- Imagine being able to have a communication, a real communication, with the simulacrum of someone who's passed away.

That technology is not a "Black Mirror" episode anymore.

[soft music] - Hello, and welcome to "GZERO World".

I'm Ian Bremmer.

And today, do you remember the story of Icarus?

It's the Greek myth about the man who built wings that allowed him to fly, but he fell into the sea because the wax holding them together melted when he flew too close to the sun.

It's a good metaphor for people that don't understand anything about how far away the sun really is, but also to keep in mind for the subject of today's show, The New Humans.

Because tinkering with human abilities can be radically transformative in mind and body-expanding ways.

But there's also an inherent risk in messing with human nature.

Over the past few years, we've seen an explosion in biotechnologies like gene editing, synthetic organs and AI-assisted medical devices that are helping to eradicate disease, improve the human condition, and enhance our brain power.

But like most new technology, there's also potential for misuse, privacy concerns and big ethical implications.

That tension is the subject of my conversation with Siddhartha Mukherjee.

He's a physician, biologist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose new book, "The Song of the Cell," explores the science, history and technology behind what he calls the New Humans.

Don't worry, I've also got your Puppet Regime.

- You should be in charge of bedtime.

- [Group] Yay!

Power to the people!

- But first, a word from the folks that help us keep the lights on.

- [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis.

[inspirational music] - [Advertiser] Every day, all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by... - [Advertiser] Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO".

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York.

And... [bright music] [lively beats music] - [Oscar] We can rebuild him.

We have the technology.

Better, stronger, faster.

- When I was a kid back in the 1970s, "The Six Million Dollar Man" was a pop culture icon of human enhancement.

He was an astronaut, rebuilt with bionic implants after a tragic accident, giving him super strength, speed, and vision.

50 years later, we are still obsessed with the idea of superhuman transformation.

Hollywood pumping out blockbusters like "X-Men", "Captain America", and "Dune", showing us worlds where humans are engineered with special abilities to fight bad guys and save the universe.

[soft upbeat music] The idea of human enhancement is nothing new from prosthetics found on ancient Egyptian mummies.

Yes, that's true, to wheelchairs in sixth century China.

Also true to Viking warriors who ate toxic plants to feel more fearless in battle.

But the mechanical and digital revolutions of the 20th century increase the scope dramatically of what we thought was possible, leading to the birth of transhumanism, a philosophical movement that believes humans are in the early phase of evolution and need technology, and it's coming fast to transcend our physical and cognitive limitations.

Here is transhuman philosopher FM-2030, that's his name on "Larry King" back in 1989.

- If you're around in 2030, there's an excellent chance you can coast to immortality.

Indefinite lifespans.

Mind you, Larry, not with these bodies and certainly not on this planet only- - Jesus, we just missed.

- No, we haven't.

- Sadly, Larry King didn't make it to 2030, but you and I may, fingers crossed.

And while we haven't figured out the whole immortality thing yet, advances in gene editing, synthetic biology, and neural implants mean that the transhuman future is a lot closer to reality.

[soft music] Five years ago, a rogue doctor in China stunned the medical world when he announced he created genetically modified babies designed to resist HIV.

In 2021, Elon Musk's brain implant company, Neuralink, posted a viral video of a monkey playing Pong with only its mind.

- [Narrator] Pager still moves the joystick out of habit, but as you can see, it's unplugged.

He's controlling the cursor entirely with decoded neural activity.

- [Ian] And in 2023, they cut FDA approval for human trials.

Then, this past October, experts announced a genetic therapy to treat sickle cell anemia was safe for clinical use.

And that set the stage for the first ever FDA approved CRISPR treatment, the technology that uses RNA and proteins to selectively edit DNA.

All these developments hint at a future of disease eradication, independence from physical disability and recovery from traumatic brain injury.

But with the good comes lots and lots of risk.

Gene editing raises the specter of designer babies, eugenics, and the slippery slope to creating a genetic underclass.

There's also the not at all terrifying possibility of militaries using biotechs to create super soldiers who need less sleep, have more muscle mass.

Then, there's the question of privacy.

As tech firms gain unprecedented access to our data, our biometric data, and our medical histories.

We don't want that.

Not to mention bad actors.

I mean, if your brain is partially powered by a computer, what happens when somebody hacks it?

We need to strike a balance between embracing biotech's life changing potential and safeguarding our values, our ethics, and the idea of what it means to be a human being.

These tools are gonna lead to profound advances in human life and we'll experience 'em.

But how do we make sure that the enhanced humans of the future end up being superheroes and not super villains?

Here to help me answer that question and understand the science behind these exciting advances in the biomedical field is Siddhartha Mukherjee.

He's a physician and biologist whose most recent book, "The Song of the Cell", unpacks the history and science of what he calls the New Human.

And here's our conversation.

Siddhartha Mukherjee, so nice to have you on the show.

- My pleasure, thank you for having me.

- I mean, it's been a while.

We've been talking about this.

- I know.

- But your new book... - Yes.

- [Ian] Is "The Song of the Cell" and I liked the subtitle.

I always like subtitles.

They're substantive.

- Great.

- "An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human", and that excites me.

The idea of the New Human.

What's the New Human?

- So in the book, in the particularities of the book, the New Human is a human being that we have altered in some way.

In the book, for medical benefit, and in the future potentially for enhancement.

So, I use the word New Human provocatively, saying in some ways, of course there are people walking around downstairs whom have had a bone marrow transplant.

That person is a chimera because their blood is made out of someone else's blood.

But their body, the rest of their body is made out of their old body, their shell.

And then there's the blood that someone else's blood.

- So far you and I are good.

Yeah, so far we're like, "Okay, this makes sense to us."

"We're okay with it."

- Right.

- You're saying we're not going to in short order?

- Right, so I'll walk you through the next step.

The next step is we are now beginning, and there are people again walking around amongst us, who have electrodes implanted into their brain to stimulate certain parts of their brain so that they could not suffer from, for instance, the movement disorder of Parkinson's disease.

So they're half human, but they're human.

But they have electrodes stimulating their brain.

Next step onwards, there are people who have electrodes into their brain stimulating a particular area so that they won't suffer from debilitating depression.

By this time, I'm now thinking, "That's a little bit far than what I had imagined where we would be."

Then we go on to the next step, which is genetically altered cells inserted into humans.

So my group, broadly speaking, is among the first to do a bone marrow transplant.

We've transplanted about 12 people so far with a genetically altered bone marrow.

Other people have done this too.

But we've done this with CRISPR and we are among the first to do this.

And these 12-15 people- - CRISPR, which is the gene altering technology which allows you to do that.

- Correct.

With specificity, right?

- Exactly.

- Okay, now you said one thing so far that piqued my interest particularly.

You said that, "We are significantly farther right now than I would have expected."

- Yes.

- But like flying cars, we're not.

People have been talking about it for decades.

- That's right.

- We ain't there.

- Yeah.

- Why is it... You've been in this science.

And you've been at the cutting edge of the science for decades now.

So why has it exceeded your expectations?

- Well, several tools came upon us, which were unexpected.

CRISPR is absolutely one of them.

So just to go back a little bit to explain what CRISPR is.

CRISPR is a bacterial system by which you can make very specific alterations in the genome.

- [Ian] In the DNA of a person.

- Yeah, in genomes, which you couldn't do before.

That technology, I would say, is groundbreaking.

And it really shook our worlds because I hadn't expected- - Because in principle, you can now customize a human being.

- In principle, you can customize the genomes in, as I said, in small ways.

People say, "Oh, you know, we're gonna make new human beings that are customizable to the nth degree.

Blue eyes, taller, whatever, et cetera."

Those are almost impossible things to do.

And that's because most of those traits are encoded not by one, but by hundreds if not thousands of genes.

That puts a natural limit because with CRSIPR, you can only go so far.

So that's one thing that happened.

The second thing that's happening very, very quickly is we're making synthetic genomes that are longer and longer and longer.

Now, if you make a synthetic genome that's longer and longer and longer, very soon you're gonna get to a place where you can put a really, really long piece of an entirely chemically synthesized piece of DNA.

You don't need CRISPR for that.

You can basically write a code.

I hadn't expected the speed at which that's happened either.

So now you can go up to thousands, tens of thousands.

Very soon you'll be able to go up to millions of completely freshly written code, just like you would type into a computer.

Last piece or last two pieces.

So I talked about CRISPR.

I talked about synthetic genomes.

Number three is, we are now doing more and more bionics things.

I talked about electrodes.

So we are doing bionic things.

We're extending our hands, our brains, using bionics.

And where bionics comes in, of course, AI comes in.

The minute you have bionics, you have AI because artificial intelligence, in principle, allows you to do very much superior bionics.

- So we can optimize a prosthetic leg.

- For instance.

- to work more effectively - Correct.

- than a real one.

- That's right, and we can optimize potentially a prosthetic electrical device that would sit on your brain to work much, much more effectively, because there's a learning algorithm inside it, which wasn't there before.

And I said there were four things.

The fourth is, has been around for a while, but it's been cloning.

So Dolly the sheep.

It's moved along in time, and now all of a sudden we are cloning lower animals like sheep, much, much more effectively.

So what I'm trying to say is now combine all of these four pieces.

These pieces are sort of sitting right now in different silos.

But imagine a combination - Of all four.

- of all four of these, or some combination of these three things applied to a real human.

And that's what I mean by the New Human.

That's the speed at which I had not expected these four pieces to come together.

Again, to name them CRISPR, synthetic biology, prosthetic biology with AI, and cloning of individuals.

That's what is moving...

This nexus has been moving faster than I had expected- - And now... What are we doing right now that strikes you as ethically problematic, irrespective of consent, right?

Assuming we have consent, that it strikes you as, "We might not wanna open that bottle right now."

- Yeah.

- Well, I mean, - What are those areas?

if we're gonna talk about that, we gotta talk about AI.

People say it's an existential threat.

AI is an existential threat.

What is the existential threat?

So let me offer it to you and maybe you can offer some back.

So number one, I think it's an existential threat in the informational sphere, particularly in the political informational sphere.

The second one, I think it's, again going through this typology, is I think there is a biological and chemical threat.

So we can start doing things with AI, building organisms, building molecules that didn't exist before with properties that didn't exist before.

Now some of those will be very beneficial, hopefully medicines that we make.

But equally, some of them will be problematic because you could make things that are poisonous, toxic.

You can make organisms that are poisonous and toxic.

And you can make them faster with AI than you could with other mechanisms because the system learns.

It learns how to make them, molecules that don't have properties that human beings would like.

So that's the second one.

The third one I think, is privacy.

So my daughter calls me and by listening to her voice, I'm confident it's my daughter calling me.

In five years, I could imagine that that's gonna be a problem.

- Oh, in two.

- Exactly, or two years.

- In two, yeah.

- In two years.

- I accept all of that.

I'm wondering which are the developments in your field that when you see these technologies, you say to yourself, "I'm not sure that people like me should be applying those technologies to human beings."

- So two I talked about.

Number one is the enhanced capacity with AI to develop molecules that may be toxic or may unleash biological warfare, biological toxicity, et cetera.

These, I think, are potential problems.

We could do them before.

We can do them in hyper speed now.

- We can do them faster now.

- Yeah.

Number two, is going back to the same idea.

Number two, is CRISPR.

Using CRISPR inappropriately on either various organisms, again for defense or biological reasons.

And number three, is cloning.

Cloning of certainly lower organisms and potentially of higher organisms.

Because again, these are all moving at hyper speed.

- And cloning of lower organisms is problematic for what reason?

- Well, you can create an organism which has altered properties.

Those altered properties could be beneficial in the short run, but could for instance, overtake by gene drive, we'll talk about what that means.

But could overtake other organisms.

And that may be great in the short run, but there may be unintended consequences.

We don't understand biology well enough to be able to say, "Oh, I'm gonna make a new kind of crop, and this new kind of crop is gonna be so beneficial for humans."

And all of a sudden what happens, and this has happened over and over again in history.

All of a sudden what happens is that that crop becomes a monoculture and eliminates for instance, a previous crop which was disease resistant.

So people are making seed banks for this reason.

- And you're seeing real time experimentation on the ecosystem and- - And the ecosystem's a great example of a system that we understand only so much.

And doing experiments with the ecosystem affects everyone.

- We've spoken a lot now about the technologies themselves, the concerns of the technologies.

I wanna end by talking about the opportunities.

So we think about the next five years.

What are some things that you think an average human being will be able to experience, that they cannot right now?

- A whole host of new medicines.

You know, the capacity of some of these new systems that we're developing is so high that we're spitting out molecules with properties that we didn't even know existed.

I mean, we're making them.

So, I suspect that we will have a whole host of new medicines.

Great opportunity.

I suspect that some diseases, which were very difficult to cure before, will have with a combination of gene therapy and with new medicines, be curable.

We're already seeing that, diseases like spinal muscular atrophy, a rare disease, but debilitating, used to basically almost...

It was almost certainly deadly.

A single injection or a couple of injections off one drug has completely reversed that.

These children are now walking and will probably continue to walk for the rest of their lives.

So a huge change there.

I think that we will also see more prosthetics.

And we will arm our... Again, these are opportunities.

We will arm ourselves with a much wider system of information, again, enhanced with digital and AI tools, which will expand our capacities.

Those are the opportunities.

So we will become smarter.

We will become hopefully more disease resistant.

We will have larger memory banks.

And we will have the capacity to interact in the virtual sphere in a way we cannot just simply interact in the real sphere.

- And as we see human beings becoming more digitally interactive, including directly with chips being implanted inside human beings.

What does that look like in a few years time?

What are the capabilities that people may have, good or bad, that they don't have now?

- So I think, I mean, I'll talk about the good.

I mean, as I said.

Imagine someone who has been paralyzed by a stroke.

Imagine someone who can't speak because they have Lou Gehrig's disease.

And all of a sudden with these capabilities, they're able to do that.

Actually, there are already programs that exist.

I'll give you one great example.

There is an incredible algorithm, AI-driven algorithm, that essentially acts as a LiDAR.

So just like dolphins have sonars, this is an algorithm by which you can put on a headset and that headset, because by sending out sound or light in every direction, can signal to a person who's lost their eyesight, can signal what the real world around them looks like through their ears.

So their ears become their eyes and people...

It's an amazing...

I saw a video of a marathoner running a marathon with this device.

[crowd cheers] So, people with strokes, people with paralysis, people with movement disorders, people with anything that requires prosthetics.

Number two, I think our memory is limited.

Our memory of our social interactions is limited.

Now imagine that multiplied by n-fold.

- How does that happen?

- Well, you can start...

I mean, it's already happening.

So the simple example right now is how much memory do you store in real life versus your iPhone?

- Oh, sure.

Understandable.

- Sure.

Imagine that multiplied by 10,000 fold.

Imagine that multiplied by 100,000 fold.

Imagine, and this was a conversation I was having yesterday.

Imagine being able to have a communication, a real communication with the simulacrum of someone who's passed away with your, in my case, with my father who passed away.

Imagine I could create- - "Black Mirror" has had that episode.

- I know.

- So, yeah.

But that's no longer a "Black Mirror" episode.

It is becoming and will become a reality.

And these are not fantastical.

I'm not making up technologies.

These are technologies that are one hand's reach away.

And the question is do we reach or do we not reach?

I talked about the problems.

But these are enormous opportunities.

I would love to be able to have some kind of communication, which sounds like through a shaman.

But I would love to be able to, once in a while, ask my father who passed away a question about my life and get an answer that he would likely give.

That would be very helpful to me I think, as I grow older.

That technology is not a "Black Mirror" episode anymore.

That technology is, I would say, one and a half hand reach away.

Should we go there?

I don't know.

- Siddhartha Mukherjee, thanks for joining us today.

- Thank you.

[digital tones chiming] - And now to Puppet Regime.

Most former presidents wouldn't be so happy if they'd been banned from running for office for eight years.

But that's not Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, who's hawking a Bolsonaro themed birthday party kit in his online merch store.

Of course he is, true story.

Roll that tape.

- [Narrator] Hey, kids.

[playful polka music] Sick of juvie old birthday party themes with the same boring boomer decorations?

[buzzer sounds] Well now you can blow up your next bash with the very real Jair Bolsonaro party pack.

- Because what says party time more than a disgraced ex-president who loves to hang out in Florida.

- [Narrator] This product is 100% real.

And now for a limited time, order the party pack and your party will receive a special appearance by Bolsonaro himself.

- Hey kids, it's party time, okay?

- [Kids] Yay!

- [Narrator] He'll do magic.

- Wanna see me disappear?

- [Kids] Wow.

- [laughs] That only happens when I get to Mar-a-Lago.

[Jair speaks in foreign language] - [Narrator] He'll be a clown.

- Ha, I cannot be shamed.

Wanna see the scar where I got stabbed?

- [Kids] No!

- [Narrator] He'll lead cake time.

- [laughs] Okay, let's light up these candles like we light up the rainforest, okay?

- But the planet is burning up.

Mommy.

[cries] - [Narrator] Order now and he'll even start a coup.

- Your parents are communists.

You should be in charge of bedtime.

- [Kids] Yay!

Power to the people.

Power to the people.

- Order your party pack today.

Special offer not available in Brazil for the next eight years.

♪ Puppet Regime ♪ - That's our show this week.

Come back next week.

And if you like what you see or you don't, but you think you can genetically re-engineer it, why don't you check us out at gzeromedia.com?

[digital tones chime] [upbeat music] [music continues] [music continues] [digital tones chime] - [Announcer] Funding for "GZERO World" is provided by our lead sponsor, Prologis, - [Advertiser] Every day, [inspirational music] all over the world, Prologis helps businesses of all sizes lower their carbon footprint and scale their supply chains with a portfolio of logistics and real estate and an end-to-end solutions platform, addressing the critical initiatives of global logistics today.

Learn more at prologis.com.

- [Announcer] And by... - [Advertiser] Cox Enterprises is proud to support "GZERO".

We're working to improve lives in the areas of communications, automotive, clean tech, sustainable agriculture, and more.

Learn more at cox.career/news.

- [Announcer] Additional funding provided by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead, Carnegie Corporation of New York, and... [upbeat music] [upbeat jingle]