I'm reading a book titled "The Coming Wave" by Mustafa Suleyman co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence firms Deepmind and Inflection AI. I predict it will replace Fred Wilt's "How They Train".
Fascinating read about what AI , Bio-Technology, robotics, and DNA research are up to and capable of doing and will do in the near future. The advances are so huge and mind boggling. A couple of paragraphs on pages 85 and 86 caught my attention in relation to athletic performance. In it Suleyman talks about altering humans with Biotech and even creating new humans with genetically altered DNA. Here is what he says, highlights are mine:
Alongside a host of other promising interventions, the inevitability of physical aging--what seems like a fundamental part of human life--is called into question. A world where life spans are set to average a hundred years or more is achievable in the next decades. Nor is this just about longer life; it's about healthier lives as we get older.
Success would have major societal repercussions. At the same time cognitive, aesthetic, physical, and performance-related enhancements are also plausible and would be as disruptive and reviled as they are desired. Either way, serious physical and self-modifications are going to happen. Initial work suggests memory can be improved and muscle strength enhanced. It won't be long before "gene doping" becomes a live issue in sports, education, and professional life.
Wow, are you thinking what I'm thinking? Yep. And Suleyman goes on:
Already the first children with edited genomes have been born in China after a rogue professor embarked on a series of live experiments with young couples, eventually leading, in 2018 to the birth of twins, known as Lulu and Nana, with edited genomes. His work shocked the scientific community, breaching all ethical norms.
It would be interesting to know what the experiments that went wrong looked like. They are probably pickling in a jar of formaldahyde as I write this. Makes you wonder what gene edits might have been applied to those Chinese twins. Will they be adapted to run a marathon in an hour and thirty minutes or high jump nine feet with a two step approach and a scissor kick?
And with technology advancing so rapidly, you can now acquire a work bench gene splicing tool for under $25,000 and start rebuilding yourself or your grand kids in your garage. Just have to park the Tesla in the driveway. There is no telling what some 'smart' folks may be cooking up in their home labs right now, and eventually Frankenstein-like athletes may, correction, will be appearing on sports fields. If it is considered unethical or immoral to do such work on others, it doesn't mean someone won't be able to experiment on themselves. There are plenty of examples in science of people who did such things on themselves or on family and friends.
“In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one's face.”― A Short History of Nearly Everything
In his book Bryson describes a number of other 'experimenters.
If interested I suggest this article by Josh Clark on 'How Stuff Works'
10 Scientists who experimented on themselves
My hypothesis for how we should deal with these issues as well as the challenges of global warming and the need to reduce carbon emissions is as follows.
Instead of using AI and Biotechnology to make humans bigger and stronger, we should revamp them into smaller and more efficient beings. This could be done over about three generations. Of course this will be a reversal of the evolutionary process in some ways. Possibly makes visiting the 'Creation Museum' in Petersburg, Kentucky, more interesting.
But realize that a smaller more efficient body will take less energy to exist. If we can reduce the average height of humans to say 24 inches or 0.6 meters we could reduce the demand for energy down by 67%, just for human consumption alone. We could abandon cities like NYC, Dallas, Paducah, Vancouver, and Medicine Hat and rebuild new ones at one third scale. Might need immigrant labor to pull this off. But we would need fewer fields under cultivation, fewer factories producing small cars, trucks, and airplanes. We could go from singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall to 32.67 Bottles of Beer. The Indy 500 would become the Indy 165. Our running tracks would go from 400 meters down to 132 meters. I know you say this is too difficult for the human mind to make such adaptations, but we did it once before when we went from tracks measuring 440 yards down to 400 meters. I admit we still can't do the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion in our heads But we must for the sake of humanity. FYI, you convert Celsius to Fahrenheit by doubling Celsius temps and adding 30 degrees. So 10 degrees Celsius is 2x10 + 30 = 50 F. That is why Canadian six packs have 42 beers according to the McKenzie Brothers, Doug and Bob.
In all honesty, I did not come up with this concept on my own. I owe a tremendous debt to Steve Martin for blazing the path to this hypothesis. See link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOrdzCHnpw4
And of course we'd have to get Putin to go along with it and do the same for the Russian people. 'You go first, Vladimir.' Nyet, nyet, you go first, while I have a vodka tonic.'
I would also love to hear the responses of the presidential candidates if this question were thrown at them in another debate.
Get ready for the next fifty, no, make that ten years and don't say I didn't warn you. George
P.S. After running this piece past my daughter, her response was, "Oh Dad, Matt Damon already did this in a film called Downsizing.
George,
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