My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,
Once-science-fiction advancements like AI, gene editing, and advanced biotechnology have finally arrived, and they’re here to stay. These technologies have seemingly set us on a course towards a brand new future for humanity, one we can hardly even picture today. But progress doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t the result of any one breakthrough.
As Jamie Metzl explains in his new book, Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions will Transform our Lives, Work, and World, tech innovations work alongside and because of one another, bringing about the future right under our noses.
Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Metzl about how humans have been radically reshaping the world around them since their very beginning, and what the latest and most disruptive technologies mean for the not-too-distant future.
Metzl is a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council and a faculty member of NextMed Health. He has previously held a series of positions in the US government, and was appointed to the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing in 2019. He is the author of several books, including two sci-fi thrillers and his international bestseller, Hacking Darwin.
In This Episode
* Unstoppable and unpredictable (1:54)
* Normalizing the extraordinary (9:46)
* Engineering intelligence (13:53)
* Distrust of disruption (19:44)
* Risk tolerance (24:08)
* What is a “newnimal”? (13:11)
* Inspired by curiosity (33:42)
Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.
Unstoppable and unpredictable (1:54)
The name of the game for all of this . . . is to ask “What are the things that we can do to increase the odds of a more positive story and decrease the odds of a more negative story?”
Pethokoukis: Are you telling a story of unstoppable technological momentum or are you telling a story kind of like A Christmas Carol, of a future that could be if we do X, Y, and Z, but no guarantees?
Metzl: The future of technological progress is like the past: It is unstoppable, but that doesn't mean it's predetermined. The path that we have gone over the last 12,000 years, from the domestication of crops to building our civilizations, languages, industrialization — it's a bad metaphor now, but — this train is accelerating. It's moving faster and faster, so that's not up for grabs. It is not up for grabs whether we are going to have the capacities to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life — we are doing both of those things now in the early days.
What is up for grabs is how these revolutions will play out, and there ar
Published on 3 months, 1 week ago
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