Bryan Johnson and other thinkers argue that code is becoming a universal language for programming matter, life, and mind. They envision genetically designed organisms growing houses and vehicles, brain cells functioning as biological computers, and AI enabling technologies we can't yet imagine. The conversation spans neuroscience, genomics, and synthetic biology as paths to eradicating disease and poverty.
Chapters
Everything I thought about the future was wrong. I grew up believing that the world was fixed, that it was unchangeable. Turns out it's not. This discovery has given me a new reason for existence, setting me off on a course of finding the brightest minds, the creators of humanity's future.
In a way, you know, we have three phenomena that we are manipulating. It's matter, life, and mind. Right. What would you end up creating when you have mastered all three domains?
The most amazing discovery of our generation is that we can program anything. Code is the new language of creation. And this is happening right now in neuroscience, genomics, and synthetic biology. We are decoding the language languages of biology into zeros and ones. And life itself is becoming programmable.
You know, say, software, computer science, where you use programming to manipulate information bits. With biology, you can use programming to manipulate atoms. Right. And do all sorts of crazy stuff.
So I'll give you kind of an interesting and perhaps unusual idea. Once we understand how to build big slabs of tissue, we can grow them. So we could actually design schematics in genetics to actually grow, let's say, an entire space faring vessel. All we'd have to do is supply it with energy, maybe even just sunlight, and it would grow itself. So that could be applied to everything from cars to ships to houses.
Yeah, let's see. Instead of growing a tree, cutting it down, and then using mechanical engineering to sort of reshape it into a house, we just design a tree to grow into a house.
People forget that the trees they see around them are machines that turn dirt and sunlight into more trees. So there's an incredible amount of potential, using the materials we have around us to do quite a bit more good.
Nature is far smarter than we are. A single neuron in the brain might have a huge amount of information stored within and connect to thousands and thousands of downstream cells. And so it's almost like every cell in the brain is a little computer on its own. If we build computers out of brain cells, we might be able to make computers that are far more powerful than silicon chips are right now.
We already know that there are examples where about 1,000 or 2,000 neurons were able to control a flight. So it's an entirely new paradigm of computation.
So When I was 8 or 9 years old, I imagined a future that would contain flying cars and space travel and skyscrapers and all of the magical things that we see in science fiction now. But now having the chance to work on artificial intelligence, I believe that the future can be way more remarkable than that, because AI has the potential to build things that like, I'm not even capable of imagining now, and neither is anyone else.
I think really what's in our future is using biology and biological design to not just take what nature's already given us, but actually expand what nature can do.
I have, I think, the normal aspirations of, you know, seeing poverty vanishing from the planet, seeing preventable diseases completely eradicated, seeing conflict, armed conflict considered as something completely unacceptable. You know, the opportunity that we have ahead of us now is to really redefine access to everyday goods.
We'll suddenly be forced to ask ourselves what we really want humans doing and design a world where we aren't demanding that humans do things that sort of aren't worthy of a human mind just to earn their keep.
Beautiful futures and beautiful outcomes require humanity to do certain things and aspire higher. So a dystopian future doesn't require us to do anything.
Today the Google self driving car is a great example of the future happening around us. A technology isn't locked into one industry. So what works for driving a car autonomously? Actually it also probably works for flying an airplane or piloting a spacecraft.
What we have though today is an opportunity to solve transportation, mostly as a software problem. And this is extremely exciting.
The beauty of life and creation is that you never really know what could come next.
For example, if you go back to the early days of the Internet, they were just trying to figure out ways to exchange information across long distances. They had no idea really what the Internet was going to be capable of.
I sometimes wonder if science would be better explained as like an adventure movie. You know, you don't hear about the drama and the difficulty and the turmoil and you know, it's an adventure story. And I feel that the way that we teach science, especially the kids, misses all of that.
If I would have told my 12 year old self or my 18 year old self what I would have been doing the next 10 or 15 years, I would have blew my own mind.
There are a whole bunch of things that I can't even imagine today, but that I think will be possible if we can actually tame the engineering of biology. It sounds sort of odd, but what I'm actually most excited about is the stuff that I can't even dream of today.
Having heroes be people who have made technologies that have created great shifts in the world is a really useful property for society to have.
What's important to realize is there are no superhumans. You actually can do anything, you just have to set out to do it.
Now the question is this. What kind of world are you going to help build?
