Evolving Ourselves–Redesigning the Future of Humanity

our final speaker this afternoon is Juan and Ricky's and I'm not going to spend a lot of time trying to describe what he does but he is working on what's next in a whole different frontier of mapping and seeing the world differently one where are you one side or the other okay better welcome him here he is ladies and gentlemen thank you why thank you okay enough all right so I know what you're thinking nothing like a lecture on gene research to wake up the afternoon so I want to convince you that early maps don't look like much but they end up changing the world so this is one of the first maps done island of Hispaniola 1492 and eventually it became a map that looked like that and what we're doing today is for drawing maps with different ways so I want to talk to you about three different maps I want to talk to you about maps done with alphabets maps done with genes and maps done with brains and I think as you think of what's happened to this room the first map has already changed this world it's what you do the second map is what's changing world and the third map is something that looks like that early map of Hispaniola today Dominican Republic and Haiti so alphabets are maps of knowledge genes are maps of life and brains maybe maps of consciousness so let me start unpacking well the difference between ourselves and a monkey is about less than 0.1% of gene code you often see that in Washington and and as you think yeah but the real difference between ourselves and monkeys as we code and this is one of the first examples of coding so what are we doing here what we're telling people what this is how many of us there are this is what we eat this is how we dress this is how we have a baby this is the fish we eat and you just learned a whole lot about what was happening in Argentina 2,000 years ago so by coding what we're able to do is we're able to teach the next generation the next generation the next generation a whole lot of stuff and the history of wealth has been a history of code because code keeps changing so as we stylize that code and make it half a drawing half a hieroglyph half a letter what we've done is we've had this history of taking these symbols and making them more and more abstract until we get to something that looks like this and the reason why these 26 letters in English are 29 letters in Spanish as many letters as you have in different alphabets are so important is because they allow you to code they allow you to concentrate knowledge they allow you to build big libraries that tell people look this is what we learned in 1400 this is what we learned in the 1500s this is what we learned over the last few years and it's this ability to code that allows us to concentrate apply learn transmit data and what's happened the history of the last 40 years has been a history of a change in alphab so when I was in high school almost nobody was using this digital code when I was in college very few people were using this digital code today 99% of the world is using this code and what it does is it takes those ABCs and transmits it in a two letter alphabet so if I send you the first line of code right here you're gonna get a message that says I love you on your cell phone if I send you the second line of code then you get a message that says I hate you difference between love and hate green or orange very different reaction but these ones and zeroes are really important because all of a sudden you don't need a separate alphabet for Chinese or Japanese or Cyrillic or Aramaic every alphabet every word written and spoken in the world is now on a 2 letter alphabet and what you can't do with words you can do with ones and zeroes because all of a sudden every image every photograph every film every video every bit of music is in a 2 letter alphabet so this 2 letter alphabet turns out to be incredibly powerful you can carry most of the world's knowledge in your pocket have more information than a president had 20 years ago because all of you have become digital citizens so if this is so powerful why weren't we using it well this was 5 megabytes in 1956 so this is one photograph on your cell phone and it only cost you a million dollars well guess what not a lot of digital photographers but the next year two photographs $500,000 next year for photographs 250,000 dollars next year 8 photographs 125,000 dollars how much did your last thousand digital photographs cost you you don't even count it so these systems just like that first map of hispaniola take awhile to get started but once they get started it has an enormous impact on humans these maps are possible because of things like this so this is one of the patents for the very early computer chips right and in 1959 it didn't seem very relevant and then it goes forward and it took oh body years 9 years for this to start birthing these little tiny startups that seemed irrelevant certainly doesn't seem relevant to mapping at that point and I got to tell you it isn't a coincidence the Jack and Laura showed up at Harvard's Graduate School of Design right in between there and just as these things are getting started there's a professor or two there who say you know you might want to look at this computer stuff and you might want to look at the applications of this to design and it was one was very very early Maps just the outline of what would become the Americas fast forward this takes a long time 1981 then you start getting command lines that look like this and that's the year that Microsoft licenses to IBM the Microsoft da system that didn't seem like a big deal to IBM if IBM had realized what it was doing it would be the most dominant computer company in the world as opposed to Microsoft and oh by the way that's also the year that Jack and Laura decided to sell their software and not just be a consulting firm and they were able to sell for entire copies of arcinfo for and it didn't seem like this was gonna change the world it didn't seem like we were gonna end up in a room with a few of our friends and it didn't seem like those chips were gonna become billion transistors chips with several layers of the 13 nanometer resolution takes a while for these maps to get started but once they get started they get really powerful everything every one of you does everything is leveraging ones and zeros everything you've seen over the entire day is possible because you have all changed your alphabets you're no longer drawing by hand you're no longer using protractors you've all become digital citizens and you're all literate in the digital world and if I'd stood here back at the first conference and said the biggest single driver of the global economy is gonna be your ability to use ones and zeros it might have seemed a little preposterous so why is this important today why should you pay attention to us because we're changing the dominant alphabet again because we're starting to read write use a completely different alphabet so this is an alphabet that was discovered by or1 Mendel and a whole series of other folks and then Watson Crick came up with this argument that all life is coded in DNA so what does that mean it means you've got a little spiral staircase and it's got four chemicals on it it's got adenine thymine guanine cytosine every life form on this planet every sheep every cow every tree every clover every bacteria every monkey every human being every politician they're all made of this stuff and when you look at this stuff what you can do is you can write out that code in the same ways you write out those 1 1 0 1 1 1 1 so this thing executes code this is a computer but it executes life code it doesn't execute digital code how does this work it's it's up on a tree minding its own business until one day it does ker-plop and when it does that that's like pushing execute on your computer program and it begins to execute code first line of code taa ACA AG that means make a little route tcga make a little stem gcta make some leaves a CGG make some flowers GCA make a couple more of these things remember what happened with those ones and zeros zero one one one one I love you Oh one one one one one I hate you a very different elk pending on the order of those ones and zeros same thing with this if I change some lines of code in this and say GAA CTTT instead of what's on there then this thing becomes a tangerine GCA it becomes a lemon cg a TCCC it becomes a great free very small changes in code have a huge impact on how life executes in fact the difference between you and the person sitting next to you today is about one in a thousand of those letters change one in a thousand of those letters you become a person sitting next to you be more careful where you sit next time so it turns out that life is code and if life is code it means in the same way as you can do it with the alphabet for ABCs or in the same ways you can do it with ones and zeroes you can read the code you can copy the code you can edit the code and that's going to change the world because just as happened in the digital revolution the cost of understanding life code has just dropped like a rock first human genome billion bucks current human genome about a thousand bucks dropping about 50% faster and Moore's long you can't build computers fast enough to store this stuff to analyze it to triage it that's why the world's biggest IT companies are becoming life science companies and as you're looking at this stuff let me just give you a sense of the kinds of maps that I think are gonna be interesting to you and the kinds of people who are gonna be in this room as your world and the life science will converge over the next decade or two so these are all the chromosomes 23 and the one tiny little runt over there is what makes people male it's recessive its mutant and sometimes useless but hey and as you're looking at the stuff you can map it at very different resolutions so you can take the human Y chromosome and you can break it down and say hey here's one section here's another section and then you can zoom in and look very specifically at each of those eight ECGs on this stuff and then you can look and say hey when you've got a form of leukemia these are some of the changes that you have in this code these are some of the things that are misspelled or misplaced or edited in or edited out and then you can get very very specific on this you personally have this form of colon cancer and this is what this is doing to you and this is the medicine you should think about using these are early Maps right we're not at the stage where we can build medicines for all of these things but we're starting to build medicines for some of these things it also teaches us a whole lot not just about humans but about other things so you can take something like cholera and figure out exactly what it is within cholera that makes it much more toxic over here less toxic over here comes from Africa you can you can type exactly where that cholera came from and by the way you can compare it to jeburk you Llosa's so what is it in this disease that makes it particularly nasty or particularly violent what does it do across all flus and as you begin to map the stuff you can go micro and you can go macro these are basically all the forms of life on Earth on a big scale when they arose what came from what and what the size of the genomes are so that's what we know about life on the planet in one graph at this stage the maps get interesting just like your layering maps this is huge amounts of data being layered because see the gene letters down here turn into sentences which are the metabolites up here when they turned into paragraph I'm sorry the senses of a pet or the proteins and then they turned into metabolites which are the paragraphs and these are really interesting really complex Maps and if you tweak them at the gene level you're gonna have effects all the way up and if you're teaching them at the protein level you're gonna have effects all the way up and it should tweak them over at the metabolite level you're gonna have effects all the way up right so it's like playing a multi-dimensional chess game these are some of the most interesting complex interesting just fascinating mapping problems on the planet today talking about geographic information systems looking at protein protein interactions we don't have computers powerful enough to model this today this is what's pushing high-end computing this is what's pushing high-end AI these are problems that are just absolutely fascinating and they're problems of maps and I think in the next decade you're gonna have a whole pile of people asking you so how did you map this how did you visualize it and by the way some of your kids if they choose to enter mapping and high-end mapping may want to ask questions about life sciences as well so that's the mapping part let me talk about consequences so see the old biology used to be reactive you used to take your little magnifying glass or microscope and sort of look at what was there at the new genome biology is proactive you make stuff with it once you have the map then you know how to explore once you know how to explore you know how would change the place so what we've done is we've taken the rules of what lives and dies on earth for four billion years which Darwin and Wallace established and we flipped the logic of evolution completely on its head so the old evolution needs to be natural selection random mutation the new evolution driven by humans creates a parallel system different from that of nature that's unnatural selection non-random mutation so let me unpack that natural selection is a wolf you domesticate a wall you start breeding wolf and you get unnatural selection that looks like that and basically what you're doing is you're saying hey I'm gonna breed this one to be a Labrador I'm gonna breed this one to be a Doberman I'm gonna be this one to be a bloodhound this is not natural selection take one of those little yapping Chihuahuas that you found over here on Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles put it on the African plain you will watch natural selection happen really quickly a cornfield is the least natural space on earth leave a cornfield fallow it will not look like a cornfield plants don't normally grow like amber waves of grain absent human intervention the types of things that would occur on 1/2 the surface of the planet wouldn't occur because we like snakes laughs we like dogs more we like cats we like corn we like flowers so we're deciding what lives and dies not necessarily nature and so we've taken mustard weed when you suppress the flowers you get broccoli when you get bigger leaves you get kale when you sterilize the flowers you get cauliflower these are non random mutations and we're getting better and better at reading this language of life copping up and editing it which some people might call intelligent design to pick a completely random phrase and then give you a second example of how this is working a company I co-founded a few years ago with the man who sequenced the human genome craig Venter and Hamilton Smith have got with no bail for restriction enzymes basically wanted to map the smallest living organism and do this and I know this picture is wildly exciting to all of you it only took us about 40 million dollars on four years to do them take that picture but basically what we did is we took the entire program out of the cell and put in a completely different program and so that's the world's first synthetic life-form which some people thought was a big deal in fact it was a science discovery of the year and what we can now do is we can take that code and change that code in the same way as you rewrite a sentence or rewrite a paragraph or rewrite a book and we can stick that code in a little green soup and the cool thing is scale no matter how I program a cell phone I'm not gonna have a thousand cell phones but if I program green soup it becomes this alone if you go into our greenhouses which are just up the road here in La Jolla it becomes this and then you stick it in a plastic bag and then you come back a few days later and guess what what we've now done is we've now started thinking could we make this on a big scale so we're thinking of making something basically that goes to the mountains and that's the reason why you're seeing all these exons that are talking about making energy out of algae that's one of our partnerships maybe we can make it close to carbon neutral fuel and see the interesting thing is it's not just about making energy programmable life forms can make almost anything it can change agriculture on a massive scale you can produce an enormous amount of protein or oil or fiber on a tenth to a fifty the surface area of current agricultural structures you can store information basically library Congress and have a glass of water you can make a bird flu vaccine and ship it via a programmable fax in a very short period of time and this is stuff that we're beginning to do on a large scale because we've made the printers we're shipping the printers to program life-forms they're about the size of a color printer which takes me to my last point we are now probably at a stage where we can remake almost every one of our body parts we can take the code that's in each of our cells which is the human genome and the human genome each of your cells knows exactly how to make every single one of your body parts let me put it in terms of a baby you were all born with no teeth and your mothers were most grateful and then you grew a set of teeth and then you gave them to the tooth fairy and then guess what you grow a second set of teeth but then you went and played hockey and lost a couple of teeth well here's a weird part if your body knows how to make a full set of teeth and did so once and did so twice and you have the gene code nature yourselves why can't you make a third set of teeth well you can and by the way in the same ways you can remake your bones when you break them or your skin when you get burned we're learning how to make kidneys how to make tracheas how to make bladders how to make eyes because the code necessary to do that is in each of your cells your body knows how to make your body as we learn how to recode how to execute code we can marry make over the next few decades every single one of your body parts except one the brain so the great challenge to living more than 120 hundred and forty years a challenge which i think is going to take us centuries not decades is mapping the brain and these brain maps are getting more and more sophisticated but they're way behind the maps you do they're way behind the genome maps so I think the capsule cutting edge of map making and what will be in this room not in 10 years but in 30 years has to do with mapping the brain and some of these maps are obviously fascinating so if you actually map the human body as to how connected is it to the brain this is how connected each of your body parts is to the brain you can go online start looking at these maps start learning this stuff very very cool stuff and I'll close by telling you something that we're trying to build to map the brain so this incredible woman Mary Lou Jepsen one of the greatest inventors academics engineers in the world had a brain tumor and she said you know what I'm gonna learn a whole lot about the brain in fact I'm gonna map the brain and what she wants to do is she wants to create the equivalent of a ski cap that operates like an MRI so the vision of this thing is to build a technology platform that's non-invasive that allows mapping and communicating with your brain by basically wearing a ski cap that substitutes for a six million dollar machine that most hospitals don't have and by the way she wants to do it at a thousand dollars instead of six million and she wants to have a billion full the resolution these are gonna be some of the most interesting maps and intricate maps humans have ever built because it's not just mapping neuron by neuron its mapping the millions and billions of connections between each of a cluster of neurons we've built the lab sized prototype we should have consumer kits within the next three years and that is gonna unleash one of the greatest mapping adventures humans have ever been in because this is a map of what makes us human we have to think about not just the science we have to think about how this changes countries how it changes industries how it changes ethics how we should think about this stuff how we should control it and all of you have an enormous knowledge of all of these things what can you do with maps for and for ill how do we think about new maps how do we teach kids to use new maps how do we establish rules and ethics for the use of information I want you and your kids to be part of this adventure this is absolutely the greatest time to be alive there's a whole lot of problems in the world there's a whole lot of violence there's a little bit of political squabbling that is irrelevant compared to some of these journeys of exploration because when this era is remembered it's going to be remembered as the era where we started to learn life code and brain code as well as a whole host of other things and you and your kids are going to be the explorers so faced with that future there's only two things that matter Nike and Nissan so just do it and enjoy the ride thank you very much pantheon thank you for sharing what your vision is futurist visionary why Enrique thank you so much for being here and what would you have them do are you gonna recruit them to into your labs you know I I left academia a while ago because I wanted to build companies I think these companies they're a little bit like yours you know they have a vision of what the power information and knowledge sharing and mapping can do and they give some of the smartest people in the world an opportunity to go out and apply that knowledge build that knowledge create the future and it's it this is just a great adventure and you know all of you are gonna be at the forefront of some of us well it's very cool so you are a good friend of yo Wilson as well yes so he says save half the world in total totally protected areas what is your thought so I'd been less ambitious I'd say save a quarter but I love the idea of saving a half the world because I think it's irresponsible for humans to say I'm going to determine what lives and dies on most of the planet and I think we have to let nature operate without human intervention in the rain forests in parts of the ocean you know it's very nice to live in our suburbs in our countryside in our national parks but I'd like to preserve a whole bunch of places in the world so that the natural evolutionary system continues just in the small chance that we make a mistake one thank you very much thank you Alana's gonna be around tonight he has an exciting new book evolving ourselves you can meet him personally thank you very much you you

Channel: Esri Events

Views: 4,593

Keywords: Esri, ArcGIS, GIS, Esri Events, Esri UC 2018, User Conference, UC, 2018, Plenary, Maps, The Science of Where, Juan Enriquez, Excel Venture Management, the Future of Humanity, Unnatural Selection, Nonrandom Mutation, Darwin’s Natural Selection, Life Sciences

Id: JrpiozFqwmg

Length: 29min 55sec (1795 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 10 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Earthbjorn]

Truly exciting! Greatest time to be alive indeed.