Berggruen Institute – Future Human

Project Update: Human Body Ideas

I’ve spent the past couple of weeks really immersing myself in futurism and people who think about the world on a timeline three decades out. That’s led me to a framework for our areas of inquiry that both holds up for organizing changes of the past — and can stand up to the changing winds of the future: human-centeredness. Each chapter can be organized by a basic human need.

I’m going to start exploring the human body, and what enhancements both biologically and technologically to humans-as-we-know-them will look and feel like by 2050, and the potential consequences and possibilities from that.

From that layer we can build out. From individual human bodies to human-to-human connections, with an exploration on love, sex and connection in 2050. And then further out, to human-to-human-human — communities and cities in 2050, where the urban question and transportation and such can be explored. The questions of economy, and power and governance could then flow from that, into another area of inquiry. But we’ll start with the most basic unit — the human body, and go from there.

So here are few angles I think we could hit for a single “episode” or chapter of this project. Each idea could be its own explainer and then we can piece them together for an episode.

1. Past predictions for the human body, that is, how “futurists” of the 1980s believed humans would operate by our present. Will it need food and water to survive? How long will humans live in 2050? Will genetic disease be eradicated by then? What were PREVIOUS predictions for how humans would be by 2020? (The look back would be a feature of every chapter/episode).
2. Everyone wants to live longer, but no one wants to grow old: The focus these days is increasing longevity while avoiding or delaying the stigmata of biological aging. Billions are now being spent to prove that advances in medicine will slow the aging process so that the average 90-year-old will feel as good as today’s 70-year-old. Google’s Calico is in the forefront of these efforts. Other companies have focused on specific diseases, but Calico is targeting the cellular degradation involved in aging that plays a role in most deadly diseases.
3. Cryonic preservation: The Cryonics Institute in Michigan has over 100 people in “cryonic suspension” at its facility. SO MANY QUESTIONS. Alcor in Arizona charges $80,000 for “neurocryopreservation” (the head only) and $200,000 for the whole body but this includes all costs and perpetual maintenance. Cryopreservation can be covered by special insurance policies!
4. Real time emotional state detection: Facial and tonal recognition analytics will help machine learning systems to detect consumers’ emotional state in real-time. Algorithms will harness your data in order to assess your predicted success at work, how likely you are to bounce around jobs and more. (This would then lead right into the 2050 dating/love chapter, in which future dating is predicated on systems that can read your physiological response to potential partners — you don’t even HAVE to decide!)
5. Nanobots for targeted therapies: Teeny tiny robots could become mini-surgeons, squished into a pill that you swallow, under work being led by CSAIL at MIT. Because magnetic fields are able to transmit through our bodies without harming us, future surgeons could ask patients to ingest these nanobots and then direct them magnetically in order to deliver targeted therapies.
6. Communicating with thought alone: At the University of Washington’s Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering, researchers built a system allowing one person to transmit his thoughts directly to another person. Using electrical brain recordings and a form of magnetic stimulation, one researcher sent a brain signal to another person elsewhere on campus, causing his finger to tap a keyboard. At Duke, researchers at the Center for Neuroengineering built a real-life Iron Man suit, allowing a young man suffering from complete paralysis of his lower body to walk out onto a soccer field and kick the first ball of the 2014 World Cup.
7. Computerized Brains, and brain hacking. Devices implanted in your brain could function in two main ways: “Not only send signals to the brain as a means of treatment, but also gather data about the nature of these maladies.” There are several labs currently looking at ways in which computer interfaces will be operating within our brains, and the social implications of it. There is a cybersecurity angle in which brain hacking could become a thing. The hot brain implantation right now is neural lace: a new kind of flexible circuit implanted via injection, a grid of wires only a few millimeters across can insinuate itself with living neurons and eavesdrop on their chatter, offering a way for electronics to interface with your brain activity, perhaps curing diseases like Parkinson’s. (Engineers at Kernel, Charles Lieber at Harvard).
NOTE: The Bergguen Institute here in LA has a dedicated topic area called “Transformation of the Human,” which we can partner with or report on as they explore the same area. I don’t know where it fits in but I am imagining using them as talking heads or as co-travelers/co-hosts in exploration. I have a visit scheduled with the head of the Transformation of the Human project on October 9. More info:

“Humans have historically defined themselves by contrast to machines and animals, by having language and intelligence, and by the idea of a soul. Just as earlier changes such as the evolution of language, literacy, and better nutrition changed what it means to be human, so are new technologies changing our material realities and thus destabilizing old definitions of the human. We are interested, for example, in artificial intelligence and gene editing, as well as developments in neuroscience, bio-engineering, and interventions into the human microbiome. At the same time, we recognize that changing social and cultural norms are part of the process of redefining of the human, not least as different civilizational traditions inform and challenge each other.”

“Berggruen Institute Casts L.A. as the Lab to Reconceive Humanity”

OBVIOUSLY I am getting hooked up with these folks…

“Entertainment, art, science, education — all are embodied by the Berggruen Institute, a DTLA-based, big-picture think tank working to get our society out ahead of the major issues that will affect humanity in the coming centuries.”

Brainstorm Notes: Colin Maclay of USC Innovation Lab

Me: When you think out to 2050 — how do you think about it? How do you organize your thoughts and inquiry and experimentation?

Colin: I’m going to free associate which may or may not have connections to this.

My pal and office mate Henry Jenkins is working on a civic imagination project. Workshops with people to imagine the future generally. They choose 2040 or 2050, and map out what they would like to see, what they would expect. And use narrative and popular culture mashups to create a tale of how we got from here to there. Part of the thinking being that we live in the tyranny of the possible and we see barriers and can only imagine modest change rather than imagine something more ambitious and positive that we would have to WORK to achieve. Let’s have this grand vision. What they find that’s interesting is that people regardless of politics, people have similar visions but don’t know how we’re going to get there when they think about near-term stuff.

Henry is a pop culture, science fiction junkie and just a neat person. He’s the digital culture historian at the Library of Congress right now. We’re doing an event with him in late January on podcasting and he became a huge podcast fan. Something neat there and opportunity around him and his network. Around civic and community and what that looks like, what our lives are like. One lens.

My immediate reaction to your “how to explore it” question is, we’re too siloed into disciplines. And the action is always at the intersection of the buckets and how they connect and interplay. That’s an obvious pushback. How do you make the buckets DIFFERENT from the way we normally think about, or set them up so we show an interdynamic system. Because clearly the environmental bucket would affect everything if you label that, it would be limiting.

Two things in this zone: Alex McDowell — production designer who teaches at USC who made a bunch of movies. Most famously Minority Report. Fight Club, and a bunch of other things. When he did Minority Report he faced the challenge you were in making it. They said, when you make a movie they give you a script with a plot and everything. The only thing he was given was, “Imagine if we could see five minutes into the future.” That was the whole thing. There was no story. So he brought together and interviewed all these people who were working on different aspects of the future. They did this practice called world building where he created an integrated view of what the future could look like. So it wasn’t like in one domain there were assumptions in one direction, and there were assumptions in another direction. So that you could see how all the aspects moved together to create a coherent world. So that if you saw this massive development in batteries, it would have a ripple effect in education and transportation and in the end it feels much more real. Many people have argued that Minority Report is a compelling and coherent as an experiential view of the future.

Ann Pendleton Julian. She leads world-building studios. And she’s in LA now and we would love for her to stay here.

NOTE TO SELF: World-building studios exist! Go see one. (For example they build a world after a scenario, for example the seas rise two feet by 2050 and do a whole studio around it, and design things for that future and explore problem solving to respond to that future.)

“We think this whole world building stuff is an interesting mashup of futurism and storytelling and creates an environment to do problem solving.” There could be a project where we really tap into heavy hitters. Just to put in perspective, JSB (writing partner/supporter of Ann) is just now stepping off board of Amazon.

There are a bunch of people who want to use world building to think about what’s happening but also to prepare challenges and opportunities.

Me: But I need limits! Because of what I’m making.

Even without the limits of what you’re making it’s still a really hard question to figure out how you want to organize. I’m unburdened by knowledge!

I believe in dog fooding. We need to be doing reflection and practice. We should thinkign about stuff and learning and trying shit out. How do you integrate the learning in a natural way so that it’s more real? Maybe the thing is, we need to create some buckets ultimately but we don’t knwo what the buckets are. So is there a way we can have conversations or activities to chunk it out into smaller pieces. You dont have to understand the grand organizing scheme but explore it in a way that listenrs can follow along and engage and get you to see how to then organize it. A phase that’s exploratory and unburdened but not try to be too smart by half when you havent even delved into it. Maybe X period of time, now we’re gonna come at it from another angle. Now we’ve learned and we’ll build it out. So that way it’s iterative. Between different data points. As opposed to assuming that before we start we know what stories.

What if I did it around humans? I start with a body, and then bodies in love, and then humans in community, and so on?

My immediate reaction is, that sounds good. If you start with say the future of work, there are assumptions baked into that. Like that we need to work. or the need to be educated, and those values are baked in. Maybe that might be functionally real. But I like the idea of what we really NEED? What we need to survive. It puts you in a position to build a world based on what we need and want rather than what we have. That way you’re not as burdened by the tyranny of the possible — how do we transition from late capitalism and democracy — and that might be real but this is more interesting, saying what do we want to achieve around live and love and shelter? If those are necessary or possible? How do we work back from that? What does that look like? The neat thing about live, love, connect, removes it from a US context and a global set of questions. The people who don’t live in our context can open up universes of possibilities of whats’ happening in other places or the values in other places. Other cities and communities are thinking about the future. Increases potential ideas and potential audience. That way we are lowering the barrier.

Some constraints are your friends. The constraints I like suggest a constraint but truly you could do a lot under it and yet are meaningful to the audience. Here’s are time immemorial questions. And these are the most fundamental questions of humanity. And of society. So let’s ask em. We have a blank slate.

Who should I talk to next?

The Berggreun Institute. This guy Nicholas Berggreun, used to be called the homeless billionaire is a think tank foundation something and as with any organization there are some uneveness there but there are some people there I really like, including the VP who runs most things. His name is Dawn Nakagawa. She’s leading the exploration of 21st century governance and what it looks like in the emerging world we’re entering into. She’s super sharp and creative and they’re trying to be anti-academic in a good way. Thinking about inquiry and action. I like her and trust her.

They have a program called future of the human, with a guy named Tobias Rees, who I like a lot. Who’s like a philosopher. His idea is that metaphors about being human are breaking down — what does it mean to be a human in the future?