Re-Making Ourselves

Perhaps the sharpest edge of all is the edge between life and death.  It is an edge that we will all personally experience.  It is also an edge that is spurring significant technological innovation, with widespread economic, social and ethical implications.

Medical science and technology historically has focused on treating diseases of the body.  Increasingly, scientific inquiry and technology innovation are taking on two broader goals: extension and enhancement.  Extension involves understanding the aging process and developing technology to extend our lifespans.  Enhancement involves the development of software (in this case including pills) and hardware (e.g., implants) designed to augment our performance on a variety of dimensions, including cognitive capabilities, resistance to disease, strength and endurance. What used to be considered fringe(another form of edge, if you will) is now rapidly becoming mainstream.

It may be my imagination, but I have a sense that technological innovation is accelerating in these domains.  In the words of Joel Garreau, author of the intriguing new book, Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Bodies, Our Minds – and What It Means to Be Human, four related technologies are now advancing at an exponential pace to enhance our performance and, indirectly, extend our life spans. Garreau refers to these as GRIN technologies: genetic, robotic, information and nano.

Certainly there has been a wave of publishing in this domain over the past several years. In addition to Garreau’s book, some of the better books providing an overview of developments in extension and enhancement technologies are:

• Ramez Naam, More than Human: Embracing the Promise of Biological Enhancement
• Gregory Stock, Redesigning Humans: Our Inevitable Genetic Future
• Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever
• Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies, and the Future of Human Intelligence

For a different take on these developments, focusing more on the people and personalities shaping the innovation in these two domains, I can recommend:

• Brian Alexander, Rapture: How Biotech Became the New Religion
• Stephen S. Hall, Merchants of Immortality: Chasing the Dream of Human Life Extension

Both of these provide an intriguing view of how the fringe and the mainstream have interacted and shaped innovation.

This posting has become more of a book citation list than I had intended. I have a strong interest in this topic because it  reflects some broader trends in society and in turn is being shaped by these trends.

Just as we are becoming more involved in making the products and services that we consume (see my previous post), we are becoming more involved in making, or more accurately, re-making our bodies rather than simply taking what we were given at birth.  Whether we look at trends in plastic surgery or body modification or some of the technology innovation described earlier, the pattern is clear: we are taking a more active role in shaping what we are and not just who we are.

JSB and I in our new book have written about the importance of accelerating capability building in a globalizing world.  This puts an entirely different, and more personal, lens on the notion of accelerating capability building.