Humanity Getting Better, Faster

"Superconvergence

By Jamie Metzl

Timber, 432 pages, $34

It is said that triumphant Roman generals, to ensure that the rapture of victory didn't go to their heads, would require a companion to whisper in their ear: "Remember, you are only a man." Jamie Metzl worries that we may have learned all too well such lessons in humility. Given remarkable recent advances in technology -- and the promise of more to come -- we need to lean into our emerging godlike powers, he believes, and embrace the opportunity to shape the world into a better place. In "Superconvergence," he sets out to show us how, after first helping us overcome our hesitations.

"Our world today is more livable for more of us than at any point in human history," Mr. Metzl asserts. In the words of a 2013 Oxford report that he cites: "Now is the best time in history to be alive." What's more, humanity is just getting going. Revolutions in genetics, biotechnology and artificial intelligence are amplifying one another -- and converging. Some may worry about the dangers of interfering with nature, but Mr. Metzl, a former White House fellow and science autodidact, thinks that such worry is misplaced. We've been "meddling with living systems over tens of thousands of years," he writes, and the effort has worked out pretty well for our species. Now he foresees exponential progress. It is possible, he says, to imagine scientists "unleashing the miracle of human innovation on a planetary level," giving us the capacity to "redirect evolution and recast life in all its dimensions."

Propelling Mr. Metzl's breathless narrative is the conviction (shared by many "exponential" thinkers in Silicon Valley) that we're not just getting better but getting better faster, in part because of global interconnectivity. The people of Mesopotamia learned how to smelt copper 7,000 years ago, Mr. Metzl observes, but it took another 4,000 years before the process was independently discovered in the Americas. Today word of discoveries spreads almost instantaneously, and we benefit from a far greater body of accrued knowledge than our forebears did. The current pace of change will itself be superseded, he says, as "more connected and better-educated people apply ever-more powerful tools to do ever-more radical things."

Mr. Metzl is especially taken by the prospects of biology, which he sees as the breakout science of the 21st century -- what chemistry was to the 19th and physics to the 20th. Bioengineering, in the near future, may make plants more environmentally friendly by, for example, restructuring their metabolism to absorb more carbon dioxide. And genetics may reduce the environmental impact of animal husbandry. Already there are attempts to create "Enviropigs" -- swine that can synthesize a critical digestive enzyme so that it doesn't have to be put into their feed, from which it now leads to harmful runoff.

But the big advances will be in medicine -- and indeed are already in evidence. Mr. Metzl points to the blisteringly fast development of the Covid-19 mRNA vaccine, from digital file to widespread immunization in less than a year; and to gene-editing technologies like Crispr. He cites the experience of Victoria Gray, a young woman from Mississippi who was suffering from sickle-cell disease until, in 2019, researchers in Nashville, Tenn., reinfused her with her own cells, which had been Crispr-edited; the treatment worked, liberating her from the disease's tormenting pain and crippling fatigue. For Mr. Metzl, these are just the first intimations of a revolution to come. AI tools like DeepMind's Alphafold, he says, will help scientists design therapies faster and better.

To get smarter about human health, though, AI will need more information, and here Mr. Metzl's ebullience edges toward the willful suspension of disbelief. His imagined future of healthcare will require "collecting huge amounts of genetic and systems biology data in massive and searchable databases." The details will include not only medical records and the results of laboratory tests but data from the sensors he anticipates will be everywhere -- "bathrooms, bedrooms, and offices" -- as information is hoovered up from "toilets, mirrors, computers, phones and other devices without the people even noticing." While acknowledging that such a scenario sounds like "an authoritarian's dream and a free person's nightmare," he suggests that the chance to catch disease early may offset the risks. This trade-off promises to be a tough sell.

More than many techno-optimists, Mr. Metzl seems to grasp the intricacy of biological systems; he notes that they are beyond our full understanding right now. Even so, a time will come when "the sophistication of our tools and understanding meets and then exceeds the complexity of biology." He is also keenly aware that technology can go wrong. An early advocate of the Covid-19 lab-leak theory (the idea that the virus escaped from a research facility in Wuhan, China), he is sharply critical of China for its initial coverup. He concedes that even in the most reliable hands, godlike technologies can be "extremely dangerous."

To ward off the most dire possibilities, Mr. Metzl offers a series of recommendations. These include initiating forums to catalyze "meaningful, multidirectional public engagement." He envisions coordinators in every country serving a new international body -- under the auspices of the United Nations -- focusing on a "common response to shared existential challenges." "Imagine," he writes, ". . . if we'd had an international health organization . . . with the power to overrule the Chinese government's cover-up." He may have to keep imagining.

Beneath the gauzy futurism and anodyne policy proposals, Mr. Metzl has identified an important truth: that the convergence of new technologies is galvanizing us to reimagine how to meet urgent challenges in medicine and the environment. It's a compelling opportunity -- provided we manage to sidestep self-induced catastrophes along the way.

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Dr. Shaywitz is a physician-scientist and board adviser, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute." [1]

1. Getting Better, Faster. Shaywitz, David A.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 July 2024: A.13.