The Future is Here. Are You Ready?

Futurist Jamie Metzl shares insights from Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform our Lives, Work, and World.

Can we handle our own superpowers? Even as our technological prowess brings exponential change to the world, our ability to manage that change is stubbornly slow to keep up. Prepare yourself with these 5 big ideas from Superconvergence: How the Genetics, Biotech, and AI Revolutions Will Transform our Lives, Work, and World by Jamie Metzl. Jamie was a member of the World Health Organization’s expert advisory committee on human genome editing and previously served in the U.S. National Security Council, the State Department, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and with the United Nations in Cambodia. Read or listen to 5 of his big ideas below.

The 5 Key Insights:

1. Our world is at the precipice of a radical and fundamental change.

2. This change is not abstract or theoretical.

3. These changes have the potential to help us enormously in fundamental ways.

4. If we’re not careful, these changes can cause fundamental harm.

5. Things we can do now to optimize the benefits and minimize the harms.

1. Our world is at the precipice of a radical and fundamental change.

Two of the biggest changes today are human-engineered intelligence and human-engineered life. Putting it another way, after nearly roughly 3.8 billion years of evolution, suddenly, one species has God-like powers. The drivers of this change are compounding and accelerating, with big implications for everyone. There are four times more people now than just a hundred years ago. We’re better educated and more literate. We’re so connected to each other that nobody needs to invent something already invented somewhere else. Every day, the baseline for innovation is reset, and the technologies are converging.