The Future of Humanity
Week of January 2, 2021
Hacking Aging – The Science and Science Fiction of Extending Human Healthspan
Most everybody knows we should exercise, eat well, build meaningful communities, and reduce stress to live healthy longer. But the revolutionary new science of human life extension is creating enticing new possibilities for using technology to extend our lives far beyond what nature intended. Technology futurist Jamie Metzl explores the latest breakthroughs in the science of human life extension that promise to gain more of life‘s most precious commodity: time. Jamie explains what individuals, companies, and governments must do now to prepare for this revolutionary future that will fundamentally reorganize our societies and global economics.
The Coronavirus Broke the World, How Can We Build Back Better
The COVID-19 pandemic will fundamentally transform every aspect of our lives on the personal, professional, national, and global levels. The crisis has made processes that might otherwise have unfolded over decades arrive all at once. Our future has come crashing into our present. As much as many of us are hoping our previous world will snap back after this crisis abates, that will not be the case. But while it is appropriate to mourn what we have lost and the tragedy of this moment, the foundations for our new lives, companies, and world are today being laid. Futurist, WHO expert adviser, Atlantic Council Senior Fellow, bestselling author, and founder of the global social movement OneShared.World, Jamie Metzl places our current crisis in its most essential context and helps communities understand how the world we’ve known is dying faster than we’d thought and imagine our new world emerging faster than we’d imagined.
CRISPR, Genetic Engineering, and the Future of Humanity
The transition from today’s system of generalized medicine based on population averages to the new model of precision healthcare based on each person’s individual biology is already well underway. But the use of the precision medicine tools of genome sequencing, big data analytics, and targeted gene therapies to treat cancer and other diseases are paving the way for a system of predictive healthcare where parents will know and begin responding to their children’s future risk of developing hereditary disorders before their children have even been born. The genetics revolution will fundamentally transform our healthcare, the way we make babies, and the nature of the babies we make, but health professionals, the business community, and society at large are not at all ready.
Jamie Metzl is a leading futurist, geopolitical expert, science fiction novelist, and media commentator and a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council. He was recently appointed to the World Health Organization expert advisory committee on developing global standards for the governance and oversight of human genome editing. Jamie previously served in the U.S. National Security Council, State Department, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, as Executive Vice President of the Asia Society and with the United Nations in Cambodia. Jamie appears regularly on national and international media discussing global issues and his syndicated columns and other writing on Asian affairs, genetics, virtual reality, and other topics are featured regularly in publications around the world. He is the author of A History of the Cambodian Genocide, the historical novel The Depths of the Sea, and the genetics sci-fi thrillers Genesis Code and Eternal Sonata. His most recent book is Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Humanity. An avid ironman triathlete and ultramarathoner and former White House Fellow and Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, Jamie holds a Ph.D. in Asian history from Oxford, a JD from Harvard Law School, and is a Phi Beta Kappa Magna cum Laude graduate of Brown University.
jamiemetzl.com; hackingdarwin.com; OneShared.World