Re: What is your outlook?

Description: Within the year, Church says, people will have affordable access to their genetic information.

Question:  Are you generally optimistic or pessimistic about the way the world is headed?

Transcript: Well I’d like to think that I’m realistic which means that the optimism is only justified if a few people take very strong action, sometimes putting themselves or their careers at risk.  And then you will see this positive feedback loop where more people get inspired by this, and I mentioned some of the people that have inspired me, that have taken their family’s disease and become healthcare activists.  If we have a few activists, it doesn’t have to be everybody, but everybody should join with them in doing their little part.  So I think that would lead to optimism, but I’m not going to be blindly optimist.  We need to have activists and people who get inspired by activists.  

Question: Do you have a vision for the future?

Transcript: Well I think that certainly in the . . . I would say in the short term, but since these are exponential technologies, it’s actually a very long time, in say, Internet time, okay?  I think that most people will get access to their genetic information.  A lot of people will want it and they will get it.  It will probably be affordable this year.  So it’s not very long even in Internet time.  But then to get it interpreted they will have to share.  I don’t know exactly how it will work out, but I see trends for sharing. You know, Wikapedia, the Red Cross, all kinds of things old and new that indicate that at least a significant fraction of the population will share their genes, their environment, and their traits.  That will lead us to a point where . . .  And I also see stem cells where you can take a bit of skin and reprogram it so then you can get access to any tissue in your body.  That’s coming down just in a few years.  Then using that to fix what’s going on in adult aging so you actually stay youthful for a longer period of time.  Not necessarily eliminating aging, but certainly increasing the quality of life.  I think that will happen, and that it will have a huge impact because there’s a certain wisdom that will happen when healthy people stay healthy and engaged for a long period of time.  Another one of the things that make humans fairly amazing is that they do live for a long time, well past what would have been their reproductive limit in ancient days, because grandparents, and great grandparents, and business leaders and so forth add value that goes beyond their reproductive years.  And I think that if we can make those very healthy and very undistracted by health issues, that would be a huge change in the future.  And then if we have computers, robots, humans, all acting as super computers and geniuses, we have a planet full of six billion people, each with six billion super computers, then you can no longer predict.  I mean that’s a fairly rosy picture, but that at point you don’t know where it goes.

Question: What are the political implications?

Transcript: I think a huge fraction of . . .  And this is not a political scientist speaking, so you have to take it with a grain of salt.  But from my biased viewpoint, a lot of the political problems have to do with the “haves” and the “haves not”. And we have seen many examples of the rising tide floating all the boats where there’s more people in the middle class then there ever was in the past history.  So if that trend can continue, then there will be fewer people who feel like they represent an underprivileged class.  Now there still are cultural differences that even though two different wealthy people could have major cultural differences of opinion, but perhaps those will be mitigated by having . . . by some embracement of diversity.  We’ll just have to see.  It certainly will change. The technology will change the way that people interact politically, but it’s very hard to predict exactly that dynamic.

Question: Will we be able to move beyond this planet?

Transcript: It’s not inevitable because right now it’s a trade off between curing poverty and sending very expensive space machines out there.  And I wish there weren’t an economic tradeoff.  We will probably do both as we have, but it would be great if we cured poverty and then used all those resources, those additional minds and so forth, to help us get off the planet.  But I think sub orbital is very far stretched from where we need to go because out there is a lot of radiation, and a lot of particles that will destroy any rapidly moving device and everything in it.  And so we need to build a . . .  It’s a very challenging task to be able to build space elevators, build very thin devices that are very robust, that would not be affected by space particles.  Or build very large devices that will not be affected by radiation, because like the earth’s atmosphere they provide many meters of protection from cosmic radiation.  So I think these are things that are not commonly discussed.  Even getting to Mars is extraordinarily expense undertaking. Getting to something outside of our solar system is almost beyond fathoming from an economic standpoint, and really requires that we have all the rest of our economics, I think, in good shape.

Recorded on: 7/6/07