✨ 🧬 When AI meets biotechnology: My chat (+transcript) with techno-futurist Jamie Metzl

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

Once-science-fiction advancements like AI, gene editing, and advanced biotechnology have finally arrived, and they’re here to stay. These technologies have seemingly set us on a course towards a brand new future for humanity, one we can hardly even picture today. But progress doesn’t happen overnight, and it isn’t the result of any one breakthrough.

As Jamie Metzl explains in his new book, Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions will Transform our Lives, Work, and World, tech innovations work alongside and because of one another, bringing about the future right under our noses.

Today on Faster, Please! — The Podcast, I chat with Metzl about how humans have been radically reshaping the world around them since their very beginning, and what the latest and most disruptive technologies mean for the not-too-distant future.

Metzl is a senior fellow of the Atlantic Council and a faculty member of NextMed Health. He has previously held a series of positions in the US government, and was appointed to the World Health Organization’s advisory committee on human genome editing in 2019. He is the author of several books, including two sci-fi thrillers and his international bestseller, Hacking Darwin.

In This Episode

* Unstoppable and unpredictable (1:54)

* Normalizing the extraordinary (9:46)

* Engineering intelligence (13:53)

* Distrust of disruption (19:44)

* Risk tolerance (24:08)

* What is a “newnimal”? (13:11)

* Inspired by curiosity (33:42)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Unstoppable and unpredictable (1:54)

The name of the game for all of this . . . is to ask “What are the things that we can do to increase the odds of a more positive story and decrease the odds of a more negative story?”

Pethokoukis: Are you telling a story of unstoppable technological momentum or are you telling a story kind of like A Christmas Carol, of a future that could be if we do X, Y, and Z, but no guarantees?

Metzl: The future of technological progress is like the past: It is unstoppable, but that doesn't mean it's predetermined. The path that we have gone over the last 12,000 years, from the domestication of crops to building our civilizations, languages, industrialization — it's a bad metaphor now, but — this train is accelerating. It's moving faster and faster, so that's not up for grabs. It is not up for grabs whether we are going to have the capacities to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life — we are doing both of those things now in the early days.

What is up for grabs is how these revolutions will play out, and there are better and worse scenarios that we can imagine. The name of the game for all of this, the reason why I do the work that I do, why I write the books that I write, is to ask “What are the things that we can do to increase the odds of a more positive story and decrease the odds of a more negative story?”

Progress has been sort of unstoppable for all that time, though, of course, fits and starts and periods of stagnation —

— But when you look back at those fits and starts — the size of the Black Plague or World War II, or wiping out Berlin, and Dresden, and Tokyo, and Hiroshima, and Nagasaki — in spite of all of those things, it's one-directional. Our technologies have gotten more powerful. We've developed more capacities, greater ability to manipulate the world around us, so there will be fits and starts but, as I said, this train is moving. That's why these conversations are so important, because there's so much that we can, and I believe must, do now.

There’s a widely held opinion that progress over the past 50 years has been slower than people might have expected in the late 1960s, but we seem to have some technologies now for which the momentum seems pretty unstoppable.

Of course, a lot of people thought, after ChatGPT came out, that superintelligence would happen within six months. That didn’t happen. After CRISPR arrived, I’m sure there were lots of people who expected miracle cures right away.

What makes you think that these technologies will look a lot different, and our world will look a lot different than they do right now by decade’s end?

They certainly will look a lot different, but there's also a lot of hype around these technologies. You use the word “superintelligence,” which is probably a good word. I don't like the words “artificial intelligence,” and I have a six-letter framing for what I believe about AGI — artificial general intellig