Ok, I watched Juan's latest. He's always been one of my favorite TED speakers.
A couple of comments on the talk:
-
I found his thoughts on Autism and other conditions as (possibly) being evidence of a rapid evolution of the brain in "real time", very interesting. What would the process of evolution "look like" to the species it's happening to, as it's happening? Unless there was visible evidence within 2 generations, you would never be able to see it.
Version 1.1 would look defective to the Version 1.0 entity because it doesn't function the way we 1.0 expects it to. But as the pressure to process these massive amounts of data causes the survival of the fittest data processor, eventually Autism evolves to 2.0 and all members of the species have eidetic memory and the ability to calculate things faster than today's supercomputers. ( this last bit is inferred by me, not stated by Juan) - The study and manipulation of life may or may not be a catalyst for human extinction. If it isn't, something else WILL be. We are not the ultimate expression of the universe. We will either become something else or die off.
Listening to guys like this really shifts my perspective immediately. Go back and watch his talk from 2003. http://www.ted.com/talks/juan_enriquez_on_genomics_and_our_future.html
What's really scary is that no one will be ready for it. They won't be able to cope, like an 80 year old farmer couldn't cope if his life suddenly depended on understanding genetics. Our hardware will be obsolete. Also scary, is my ignorance of the state of the art. I may be able to tell you how to put together a top notch personal computer, maybe a server rack with a L.A.M.P stack, and describe the subtle differences between "the Apple" and "the Android", but that's all caveman shit compared to the petabytes of information produced by GEN firms on a regular basis. Is it too late for me to get a degree in Genetic Engineering?
Ok, assuming I'm too old, too poor, or not smart enough to get into the nitty gritty of mastering the genome, what other problems/opportunities do I see?
I think every one of us has this vision of the future where "humanity" as we know it is basically intact. Even in sci-Fi, all the advanced alien races engender or personify human attributes that the human protagonist is forced to contend with.
Star Trek, an example I'm familiar with, envisions a future where humanity has overcome it's barbaric nature and goes forth, enlightened, in the name of discovery. A consistent theme is that our "humanity" is what causes our species to triumph. It's the core and most important aspect of our being. It seems to suggest that this "humanity" is at it's finest when our "logic and reason" are in balance with our "feelings and empathy". From Spock's logic, balanced by McCoy's (com)passion to Spock himself struggling with being half human and what that means. Can he be a purely logical Vulcan and suppress his emotional side? The same is echoed in The Next Generation. Data is an Android who "dreams" of being human. He tries to emulate human behavior and emotion, not content to be superior to humans in every way, except the capacity for emotion. Captain Picard constantly turns to Dianna Troy for advice when dealing with other races. Because of her "empathic" (not psychic) ability she can sense how a person or a collective is feeling; their general mood, or distress.
Of course, these are human dramas, created by humans, for humans. We wouldn't find them interesting if they didn't show us ourselves, but this is not what humans will look like in the 23rd century. Do we, now, have the balance between logic and emotion, reason and passion, to safely wield the tools we have created already? Will they destroy us, or will they jump us to a new evolutionary track? Will our "humanity" make that jump? Will our collective "what it means to be human" be recognizable on the other side? If you or I could peek at our future generations say, 200 years from now, would we see or feel anything familiar? I think, more than anything, that's what we all secretly want for the future. Aside from immortality, we want to be comfortable in the idea that the future will contain everything we currently love and hold dear, in some recognizable form. This, of course, is despite all evidence to the contrary, i.e. the fact that all versions of our species have only existed on this planet for something like .001% of it's existence. (Not an accurate number, but it's basically a fart in the wind of the cosmic big bang).
So what needs to be done, on the ground rather than in the lab, for collective humanity to survive this age of change? We need to build a proverbial Ark. Not for genetic diversity, the labs are already doing crazy shit there, but for human identity. Some sort of recipe for being human and a reason to hang on to it. If we truly have the power to create ourselves in any image, we should spend a LOT of time working out what that image should be and why. Kind of a "HUMAN evolution field guide".
There was a roleplaying game I used to play, way back in the day, called cyberpunk. In it, you were able to augment your character with various cybernetic devices. But you had to be careful, because while these enhancements made you more powerful, they reduced your humanity. If your humanity dropped too much, your character basically became unplayable. He went crazy or unstable. We should have guidelines, or at least an understanding of what will diverge us so far from a human identity that an "original" would be as different from a "modified" (or derivative) as we are from a Bonobo. We're extremely close cousins, but we can't relate or co-exist.
If not guidelines, at least an open conversation. Granted, there's enough diversity within the existing global populous that we can't relate or co-exist in some cases. It would be nice to have everyone on the same page. Anyway, LeVar Burton (Gordy Laforge StarTrek TNG) has a nice talk about storytelling shaping culture.
"The stories that we have told each other throughout the history of our civilization are inextricably linked to how we continue to invent the world in which we live."
Quote from about 3 min in : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXLju6cBDwI Continue watching the next bit about the "case in point".
--
So we need some storytelling about the coming changes. To put in the human psyche, the question of where to take the future if we had the power that is coming. I don't mean a zombie apocalypse film that suggests genetic engineering is responsible for the zombie outbreak, but human drama like StarTrek in a setting closer to what we now know is coming. Stories in any medium. I'm obviously not going to whip out a Hollywood movie but might be a catalyst, curator, or digital contributor of some sort in some medium.
On the other hand, shit can happen, people may see how good/bad it is, and respond (in the interest of self preservation) accordingly. Maybe we'll just learn from trial and error, assuming we survive the first few trials. Or maybe it doesn't matter. Kids/grandkids will evolve and won't even acknowledge their obsolete predecessors. What a terrible word. Pre- deceased... dead before you. But perhaps immortality is just around the corner.