Would you believe me if I told you that earlier this year, Chinese scientists genetically modified human embryos for the first time ever? Actually, it really doesn’t matter if you believe me, because either way it happened.
Gene Editing
If you weren’t aware of that fact before now, your first thought was probably something along the lines of, ‘Man, that seems like it could pose some serious ethical problems. I feel like we ought to come up with some basic rules to make sure nobody does anything too crazy.’ You wouldn’t be the first person to think that — many people in the scientific community have voiced serious concerns about the new gene-editing method.
One such person is Edward Lanphier, president of Sangamo BioSciences, a California-based biotech company that uses gene-editing techniques on adult human cells.
“We need to pause this research and make sure we have a broad based discussion about which direction we’re going here,”
Lanphier told Nature after news of the Chinese scientists’ work became public. He added, “The ubiquitous access to and simplicity of creating CRISPRs [the gene-editing enzyme] creates opportunities for scientists in any part of the world to do any kind of experiments they want.”
An artist’s depiction of CRISPR modifying a strand of DNA
Of course, it’s important to note that we still have a lot to learn about our genetic code, so the age of “designer babies” is still a ways off. But while the field of genome modification is still in its infancy (no pun intended), many other forms of human enhancement have already become well-established parts of our society.
Nootropics are one example. Also known as smart drugs or cognitive enhancers, nootropics are drugs, supplements or foods that boost specific aspects of mental function. Caffeine is probably the most common, but powerful pharmaceutical amphetamines like Adderal and Dexedrine have become increasingly popular since the early 90s. (Side-note: the United States experienced a major outbreak of amphetamine abuse between the years of 1929 and 1971, driven in large part by the drug Benzedrine. Some scholars say that we are in the midst of the second amphetamine epidemic today.)
Human enhancement is also becoming increasingly prevalent in the field of medicine. Prosthetic limbs are one of the most common forms of medical human enhancement, and engineers are currently in the process of developing powered exoskeletons that give people suffering from paralysis the ability to move again. A number of other medical devices, from hearing aids and pacemakers to fully-artificial hearts, fall under the umbrella of human enhancement as well.
All of the above-mentioned technologies were groundbreaking when they first arrived on the scene, and each one posed its own unique set of challenges. But those challenges pale in comparison to the questions that will be raised by two emerging forms of human enhancement: anti-aging technology and neural implants.
Anti-Aging Technology
It may sound like science-fiction nonsense, but researchers are getting extremely close to creating an artificial “fountain of youth”. Last year, for example, a group of scientists tested out a compound that literally reversed aging in mice. Even David Sinclair, the gerontologist who led the study, was shocked by the results:
“I’ve been studying aging at the molecular level now for nearly 20 years and I didn’t think I’d see a day when aging could be reversed. I thought we’d be lucky to slow it down a little bit. The mice had more energy, their muscles were as though they’d be exercising and it was able to mimic the benefits of diet and exercise just within a week. We think that should be able to keep people healthier for longer and keep them from getting diseases of aging,”
Sinclair said in an interview with ABC. He added,
“Some people say it’s like playing God, but if you ask somebody 100 years ago, what about antibiotics? They probably would have said the same thing.”
Human trials of the compound began last fall, and early results have been promising.
The anti-aging movement will also be helped along by the emergence of nanorobots: tiny robots that could travel through your bloodstream detecting and fixing problems throughout the body.
An artist’s depiction of nanobots in the bloodstream
Aniket Margarkar, a researcher who works on nanobots at the University of Helsinki’s Centre for Drug Research, described what these bots would be like in a recent interview with The Atlantic’s Rose Eveleth — she summed up his vision like this:
He imagines diagnostic nanorobots, ones that will float around in the body, fitted with sensors to detect possibly dangerous changes. If an artery starts to get a little clogged, or if a cancer node starts to grow, these nano-monitors would detect those changes, and alter their chemistry in response.
Researcher Shawn Douglas, who is currently working on his own nanobot project at the University of California in San Francisco, is more conservative with his predictions, stressing that there is still lots of work to be done. But even he thinks that nanobots will be a truly viable technology in the near future, telling The Atlantic,
“We’re using the same materials that cells use to really great effect, we’re repurposing those for medicine. We’re in the stage where it’s totally obvious that it has to work, it already works in nature, it would be surprising if it didn’t work in the end.”
Neural Implants
Neural implants are the second technology poised to shake up the world of human enhancement.
Three years ago, scientists did something that makes the plot of Planet of the Apes sound a lot more realistic: they made monkeys smarter by implanting computer chips in their brains.
The researchers started by training the monkeys to perform a simple matching task; after two years of this training, they were able to pick correct matches roughly 75 percent of the time. Once the monkeys were familiar with the game, the researchers hooked them up to electrodes and recorded the pattern of electrical signals their brains sent out when correct decisions were made. Then, they fitted each monkey with a neural implant that fed this pattern back into their brains in an effort to prompt more correct responses. It worked – the monkeys’ accuracy immediately shot up by 10 percent.
Curious to see how effective the implant would be when decision-making skills were impaired, the researchers decided to repeat the experiment after drugging the monkeys with cocaine (yes, seriously). The coked-out monkeys were terrible at the game, picking correct matches only 20 percent of the time. But amazingly, when fitted with the implants, they were just as accurate as implanted monkeys who hadn’t been given cocaine.
The monkeys used in the study were all rhesus macaques, like the one pictured here
The neural implants in this study were used for a very specific purpose: playing the “correct” electrical pattern on a loop in the monkeys’ brains. But what if the implants had more capabilities? What if they could connect your brain to the internet?
That future may not be far off. Ray Kurzweil – a well known technologist and futurist who also serves as Google’s director of engineering – recently predicted that humans will be able to connect their brains to the “cloud” in as little as 15 years.
“In the 2030s we are going to send nano-robots into the brain (via capillaries) that will provide full immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system and will connect our neocortex to the cloud. Just like how we can wirelessly expand the power of our smartphones 10,000-fold in the cloud today, we’ll be able to expand our neocortex in the cloud,”
Kurweil said earlier this year during an Abundance 360 seminar about the future. Kurweil predicts that 10 years after that, most of our thinking, “will be done online”:
“Our thinking then will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking. We’ll be able to extend our limitations and think in the cloud. We’re going to put gateways to the cloud in our brains… We’re going to gradually merge and enhance ourselves. In my view, that’s the nature of being human – we transcend our limitations,”
he said during a speech at the Exponential Finance conference in New York this past summer.
These predictions might sound a bit outlandish, so I wouldn’t fault anyone for being skeptical. But it’s worth noting that Kurweil has a history of being right about these kinds of things. According to Big Think,
Of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990’s, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be “essentially correct” (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate.
With this in mind, we probably ought to take Kurzweil’s predictions pretty seriously.
Should parents be allowed to “customize” their children using gene-modification techniques? Should people be allowed to put computer chips in their brains to enhance certain cognitive functions? Is a human still a human if they plug themselves into the internet? These are all questions that we will be forced to ask ourselves in the not-so-distant future.
We will also have to ask ourselves the question of how to regulate these type of human enhancement, specifically in terms of access. As with any new advancement, it’s likely that many of these technologies will be extremely expensive when they become available. Are anti-aging measures and internet-equipped neural implants going to be something that only the richest of the rich can afford? Will human enhancement simply widen the gap between the world’s elite and the rest of society?
We’ve reached a point in history when many of our craziest predictions about the future are just around the corner. I think it’s time we stop treating them like science fiction and start discussing them as reality.
Editor’s Note: This is part three in a four-part series about the challenges facing millennials as we look ahead into the future. You can check out “Part I: The Inevitability of Climate Change” here, and “Part II: Technology, Automation and the Obsolete Human Worker” here. Be sure to come back tomorrow for Part IV: So What Now?.