Juan Enriquez

As technology has advanced over the centuries, our fundamental notion of right and wrong has evolved alongside it. With technology now accelerating at an exponential pace, we should consider that our ethics may change as quickly and as radically. This talk takes the principles of Right/Wrong: How Technology Transforms Our Ethics (MIT Press) and looks ahead to examine the surprising ethical implications of breakthroughs from gene editing to synthetic meat, to generative AI and quantum computing. So much of what we take for granted is changing so fast; Rather than adopt absolute positions on the issues of our day, we should practice flexible thinking to allow for learning, evolution, and tolerance. Because history has shown that even if we think we know right and wrong, ethics will change across time. And the faster this change occurs, the more humility, forgiveness, and caution we should employ when learning from the past and preparing for the future.

Genetics and digital are becoming the dominant languages of this century. The genetic revolution and other technologies will have unprecedented political, ethical, economic, and financial impacts on almost every business. You can begin to see this in both the pattern of mergers and acquisitions as well as new investments. Gene data is already transforming how pharma, biotech, hospital, food, feed, fiber, insurance, chemical, and energy companies do business. This session will map out how these discoveries and applications will change your business and life.

The genetics revolution means that life can be thought of as code, according to the futurist and genomics expert Juan Enriquez. As we understand that code, we can rewrite the sentences of life. Vaccines will be produced faster, organs for transplant will be grown on demand and we will be able to edit ourselves genetically. This will lead, said Enriquez, to a system in which people will be able to edit, alter, insert and delete memories because we are “beginning to decode the brain”. The pinnacle of our use of genetic technology could, suggested Enriquez, be in designing an interplanetary species. Earth faces threats from, for example, asteroid impacts, so humans should settle other planets. But as we suffer myriad health problems in space, we must redesign the human being. If we believe in human rights, Enriquez said, we should pursue these efforts to ensure the human race's long-term survival.

There have been at least 25 prototype humans. We are but one more model, and there is no evidence evolution has stopped. Juan Enriquez will take you into a world where humans increasingly shape their environment, their own selves, and other species. It is a world where our bodies harbor 100 times more microbial cells than human cells, a place where a gene cocktail may allow many more to climb an 8,000 meter peak without oxygen, and where, given the right drug, one could have a 77 percent chance of becoming a centenarian. By the end you will see a broad, and sometimes scary, map of life sciences driven change. Not just our bodies will be altered but our core religious, government, and social structures as humankind make the transition to a new species, a Homo evolutis, which directly and deliberately controls its own evolution and that of many other species. By the way, these changes are already altering some of the world’s largest companies.

The rise and fall of nations and economies and industries and your own company depends— and has always depended—on how literate you are in the dominant language of wealth generation; that is, in the dominant language used to transmit data over time. Once, that language was hieroglyphics. Then phonetic alphabets and the characters used for Asian languages. Recently, it has been the digital language of ‘1s’ and ‘0s’. Increasingly now, and in the future, the dominant language for generating new wealth will be bio-related, especially the ATCGs of the human genome, and it can be digitized. In this presentation, Juan Enriquez opens the window onto the genomic future of the next twenty years, and offers this message: Genomics—the code of life—is the language and the code that will drive the economy of the future. Master this language and you will thrive. Fail to become at least literate in this language and you will not survive. Already, of the top five patent categories in the U.S., only one is digital; the other four are bio-related. The digital language is already falling behind. An orange is really code, biological instructions for making another orange tree. We are beginning to understand this code well enough to rewrite it to specifications. And not just for oranges but for humans, also. Here lies the future of wealth generation and of competitive advantage. Another metaphor: The single most important map ever created was published on February 12, 2001—the map of the human genome. Maps matter, and this map will radically change the balance of power in the world. It’s still very crude, as crude as those drawn of the new world in the late 15th century, but it’s even more valuable. It leads to a new world whose outlines we cannot even guess. Countries and companies that miss the importance of this map will be navigating in the wrong direction. Countries and companies that learn how to read it will enter that new world.