I was expecting something like the “Genesis code“. A book about altering genomes, fluid, programmable biology and about how we are hacking Darwin.”Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform our Lives, Work, and World” is more serious. “It is the bio-economy stupid” at a lighting speed we can barely comprehend.
The pace of change has been remarkable.
Our world’s total economic output increased 5,000% over the past 160 years. The 21st century will be equivalent to 20,000 years of progress at today’s rate of progress, which is a thousand times greater than the 20th century, which was no slouch in terms of change.
We’re only a quarter of the way
We’re only a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, but we’ve already sequenced the full human genome, figured out how to turn adult cells into stem cells, discovered ways to rewrite the genetic code of any living cell, brought down the cost of hacking genes by a factor of millions, and created novel forms of intelligence capable of speeding everything else up.
We can’t keep up
Our revolutionary technologies are developing so rapidly, and with such profound consequences, that no one—not the scientists, technologists, politicians, government officials, or international agencies—can keep up. Read “The exponential age”. There is a gap between the speed of technological and social change and the speed of law, tax and governance. In general, governments have been caught off guard by the rapidity with which the exponential age titans have grown.
The bioengineered future is coming
The twenty-first century will be the century of human-engineered intelligence and reengineered biology. The potential era of transhumanism and transcending the constraints of human biology, and the ability to create synthetic life.
Synthetic life
The goal of building synthetic life is not to print new, complex life from scratch using a vocabulary entirely different from that evolved by nature. For example, they have started replicating E. coli bit by bit using synthetic versions of its code. Because all of life is connected and runs on the same essential operating system, the story of engineered bacteria and fungi has implications for, well, everything.
Watch “The Titan”
What about future generations who may need a different biology to survive in our hotter planet or in space once our sun expands and our planet is no longer habitable? What about other species?
It is not tech, it is us
When people think of exponential technologies and the rise of artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and genetic engineering, we tend to think of the amazing technological capabilities themselves, as if there is something essential about the computer chip that makes its rapid acceleration possible. But the more revolutionary story of the human experience is not any of these massively enabling technologies themselves but the continued unleashing of one of the greatest forces in our world: human imagination.
7 billion potential innovators
Today, there are 8 billion people with a roughly 85% literacy rate. This means that 6.8 billion people, twenty-three times more than a century ago. Every person on Earth with access to a computer, smartphone, or other connected device has the potential to be a computer programmer. That means we will have around 7 billion people turning abstract ideas into coded reality. That is 233 times more than the roughly 30 million expert human programmers able to generate code today.
Innovation sparks more innovation
What we are now experiencing is a superconvergence of technologies—one in which all technologies, in one way or another, inspire and are inspired by the others at historically unprecedented rates. That’s why it’s impossible to understand the revolution in biology outside the context of the revolutions in AI and machine learning.
76 trillion
There are some 20,000 essential proteins in the human body alone, and around 230 million proteins known to science. It’s estimated there are around 39 trillion bacterial, viral, fungal, and other microbial cells in the average human body—compared to roughly 37 trillion of our own cells. The massively complex and dynamic ecosystem made up of all of these systems in and around our bodies is constantly interacting with and responding to changes in the environment around us. The future of precision medicine largely depends on progress toward decoding each of these systems individually and all of them collectively. And ff you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.
Cambrian-level revolution
Although the future of the AI revolution is not clear, there can be little doubt that we are approaching a Cambrian-level revolution in how data inputs are transformed into outputs of deeper understanding of complex systems and a greater ability to manipulate them with increasing precision.
Some interesting stats/facts:
- In the United States, the world’s largest corn producer, 88 percent of all corn is genetically modified in the all-caps GMO way.
- A 2009 clinical trial in China showed that eating just one cup of Golden Rice a day had the potential to provide half of any child’s recommended daily Vitamin A intake.
- The most common staple crops we collectively consume, including wheat, rice, and soy (not to mention about 85 percent of all plants) are what we call C3 plants.
- C4 crops (they produce a compound made of four carbon atoms) can, on average, be grown far more efficiently, using less water and fertiliser than if the same crops were C3.
- In 2015, scientists developed a process for inserting a few genes from domesticated spinach that encode a bacteria-killing protein into an orange tree’s genome.
- Recently, soil bacteria lining the roots of wheat, rice, and other cereal crops were engineered to help the plants function a bit more like legumes and fix more nitrogen in the soil.
- Today, around two-thirds of all antibiotics sold in the United States are given to domesticated livestock, not people.
- We’ve supersized broiler chickens, making the average broiler chicken on a US farm five times bigger today than its ancestors were in the 1950s.
- Just sixty years ago, industrial fish farming has gone from producing 2 million tons of fish globally in 1960 to 175 million tons in 2020.35 Today, around 80 percent of the salmon we eat comes from salmon farms, not the wild.
- They have already genetically engineered the world’s first bull, named Cosmo, whose pre-implanted embryo was manipulated to increase the odds he’d be born a male. It’s expected that 75 percent of Cosmo’s future offspring will be male.
- The Minnesota-based company Recombinetics has created engineered cattle by inserting the gene that gives some cows in tropical environments slick skin and short hair—making them better able to endure hot weather—into the genomes of cattle types currently grown in the United States.
- In the United States alone, 100,000 people languish on the US national organ transplant waiting list.
- Aleph Foods is already in the early stages of 3D-printing stem cells that generate muscle and fat into collagen scaffolds, in its effort to replicate the complex texturing of a marbled steak.
- Startup companies like Loliware, Carbonwave, and Seaweed Generation are using sargassum as feedstock to generate bioplastics and other industrial materials.
- Research is also being carried out in genetically modifying plants like Arabidopsis thaliana, a relative of the mustard plant, and camelina to make them produce more polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a biodegradable polymer, in their leaves.
- A group of Chinese scientists showed that by genetically modifying the bacteria to produce their calcium byproduct more efficiently, they can create self-repairing cement
- Over recent years, engineered spider genes have been inserted into the genomes of E. coli bacteria, silkworms, tobacco, soybean and potato plants, baby hamster kidney cells, goat mammary gland cells, and transgenic mice, all of which started producing the essential components of spider silk.
- It’s been estimated that a refrigerator box’s worth of DNA could conceivably store all the world’s data today, and that a few tens of kilograms worth, the size of a few shipping containers, could store all the world’s data for many centuries.
- A team at the Australian company Cortical Labs trained a community of human brain cells living in a modified silicon chip to detect electrical signals and generate digital outputs.
- A group of Chinese scientists are working to build a general-purpose “liquid computer” that, they believe, could integrate short segments of DNA, which they call DNA-based programmable gate arrays, to run billions of simple programs using the biological equivalent of computer circuits inside of living cells.
- In 2017, China released its Five-Year Bioindustry Development Plan, setting a target of growing the country’s bioindustries to account for over 4 percent of its total economy. Read “Breakneck“. The Chinese will beat us here too.
- In 2022, when Swiss researchers asked the generative AI system they had designed to help with drug discovery to come up with ways of designing molecules that achieve the same result as VX, an extremely toxic nerve agent, it took the system six hours to come up with 40,000 options.
- In 2005, a researcher at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced he had re-created from its genome sequence a replica of the deadly synthesised horsepox virus, a close relative of smallpox, in six months and at a cost of around 100,000 dollars,
A 60% biological economy by 2030
In 2020, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report estimated the global bioeconomy could generate 11.2 trillion dollars in commerce by 2030. A McKinsey report issued the same year, to which I contributed, put that number at up to 7.7 trillion dollars and estimated that by 2030, “as much as 60 percent of the physical inputs to the global economy could, in principle, be produced biologically.
The bright side
- Our healthcare systems shift from symptom-based sick care to true models of predictive and preventive healthcare, where terrible diseases can be stopped in their tracks at the optimal time.
- Global pathogen surveillance systems help monitor the spread of deadly viruses.
- Gene drive technologies make it possible to safely eradicate malaria and other vector-borne diseases.
- Innovations in plant agriculture help us grow more and better crops on less land and with fewer inputs.
- Advances in cell-cultivated animal products make it possible to provide the world’s growing population of humans with animal products.
- Precision fermentation and other tools of synthetic biology help us grow a much higher percentage of the industrial materials.
- Long-term data storage makes it feasible to better safeguard the cultural inheritance of humanity for millions of years.
- Our life sciences capabilities help ensure that we and other species can survive climate change, pandemics, and other future threats.
- New models of sourcing animal products and industrial raw materials make it necessary for us to return a significant proportion of the lands we now use for agriculture and industry to other uses.
The dark side
- The application of advanced technologies to human reproduction instrumentalises our relationship with future generations.
- People around the world face genetic discrimination, denying them equal opportunities in healthcare, employment, and insurance.
- Our populations are ravaged by a series of synthetic biology–manipulated pathogens.
- We become overly reliant on genetically modified crops that do not withstand evolutionary pressures.
- The tools of the genetics, biotechnology, and AI revolutions will be weaponised to achieve harmful political ends.
- The capabilities of the synthetic biology revolution fuel a dangerous arms race that threatens our long-term security.
- Our AI systems develop their own agency with goals not sufficiently aligned with ours and outcompete or out-survive
- We humans, use our godlike powers to manipulate life in ways that overwhelm and inadvertently crash the living ecosystems on which we and all species depend.
Convergence
There is no question about it. Because of the convergence of all kinds of technologies that are completely interchangeable, our world today stands at the beginning of a transformation that will prove, over time and in historical terms, every bit as profound as industrialisation or the internet revolution, and will come at us with far greater velocity. In other words, AI is chicken feed to what is coming next.
