Superconvergence: The Dawn of Human-Engineered Intelligence with Jamie Metzl

28:38And if we had zero tolerance for GMOs, we really wouldn't have, we'd have no animal products because all of our animals are being fed with GMO crops. And pretty much all of the foods, certainly all the processed foods that we eat, including the foods that say no GMO, have GMOs in one way or another in their supply chain. So it's a misinformation campaign. When I was in Berlin, I met with all these government, German government and EU regulators talking about this exact topic. They all told me privately, we don't believe a single word of what we're promoting. And 40 plus years of research hasn't shown any single example of GMOs being unsafe for human consumption, not one.

29:27And this by everybody, by the World Health Organization, by the EU, by everybody. But there's this misinformation campaign that GMOs are unhealthy. And once that idea sinks in, it becomes just this accepted truth. And that's why I think we all need to kind of take a step back and say, well, what is the thing that we're trying to achieve? And the thing we're trying to achieve is to feed well as many people as possible with as little cruelty to animals as possible without destroying our planet. And I think that advanced biotechnology must, I repeat, must be part of that process. Yeah. So what, I mean, you, you mentioned in the book, what you just said, that there's not a single study that's ever shown this food's unhealthy.

30:16So where's everybody getting the information that it's unhealthy. No, but it's been a sustained misinformation, and I would even call it a propaganda campaign, by Greenpeace and other organizations. And again, I want to make clear, there are reasons to be critical of various companies, whether it's Monsanto, Syngenta, or others. But it is just, so that part is legit. But to say that GMOs pose a health threat to human beings, there's just maybe in 200 years, it'll end up being true. But in 50 years now, almost, there's no evidence of that being true to date. And if we didn't use GMOs, the amount of pesticides and insecticides that we would have to use would increase astronomically.

31:13And we know for certain that that would do a tremendous amount of harm. And so there are just things that people feel. And there are people who are investing in having people feel those ways. And I just wish we could have a common sense conversation, not saying that GMOs are all good and not saying that GMOs are all bad, but just saying this is a very important, useful technology. How can we best use it? Our farmers have already made that decision with the soybeans and corn that's grown certainly in this country and in many other countries. The cotton farmers in India already made that decision, even when there were regulations trying to prevent them from using GMO seeds.

32:05And even when there was a whole misinformation campaign saying they were wrongly saying they were committing suicide because of these GMO seeds, these farmers were doing everything they could to get those seeds because they saw that the insecticides and pesticides were actually killing their families who were having to live with these toxic chemicals. So there's a conversation to be had and it's just unfortunate that we're not able to have it. Yeah, like, and again, like, and look, I want to get to AI and some of the genomic stuff also, but let's take Nassim Taleb as an example. I'm picking on him, but I'm picking on him because I consider him one of the smartest people out there.

32:45Why does he think there's basically zero nutritional value to many of these GMOs? Well, that's just - He's smart. Yeah, no, he's a smart guy. Because he won't just take propaganda and believe it. Well, it's 100 % irrefutably wrong that there's no nutritional value to GMOs. Because if you lined up GMO corn and non-GMO corn, and you did the nutritional analysis of both, there would be no possible way. There's no nutritional difference in terms of the percentage of genes influenced by these trans genes. It is a tiny, infinitesimal fraction. So that is just wrong. His general fear of, I haven't heard him or read anything that he's written on this, but just assuming that he's kind of like standard Greenpeace issue, like I just think it's misinformation.

33:44And I'm sure that he could and maybe he should say, all right, here are these studies. I've posted certainly on my website from a while ago. I have a whole, and in my last book and in my current book, a whole list of the studies that I cite. And it's literally every study over the last 45 years. Not a single study has shown that GMOs are unsafe for human consumption. There was one study out of Spain, which I don't actually believe, but it apparently showed that GMO corn was somehow healthier than non-GMO corn. I'm not going to go there, but at least it's the same. Well, it could be possible. Again, if these stem cells...

34:26We assume when we get human tissue transplanted into us that's been grown from stem cells, I assume that's healthier than my old disease tissue that's being replaced. It's such a great point. And I write about it in the book because you can imagine as the future of genetic modification. We talked about cell-cultured animal products. So maybe step one is you make it just like the animal product. But let's just say that you are making a cell-cultured burger and you replace the unhealthy saturated fats that are just the natural fats in the cow with omega-3s or healthier fats, and you're the same product.

35:13So in the book, I talked about golden rice, which basically is rice that's genetically manipulated so that the people who eat it get an extra dose of vitamin B, which is a big deal because if you're in a poor country and you don't have vitamin B, it can lead to all kinds of problems, blindness, and other things. So this golden rice is this incredible thing. And yet it's not able to be realized in the world, at least at scale, because there's such an aggressive campaign against it. So now with genomics, like, again, you've been an expert on this for a long time. You've followed all the developments closely.

35:55Jennifer Doudna, who you know, I don't know how to say it, but you know very well, who won the Nobel Prize for her work on, I guess, CRISPR. And what's going on now? What's been the latest developments? Can we start cloning little versions of me? Well, so we already probably can do that. I mean, we're already at the stage of cloning primates. And so are there people now trying to clone humans? Probably. I don't know who they are. Not yet. The Chinese. Yeah, probably. That's the answer to everything. Who's doing bad? Oh, yeah, it's the Chinese. But certainly, the tools and capabilities of genome editing are advancing with unbelievable rapidity.

36:49So Jennifer Doudna and her colleague, partner, Emmanuel Charpentier, they published their groundbreaking paper, which won them the Nobel Prize in 2012. Six years later, in 2018, the world's first genome-edited CRISPR babies were born. So six years from a basic science paper to genome-edited humans. And since then, the tools for genome editing have just gotten better and better. There certainly is CRISPR-Cas9, and the Cas9 is the cutting enzyme. But now there's a bunch of different CRISPR enzymes that cut in different ways. David Liu at MIT, he has innovated prime editing and base editing, which are basically you can edit a genome without doing the double-stranded cut.

37:39And double-stranded cut is what George Church calls genomic vandalism. The accuracy, the error rate, all of these things are getting better. The applications of tools like CRISPR and other genome editing tools are just getting much more and more targeted. And as I write about in the book, then there's a range of applications where they're being used, whether it's healthcare with gene therapies, whether it's agriculture in manipulating plants or animals or manipulating the microbiomes in soils, energy, developing new industrial materials like spider silk that's stronger than Kevlar and stretchier than plastic.

38:22There's just tons and tons of applications, and that list is just expanding with unbelievable rapidity.

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39:46Like what's surprised you the most? And I think that's a reasonable question. Like with AI several years ago, and you mentioned this in the book, like AI beat the world Go, the best player in the world at Go. I'm a technologist by education and my early career. And a chess player, right? That surprised me. Aren't you a chess player too? Chess player, and I worked on the AI for all the different chess programs. I even worked on AI for Go, which is why when AI for Go happened, it surprised me. That was a miracle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then that, of course, led to what is now basically chat GPT. Like that was the same type of neural networks that were used.

40:28So the whole thing is just incredible. And so as a futurist, I like to say, well, I predicted everything, which is not the case. But I definitely hope that somebody cares about me enough someday to audit everything I've been saying for the last 40 years and say, all right, here's what you said was going to happen and didn't happen. And I think my record will be pretty great. And in my - The AI is going to audit you and let you live. Exactly. And in my congressional testimonies, I've said, hey, here's what's coming. Here's what we need to be ready for. And so the whole story is what I said earlier, just about speed, scope, and scale.

41:10And it just gets more and more. And so it's one thing to say it. It's one thing to intellectually believe it. But when you kind of keep seeing it every day over and over, it's just kind of incredible. I mean, that kind of this chat GPT moment where our AI systems went from being kind of stupid and my, I don't want to say the name because she's listening, S-I-R-I and A-L-E-X-A. They're still kind of dumb. But then we kind of watched in front of our eyes, chat GPT, get smarter. And then just a couple of weeks ago with the Gemini 1.5 Pro release and with the GPT 4.0 release, we saw Mr. Potato Head, that all of a sudden this intelligence, suddenly it had eyes, suddenly it had ears and they were crappy eyes and crappy ears.

42:11But the first little multicellular organism that could see a little bit of light or hear a little bit of something, those were crappy eyes and crappy ears. And all of this stuff is getting better. So it's literally like when you watch those time-lapse movies of something like a baby growing or something like that. It's like we're watching that movie every day. And it's not just one technology, it's a whole slew of technologies. So what has surprised you? I mean, certainly the speed of AI systems getting smarter has surprised me. The speed of popular adoption, I mean, this is nothing that exciting, the speed of popular adoption of ChatGPT.

43:03And ChatGPT wasn't even that much better than other stuff. It was just, it kind of reached people in a specific moment. I think that part, and if I look, just look back over the course of just my life. And again, as someone who's been saying this stuff is coming, would I have, and someone who actually said, we're entering the age of genome edited human babies. And I said in congressional testimony 11 years before those babies were born. And actually in my last book, frankly, that I talked about with you in Hacking Darwin, I said, and this was, it came out in, the final version was in, in 2018, when the book was already in print, being printed.

43:56And I called the publisher and I said, we need to pull back the book from, because the first CRISPR babies. It was just announced they've been born. But the edit that we need to make is really tiny because I predicted this would happen. I predicted it would happen in China and explained why. And I gave a list of five specific genes that I thought were the most likely targets. And one of the genes, which is the gene that was edited in these three, what became babies, were on my list. So all I need to do for this first version is say, add a little paragraph and saying, and this thing happened and was announced on this day.

44:40And specifically, if I remember correctly, that was the gene that prevents, that if you have that gene, you won't get AIDS. You know, that's the aspiration. So people, largely Europeans, who have disrupted versions of this genes are less susceptible to HIV. But these kids weren't going to be born with HIV. They had one parent who had it. And so that's why it was so unethical. The goal was to give them increased resistance, but it's increased resistance for some time in the future if they happened to be exposed to HIV. So that's why it was so unethical. Why is that unethical? I don't get it. because if you, my feeling is if you're going to, if you're going to do something so aggressive as genome edit, a pre-implanted embryo, which is really big.

45:33And if you're, and especially when it's the first time it's ever been done on a human embryo to take, taken a term, that's a really big risk. If you said this kid, if we don't do this edit, we'll be born with this genetic abnormality that will cause this terrible harm, death or something else. Then we could have that conversations, it's like, well, there's a big risk on doing experimental intervention on an embryo, but we know that the harm is clear. But in this case, there was no risk to that embryo and future child. And so what they were saying is we're going to take a huge risk of doing this experiment on this potential future child.

46:18And even if we're successful, and it turned out that the edit was not sufficiently targeted. But even if we're successful, the only benefit will be that if at some point in the future, this child is exposed to the virus, and maybe it's through a dirty needle or unprotected sex or something like that, that they will possibly have some percentage of additional protection. It just seems it wasn't worth the risk. The reason why I'm not against in principle, the editing of pre-implanted embryos is you can easily imagine, and I described them in my last book, Hacking Darwin, what would be scenarios where you'd say, hey, this is really worth the risk.

47:03And that's why I've called this what happened in China, Nuremberg-style experimentation. But you know, okay, it's, yes, Nuremberg-style, but it's happening to an embryo. So it's not quite Nuremberg-style where it's happening to adults. But they implanted the embryo. If it was just an embryo in a lab, then that's embryo research. And I'm actually pretty supportive of embryo research. But when you implant the embryo in the mother and grow that embryo to term, and you don't really know what's the implication of the intervention that you've made, in my mind, that is an unsupportable risk. I sort of agree.

47:48Like I see what you're saying because you're risking a life that didn't need to be risked. And even though that life is not born yet, it's going to be born, it's going to live and maybe have undesirable side effects because of this experiment. And you don't know when you're implanting it. Like if you could say, we're doing this, we have 100 % certainty what is the implication of the edit we've made on the pre-implanted embryo. And so then you have another decision point, implant or not implant. But these guys, they did it. They didn't and couldn't at that moment because of just the state of technology, known what they'd done, whether it was good, bad, indifferent.

48:32Then they implant it. And so that's why. I just think that I can easily imagine an ethical way of doing exactly this type of thing, but this was not that. I agree with you, but I also think though, ethics, this is like a societal thing and this, or a cultural thing. And I don't think, like we always say, oh, China's willing to break the ethical rules, but for a microsecond, I'm going to defend them, which is that they they think in terms of the collective, you know, that the individual, like we, we're individualists, like America, the West, we believe that the individual comes first and the individual's happiness and protection and so on comes first.

49:17And that's baked into our legal documents and our religion and our philosophy with China because of the influence of Marxism or whatever else they believe in the importance of the collective before the individual. So for them, I don't think they go into this thinking it's unethical, even though we think it's like a clear case of breaking ethics. See, I don't know. I mean, as you know, I have a PhD in Asian history. I live a lot of my world in this thinking about China. And I don't fully know the answer to that question. But if we just take He Jiankui, the doctor who took the lead on this at his word, what he was trying to do was to essentially bring nationalist glory to China by being the first and being a scientific pioneer and hero, which is a different motivation than saying, I'm going to be the first in doing this great thing to benefit humanity.

50:21And I think that even with that aspiration, and who's to say? I mean, in a way, we've gone mad with our almost out-of-control individualist society. We need to, like, there's a role for individualism and there's a role for communalism. But for these technologies, these are really powerful, life-altering technology. And my kind of core point is it's not that we shouldn't use them. It's just that we need to do so wisely. and to do so wisely, we should do so within frameworks. And Hu Zhanghui, this doctor, I mean, he went to prison in China in three years. So although he was praised for the first couple of days, he was then condemned.

51:05And there's lots of great science that's happening in China. But what we're talking about, as I said in the beginning, is our species has the ability to manipulate living systems. And we are living systems, and we live in a world of living systems. And if we're making these kinds of decisions, we should do so as thoughtfully as possible. And so that's why if it's just individual people running off and doing it on their own outside of these frameworks, I think that becomes certainly riskier. So can you explain protein folding and AI that operates on protein? This is like a new thing. You didn't really talk about this that much in Hacking Darwin.

51:48but there's a lot in this book about it and it's very interesting and it's game changing. It's gonna change the whole world. So A, protein folding, but then B, the AI that is figuring this all out and what it's going to do. Yeah, it's really important. So just a little bit of biology. And again, for people who are thinking about reading the book, my entire reason for writing books is to make complex stuff accessible to people. And so I think a lot of people are like, oh, protein fold, that sounds scary. that sounds like biology. It's like, I really want this to be kind of a book that you take to the beach and you think, wow, that was fun.

52:22And then, oh my God, I accidentally learned a lot while I was having so much fun. So protein folding. So proteins are the part of our biology that does stuff. Like proteins are just the building blocks of life and certainly of our life. And as we've entered the new era of analyzing biology and sequencing biology, you can actually sequence a protein, and proteins are made of amino acids, and you can get a string of letters that just tell you the order of the amino acids in that protein. And that can tell you a lot about the protein, but it can't tell you everything. And it certainly can't tell you enough to be truly meaningful because the two most important determinants of how a protein functions are one, the order of these strings of amino acids, the letters, and two is the shape of the protein because it's these long things.

53:26And because there's so little real estate in our biology, they have to kind of fold up in these tiny, beautiful shapes. Remember, you praised the cover of my book, that is a protein on the cover of the book. It's the folded protein from a skin cell. And so one of the hardest problems in biology called the protein folding problem has been, can you predict the shape of a protein from the string of amino acids? And you wouldn't be able to ask that question if we hadn't entered the world of genome sequencing and protein sequencing. And so it was such a hard problem that somebody set up kind of an Olympics of protein folding every two years.

54:07And basically, people would be given this string of letters, and they'd be asked to use whatever programs or strategies they would have to predict the shape of that protein. And the way that you could test whether they were right or not is that we had a traditional model, which is the last innovation, called x-ray crystallography. And so with x-ray crystallography, you take this tiny, tiny, tiny protein, you turn it into a crystal, and you x-ray it a gazillion times, and you're able to get a 3D model of that protein. And then you compare that 3D model to the string of letters of amino acids. To do one takes about three years for a graduate student or a postdoc or a professor, three years for one.

54:55and and is that because and just the importance of this again the importance of knowing the shape as well as the letters is because it could have the same letters but if it's different shapes it does different things yes exactly yeah because both of them determine um what it does and then before we move on like it's really important because if you're trying to make a drug if you're trying to have a chemical that that does something let's say eats up the oil in an oil spill or just really just anything you can imagine, those two pieces, done with proteins, and because life is done with proteins, that's kind of everything.

55:32This is a really important thing. So people have been trying to build computer models for predicting the shapes of proteins from these strings of amino acids for a while. So you mentioned AlphaGo. So the first there was AlphaGo, which defeated the world Go champion Lee Seedol in 2016. In 2017, AlphaZero, which didn't, unlike AlphaGo, it didn't train on the digitized games of Go. It trained by just being fed the rules of Go and asked to play against itself. And after three days of playing against itself, it became better than AlphaGo, which had beaten the world champion one year before. And so then in 2018, they said, all right, now we're going to try to address the protein folding problem.

56:18They created this new algorithm. This is Google DeepMind called AlphaZero. And then AlphaZero entered into this Olympics of protein folding and came in a disappointing 20th place. So they went back and they rejiggered the algorithm. They worked for two years, came back. As I said, it's biannual. In 2020, they won the competition so handily that Nature Magazine declared that the protein folding problem had been solved. So that was a big deal. Now, did they fail initially because there weren't enough examples for them to train on? No, it was because the algorithms, I mean, certainly that's the kind of the rule of thumb for all of these areas is you need more data, more computing power, and better algorithms.

57:02Like that's the formula. And with those three ingredients, we can decipher more complex patterns that would be more and more complex, more and more difficult for our unaided minds to identify. That's kind of the essential formula of everything. And so all of those things got better. There was more data, more compute, and better algorithms. Certainly the better algorithms were key here because these algorithms were so great. So that's 2020. They win this competition. 2021, they released the predicted shapes, folds of 350 ,000 proteins, including all of the proteins in the human body. So 350 ,000 times three years, which is how long it would take to characterize one, that's like a million years of saved time.

57:56In 2022, they released 215 million predictions, all of the proteins known to science. So if you do 215 million times three years, 645 million years of time thrown back into the pot for humans who would have spent that time trying to characterize proteins now can spend even a fraction of that time trying to figure out what do we do with characterized proteins. It comes back to the earlier point of acceleration that everything, because we're so connected, every day we're resetting the baseline, the starting point for everybody else. And we have more people and more technology, and we keep resetting the baseline every day.

58:49And so now that this is done, okay, this seems like really big news, but how are our lives going to change? How is this going to make our lives better? Yeah, so a big chunk of the book is about exactly that. It's the applications. And so basically the way the book is organized is the beginning is about the nature of change, how to think about technological change, how to internalize technological change. And in some ways, how do we think like science fiction writers in a world that just feels to us correctly like science fiction? And then I talk about the applications, which we'll talk about now.

59:27And then it's what could go wrong, your first question. And then the final chapter is what are the things that we need to do now to optimize the benefits and increase the odds that things will go right? So for the applications, this has the potential to revolutionize healthcare. And we're moving from our world of generalized healthcare based on population averages to our new world of precision healthcare based on understanding each person's biology. But as we get more and more data about each person's biology, we're going to have these massive data sets, and we're going to be able to decipher patterns both in how human biology works and how each of our biology works.

1:00:07And that's going to unlock doors for specific treatments like gene therapies, personalized pharmacology, pharmacogenomics based on our biology, systems biology approaches to diseases where we're kind of less instrumental. And it's going to move us to a new world of health care that's more predictive and preventive, where we recognize that we live in a range of possibility. and the goal of healthcare and health and life maybe is to optimize what's possible for us at the upper end of our capacity. And maybe in some cases go a little above, beyond our innate possibility. And that's just healthcare, but we can do it in lots of other areas.

1:00:48So like, okay, so give it an example though. Like let's say I have brain cancer. Is because of these new proteins that have been mapped out, will we be able to make a drug that will cure me? So let me give you a very, very, very personal answer to something like that question. And I just, so I don't upset any of your viewers or listeners. There's a really nice ending of this story. But while I was writing the healthcare chapter of the book a little less than two years ago, my father was diagnosed with stage four metastatic neuroendocrine cancer, which is the same cancer that Steve Jobs died from.

1:01:29And it was this huge shock. And I have three other brothers. All of those are MDs. I'm a JD, PhD. For a mix of whatever reasons, including family dynamics, I've been the one overseeing my father's medical care, working with his oncologist. And from the beginning, I insisted that we do full genome sequencing of my dad's cancer cells, which was not the standard practice for this cancer. We have a really great oncologist in Denver. I worked very closely with him. And the first chemo my dad was on, he tolerated, it didn't work. He wasn't a candidate for what people had hoped for the second, this radiation therapy.

1:02:18And then we were at this turning point where the oncologist was recommending a very aggressive chemotherapy. And the sequencing had come back and there was a potentially targetable mutation. And there was a treatment that had been approved by the FDA, not for my dad's cancer, but just more generically, like three weeks before. And I said, if we go on chemo, it's going to knock him on his ass and it's probably not going to help. This thing is new, but we have a specific target. Let's go after that. And so the oncologist had said at the time of the diagnosis, the best that we can hope for is to slow the spread.

1:02:54Remission is out of the question. My dad has had so much remission. I said Denver, but we're originally from Kansas City. We got him through last year's, the 2023 Super Bowl and the Chiefs won. And then we said, all all right, we're going for next year's Super Bowl. He's doing so well. My brother and I took him to Las Vegas. We were right there, like right above where Mikol Hardman caught the winning pass in overtime of the Super Bowl. My dad is doing great. I just remember today, he's at his grand, with my mother at his granddaughter's eighth grade graduation in Denver. It's because of these technologies that my dad is alive.

1:03:36It's because of these technologies that people, like I mentioned, Victoria, or maybe I didn't mention, I can't remember, Victoria Gray, the woman who was essentially cured of sickle cell disease. I mean, it's just, this was, it's like - Is that because the identifying all these, the shapes of all these proteins allows you to look into the genome and see what might be mutating and what we can correct? And you saw a treatment that corrected this possible mutation related to this cancer? It's not all the protein folding. It's the integration of all of these technologies. And so with every one of these, there's a bunch of technologies that are woven together, like with the sickle cell disease.

1:04:17Certainly there's all of the sequencing. There's the gene editing to take these cells out of her body. Then basically what you do is you turn on the fetal hemoglobin. So we have one mechanism for creating hemoglobin when we're fetuses. And then we have another mechanism when we're adults. People with sickle cell, generally their adult hemoglobin manufacturing facility isn't working. So basically they turn back on this thing that biology had turned off. So how much do you need to know about that? And then to reintroduce those cells back into the person in a way that their body isn't going to reject.

1:05:03It's like there's no one technology that makes all of this stuff possible. It's a million technologies. Like in the book, I write about the COVID-19 vaccines. And it's another, it's just incredible story where there were just so many different innovations that made those possible. Obviously, understanding how messenger RNA functions, but figuring out how to do genome edits so that our bodies wouldn't reject an intervention, figuring out how to make little balls of fat, essentially, that could deliver these payloads without being attacked by our bodies. And so that's why it's like there are certainly blow your mind technologies and certainly predicting protein folds and CRISPR genome editing.

1:05:53But the real story, hence the name of the book, is the super convergence of all of these technologies, which are making incredible things possible. But the super convergence is also making ever more incredible things ever more possible. But you know, it's interesting, though, that like the doctor made his one prediction about remission, and you had other thoughts about that, because perhaps you knew the cutting edge of some of these technologies. If someone is sick or knows someone who's sick, how can they right now, there's such a wide spectrum of different, like the doctor is an expert, right?

1:06:30He's a great guy. You said he was an excellent oncologist. He's an expert. And you're an expert also on, you know, all these futurist type technologies. How do you now know what to do? How does somebody think, like if I'm on my own, how do I figure out, oh, they just approved this obscure gene therapy that I could use for this? It's a really tough question because we want our doctors to be conservative. There's a reason why we have regulations. And the reasons why, frankly, I was so critical of Ho Jianghui in China is there's a built-in conservatism in healthcare because it really matters to us.

1:07:12and certainly in this country, our liability controls are so strong. Like I mentioned the COVID-19 vaccines, these were historically incredible vaccines, saved millions of lives. But certainly there were small numbers of people who were likely harmed by this vaccine and Joe Rogan and others have talked about teenage boys who had myocarditis and some of them probably died from this and it may well have been connected to the vaccine. So our standard is zero tolerance for things going wrong. And so if that's the message that we've given to our healthcare system, we collectively don't want our doctors to be kind of taking these kinds of risks.

1:07:58And like I said before, maybe it's not coincidental that I'm the one non-MD in my family and I was the one who was pushing for the new stuff because I have a younger brother who's a phenomenal doctor. and he in the beginning was saying, what are you doing? You're only causing harm. The strategy is don't do anything and trust the doctor. And he's a great doctor. I think he knows what he's doing and he doesn't like when people heckle him. I have a great relationship with our oncologist in Denver, who's literally unbelievably phenomenal. But yeah, but certainly things are moving so fast that there's a lot of education that's required for anybody.

1:08:40Like how would someone even know though, to pursue this? Like, you know, disease now is getting such multi-dimensionality, let's call it. Like there's so many new factors now introduced into what a disease is. Like, how do you know, how can you know what can cure it? Or are we just going to have to wait now until, I mean, that by itself is going to become a profession, being able to navigate between traditional medical care and this new stuff with genomics. Yeah. So again, I think everybody needs to educate themselves because there are things that the system will not provide. The system is not organized to provide certain things.

1:09:18If we said, all right, everybody gets a whole genome sequence, the system would collapse because everyone's saying, oh, I found some rare mutation and I'm making 600 doctor's appointments and then the doctors don't know what it is. And so I certainly think that people should educate themselves. And I'll tell you what I do just for me personally. There's a test, a GRAIL test, which is a liquid biopsy, and it costs like$1 ,000. They send the phlebotomist to your house. They take blood. They send it away for sequencing and they find basically biomarkers. They look for biomarkers for 50 different cancers.

1:09:54Luckily, I didn't have anything once a year when I can. I go to India and at Max Hospital, they have a preventive health checkup, which basically you go at 8.30, they have a little guy. They run you room to room. You get like 50 gazillion checks and they serve you lunch, come back a couple of days later and they have a thick stack of all these reports. And you meet with primary care doctors who tell you what they've seen. I personally believe that knowledge is power. And the sooner we have that knowledge, the better off we'll be. And for sure - Why is that hospital in India? Well, it happens to be in India.

1:10:36You could do it here. It would just cost you a gazillion dollars in India. This whole thing is$250 and lunch is included. And why specifically is it a little guy taking you from room to room? Does he have to be little? That's a very important question. I think it has to do with village nutrition in India. I'm sure if you brought this guy here, this little guy as an infant, and they ate the crap and all the protein and meat that we eat, they would be the big guy that took me. But this guy and the other guys seem to not be huge in India. Well, I want to also ask about AI. So we both know chat GPT 4.0 was just released and it's a nice improvement over chat GPT 4, which was a huge improvement over 3.5 and 3.

1:11:31Are there areas where you think AI might plateau in terms of its benefits and other areas where it will kind of keep increasing at an exponential rate. So for instance, AI is getting better and better at rendering a great movie. So to the point where Tyler Perry, the famous movie producer and director, he stopped building a$300 million facility because he says, AI is going to do all my stages and sets and makeup and sound and cameras and everything. He doesn't need a facility. But on the flip side, I'm wondering if storytelling, like screenwriting, will plateau because ultimately AI doesn't have human experience.

1:12:20I don't know. I'm just making this up. It's a great question. I for sure think that LLMs, large language models, will plateau. I just think that that's just one philosophy, one approach, one algorithm. And I think like everything else, it'll be good at some things and not good at some things, and we'll figure that out. But that's just one approach. Under the umbrella of AI, there may be thousands of equivalent algorithms like the LLMs. The LLMs themselves might be able to come up with other algorithms with different philosophies about how to do AI. And those different systems would also have, like every person and every species, some mix of things that they're really good at and some things that they're really bad at.

1:13:09And I also believe, like people talk about AGI, artificial general intelligence, the whole concept doesn't make any sense to me. Because if we're talking about machines that can do a bunch of different things well, we already have those. I mean, we have AI systems that can play Minecraft and chess and Go and other things. And if we're talking about an AI system that can do everything that humans can do, I would really be terrified because humans, we're this mixed species with 3.8 billion years of evolved bodily, evolved intelligence that's connected to all of our other senses. It's embodied in this human form that we have.

1:13:55As I said in the beginning, I don't think that we're moving toward AGI, whatever that is. I think what we are doing is giving birth to machine intelligence and probably machine super intelligence. Then we're going to have to figure out, just like if Martians landed on Earth or if we gave birth to Martian somehow, what's our relationship with them? And it doesn't mean we're totally disempowered, but it does mean that now is the time we need to start thinking about what are our goals. But it's like you said, though, about the protein folding. One year, it did 315 ,000 proteins that it figured out the shape of.

1:14:38The next year, 200 million and saved us 600 million years of time. So that's something that's not plateauing or it didn't plateau. Whereas let's say AI's ability to write a love letter to your girlfriend, that might plateau. Because ultimately, I don't know why that might plateau, but it seems to me looking at the output of when you ask the AI to write something creatively, it doesn't really seem to get that much better. Maybe it It uses a few less adjectives and the writings are less cringy, but it doesn't really seem to - But these are the Pong days of AI, so who knows where things will go. But what I'm saying is I believe that humans, we have our unique superpowers.

1:15:23We just don't yet fully know what they are relative to our machines. So there could be things that we really value now that it turns out these are just commodities that will have no value. And there could be things that we don't really value that much now, like somebody who has tremendous empathy or compassion or the most loving person who's working in an assisted living facility making$33 ,000 a year. It could be those are the human superpowers. And so I think that's why we just don't know what the strengths of our machines are going to be, although they are going to be incredible based on just period, I should say.

1:16:14And we don't know what are the attributes of us that we're going to value the most. And that's why we need a dynamic, continuous process for trying to figure this out. Say, well, what are the guardrails around our machines? What are the goals? How do we achieve them? What type of engagement do we want with people? How do we think about the future of to kind of insert the thing? Because technology is going to touch that thing, whatever it is. So Jamie Metzl, author of Super Convergence and previously Hacking Darwin, so many great insights in all of your books about what the future, it always gets me so excited talking to you because it's sky's the limit really, but there's a lot to learn and a lot to know to understand that.

1:17:09Give us a prediction. Tell us something in the future that doesn't exist yet. Yeah. So before I did, so there's a lot to know, but I say this a lot. This is a conversation that's ultimately not just about the technology. It's about the values. It's about what values do we want to infuse into our technology and into this journey so that when we get wherever we're going, it's going to be familiar enough to us based on our essential sense of who we are and what we stand for. I think that's really the denouement of the book is to say, well, how do we think about doing that. Sorry. So in terms of predictions, and again, it's hard not to, and I also, as you know, James Wright, science fiction, it's hard not to just sound boring, but I just think that we're going to be able to do all these things that we love to do in just more sustainable ways.

1:18:14So we're not going to get rid of all diseases because if we cure these diseases and live longer, there'll be a whole new set of diseases. I hope we're going to have a different relationship with the natural world around us, and whether that's through plant and animal agriculture or industrial materials, and we can get away from the killing, digging up, cutting down models to the growing models, or we can think differently. Data storage, None of us are any smarter than our ancestors 50 ,000 years ago, but we live our lives. Actually, there's a lot of evidence that we're less intelligent. Probably.

1:18:57Because we don't have to know. 50 ,000 years ago, they had to know in a five mile radius, every crop, wild animal, place where they could sleep. I don't even know what's in my closet. Yeah, and don't eat any crops or wild animals you find out on the street in New York, by all means. I don't know what's 30 feet away from me right now. In New York City, there's at least one rat within 14 feet of you on average. Exactly. But even if we were desperate, I don't think we would know how to catch it and eat it. Right. Other than the poor owl. I can't remember his name. May he rest in peace. So I think we're going to have to just think differently about how we interact with the world.

1:19:39And then cultural inheritance, as I was saying, the reason we live our lives is because of our cultural inheritance. But we're generating more data every two years than in the entire history of humanity up to that point. And so I think that DNA data storage, as I write about in the book, is going to give us, under the right conditions, you can store data reliably in DNA for 5 million years, unlike the 30 to 50 in magnetic tapes. And so I do think it's just our inevitable future that we humans are going to leave this planet. I don't think we're going to be living in Alpha Centauri, but I do think that we're going to be living longer term in space.

1:20:21And I think that we're going to have to use these technologies. And we're going to have to recognize that our future is not human alone. It's not AI alone. It's human plus AI. And that means humans interacting with our machines and in some ways humans merging with our machines and that scares people we already have cyborgs people with cochlear implants people with pacemakers and I just think that that is going to uh to increase and there's just a whole set of experiences that we can't even imagine now because of these interfaces so just like you know I'm imagine I'm speaking with you, James, but imagine if I had just kind of like, there are all these things that are happening in me as we speak that even I am not aware of.

1:21:08But imagine if we all had sensors and we were able to kind of know what was happening in another person in a way that that person themselves didn't even know. Or I mean, I just think that we can really, when we get beyond ourselves, and that's the story is that we're this one species that is pretty significantly getting beyond ourselves. There's a whole world of possibilities that we really have to kind of take a step back to imagine. And so certainly with my books, what I want people to do is to kind of take a first step back with these ideas and then say, all right, well, what's another step back?

1:21:46And that's why I love hearing from readers because I try to think of a lot of stuff, but there's a lot of stuff that I haven't thought about. And I love, that's what's so exciting about sending out a book into the world is you put so much heart and soul into a book and then it becomes this object that other people absorb in their way on their terms. And it's always very exciting for me to hear about what comes back. Well, after I read one of your books, I always feel like I want to write a science fiction novel because there's so many new ideas and so many things I can think of that. And that's often a way to communicate what some of these ideas are and what some of the potential is, is through storytelling, through fiction.

1:22:25And you do such great work, James, because not everybody, myself included, has time to read every one of these books or ideas. So you do such a great job of making these ideas accessible to people. So thank you. You know, somebody was over my house recently and looked at my library of books and said, I, you know, and he asked the typical question was, I bet you've only read like 5 % of those books. And I said, no, unfortunately, I'm one of the few people who's probably read all of the books on the bookshelf because of all the, they're all books for podcasts. So that I just have to read all of these.

1:23:02I love it. So, and for good, I mean, but I'm not like, I don't have the, there's a Japanese phrase for it where most of your library is unread. So you have this anticipation of reading it all. And I've read everything on my bookshelf. I have to always get new books to have stuff that I haven't read. I love it. So, well, Jamie, thanks so much again. You're always welcome on the podcast. Anytime you want to talk about anything, or even if just some of your predictions come true and you want to brag about them, come on back and we'll talk about it. Awesome. James, well, I always love joining you and it's great to see you.

1:23:36and the book is Super Convergence, How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform Our Lives, Work, and World. Super Convergence.