People linking their brains together to form a global collective intelligence. Humans living well beyond 100 years. Computers uploading aspects of our personalities to a network. These could all happen this century with the proper investments in technology, according to a recent report from the National Science Foundation and the Department of Commerce.
Titled Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science, the 405-page report calls for more research into the intersection of these fields.
The payoff, the authors claim, isn't just better bodies and more effective minds. Progress in these areas of technology also could play a key role in preventing a societal "catastrophe." The answer to human brutality and new forms of lethal weapons, it suggests, is a kind of tech-triggered unity: "Technological convergence could become the framework for human convergence."
Published last month, the report could one day be remembered as a seminal road map to the future. But it's not clear whether its recommendations will be followed--or should be.
Some critics question whether such sci-fi promises can ever become reality, while others doubt world salvation will come through technology. Others worry that advanced technologies such as super-smart robots or genetically modified organisms may cause us more harm than good.
The "Converging Technologies" report stems from a workshop last December involving tech leaders in government, academia and private industry. Major themes at the seminar ranged from expanding human cognition and communication to improving human health to strengthening national security.
The final report, edited by Mihail Roco, NSF's senior adviser for nanotechnology, and William Bainbridge, acting director of NSF's Division of Information and Intelligent Systems, includes papers submitted by various participants as well as an overview by Roco and Bainbridge.
In the overview, the editors argue that a host of advances can be achieved in the next 20 years alone. Among these are wearable sensors that send health alerts, much more useful robots, invulnerable data networks, and direct broadband interfaces between our minds and machines.
With research in converging technologies, it's possible some disabilities will be eradicated completely and normal standards of healthiness will soar, Roco and Bainbridge wrote. "The human body will be more durable, healthy, energetic, easier to repair and resistant to many kinds of stress, biological threat and (the) aging process."
Also at stake is the health of the nation's economy, said James Canton, a futurist who helped organize the workshop. If the United States doesn't coordinate research into these four technologies, it risks losing its global tech leadership, Canton said.
Technology already lets individuals and nations "leapfrog" others, and the combination of nanotechnology, biotechnology, information technology and cognitive science is going to create an "entirely different economy," Canton said.
"It's really a comprehensive change that makes the Internet seem small," said Canton, president of the Institute for Global Futures in San Francisco.
The report thinks big when it comes to peering beyond the next two decades to the rest of the 21st century. Taking visionaries such as Ray Kurzweil seriously, it imagines robots so advanced they may deserve political rights, building surfaces that automatically change shape and color to adjust to the weather, and the prospect of personality uploads that make death itself ambiguous.
Merging human consciousness with machines is tied to another mind-boggling concept: brain-to-brain connections. The report discusses the possibility of "local groups of linked enhanced individuals" as well as "a global collective intelligence."
Creating such a networked society could play a vital role in overcoming today's social and political crises, Roco and Bainbridge suggest. "The 21st century could end in world peace, universal prosperity and evolution to a higher level of compassion and accomplishment," they write.
"It is hard to find the right metaphor to see a century into the future, but it may be that humanity would become like a single, transcendent nervous system, an interconnected 'brain' based in new core pathways of society."
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