Conference Presentation, Fireside Chat, Panel
Humanity, Revised? Editing and Augmenting the Human Species
- Human evolution is shifting from natural selection to intelligent direction, creating a parallel framework where humans control biological outcomes, potentially resulting in "advantaged" individuals with prosthetics that are integral to life and reaction times increased by 10 to 50-fold.
- Advanced prosthetics and sensory implants, including cochlear devices capable of perfect pitch and hearing frequencies of other species, may become standard requirements for professional roles within a decade or two, while future generations could be born with eyes capable of seeing infrared, ultraviolet, or long-distance focus.
- Biological regrowth will treat the body as a modular structure where parts are swapped out, while programmable cells designed to perform specific functions like energy production or data storage are predicted to become the primary driver of the global economy.
- Commercial-scale, nearly carbon-neutral fuel production via partnerships between Exxon and Synthetic Genomics is targeted for 2025, alongside the scientific execution of the woolly mammoth gene code to birth the first mammoths since Egyptian times.
- Computational power will expand exponentially, with $1,000 buying the power of a human brain by 2023 and the entire human race 25 years later; quantum supremacy is anticipated in 2018 to revolutionize material sciences and accelerate drug trials a million-fold.
- Digital connectivity is projected to triple global income and double lifespan over the last century, with 5G networks deploying speeds of 10 to 100 gigabits per second within the next year and satellite constellations totaling 11,425 satellites planned for immediate deployment.
- The number of connected devices is forecast to reach 50 billion in 2020 and 500 billion by 2030, supporting the connection of 4.2 billion previously unconnected minds within five to seven years and enabling cloud-based brain integration by the mid-2030s.
- Longevity research aims to add 20 to 30 healthy years to every life, with "longevity escape velocity" predicted to be reached in 12 years, allowing memories to be transplanted into new bodies to achieve significantly extended time scales.
- Humanity faces a moral imperative to become a multi-planetary species to survive potential extinction events, with space exploration driven primarily by private individuals like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk investing billions to access near-infinite resources in space.
- Gene editing technologies like CRISPR will be rapidly superseded by desktop genome printing, creating difficult ethical dilemmas where parents may enhance children's traits, potentially rendering current legal and religious frameworks obsolete as they fail to adapt to the pace of change.
- Future interstellar travel could involve round trips to the nearest solar systems in roughly 24 years at one-fifth the speed of light, though governments are unlikely to lead these efforts due to high risks and spending disputes, favoring individual and corporate leadership instead.
- Economic and social structures will evolve to share risk similarly to the shift from Queen Isabella's financing of the New World to the creation of stock markets, while new XPRIZE initiatives target rapid literacy, robotic consciousness transfer, water generation, and carbon extraction.
- Significant risks include the potential for human extinction given that 99% of past species have vanished, the impossibility of current biology surviving in space environments like Mars or Venus without re-engineering, and the ethical necessity of diversifying the species to ensure survival against major extinction events.