Science fiction is becoming science fact. A host of technologies are set to radically challenge the very idea of what it means to be human. Thanks to a myriad of advances in genetic engineering, nanobots, robotics, AI, and more, many experts believe that it’s possible to eradicate disease, rebuild and inhabit ageless bodies, and supercharge our intellect. Perhaps we’re even at the tipping point of human and post-human. What technologies are available now, possible in the near future, and beyond? What are the moral implications on the path from better health and wellness to transhumanism?
We spoke with a wealth of experts, including William B. Hurlbut, a bioethicist and professor of neurobiology at Stanford Medical School; David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, technologist, and best-selling author; Michael Levin, a developmental biologist; and tech CEO Bryan Johnson who sold his company to PayPal for $800 million and now spends millions on the quest for eternal youth. The future, ready or not, is here.
Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible.
—Ray Bradbury
From Sci-fi fantasy to big business reality
Pop culture is filled with content about enhanced humans, cyborgs, AI, merging our brains with computers, and becoming immortal via mind-uploading. The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman look quaint compared to current research. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Black Mirror, Blade Runner, Ex Machina, Gattaca, Interstellar, Limitless, The Matrix, and Star Trek are a small sample of iconic narratives that both reflect and drive the future of humanity.
Many are cautionary tales. Transhumanism, the belief that humans can evolve beyond our current physical and mental limitations by utilizing science and technology, can delight or terrify.
Driverless cars, ChatGPT (the AI chatbot released in November 2022), and humanoid robots have already arrived. The company Replika creates personalized emotional chatbot companions powered by AI that they say can be programmed to be a virtual girlfriend, boyfriend, friend, or even a deceased loved one. One can see the upside during our current loneliness crisis, but for anyone that has seen the 2013 film Her, it’s also unsettling.
Helping the blind see, the deaf hear, and the lame walk, is an achievement of biblical proportions (see Isaiah 35:5-6). But where do we draw the line between enhancement and dystopia?
Live longer, live forever?
Globally, the number of people age 60 and over is projected to soar from about 900 million to more than 2 billion by mid-century. A wealth of academic institutions and government agencies serve as healthy aging resources. Valter Longo, is a Professor of Gerontology and Biological Science, Director of the USC Longevity Institute, Director of the Longevity and Cancer Program at the IFOM Institute of Molecular Oncology Institute, and author of The Longevity Diet that popularized “timed eating” for healthy aging. He says we’re in the midst of a “leap forward” in diagnostics and the body’s ability to repair, regenerate, and rejuvenate itself and that “Eventually, the biohacking will take over,” says Longo.
Indeed, private companies, including those heavily funded by billionaires like Larry Ellison, Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos, are committed to slowing, halting, and even reversing aging.
The startup LifeNaut claims to create a “BioFile” of cryogenically frozen DNA samples as well as a “MindFile” to potentially create a “Mindclone” – a self-aware digital being so that, as their website states, after your physical body dies you will live on, forever. (FYI, the human brain has about 100 billion neurons—with 100 trillion connections. Imaging even a fraction of the brain with electron microscopy would require gargantuan data storage capacities and energy consumption).
A legacy of human progress and possible futures
Modern medicine and sanitation, including hygiene, water treatment, nutrition, antibiotics, and vaccines, have doubled the human lifespan just in the last century, an almost miraculous success story. The “wellness” movement, projected to be a $7 trillion industry by 2025, piggybacks on these real successes to promise ever greater vitality. There is so much coming at us that it can be hard to parse the snake oil from what is actually helpful. Our experts share their take on what’s here, what’s coming soon, and what’s possible.
A case study in reverse aging
Bryan Johnson, 45, sold his company Braintree Venmo to PayPal for $800 million. He’s spent millions creating his Blueprint protocol, based on research in over 1,000 peer-reviewed publications, and shares the details publicly. He calls himself a “rejuvenation athlete.” Blueprint takes 70+ measurements of Johnson’s body (via blood tests, MRIs, ultrasounds, colonoscopies, and more). His diet and routine are determined by those data points. His goal is to have all his major organs, including his brain, liver, kidneys, teeth, skin, hair, penis, and rectum, functioning like an eighteen-year-old. In 2021, he claimed to have reduced his epigenetic age by 5.1 years in 7 months, setting a world record.
What’s here:
"There’s been no time in history better for humans to exist than right now, and the speed of technological progress is stunning,"
says Johnson, who subsists on a 1,977 calorie vegan diet (70+lbs of veggies monthly), 100+ pills daily, a militarily-precise regimen that includes customized workouts, skin creams, lasers, light therapy, a rigid bedtime routine, blue-light blocking glasses, and much more. “Our main thing is don’t trust human opinion. Trust data. I jokingly say, Blueprint is the best health protocol ever built in history. Prove me wrong with your data.”
He cites “self-aided destruction” as anything that accelerates one’s aging, especially overeating, junk food, skipping bedtime, skipping exercise, and smoking. “Instead of trying to do a whole bunch of positive stuff to address negative stuff – number one, focus on stopping the negative stuff,” says Johnson.
What’s coming soon:
“What if when you and I imagined ourselves in 20 years and we didn’t think of inevitable decay and decline. To me, this is the most revolutionary thought we could have…It’s a fundamental shift in how we understand ourselves, and it would change society,” says Johnson. “What if humans were able to interlock and be on the same improvement trajectory as our technology?”
What’s possible:
“Imagine that in the 25th century, whatever form of existence is looking back at the early 21st century and marveling at what we figured out in our time and place that changed the course of humanity in the same way we look at back at history, and we look at electricity, the discovery of DNA, germs, and penicillin,” says Johnson.
"I think it’s possible that the future of existence is more magical and more interesting than anything anyone can imagine. And so, for me, the number one goal is to be around for the future."
When I ask if that means 100, 300 years? Johnson responded, “Maybe time becomes irrelevant.”
The deaf will hear, the blind will see
Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman is a bestselling author whose book Livewired was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. He’s the host of The Brain on PBS, science advisor on shows such as Westworld, a Guggenheim Fellow, and his TED talk has been viewed by millions.
What’s here:
One of his startup companies, NeoSensory, created a haptic wristband that allows deaf people to hear. “We’re taking all the operations that the inner ear does, and we’re just transferring that over to the skin, and then the wristband captures sound, passes it through the skin into the brain, and deaf people can come to hear that way.”
There’s also an abundance of tech from other companies to help the deaf and hearing impaired, including eyeglasses that turn speech into subtitles, regrowing auditory cells, and improving hearing aids and cochlear implants.
To improve sight, there is bionic eye technology from other companies to assist the blind and several devices for low vision currently in trials.
Restoring site is a challenge. “A third of the brain is devoted to vision, and so you’ve got a million neurons per eye going back into the brain,” says Eagleman, noting that his team can’t currently capture that amount of data. “But we did do something for blindness with our vest where you can feel the location of every person around you…In fact, that you can feel people moving behind you better than a sighted person.”
What’s coming soon:
“One of my interests is building, expanding the senses that we already have, such as being able to see in different parts of the spectrum, such as infrared and ultraviolet,” says Eagleman referencing technology expanding our “umwelt.”
Eagleman says you could conceivably use the haptic wristband technology by putting it on another person and feeling their sensations. Or even plug into the physiology of groups. For example, one could “scrape Twitter for any particular hashtag and feel in real time what people are saying about a topic, just by doing a sentiment analysis on it.”
What’s possible:
When it comes to backing up or putting information into the brain, “People are like, oh, I can just take my memory and offload that, or I can plug and play Google, learn a new language by plugging it in [my brain]. It’s not that simple,” says Eagleman. Thanks to genetics and individual experiences, everyone’s brain is unique, so input, like how to fly a helicopter, would need to be customized to you. It may be 50 to 500 years from now, but “it’s totally possible.”
“Now, the one thing we don’t know is whether there’s something special about the biological tissue such that you can’t just run your brain on the computer and get the same thing out of it. In other words, if I copied everything about your brain…would it be you? Would it have private, subjective internal experience the way that you do? We don’t know,” says Eagleman.
“Each neuron in your brain is spiking ten or hundreds of times per second, and you’ve got 86 billion of these, and somehow that is the neural code that builds your life. But we don’t actually know how to read the neural code. We haven’t found the Rosetta Stone for it yet. So that’s what I’m most excited about. My hope is that I make it long enough to see the answer to that.”
Limbs will be regenerated, diseases eradicated
Michael Levin is a professor at Tufts University, where he is director of the Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, which focuses on advances in regeneration, cancer, and birth defects. His team studies molecular genetics, biophysics, developmental physiology, and AI to build new tools to understand and exploit the “software of life.” He co-discovered “xenobots” – tiny, programmable robot organisms made with frog stem cells.
What’s here:
“Xenobots are made of genetically-normal frog embryo skin cells. We didn’t edit the genome. We didn’t put in any weird nanomaterials. So, what we’re seeing here is that completely normal cells in a different environment, freed from the controlling influence of their typical neighbors, have the ability to have a totally new life with different behaviors, different anatomy, and do different things,” says Levin.
“This platform enables experiments to crack the morphic genetic codes, literally understand what kind of signals and stimuli can be given to normal cells to eventually get them to build whatever you want them to build.”
To assist people living with paralysis, inventions from other companies include brain-controlled wheelchairs, tech that helps regain a sense of touch, a robotic exoskeleton that enables walking, and implants that help patients swim, walk, and cycle.
What’s coming soon:
Transformative regenerative medicine “that allows us to build new organs, solve aging, reprogram cancer - by communicating to a group of cells what we want them to build - that’s going to solve most problems of medicine,”
says Levin adding that such biobots may also be able to clean up the environment, and more.
“People see all the papers, they understand the promise of the technology, but the calls are absolutely heartbreaking. I’m not even a clinician. I don’t even deal with human patients, but I get phone calls every day: my kid has a birth defect, I have a spinal cord injury, I lost a limb, I was in a fire, my eyesight is going, I have a degenerative brain disease. I mean cancer, every kind of cancer, you name it, it’s unbelievable. The pressing medical need out there is just astounding.”
What’s possible:
“I think the first thing that’s going to happen is that we’re going to realize that the old ideas of what it means to be human, which is to have a particular human shape, to have a particular human genome, all that is going to go out the window,” says Levin adding that all around us are going to be humans with various kinds of implants and different types of links to other devices and various prosthetics. He says the future human will not be defined by shape or composition. For example, you might be 40% electronics and 60% human tissue.
“One of the powerful things that the xenobots are teaching us is that these old categories, these binary categories of organism vs. machine and human vs. cyborg, are completely useless. They did okay while we didn’t have the technology or the imagination to expand our horizons… It just happens to be where evolution brought us. And it is now possible for us to improve all these different things thoughtfully, not by random accidents of mutation, but with forethought and compassion and a plan to improve the lived experience of everybody.”
He adds that some may want “a third hemisphere in their brain to be smarter, or maybe live underwater, or resistant to radiation so you can travel in space, or maybe live much longer,” says Levin, adding that artificial intelligence is also going to be like a “Star Trek translator” that lets you talk to anything – even share your mind with other creatures.
“It’s not just about being regenerative and resilient. It’s about having what I call freedom of embodiment. Nowadays, you’re born; you get dumped into whatever body you happen to be in.”
When asked about how this future might impact religion, he said “I had some really interesting interactions with a bunch of Buddhist monks, and we talked about all of this, and they were completely unflappable. None of this seems strange to them,” says Levin. “They already understand that in any particular life, your embodiment could be anything from a log of wood to a human and everything in between. And they understand that all beings have a certain capacity for suffering and sentience, and some religions are better with this than others.”
Alene Dawson is a Southern California-based writer known for her intelligent and popular features, cover stories, interviews, and award-winning publications. She’s a regular contributor to the LA Times.
