doing year after year, it would be just as bad. What we have to do instead is open new negotiations with China, negotiations based on results, not process and procedure, because China is a command and control economy where the procedures are all underground and immune from American inspection.
We need an agreement with China that sets targets that says okay, now the trade deficit is $70 billion, next year we would like it to be $60 billion instead of $80 billion, and that we will modulate our tariffs up on Chinese goods, if necessary, to achieve that goal.
We hope it is not necessary. I am not a protectionist. I am not an isolationist. I hope we do not have to raise our tariffs a single cent on a single pair of tennis shoes, instead China needs to start buying goods from the United States.
If they knew that they would suffer some loss of access to the U.S. market, they would do it. The Chinese, when confronted by real tariffs or the real threat of tariffs, will find that our goods meet their needs, but if they are confronted by a deal that asks them to do nothing more than change the irrelevant regulations that they place on the top of the table and ignores the results of what happens underneath the table, then they will be laughing all the way to even larger trade surpluses with the United States.
Mr. Speaker, let me now bring up, in the waning minutes of this brief presentation, a third topic, a topic that is very important. I have only a bit to say about it, because, frankly, it is a topic that has me stumped. Let me by way of introduction mention that this is a topic that, as far as I know, has never been addressed.
It is a topic that my staff has said, Brad, maybe you do not want to bring that up, because you will be the only one talking about it, you will look weird. It is a topic I ought to bring up, because it is one of the seminal topics. And it is only one of several seminal topics that gets no attention; by seminal topics, I mean one of the topics that really goes to where we are going as a species and what are the dangers, not only to the prosperity of the people in my district and in the country, not only to the issues we fight about here everyday, but to where we are going as humankind.
Now, there are a number of issues that rise to that level of significance that do receive significant attention: nuclear proliferation, environmental catastrophe, overpopulation; all of these threaten humankind's continued prosperous existence on this planet.
There is a fourth issue that does, I think, rise to the level where it can be included, and it is an issue really without a name; I call it the issue of engineered intelligence.
I am going to propose to this House, I hope some of my colleagues will join me, we will have dinner, we will have a drink or two, we will think this over, not maybe a drink or two, we will think over what form this bill should take, but I am planning to introduce a bill calling for the creation of a national commission on engineered intelligence.
There are several different forces coming together or scientific technologies that come under the title of engineered intelligence: First, there is biological engineering which could give us either of two huge ethical dilemmas; one is the prospect that biological engineering will allow us to design some sort of animal, perhaps starting with human DNA and going down, perhaps starting with chimpanzees' DNA and going up, but some sort of animal that is significantly more intelligent than the domestic animals that help us do our work, sheepdogs or watchdogs or seeing eye dogs, considerably smarter than the canines that help us do work, but less intelligent, less self-aware than human beings, and one wonders whether this would be an engineered slave race or just an improvement in today's pooches, a better seeing eye dog, or a sparely self-aware cognitive entity engineered by man to serve man, arguably to be enslaved by man.
Biological engineering can engineer intelligence at a level where some will argue that that entity deserves the protection of our Constitution, and others would argue that that entity is here to serve us in the same humane way that we turn to watchdogs and seeing eye dogs. Likewise, biological engineering can go beyond.
I can see, not today, but we are within 20 years or 30 years or 50 years of when biological engineering cannot only do what I just covered, but could also engineer an intelligence well beyond that of the average person, perhaps well beyond that of any human that has ever lived, and we would have to wonder, do we want our scientists to create a new species that Darwin might think is superior to our own? I do not know.
But it raises ethical issues that are going to take longer to resolve than it will take the science to get there and present those logical issues, those ethical issues to society.
One example is that Einstein a few years before World War II, together with others, brought to the attention of Franklin Roosevelt the great power or potential power of nuclear science and the nuclear bomb, and we had only a few years to consider what that would mean. The science developed more quickly than the ethics, and we had to struggle as a species to figure out, and we are still struggling to figure out what the rules are with regard to the nuclear engineering.
We need to begin thinking now of the ethics and the international agreements and the laws that are going to apply when science gets to where only science fiction is today.
Mr. Speaker, it is not just is biological engineering capable of engineering intelligence; it is also mechanical engineering. One of my friends has said that perhaps the last decision that will be made by the human race is whether our successors are the products of biological engineering or mechanical Silicon Valley engineering; whether our replacements are carbon-based or silicon-based, because I do not know whether it will be biological engineering that engineers intelligence first, or whether intelligence rivaling our own or perhaps surpassing our own will first come from silicon chips; but the same ethical issues arise.
One can imagine a thinking machine capable of spirituality. I believe there is a book that addresses that issue by that title.
One can imagine a thinking machine smarter than any computer, almost self-aware, some would argue properly used by people, others would say properly embraced as the constitutional equal of human beings. Likewise, it is possible for us through silicon engineering, through computer engineering that some day we will invent machines considerably smarter than us who may or may not regard us as their appropriate peers or masters.
I know this is science fiction, but would it not be wise to spend a few years, and a few, in the minds of a few people a lot smarter than I am trying to figure out what we would do if science begins to offer this as an alternative for human kind?
I can only mention third, nanotechnology, the idea of engineering at the molecular level, at a level where perhaps it would be hard to decide whether what we had engineered was biological or mechanical, or maybe we will see a fusion of biological and mechanical or biological and electronic engineering where a combination of silicon chips and brain cells from human DNA or brain cells from dog DNA are fused together.
I do not want to sound unusual, but the science of the future will be a little unusual. We in this Congress will not do the science, but we in this Congress should make sure that we focus the appropriate societal attention long in advance on the ethical dilemmas that will face us as engineered intelligence either approaches or surpasses our own.
Mr. Speaker, although there would be one benefit of such marvelous engineered intelligence for, perhaps if we had an engineered intelligence massively smarter than myself, maybe we would know what the right course was for the World Bank to take or what the right course was for this Congress to take on the issues I addressed earlier in this speech.
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