9. Human 2.0: The Future Is You

It might come in 2030. It might come in 2045. Or, somewhere in between.

The Singularity, as defined by Ray Kurzweil, will happen (see Chapter 1, “The Emergence of (You) the Human Machine”). He asserts there will come a time where “man will become a hybrid of flesh and machine, and ultimately, the non-biological portion will dominate.” Many of the world’s top technology experts agree.

Certainly none of the experts we interviewed for this book dispute the fact that one day strong artificial intelligence (AI) will happen. That is to say, a machine with the same and inevitably better intelligence than a human.

Some experts have made similar strange and perhaps “radical” predictions and watched them realized. Take Kevin Warwick. “Fifteen years ago I was saying we are going to have little aircrafts that fly around autonomously and folks were saying ‘Oh, don’t be silly.’ Now, we have had drones for so many years you wouldn’t even imagine that we never had them at some time.”

So, Super You author Andy Walker’s belief that he will live forever might not be as far-out an idea. Live forever? That’s ludicrous! It’s what coauthor Kay Walker originally thought prior to the writing of this book. A few interviews later, she had completely abandoned what she had previously believed. Now she’s trying to decide if she’ll go back to school at age 100 and get that Ph.D. she “missed the boat on” getting.

Sean’s still not sure if he’ll be able to live forever—or even if he wants to—but he admits it would certainly make it easier to catch up on his Netflix queue and backlog of books.

Kurzweil’s assertions are what have given him clout as a technology futurist. It’s why your Super You authors have written this entire book around his now famous theory.

Kurzweil’s books such as The Age of Intelligent Machines (1990) and The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence (1999) made predictions about today’s technology back in the 1990s. The majority of them were right.

It’s the nature of man to be curious, to build new tools for optimizing his world. It’s how man got to where he is.

“It’s the nature of man to be curious, to build new tools for optimizing his world. It’s how man got to where he is.”

It’s as Kurzweil said: “We create these things. They are part of human civilization. They are part of humanity. Man couldn’t reach the food on the highest branch thousands of years ago, so he invented tools to expand his physical reach. Now, those tools have been adapted to allow us to build skyscrapers. Man’s also created mental tools so he can access all of human knowledge with a few keystrokes from his smartphone.”

So, we believe the Singularity will happen. The data supports it. It’s the next evolution of man, already in progress. And even though when the time comes, as Transhumanist Party leader Zoltan Istvan predicts, “There will be clashes in the street,” the truth is that once man creates a technology that makes his life superior and the consensus agrees, that technology will be adopted.

For instance, the day a robot can operate surgically on you with a lower rate of error than a human surgeon, there will be little reason to choose a human surgeon, other than in perhaps a supervisory role. That’s especially true when it comes to critical surgeries such as heart replacement.

Of course the technology laggards—those people who are slow to change—will resist it—because some hate and even fear technology. These are the same people who still prefer a human teller to an ATM machine for everyday transactions.

But largely, it is Hollywood that has planted the seed that technology change is not good. The reality is that, as Kurzweil puts it, “Technology is part of who we are. It’s not us versus machines.”

Bring it on. Peace, love, and nanobots!

Still, there are some high-profile naysayers. If you ask Tesla CEO Elon Musk, physicist Stephen Hawking, or software billionaire Bill Gates—and a handful of other smart, but perhaps less optimistic prognosticators—the Singularity and all its trappings might be our undoing. They think machines are going to rise up and take us all out, then stack our bodies like cordwood and use us as door stops.

Is that valid?

All this is mostly conjecture, with some Kurzweilian data points supporting it and some emotional fear mongering that is against it. So let’s consider both the dystopian and utopian views to help understand what you need to know in the next 30 years to 2045 and beyond.

And at the end of sections throughout the chapter, we have added some of our thoughts, musings, and “wish lists” about the future.

The cosmetic industry has been on an upward trajectory since 2000 when the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) began tracking the number of cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery procedures in the United States. In 2010, the total number of cosmetic procedures totaled: 13,117,063. By 2014, the number grew to 15,622,866. That’s 2,505,803 more people in only four years.

In 2014, Dr. Patrick J. Byrne, Director of the Division of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery from John’s Hopkins Medicine told The Wall Street Journal that “30 years from now, there will be much more demand (to look good) as our society not only ages, but also does so with greater vitality than ever before.”

A growing field of plastics means the continued development of more advanced technologies that cater to the masses. Current research efforts are attempting to make future cosmetic and plastic surgery procedures less invasive than they are today. This means moving away from “slice and dice” tactics. In the next five to ten years, it’s likely that surgeons will be using their patient’s stem cells to grow or print (on 3D bioprinters) organic tissues and organs in the lab.

Dr. Robert Murphy, former President of the ASPS, said, “One of the hot topics that is near term is stem cell therapy.” Stem cell technology will dominate the cosmetic and plastic surgery field. They will allow surgeons the ability “to grow cells that morph into a number of different things.”

The list ranges from “cardiac tissue for people with heart damage” to cosmetic solutions that treat “damaged tissue from radiation therapy in people who have had cancer,” or also to help people maintain “a youthful appearance, by filling both volume and improving the quality of the overlying skin.”

Murphy said in the next three to five years, the plastic surgery industry is “talking about being able to extract stem cells, process them in a laboratory, and reimplant them.”

While stem cells are already being used in institutions across the United States and Europe, Murphy said what’s required is more “scientific rigor.” The technology requires perfection, so that it “becomes a technique that has defined applications and accepted risks, benefits, and outcomes.” This, he asserts, could happen in the next two to five years.

It’s likely that stem cell technology will reinvent the entire plastic surgery industry, causing current surgical techniques to become obsolete. Murphy said, for example, “Implant augmentation of breasts (will become) passé because we could use tissue instead of using a foreign body.”

The nature of these procedures would require a surgeon to harvest stem cells from a patient’s body, process them in the lab, and reimplant them. Even more exciting is the prospect of “marrying genetics with stem cells in vivo,” he said. This allows for the “genetic manipulation of a stem cell in the body without extracting it.” He said this could happen in the next ten years.

Using stem cells from a patient’s body to create new tissues and organs has massive advantages. The patient’s immune system has a better chance of accepting the material. It’s likely these procedures would be done faster and easier with no need to cut open the body. A new firmer bum on your lunch break, perhaps?

And for those not interested in surgical procedures, other “looking good” technologies—from makeup, to diet shakes, to lotions will soon be smarter, too. Many will have dual functions. Nails with radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and conductive polish used to unlock doors? Tattoos made with magnetic ink that buzzes when someone texts? Clothing that reads vital signs? All possible.

Many will become more accessible to everyone. In 2015, Tina Alster, MD, Clinical Professor of Dermatology at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C. told Oprah.com, “In the not too distant future, lasers and intense pulsed light machines that remove pigment, soften lines, and treat acne will be sitting on bathroom counters next to our toothbrushes.”

In other words, Super You will be a canvas that you can change at will with easily-accessible, and low-cost technology. Just make sure you don’t opt for the bargain bin version. If you have opted for the Etch-A-Sketch budget package versus the premium Venus de Milo package from your cosmetic surgeon, you might be out at a dance club, shake your buns a bit too hard ... and erase them.

Quick clarification: That’s not to say sex won’t happen. Though it will likely be more about the recreational component of intercourse than procreation. And, of course, it might include a robot as a partner.

Engineered babies are already happening, as you learned in Chapter 2, “Baby Science: How to Conceive a Tennis Star and Other Procreative Miracles.” Test tube babies have been conceived out of the womb since the 1980s.

Today, for $18,000, a couple can go see Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg to guarantee the sex of their baby. Other companies, such as GenePeeks, use technology to genetically match two hypothetical parents on a computer to ensure the baby they create will be disease free.

Though, some would argue, guaranteeing the genetic viability of the world’s future generation is a more ethical use of the technology than manipulating individual traits, such as hair texture or eye color.

“... the big concern is if genetic manipulation is allowed to produce a disease-free baby, then that opens up the opportunity for trait manipulation, too.”

The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity (CBHD) of Trinity International University sees genetic manipulations for health purposes as somewhat reasonable, though the onus for procedures such as preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) still lies with the parents. And ultimately, the big concern is if genetic manipulation is allowed to produce a disease-free baby, then that opens up the opportunity for trait manipulation, too.

An article on the Circumpolar Health Bibliographic Database’s (CHBD) website written in 2004 by surgical pathologist Samuel Hensley argues that designer baby technologies have implications that could alter the future health dynamic of “child-parent relationship.” Hensley writes: “The oppressive weight of parents’ expectations—resting in this case on what they believe to be undeniable biological facts—might impinge upon the child’s freedom to make his own way in the world.”

Okay, so in the future, kids might resent their parents for giving them athletic abilities when all they want to do is top the charts with their death metal band Nanobot Annihilator. And parents might resent they made their kid extra tall so he’d be a basketball player because Dad didn’t make the NBA. Is that so different from now? Most kids hate their parents for something they did or said. Nothing new there.

Peter Lawler, a Dana Professor of Government and former Chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at Berry College who served on President Bush’s Council on Bioethics from 2004 to 2009, speaks to this concern. In a 2010 article published on BigThink.com he wrote, “I think that enhanced people will become, in some ways, more miserable than people ever have.”

Istvan mentions Lawler as one of a group of futurists that have written blogs about designer babies that argue, “If you edit the genome, future generations could have new diseases pop up.” But Istvan suggests this is a linear view of the future. Thinking exponentially, he suggests, “Future generations—we’re talking in 70 to 80 years out—humans won’t be human beings anymore. We may have made new types of DNA. We may have synthetic DNA.”

(This is a classic example of arguing about future technologies from the perspective of current technology.)

Ultimately, the future of designer baby technology is up to policy makers. Recall Steinberg’s story from Chapter 2 about the Vatican suggesting he shelve his plans to offer baby trait biohacking. But even further, new policies are enacted when large groups of people argue for their personal rights.

To that end, Istvan argues: “It comes back again to this idea of morphological freedom. We want the choices to do these things.” From this standpoint, denying the choice to have the technology to enhance the next generation for what some would argue “frivolous” trait selection such as height or hair color, could step on issues of personal freedom. So ultimately, it’s up to what the people want.

If the era of designer babies ever comes, Larry Arnhat, the Presidential Research Professor of Political Science at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, suggests there might be implications the world has not yet considered. On his personal blog he wrote: “Manipulation of human nature to enhance desirable traits while avoiding undesirable side effects will be very difficult if not impossible.”

But once again, it can be argued that Arnhat is considering a linear view of the future.

“Eventually, the whole designer baby argument will be old news,” Istvan says. “The age is going to come and go so quickly. This idea that we can change hair color is going to be here for three years. Then, we are going ask ourselves in 10 years, or maybe 20 years, whether we want to have hair that day because, we will be able to grow it in two minutes. Or, we are going to have some type of helmet that gives us virtual reality all day long.”

And it’s a possibility that when we get to the era of designer babies, we will already have the technology to handle any unexpected issues.

As research into the human genome continues and scientists find ways to make mapping it less and expensive, it’s almost certain that we’re going to unlock treatments for afflictions that are bound to ravage us as we grow older—whether it’s figuring out a way to turn off cancer cells or reverse or prevent neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease or Alzheimer’s. Or for that matter, to replace failing organs with 3D-printed or artificial versions, or to ameliorate chronic conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, asthma, or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

In some cases, we’ll apply treatment to people who already have these conditions as adults, but almost certainly there will be a push to use clustered regularly-interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology (or its successors) during the prepregnancy planning stages, by editing out potentially problematic genomic sequences in the parents’ genomes ... even before the sperm hits the egg.

While recognizing we’re not quite at that point yet, Dr. Bertalan Meskó thinks we’re going to be there soon ... perhaps even sooner than you think. “Based on my experience with genomics, if in ten years’ time I don’t get treatment based only on my bioparameters, health parameters and my genomic profile, I will be quite surprised and actually angry, to be honest with you.”

As ever, the ethics of this are going to be a big question and for more than one reason. As we touched on earlier, one major concern about adjusting our offspring’s DNA is economic: If only the rich can afford to give their babies a disease-free future, we would further exacerbate the health divide that has already stratified much of the world.

While countries with single-payer health care programs might have an advantage in this regard, it’s worth noting that not all procedures are covered under these systems: Even in Canada, which has been looked upon favorably by single-payer advocates in the United States, coverage of procedures varies from province-to-province for some lifesaving procedures and drugs. If you can’t even agree on treatment coverage in cities that might be only 20 miles apart, what hope is there for trying to convince a wide array of private insurers to get onboard?

Istvan believes that much of the solution lies in changing people’s minds across the board. “The question is: How do we move forward as a culture to allow these things in general in a broad sense? This is why I’ve made most of my (presidential) campaign,” notes Istvan, “on generally changing cultural viewpoints. The more we talk about the benefits of transhumanism as a whole, the more people just say ‘ah, screw it, let’s just go with it and if we don’t like it, we won’t have a robotic heart, or a designer baby’.”

Naturally, the same would go for prevention at the genomic level; people are almost unanimous that they’d like to live disease-free, but get squeamish when you start talking about tinkering with DNA to make that happen. But opening up the discussion might change minds.

As we noted earlier in this chapter, others are worried that tinkering with DNA might have unforeseen consequences that might not reveal themselves until it’s too late to undo it, and that rewiring humans at this level is problematic, especially if those genetic changes are then passed on to future offspring.

It’s harder to argue with this type of assertion; sure, it’s partially driven by fear of the unknown. On the other hand, there are plenty of times when science got it completely wrong, such as proclaiming DDT and thalidomide safe, or nuclear-age claims that exposure to radiation was actually good for your health. It’s easy enough to take this argument into tinfoil hat territory, but the doubts from more reasonable people might be enough to throw a wrench into immediate social acceptance.

Whether we come to a consensus on rewriting DNA before conception, we’re going to see a lot of advances on how to fix people up after they’re born. In fact, the process will become even easier as more research can be done using adult stem cells, which will remove many potential religious and political objections from the mix.

Meskó thinks this is an inevitability. “I believe that—this is a very strange prediction of mine—but by the time I have my first child I will not have to freeze the cord tissue because it won’t be required, because in my kid’s adult life we will be able to use the adult skin cells and convert it into any kind of tissues.”

That will certainly unlock a lot of potential treatments that could render some of our current medical procedures outdated. “It means we should forget about organ transplantation in five to 10 years’ time because we will have at least the tissues which we will be able to print out as biomaterials quite fast,” predicts Meskó. “I’m optimistic that this would be available in ten years. Right now the technology is there, we just have to fine tune it and find a solution.”

Or, of course, we can inject ourselves with nanites designed to keep an eye on what’s going on inside our body and take corrective action, such as releasing oxygen, making minor repairs to blood vessels, or terminating unwanted cells (cancer, viruses) or foreign materials (toxins, plaque, or beer).

Dr. Robert Murphy, President of ASPS, thinks we are close to such a reality. “We have been talking about—in terms of nanotechnology and stem cells—injecting cells to go through the body to go into the heart and form new heart muscle,” he said. But he notes that it doesn’t stop there. “To be able to manipulate certain cells to go into the body and clean out plaque in blood vessels that is essentially inner space so we are actually on the cusp of doing some of that. How we can purify and perfect, that is more forward thinking than conjecture. We are on the cusp.”

We’re already tracking our heartbeat from our Apple Watches and Fitbits, so people are definitely interested in living longer, healthier lives. Now it’s just a matter of convincing people to take it to the next level, whether it’s by injecting nanites into our bloodstream to monitor our health from the inside, printing replacement parts as they wear out, or rewiring us from the ground up before we’re even born.

For those who are trying to regain some lost functionality, the answer is almost certainly yes, which is why artificial limbs, pacemakers, and hearing aids have become relatively commonplace. These bits of technology are nonthreatening because at a fundamental level, people intuitively understand them and what they’re meant to do. Very few people would begrudge an amputee a robotic prosthetic if it allowed them to become mobile again. People get what mobility means to them and how it would feel if it was taken away.

Biohacks that add capabilities you didn’t previously have are a different story.

The grinders and body-hackers we looked at in Chapter 6, “Franken-You: A Better Life Through Cyborg Technology,” can be a bit off-putting to people in much the same way that you’d be alarmed if the Terminator walked into your workplace and demanded your clothes and the key to your Harley: It’s unnatural, and people tend to react to the strange with suspicion or fear.

Plus, it doesn’t help that electronic implants might make you look dorky ... hell, all it takes for that is Google Glass. But we ignore these enhancements at our peril.

Remember Kevin Warwick? He knows a thing or two about how implants can change your basic capabilities. First, he got an RFID implant that could open doors and control lights, and then he installed the BrainGate implant, which allowed him to receive signals directly from his wife over WiFi.

While he admits that some of these things are strange, he says that you can get used to their new capabilities rather quickly: “Oh yes, if you link into your brain or the peripheral nervous system you can start to give yourself a new sensation. It takes a while, but meaning, a few weeks, before you can understand all types of different things. So we can extend people’s sense, we can have new forms of communication, there is a lot more we can do with the brain.”

Warwick sees a future where people can interact with their world simply by thinking about it, without all that pesky, talking, typing, or button-pushing. “Thought communication in some basic form will be enormous, just as the telephone has been enormous. Though, the telephone will only be a tenth of what thought communication will be like.”

But when asked, Warwick is unsure how quickly this revolution will come about. “In terms of a commercial product, I don’t know. I think the first experiments will have happened [by 2024], but how long until it’s a commercial success, I don’t know.”

You can bet there are a lot of people who would love to start controlling things with their mind, such as changing the channel on the television without having to lift that onerous remote. Or thinking about a nice cold grown-up beverage and having your spouse (or bartenderbot) deliver it right to your comfy chair.

On the other hand, if you put an implant into your brain allowing you to connect directly to the network, how long will it be before you have to install an antivirus program into your wetware? The last thing you want is to be trying to pick someone up at the nightclub and have some pimply dingleberry hack directly into your brainpan. Your pickup lines are terrible enough already without being biohacked into blurting out random Madonna lyrics.

It’s no surprise that Ray Kurzweil is more positive about the possibilities of melding the biological with the technological and what it’s going to offer humanity.

“We won’t be constrained by physical parameters. We’ll become a hybrid of biological and nonbiological thinking,” he predicts. “The most important part is we will expand our neocortex again. And if you remember what happened the last time, two-million years ago, it allowed us to take a qualitative leap. And that will allow us to take another qualitative leap.”

From a plethora of research, he’s learned that man uses his present emotional state and his past experiences to consider his future. Not surprisingly, this makes man a very unreliable fortuneteller.

This inherent biological shortcoming is one potential reason most people find it hard to believe that we will ever have the choice to live forever. It’s not possible now, so how could it be in future? Birth and death is as much a reality as gravity is. Right?

Well, there are experts, one being biomedical gerontologist Aubrey de Grey from the SENS Foundation, that would argue death is only unnatural now because technology hasn’t figured out how to solve it. But perhaps one day it could make the list of impossible conundrums that technology solved alongside flying (airplanes), long-distance communication (telephones), and sending information without wires (radio, cell phones) to name a few.

So perhaps living forever is not such a strange prediction. Though, in terms of the research required to get there, de Grey told London Real (listen in at http://superyou.link/maverick), “Irrationality is slowing things down and costing lives ... 100,000 people die from age-related issues each day.” This lack of forward thinking has a direct impact on funding.

If de Grey could wave his magic wand and get what he needs so that SENS could develop a cure for aging, he said what they need is a “$50 million budget rather than just a $5 million budget.”

The scientific thinking has been done. The theories are in place. But years of research to affirm and develop technologies, and the money to do so, is in the way.

When it comes to timelines, de Grey always makes sure to reaffirm the speculative nature of these predictions. He told London Real in 2014 that he believes SENS has a “50/50 chance of getting these technologies into a decisive level of comprehension in 20 to 30 years.” Though, he admits there’s still a “10% chance of 100 years if we encounter something along the way we didn’t expect.” And ultimately, he said, “The only way we’ll get there is if the 5 to 10 years constitutes good proof of concepts and the funding improves.”

Funding and technological innovations aside, a third hurdle is social policy. Legal issues relating to living forever would need to be examined. New laws would have to be created to regulate the new issues that arise.

One for example, is population control. de Grey is often asked about this concern to which his response is “the carrying capacity of the planet is not fixed,” so he believes the “prospect is very overblown.” And perhaps, there would be new laws that would govern who could have babies to accommodate the new change.

Lastly, policy only changes when large groups of people demand they do. For that, minds will need to change. People will need to want to live forever. They’ll need to understand the benefits.

The shift in thinking will likely come in time. It takes decades to shift world conversations. Though, it has happened. At this point, it’s left up to speculation what will happen in future. In the next four decades, it’s unlikely you’ll need to be concerned.

But, if you’re like Andy Walker, Kurzweil, and de Grey, who want the ability to choose to live forever, here’s your game plan:

Step 1—Stay healthy so you can live as long as possible and make it to the day technology ends death.

Step 2—Get a “living will” now that ensures you’ll be cryonically frozen in the event of an accident or death.

Step 3—Be an advocate, and encourage others to learn and help forward longevity research efforts.

And, in the event you’re cryonically preserved, don’t be upset if when you wake up you’re living with more robots than people, drinking Soylent at mealtime, and a flight suit is your main mode of transportation.

In that case, it’s time to get comfortable with the idea of bumping into C3P0-V2 at the company water cooler. Or, sending your kid to school in a driverless car. Or, spending an intimate evening with SugarBabe3000 whom you recently purchased from your local Stag shop (no judgment here!).

Many people fear this reality. Or they don’t give it much thought and tend to think: AI happens in the movies, not in real life. But consider what you used the last time you needed to find some information quickly on the Web. A Google search bot perhaps (which is an information processing robot)? Or the last time you asked your car’s GPS module for directions. Also a robot. Or pull cash out of an ATM machine—robot too.

More robots, and smarter ones, means less need for humans to exert their own powers on tasks that range from the mundane (taking out the household trash or filing taxes) to eventually more specialized procedures (performing a kidney transplant operation). Istvan predicts that, “Five percent of jobs will be gone in the next five years.” Which he asserts is “sooner than most people realize.”

Robots taking jobs is nothing new. Consider how some of your favorite foods are processed and packaged. In most cases, an automated machine is performing a job a person used to do. The baker that used to bake the bread by hand has been replaced by giant mixing machines and conveyor belts that whip a few food ingredients into a loaf of Wonder bread you pick up at your local grocery chain.

This progression didn’t happen overnight. Which is why it’s likely robots running the corporate world will progress in stages:

Stage 1—Humans will continue to use bots to better perform in the workplace.

Stage 2—Robots will replace jobs that do not require an aptitude for conscious thinking.

Stage 3—AI robots will replace information-based jobs that are subject to human error, where a bot would be more effective.

Stage 4—Robots will replace most (if not all) humans at work.

The invention of the Internet and mobile devices has also enabled workers in many industries to access information using a robot assistant. A warehouse manager, for example, on the ground floor can get a custom quote on a new forklift purchase using a Google search bot from his mobile phone. Or, consider a chef that needs to look up a recipe for hollandaise sauce. He could do so, using a tablet from his kitchen counter.

In the medical community, Meskó said: “IBM’s Watson has been tested across the U.S. in the decision making process ... Watson can make a few suggestions to a doctor about course of treatment.” Meskó said he knows doctors that have used this technology and they “love this method because they feel more certain (because), for humans, it’s impossible to keep in mind all the millions of papers.”

In 2015, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told CNN that one day robots delivering your mail will be “as common as seeing a mail truck.” To that end, in July of 2015, an Australian startup called Flirtey received clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to test the first delivery drone in America.

In their 2013 paper, “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerisation?,” economists Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne write that jobs most vulnerable to robots are those that “mainly consist of tasks following well-defined procedures that can easily be performed by sophisticated algorithms.” Popular ones that made their list are: telemarketer, retail sales associate, accountant, technical writer, and insurance adjuster.

Istvan agrees about writers: “The way stories are written today, there is no reason a person is going to be able to write a quicker and better story than a bot. Half of today’s stories are rehashed ... they take sentences from other places and reorganize them so it’s not plagiarism. A computer can do that.”

This is good news to your Super You authors who would all like some help from a bot if they’re asked to write Super You v.2.

Kevin Warwick asserts that within the next ten years, “If you are communicating with something (without seeing it) you won’t know if it’s a machine or a human.” The job telemarketer from Frey and Osborne’s report would likely be on Warwick’s list.

Frey and Osborne cite jobs such as: dentist, nutritionist, athletic trainer, elementary school teacher, and mental health therapist, as having a less than 1 percent chance of being replaced by a machine. They also suggest a firefighter as a job that has a lower chance of becoming automated than a pilot. Though a pilot requires more technical ability, a firefighter has physical ability combined with strategic thinking, so it’s harder to be replaced by a robot.

Stage 3 will only happen when strong AI arrives. When that happens, it’s been suggested a robot will have a superior capability than those of humans. A machine will be unaffected by emotion (unless it’s been programmed with an “emotions” feature), will have a higher capability to access information, and its motor skills would be faster and more precise.

He suggests a “doctor standing behind a machine in case of a weird emergency ... could be here in 10 years.” In 20 years, he suggests, a robot alone might perform operations on its own.

Istvan cited another power position that could easily be replaced by strong AI: “Attorneys are one of the easiest jobs to replace by AI because you are just talking laws.” But that’s when Istvan believes there will be some resistance at the level of government.

He said: “40 percent of the U.S. Congress is controlled by attorneys ... and they are absolutely going to make it so that their jobs don’t get replaced.”

But people will only fight for their jobs (including attorneys) until they learn, firsthand, the value in being replaced by bots. Ultimately, technology is made by humans for the purpose of making life better and easier. Robots are no different.

Consider that in the last decade technology has brought more fun, more play, more joy into the workplace, and ultimately to life.

In a 2015 interview, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case told us, “The division between work and play is more blended together. You go home from work and you look at your television through Netflix, and then you have your iPhone and your laptop. Sometimes we answer our work mail in the evening. Sometimes we enter Facebook replies at work. So all these things that we had stable fences between are no longer there.”

A 2014 study from the Telework Research Network reported that 30 million Americans work from home at least one day a week. The number is expected to grow by 63 percent in the next five years. And get this, 54 percent of the 30 million of the work-from-home respondents reported that they are happier than ever before.

Technology has provided the workplace with many improvements and the benefits of robots will be similar. Some experts argue it will give rise to a new and improved world. Istvan suggests the day self-driving cars replace human drivers will immediately prevent 100,000 deaths a year by ending drunk driving. Not to mention, passengers can spend their car ride playing cards, talking with loved ones, or catching up on a good book.

It’s possible when humans put robots to work the world will be a lot more pleasurable. Istvan said: “People could potentially become perpetual students or whatever it is that they want to do.”

For this to happen, the government would need to create new laws and policies to ensure the unemployed would be supported. It’s why Istvan says the “Transhumanist Party supports a universal income.” Which would mean income would be disbursed by the government to ensure citizens can afford to live and enjoy life while robots work.

Your Super You authors can’t dispute a world where robots work and people are paid to learn, travel, or drink wine on a patio with their friends—do whatever it is you want to do—is a world we’d like to see happen.

By the way, for those Type A’s who are freaking out right now: Steady your gin and tonic for a sec. That doesn’t mean to say you couldn’t work if you wanted to. Or that you wouldn’t be able to earn supplemental income over your allocation of universal income. You could choose to work, if that floats your catamaran.

Or rather, we should say that certain parts of the world and elements of society have shown that particular nasty trait. Although it’s true that significant resistance comes from many of the religious leaders all across the spectrum, it’s our political leaders that have the power to prevent us from adopting some of the technologies that will lead to a transhumanist future. Although they might think they’re doing the right thing for their constituents (or congregants), the resistance to technology will spill into unintended sectors. Such as the national economy. Or the ability to retain intellectual talent inside the country.

The bottom line is this: If people want a procedure that’s available in other parts of the world and not their own country, they will book flights to get the procedure done offshore. Of course, that takes money out of the country, too.

According to Zoltan Istvan, it might not even be simply a matter of unavailability of the procedures; sometimes it’s also a matter of a local jurisdiction making it so expensive to perform a new procedure that it might as well be unavailable. “It’s just like we go overseas to have a kidney transplant because it’s so much cheaper, we are going to go overseas to have the (designer) babies done this way. And you can already see people talking about it.”

In the next decade or two, technology will explode in many super ways, but perhaps only for those that can afford it initially. Technology drops in price as it is adopted and as new successive generations of technology replace it. But the bleeding edge is always going to be expensive.

Amber Case explained: “As long as you have enough money and you are in the right social class you will have the privilege of the better interfaces as they come out. If you do not have enough money you will have to use the same phone for three or four years. Interfaces will turn against you.”

Istvan cautioned slow governmental process might also hinder adoption of new technologies. “When you look at how quickly drugs get passed in China, and how quickly medical endeavors get passed in China versus America, it’s something like 70 percent quicker. The FDA has an eight-year limit to pass a drug for the public. Whereas, in China it’s like 18 months or something.”

This government inaction will mean a lot more research and implementation of these new transhumanist technologies will happen in countries other than the United States, says Istvan, and that will cause a drag on the economy. “People are going to go overseas if they don’t allow it here. Which again this is part of this great brain drain out of America, which is very sad because if we want to keep up in the future—and we are already getting our butts kicked if you look at the timeline between how quickly Russia has been growing, or China has been growing. It’s quite possible that in 10 years China and India will have more GDP than America and will become more influential.”

Countries such as India and China have already demonstrated a great willingness to invest in these technological areas, and have been spending money in areas of research that are still dead-ended in North America.

It doesn’t really matter whether the cause of the roadblocks is religious in nature or a question of ethical reservations; the fields are moving forward in some parts of the world but not in others, which means a drain of talent and money from one part of the world to the other. Whether it’s even an area we’d ultimately want to be involved in from an ethical perspective is almost beside the point.

This disparity in tolerance levels for these new avenues of research has already led to some stark contrasts in how different countries are progressing in these new technologies, with much of this research moving to China. Basically, the more we resist these new technologies, the more another area of the world will grab the ball and run with it.

That’s not even getting into the disparity that happens within a country’s own borders and the income inequality between different groups of people living in the same area. Not having to wait in the Apple Store line to get your new Apple gadget the minute it hits the market might not be an issue to some. But consider the inability to purchase a genetic test that would have you learn if you are going to die from cancer if you don’t do anything about it. This will expand the already giant gap between social classes in the United States.

In a 2011 report, which later became a video that went viral (see the video: http://superyou.link/whereisthewealth), Michael Norton, a business professor at Harvard University, and Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University reports that the top 20 percent of American households own more than 84 percent of the world’s wealth. This economic disparity has been growing steadily since the 1970s. It’s likely to continue to grow as the wealthy become super human and naturally have an advantage to continue to succeed, where others might not.

Meskó agrees: “People who have the financial background will be able to be super humans, with perfect eyesight, digital hearing, better strength, and more intelligence. They will have access to these quality features just because they can afford them.”

He said this is a cause for concern: “It’s going to cause amazing changes in how we think about ourselves and the human race. Differences between two individuals have never been greater than before as they will be when this super era happens.”

With that stark disparity between people’s opportunities to access the technologies, it might motivate people to start throwing up roadblocks, especially when coupled with possible moral objections. “I would not be surprised if over the next five to 10 years you see a huge shift of these religious people implementing laws that absolutely make a lot of this stuff illegal,” says Istvan. “Within five to 10 years, we’re going to be seeing clashes when people start saying ‘we don’t want genetic engineering, we don’t want this type of radical technology so let’s just make it illegal.’ And of course it’s never going to become illegal in other places, and then China is going to get the upper hand on us just like they did with genetic engineering.”

This becomes more problematic in a world where more work is in danger of becoming automated, such as telemarketing, package delivery, and airline piloting. Although that’s the natural evolution of the workplace through the years—though no one is really lamenting the loss of telephone company switchboard operators or lack of work for people that deliver big hunks of ice for your icebox—the sheer amount of jobs that can be automated with smart algorithms will leave a lot of people without jobs, and without skills to get jobs that are still beyond the range of automation.

“As soon as the robots come to take jobs the entire society is going to have to be restructured in a different way,” stressed Istvan. “It’s been people’s jobs and careers that have kept the fabric of society together. Pretty soon we are just going to be human beings that don’t know what to do with ourselves.” This is one of the reasons that Istvan’s Transhumanist party supports the concept of a universal basic income.

“I think for sure you are going to see a huge outcry and this will probably be one that will cause the most civil unrest is this idea that people are losing jobs,” says Istvan. “But I think very quickly candidates are going to have to address these issues or increase welfare. I mean universal welfare is a basic system, but everyone needs something if they don’t want to work because the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. But maybe we can make it so that no revolution can occur and give everyone—what I call—a luxury communism.”

Did he just say the “C” word?

Yes, he did, but don’t summon your grandfather’s McCarthyism here.

Luxury communism is going to be a great big social pressure valve. It will give those that don’t want to work the ability not to. Those that want to retire, an early option. And those that do, new challenges to provide a contribution as a volunteer or possibly in infrastructure and innovation design. The dreamers can dream. The artists can create. The writers can ruminate. And everyone else? Istvan says education will be free. So you’ll be able to go back to school. Or raise your children. Or ... well I am sure you will figure something out.

Now some people will say where will the money come from? Remember, cost of production will diminish drastically without hourly labor costs and output will massively increase. In a robotic run AI economy there will be revenue streams from the robot productivity. There will be massive gains in production and the old school notion of human labor-driven capitalism will become obsolete.

That said, the bottom line here is that the United States, inclusive of its trading partners, will need to step in with progressive solutions.

Universal basic income will need to be built for the people by the people. And there will need to be a plan to keep technology jobs in the country. Otherwise the power base for these new technologies might well shift to other countries, leaving America and the West in the dust instead of joining the rest of the world in a bright, new transhumanist future.

Writing books is hard. And writing books about the future is even harder. And books such as this one are often wrong and sometimes right. Since then, we (Andy and Kay) moved our company from Canada to the United States, and we connected with Sean to fill out key sections of this book and get the final chapters complete. Along the way we lost a dog and a cat, and gained a baby.

Still, we were also right about a lot of things in two short years. We assumed self-driven cars were a decade away, and yet self-driving trucks have been authorized to navigate Nevada highways. Personal drones were expensive toys and by December 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos had announced Amazon’s intention to fly your purchases by Amazon Prime Air drone to your home in 30 to 60 minutes. As we complete this book in the spring of 2016, commercial domestic delivery drones are an almost certainty in the next year or two. And how long before they are taking our children’s lunch to school?

We could go on with hundreds more developments that have occurred in under three years, but it would beleaguer the point. Technology in the next half century will blossom. Life for everyone will change ... mostly for the better. You see what’s happening today is exciting and as predictable and measureable as we have tried to make it in this book, on its unpredictability is certain as it drives along the exponential curve.

Ray Kurzweil told us: “Exponential growth is surprising and seductive and people use their linear intuition even if they’re used to thinking exponentially.”

“The only thing to be sure about the future is that it will be fantastic.”

His critics and those who dismiss this book will have missed the point. We are living in the most extraordinary of times. And life as we know it is getting better and better every day. Those who refuse that are living their present into a linear future. And that’s their biggest miscalculation.

With that, we will leave you with a word from author and futurist Arthur C. Clark who said in a 1964 BBC documentary: “The only thing to be sure about the future is that it will be fantastic.”

It was. And it will be, Arthur. It will be.