After the Industrial and the Digital revolution, the Bio Revolution, promises an age beyond Darwinian Evolution, in which human technologies overcome biological principles in a quest for a fully human-centric planet.
Gene sequencing and editing, synthetic biology and artificial intelligence will allow humans to sculpt their environments, bodies, and minds to improve living conditions, health, nutrition, and cognitive abilities.
With such new technologies, new threats emerge. They challenge the core of what it means to be human and how humans interact with other life forms, which might soon include synthetically created microbes and human-machine chimeras.
Utpoian scenarios of the Bio Revolution
Elaborate screening of genes and other biomolecules will help early diagnosis and prevention of many human diseases and personalize disease treatment, to select therapies which promise maximal treatment effect and minimal side-effects
Human genetic engineering and nanomedicine will help cure rare genetic diseases, cancer and metabolic disease, neurodegenerative disorders, and many other conditions
Neuroprosthetics and AI-driven human machine interfaces will restore movement to paralyzed, vision to blind and thought capacity to cognitively impaired people
A combination of genetic selection, genetic engineering, and science-driven life-style improvements will extend or even eternalize human life- and health spans
Genetic engineering of plants and animals will help sculpt evolution to human needs – allowing crop plants to adapt to environmental and climate challenges, eradicating disease-carrying animals such as mosquitoes and preserving endangered or even resurrecting extinct species to maintain biodiversity
Genetic engineering and synthetic biology of microorganism will help to fight pandemics and other biothreats
Genetically modified or synthetically created microbes will help produce sustainable biomaterials, drugs, fuel and might even help to terraform the destroyed earth by slowing or reverting climate change
Dystopian scenarios of the Bio Revolution
Genetic screening and engineering could lead to eugenics-like selection of human traits and genetically enhanced bio elites, creating unbridgeable inequality
Human machine interfaces could turn humans into AI-enslaved cyborgs who loose their sense of humanity
Large companies could exploit our brain data, and technologies such as optogenetics could be used to plant thoughts and memories directly into our brains
Prolonged human lifespans could cause unmanageable overpopulation and challenge the social foundations of human societies
Genetic engineering of plants and animals could wreak havoc on ecosystems, causing mass extinctions and the rise of new super-pathogens
Genetic engineering and synthetic biology could be used for creation of novel pathogens as bioweapons and turn warfare into a pandemics game
Genetically modified or synthetically created microbes or DNA nanobots could get out of hand, causing ecological disasters or simply drowning the world in grey goo
Deciding our fates
Humans are monkeys smart enough to invent tools that make their lives easier. Yet, while humans excel at toolmaking, they are less proficient at considering long-term consequences.
How will today’s inventions impact the fate of humanity and the planet we inhabit?
And who gets to decide on how we use them?
When atomic fission was discovered in the 1930s, scientists were awed, excited and terrified by the impact of their discovery.
Altered biological agents have a similar potential for uncontrolled chain reaction as atomic bombs or nuclear reactors, a similar potential for being too powerful for scientists to handle and too complex for policy makers to understand.
Like the early nuclear physicists, the scientists who pioneered the key principles of the Bio Revolution: nanotechnology, artificial intelligence and gene editing, are aware of the groundbreaking, volatile, and possibly disastrous potential of their discoveries.
Many of those scientists call for caution and even for worldwide moratoria on some aspects of the technologies they are working on. Yet, as shown in the 1990s controversy on the ban of embryonic stem cell research, it is nearly impossible to find a common denominator in a debate that’s fueled by political and religious beliefs and national, military and business agendas.
In the meantime, the development speed of new technologies often far exceeds the reaction capacity of regulatory bodies. This creates a vacuum of decision making, in which new technologies are utilized by well-funded research organizations and companies, leaving ethical, potentially world-altering questions in the hands of individuals with interests that are often far from altruistic.
The technologies of the Bio Revolution might destine humanity to utopian or dystopian scenarios, many of which are still the realms of science fiction or conspiracy theories. Other technological advancement are happening in the here and now in university laboratories, biotech companies and the garages of biohackers.
Whatever we might think about the technologies of the Bio Revolution – we need to prepare for a future in which they become reality.