cial intelligence, to decode the human genome, and to engineer organisms are on their own signature achievements, but today's guest says where these three technologies intersect lies great hope and challenge for all of humanity.

He's Jamie Metzl this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(bright rousing music) (bright rousing music continues) Hello and welcome to "Story in the Public Square" where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from The Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salves Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is an old friend, Jamie Metzl who's expertise on genetics, artificial intelligence, and where they intersect makes them in demand around the world.

His new book is "Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions will Transform Our Lives, Work and World."

He joins us today from New York.

Jamie, it's so great to be with you again.

- Thank you so much, Jim and Wayne.

Really thrilled to be back with you.

- So last time we saw you here, I think it was about five years ago, and we were talking about "Hacking Darwin."

We're gonna sort of, I think, interweave a little bit of the two books here, but let's start with "Superconvergence."

Give us a quick overview of the book.

- So as I see it, the big story of this moment of human habitation on earth is the big story of what's happening now is after nearly 4 billion years of life, our one species suddenly has the increasing ability to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life, to engineer novel intelligence and re-engineer life.

And the big question for all of us and for our future and the future of our planet is whether we can learn to use this superpower responsibly.

And if we do, it opens up incredible promise for us, for improved health, human health and healthcare, for agriculture, abundant energy, new ways of producing, sustainably producing raw materials, foods, and other things, storing data reliably for millions of years.

And if we get it wrong, we could do incredible damage to ourselves, to the world around us.

And that's why this is such a critically important moment.

And the reason why I wrote the book is to help readers in a very accessible way understand what's happening, what's at stake, and what role can each of us play in working to make sure that we're increasing the odds of the more positive outcomes and decreasing the odds of the negative ones.

- And I mentioned your previous bestseller, "Hacking Darwin," which sort of introduced us to the revolution taking place in the world of genetics.

It's been five years since we talked to you about that.

It plays a role in this book.

Where does that revolution, for lack of a better word, stand now?

- So you said correctly, Jim, all these pieces fit together.

Actually, the origin of this book is that I was on my book tours for "Hacking Darwin," and I was explaining the future of human genetic engineering and genome editing.

And then I was saying, but to understand that, you need to understand this bigger context.

It's not just about what we're doing to human biology, it's about humans re-engineering all of biology.

And that was the origin of that book.

Since I was with you, Jim and Wayne, I was appointed to be a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Human Genome Editing, which was working to try to at least suggest ground rules for how we humans can use these very powerful, literally life-changing technologies.

And we spent two and a half years and we came up with what we thought were some pretty reasonable recommendations.

But the problem was there wasn't a place to deliver those recommendations because we don't have a mechanism for trying to address these big challenges of how to deal with extremely powerful runaway technology.

So as we speak today, the World Health Organization is itself under threat because the Trump administration has announced its plans to withdraw.

So if anyone was imagining that some international body like the World Health Organization or the United Nations was going to take the lead in helping manage these revolutionary technologies, you can only be discouraged.

And so while the progress in human genome editing and human genetic manipulation has raced forward even in the small number of years since we were together, and we can see that through advances in gene therapy, lots of applications in the healthcare world, and everybody is seeing advances in AI, genetics, biotechnology racing forward, and it's the title of my book, "Superconvergence," how all of these fields are coming together.

It's not that these are separate fields, it's that AI is animating biotechnology, it's animating these new approaches to healthcare that are showing up in our hospitals and clinics.

And just one more quick point.

In the time since last you and I were together, my father was diagnosed with stage four metastatic neuroendocrine cancer, Steve Jobs' cancer.

And it was while I was writing the healthcare chapter of this new book.

And so I was in many ways living in the future of healthcare, precision healthcare, and the future of oncology.

And I insisted with our oncologist that we sequence his cancer cells right away on day one.

And it turned out that with that genetic analysis, we found a mutation in his cancer cells that we could target.

And at the time of the diagnosis, we were told he had about six to nine months of healthy living to go, and now it's two and a half years.

And he's a huge Chiefs fan and we're hoping for his third Chief's Super Bowl victory since the diagnosis.

So this sounds big and abstract, but very real and exciting.

Miracles are happening now.

And it's not just about human health, but as I write about it in the book, it's about just humans renegotiating our relationship with the world around us.

- [Jim] I'm happy to hear your dad's doing okay, Jamie.

- Yeah, that's really good news.

Again, happy to hear that.

Second revolution you focus on is artificial intelligence.

And you tell the reader that AI is a misnomer, that in fact a better term might be alternative intelligence.

Break that down for us please, Jamie.

- So when people use the word artificial intelligence, what I think people are imagining is that we are creating synthetic humans.

And I just don't think that's what we are doing because to think about alternative intelligence or artificial intelligence, we need to understand, well, what is human intelligence?

Human intelligence isn't just the things that we do with our brains, it's this embodied evolved intelligence that is much bigger, broader than our brains.

We have sensors all over our bodies, we have spatial intelligence, we have all ways of knowing and perceiving, and we're not even trying to build machines that are doing that.

But what we are doing is creating machines that are really good at solving specific problems, even specific broad problems that aren't as broad as our intelligence, but that doesn't make them any less meaningful or significant.

And so we wouldn't call a dolphin an artificial human intelligence.

We call dolphin intelligence dolphin intelligence, we call dog intelligence dog intelligence, not artificial human intelligence.

What we are creating is an alternate form of intelligence, machine intelligence.

It's inspired by human intelligence, no doubt.

It's inspired by our cultural traditions and our cultural history, which is both the training data that we are feeding these machines and it's the operating system.

I mean, these are cultural artifacts created by humans, but we're not creating artificial humans, we are creating super intelligent machines.

And I think that's really important because I hear all this kind of nonsense that humans are the new Neanderthals.

We are not.

Humans have a lot of tricks up our sleeves.

But if we see ourselves so narrowly that we are just this narrow form of intelligence and if we can create a machine that can calculate or do all sorts of things better than us, it means there's no value for our own humanity, that is extremely dangerous.

And even now, I hear people talking all the time about AGI, artificial general intelligence.

I don't believe that that's a thing for this exact same reason.

Machines will not be able to do everything that we do and we won't be able to do everything the machines do, and we will co-evolve with our machines in the future as we have done for many thousands of years in the past.

- So let's get back to healthcare.

We talked about that earlier.

One of the benefits of this revolution is a move from general to precision to ultimately predictive healthcare.

What does that mean?

- So right now, Wayne, we live in a world of what I call generalized healthcare, which is healthcare based on population averages.

If you go into your, well, you're in Rhode Island, if you go into your CVS and you pick up some Tylenol, how do you know that that Tylenol isn't going to kill you?

The reason is because our regulators have decided that Tylenol helps enough people that it should be accessible to everybody and shouldn't be restricted.

But with this exact example of Tylenol, there's a small subset of people who can actually be harmed or killed.

And right now in our world of generalized medicine where we're treated based on being humans, like all other humans, we find out if we are one of those exceptions when we have a problem.

It's the same point as when people go in for cancer care or anything else where they say, "We're gonna start you with this treatment.

If it doesn't help you, hurt you, or kill you, we're going to move you on to something else."

And so that's trial and error.

And the next phase, what we're starting to enter is our new world of personalized or precision healthcare where we need to understand who each person is on an individual basis in order to treat them.

And that's why we're going to get a lot more information, biometric information, other information, but a foundational part of everyone's electronic health records will be your whole sequenced genome.

And we're all going to have our genome sequenced.

And increasingly over time, we're going to recognize that our biology, it's not just genetics and a bunch of other stuff, our biology is a system of systems and we're going to measure more of those systems as part of making sure that we can all get healthcare that's tailored just for us as individuals.

And as we do that, we're going to build these massive data sets of a lot of biological information.

And the formula, not just for healthcare, but for everything, is the more and higher quality data that we have, this more computing power we have, and the more effective and stronger our algorithms, the more we are going to be able to identify patterns in very complex entities and organisms.

And as we do that, we're going to be able to understand things better and manipulate things better.

And so in the context of healthcare, what this means is we'll move to the next phase of predictive and preventive healthcare where we recognize that we live within a range of biological possibility.

And the goal of healthcare, and in some ways life, will be to optimize our experience at the upper end of that possibility, which means identifying problems that have yet to manifest as symptoms.

To say that you're at increased risk for whatever, for falling, for developing type two diabetes, rather than waiting to fall, rather than waiting to develop that type two diabetes, 10, 20 years before, we're gonna say, "Hey, you're at an increased risk for this.

Why don't you start doing X?"

And X may be really simple things, diet, exercise, strengthening.

The earlier we go, the more benign the interventions will be.

And to make this possible, we're going to have to live in a world of much greater health sensing.

I'm not with you in person, so I can't see whether you guys are wearing Apple watches.

But if you are, you already have a pretty high quality sensor on your wrist that can already measure a whole bunch of things.

You're both wearing glasses.

In the future, your glasses will be looking at you.

Just based on our retinas, we can get huge amounts of information about all kinds of bodily health indicators.

And so we're going to live in that world and I think it's going to be scary for a lot of people, but it's going to be exciting because we're going to be able to live longer, I believe, and healthier by solving problems earlier.

- Let me ask you about that scary piece though, Jamie.

So the promise of predictive medicine seems potentially revolutionary, but I can also imagine a range of ethical and personal concerns that might rise from people having an understanding of what that genetic, I don't wanna call it future, but what those genetic possibilities might be.

You're a great humanist besides being a great scholar.

What are some of those concerns and how can we as a society best address them if this is the future we're headed for?

- Yeah, it's a really great question, Jim.

And the key point is that every one of these technologies has a really exciting upside and a really frightening downside, which is pretty much true of all technologies.

So the upside are the things that I've been saying before.

The downside is that this information can be abused.

The downside is that people might get pushed into having all sorts of unnecessary procedures because we have a hard time with probabilistic information.

Another downside is that we could be discriminated against by insurance providers.

In Obamacare, there were protections against people with pre-existing conditions.

But the more we look under the hood, the more we're going to realize that everybody has multiple pre-existing conditions.

Everybody is in the early stages of dying of something because that is just the nature of biology itself.

And so if we get into this world where there's much more information that's available to ourselves and to others, we need to make sure that we are able to process this information, that we aren't abused or taken advantage of by others who are trying to capitalize perhaps on our fears and vulnerabilities.

And that in our system, certainly here in the United States where we have this fee for service model, we don't get talked in to having all kinds of unnecessary procedures that we really, really don't need.

So it's not just that we're going to have one technological innovation that's going to fix everything, every innovation solves some problems and creates new problems.

And that's why we need not just regulation and we badly need effective, efficient humane regulation, but we need governance at every level.

Governance is more than what governments do, it's what we all do.

What happens in our institutions in the context of healthcare, in our hospitals, in our universities.

This is a society level shift.

And to manage it properly, everybody needs to play a role.

- So Jamie, that's a perfect segue into the question I was thinking of when you were saying that.

Given the state of healthcare in the United States today, fragmented, major problems with insurance companies, disparities, some people have no access to any type of care, they can't afford it, how will this impact those people who today have a difficult time getting any kind of healthcare or certainly the kind of advanced healthcare that you're describing here?

- So I don't know the answer to the "will" in your question, but I can answer how could it.

And I'll do it by laying out two possible scenarios.

Here's the best possible scenario is that these technologies decentralize healthcare in a way that everybody has access to high quality care and high quality care at home.

And that's not just true here in the United States, around the world.

There are lots of people who don't have access to quality healthcare for whom even having an AI assisted physician or an AI physician, if it's high quality, would be much better than what they have now.

You could imagine these kinds of innovations driving down costs and making it possible to have local clinics all over the country where people can be treated well at the highest possible standard.

Or you could say just as convincingly that these technologies are going to benefit the wealthiest and most advantaged people at the expense of everybody else.

And the difference between those two scenarios are the decisions that we make now about how to allocate resources.

And I talk a lot with people about the dangers of inequality in the future.

I think those absolutely exist.

But the best way to address those future dangers is to address issues of inequality and inequity now because if we're perfectly comfortable with the most advantaged of us having some of the best healthcare in the world, and the least advantaged among us having absolutely horrendous, horrible healthcare, if we're okay with that now, how can we expect that we're not gonna be okay with even wider disparities in the future?

- Jamie, I think we could probably spend a month of episodes talking just about the healthcare piece of this, but I wanna also move to some of the other elements of the bio-engineered future that you described in the book.

You call it hack-riculture, others might call it agriculture.

But you are focused on the fact that both plants and animals will be bio-engineered in the future to help feed a planet with a population headed towards 10 billion people.

For the vast majority of us, what does that mean, practically speaking, what's that gonna look like?

- So most people don't really think about agriculture all of that much in our daily lives.

Unlike our ancestors who were almost entirely farmers, hunters, gatherers, we just kind of go about our lives and just assuming that the food is there and not just the reason that we have so much food, but the reason why we have so many people on planet Earth now.

I mean, we have four times more people today than we had just a hundred years ago.

The reason we have so many people is because of these incredible series of revolutions in agriculture.

And whether it's improved seeds or mechanization or irrigation or fertilizers, all of these things have come together.

That's why we have so much food and so many people.

And right now, half of all arable land on earth is allocated toward agriculture.

We have 8 billion people, as you mentioned, Jim, we go up to 10 billion people.

And 10 billion people, a larger percentage of whom want to have diets like ours.

We're going to have to decimate all of the wild spaces on earth to grow the crops that we need to feed all of those people.

And so there are a couple things that we're going to need to do.

One is we're going to have to continue to significantly increase the productivity of agriculture.

And we need to do that.

We need to grow more food on less land using less water and less fertilizer and energy.

And among the many ways that we're going to need to do that is the application of biotechnology.

And I get that there are many people, many people who are consumers of public radio and television who say, "Well, I know that I'm anti GMO."

But what I say is that all of agriculture is genetic modification.

All of agriculture is radical biotechnology.

So we're not talking about whether or not we should apply biotechnology to our food supply, our ancestors made that decision 12,000 years ago.

What we're deciding is what's the best way to do it?

And the new technologies of genome editing.

So what people call GMOs means they tend to refer to transgenics, which are taking a basically genetic codes from one type of organism and transferring that to another.

And that's like with the genetically modified corn and soybeans, for example.

And now there's genome edited plants where we are editing the genomes of plants, not adding anything, to make them able to produce, to be more productive for food supplies, to perhaps be better at living in hot environments or with exposure to salination in soils or all of those kinds of things.

So that's one area.

Another area is manipulating the microbiomes along lining the roots of plants or in soils to reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers.

But then another really important area is with animal agriculture.

About three quarters of all of our agriculture, both land and inputs, goes to support in one way or another animal agriculture, mostly industrial animal agriculture.

And with that, most of the animal products we consume come from industrial animal agriculture and has huge negative externalities in terms of deforestation and climate change and energy use and fertilizer and not to mention cruelty to the 90 billion land animals we're slaughtering every year.

And so the right answer is for everybody to become a vegetarian.

If everyone on earth became a vegetarian today, we would solve so many of our climate and environmental problems.

We would be forced to re-wild massive areas across the globe, which would have all sorts of positive implications for all sorts of things.

But we're not going to do that for all kinds of reasons, including historical and cultural.

So the question is, can we get the animal products that we all demand, but do it with a lighter footprint?

And it turns out that maybe we can by using the tools of the intersecting AI genetics and biotechnology revolutions, and there's a whole new field of cell cultured animal products, now called cultivated milks and meats, where you have the healthiest living animals that you can have, you extract a few stem cells and you expand those cells in a laboratory and further expand them in an industrial bioreactor.

And now you can have, if we can scale this, all the bioidentical, same as the products coming from living animals, milks and meats, but to do it in a much more sustainable way.

It takes 30 calories of plant protein given to a cow to produce one calorie of milk and one calorie of meat.

And so if we can find new ways of producing those animal products, and again, these are still the early days, it really opens up a lot of opportunities for us.

And again, I know there are people who are worried about sustainability and naturalness.

The path to sustainability must involve technology because the path to the world as it exists today has been defined in many ways by our technology.

- Jamie Metzl.

The book is "Superconvergence."

This is a required reading.

Thank you so much for being with us.

But that is all the time we have this week.

And if you wanna know more about "Story in the Public Square," you can find us on social media or visit pellcenter.org where you can always catch up on previous episodes.

For G. Wayne Miller, I'm Jim Ludes asking you to join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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