John Robson: A radical future isn’t just coming. It’s arriving, now, and perhaps we should give some thought to it? – National Post

Oh dear. I have seen the future and I think it works. So if were going to worry wed better get moving because it certainly is.

I say all this after my first day at Moses Znaimers 18th ideacity conference (you can watch the free live stream at ideacity.ca, and that is also where the talks will be archived), where it was clear by lunch that many medical breakthroughs I thought decades away are at the door or in the vestibule. As for lunch itself, get ready for beef made from plants that you cant tell from the real thing. I know. I ate some. Im telling you, this stuff isnt just coming. Its here.

We got a fascinating look at the rapid evolution of organ transplants, including a machine wheeled out on stage with a pig lung inside being aerated, irrigated and generally kept alive. I never thought before about what the outside of a lung looks like. Very cool, and very practical. But were not just talking better lung transplants.

In the near future it would not just be possible for two men or women to have a biological child. One person could be both father and mother

Were talking titanium bones, designer children and artificial wombs. And while I dont know that preventative repair medicine will ever really let us live forever, barring accidents, one presenter argued convincingly that in the near future it would not just be possible for two men or women to have a biological child. One person could be both father and mother, using a sperm and an egg manufactured from their skin cells. But wait. You also get

Gene sequencing for that or any other child. Eliminating genetic defects that cause inherited degenerative diseases is hard to oppose. But why stop there? All sorts of things are drawbacks in life, including being short. And we may soon be able to edit them out with the new, astonishingly fast and cheap CRISPR/Cas9 method. Or its successors successor.

Dont get me wrong. The conference has been thought-provoking, rigorous yet accessible and highly relevant, including a fascinating, high-spirited talk on the human digestive tract. But its also been disquieting.

Presenter Andrew Stark did warn that living forever might bring all the pains we associate with mortality without even any prospect of an end to them. He said the problem isnt that we die, its that we live in time. And if hes right, then doing it longer, taller and sexier with custom earlobes wont help. (The immortality that writers like C.S. Lewis and Russell Kirk depict involves a radically different relationship to time that no amount of technique can deliver.)

A number of other speakers also touched on the need to debate the ethical issues. I myself would prefer to debate the morality but on the way to turning plants into meat and skin into sperm, scientific technique evidently transformed that old junk from the everyday concern of ordinary people to the arcane preserve of experts who have, sadly, no fixed points by which to navigate. Once we can choose what is right, in biology or morality, we have no basis for preferring any particular choice, which paradoxically gives us no place to stop and no basis for proceeding either.

To pick one example from the buffet, a presenter enthused about, as he put it, producing beef, pork or chicken from plants. But if were not stuck getting meat from a cow, why are we stuck with cow meat? Why not bork or picken? Or something radically new? To infinity and beyond!

But if were not stuck getting meat from a cow, why are we stuck with cow meat? Why not bork or picken? Or something radically new? To infinity and beyond!

If I were at the conference to cast my habitual pall of gloom over such prospects I would caution that many of our current problems stem from decades of exactly this blithe confidence and blind determination to improve on nature through technique. Food science, ingeniously combining heat, pressure and chemicals to turn plants into things never before eaten, from margarine to high fructose corn syrup, with flavours unknown to nature, already gave us Jacked Ranch Dipped Hot Wings Doritos that, Mark Schatzker notes in The Dorito Effect, have 34 ingredients. And it gave us an obesity crisis. How likely is it that food that tastes, smells, and otherwise behaves even less like what it is will make us healthy and happy next time?

I would also note that the tone of ideacity is, unsurprisingly, strongly environmentalist. Yet these projects are so stunningly unnatural that one presenter concluded cheerfully with Its Brave New World, possibly unaware that Huxleys novel was an agonized cry of warning and protest. But Im not here to cast a pall of gloom over such visions. Im here to cast a pall of gloom over the UN on Friday.

So for now Im a weatherman, whose main job is not to complain that wind blows dust into your eyes. Its to say theres wind coming, or a gale or even a hurricane. And the experts gathered here already convinced me a radical future is blowing in hard. And fast.

National Post

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John Robson: A radical future isn't just coming. It's arriving, now, and perhaps we should give some thought to it? - National Post