How Science Will Shape Smartware

But wait, there’s more! Technology for changing parts of a person’s genome already exists. At the beginning of this decade, scientists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier first proposed the use of CRISPR/Cas9, visualized in Figure 2, for programmable gene editing. Teams led by Feng Zhang and George Church separately developed this technology for use in humans—although the technology is still very much in its early stages. However, the scientific community has been slow to actually deploy this method on humans, in part because of ethical and safety concerns. Nevertheless, just last year, scientists used the technique to correct an inherited heart condition in a human embryo.

For now, scientists are being careful to treat this advance as just one step in the scientific process—not the dawn of the designer baby. But the reality is that it is now possible to edit an embryo’s DNA to remove something undesirable and perhaps replace it with something more desirable. Whether in a place like the United States, where wealthy oligarchs can ultimately have whatever their billions of dollars can buy, or in a place like China, where the focus is on progress, with less consideration of ethical concerns, it’s only a matter of time until designer babies are actually possible—at least in some limited way.

Image source: Ernesto del Aguila III, National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), (CC BY-NC 2.0)

Understanding the Human Mind

Of course, genomics is not the only scientific field that is experiencing remarkable advancement today. Neuroscience has developed into what we might call the new physics—a gravity well for many different scientific fields. Ultimately, we’ll get answers to age-old questions about the whys, whats, and wherefores of the human animal. Interest in and study of the brain is as old as recorded human history. In fact, the earliest reference to the brain dates to 17th century BC in Egypt. For a long time, we’ve understood the brain’s central role in how we function, but extending that to actually understanding essential truths about the human condition has remained elusive until just recently.

As with genomics, the origins of modern neuroscience trace back to the 1950s. In 1952, the Hodgkin-Huxley Method provided a mathematical model for the transmission of electrical signals in a neuron. A decade later, Bernard Katz modeled neurotransmission across synapses. Then, in 1981, the Morris-Lecar model federated various independent models into something more complete. This litany of names and dates represents an ever-expanding, but ultimately incomplete view of our learnings about how the mind works. However, over the last decade, neuroscience has advanced to the point where we not only understand the biological basis of how the brain works, but also its relationship to actual human behavior. This has given us insights into fundamental questions such as the cause of depression, what causes Alzheimer’s, how the Internet is taking over human memory, how an expectant mother’s diet impacts her future offspring, and how we can erase or enhance memories.

An example of the sheer volume of data that is available to neuroscientists for analysis today, “Self Reflected Under White, Red, and Violet Light,” shown in Figure 3, is Greg Dunn, Brian Edwards, and Will Drinker’s award-winning visualization of the human brain, which drew upon numerous information sources to create this amazing image of 500,000 neurons.

Neuroscience is also impacting other fields. The so-called soft sciences—fields such as psychology, sociology, and philosophy—can lattice this tsunami of new, scientifically factual discoveries about how the human animal behaves into their work on the behavior of people, societies, and even the entire world.

Image source: The 2017 Vizzies—The National Science Foundation (NSF) Visual Challenge

Building the Identity Graph

Understanding the human genome and neurological system is already leading to hyper-specific cures to diseases, as well as more sophisticated problem solving around how and why we behave in certain ways that we can leverage for greater well-being. The future will bring these insights out of the realm of our healthcare system and therapists into that of the consumer products we use every day. We call this evolution the identity graph. It will become possible—using essential data about human beings that could, with our consent, approach a genomic or neurological level—to enable the smartware environment in which we live to adapt to the very essence of who we are in an absolute way. This encompasses the makeup of our DNA, as well as who we are specifically, from moment to moment.

Altruistically, we can see how this might bestow holistically better lives upon us—in ways that range from our relationships, to how we spend our time, to finding the right work environment. More practically, this could optimize the ability of for-profit companies to tempt us to spend more of our money on their offerings by tapping into the biological underpinnings that are unique to each and every one of us. By the 2020s or 2030s, the precision, depth, and power of what our identity graph makes possible for each of us will seem like magic in comparison to today’s early algorithmic methods—or the clumsy, one-to-one marketing efforts of the 1990s.

In our next column, we’ll look at how the precise information from our identity graph—along with the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence, the IoT, mixed-reality environments, and additive fabrication—will enable new interactions and user experiences as smartware evolves.