technologies, and they illuminate a broader landscape around our evolving relationship with science and technology. And, to be honest, they are all movies that I get a kick out of watching.
In pulling these movies together and writing the book, I wanted to explore the often complex relationship we have with emerging technologies. But I also wanted to highlight some of the amazing advances we see beginning to emerge in science and technology. We truly do live in incredible times. Scientists are learning how to write and rewrite genetic code with increasing precision and efficiency. Nanotechnologists are designing and engineering materials that far exceed the properties of anything that occurs in nature. We are already creating artificial intelligence systems that can operate faster and smarter than any human. There are self-driving cars on our roads, with autonomous people-carrying drones just around the corner. Researchers are working on brain-computer interfaces and mapping the human brain down to its individual neurons. And we may well see people walking on the surface of Mars within the next decade. Until recently, these and many more scientific and technological marvels were the stuff of science fiction, yet the frenetic pace of innovation is rapidly catching up with some of our wildest imaginings.
This is heady stuff to the physicist in me—at heart, I must confess, I’m still a technology geek. And yet this stupendous technological power comes with a growing obligation to learn how to handle it responsibly. Despite the speed with which we’re hurtling toward our technological future, we are still grappling with how to do this in ways that don’t end up causing more harm than good. This isn’t because scientists and engineers don’t care about who gets hurt—most of them care deeply—but because we’re charging headlong into a future that’s so complex, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to work out what could go wrong and how to avoid it.
Navigating this future is going to require every ounce of insight we can squeeze out of our collective brains. And because the consequences of how we use new and emerging technologies will end up affecting us all, we all have a role to play here, including individuals who are all too easily overlooked by scientists and engineers—in fact, especially these individuals.
Faced with this task, science fiction movies simultaneously remove barriers to people talking together about the future, and reveal possibilities that might otherwise remain hidden. Every one of the movies here can be appreciated as much by someone who flunked high school as by a Nobel Prize winner. Because of this, they are tremendously powerful for getting people from very different backgrounds and perspectives thinking and talking together. But more than this, they have a way of slipping past our preconceived ideas of the world and revealing things to us that we could so easily miss.
It’s these unexpected insights that I’ve tried to draw out from each of the movies, building on my own work and experiences, as well as those of others. In doing so, I’ve been amazed at how powerful they are at revealing connections and ideas that aren’t always obvious. I’ve been surprised and delighted at how these reflections have taken unexpected and serendipitous turns, opening up new ideas around how to approach beneficial and responsible technology innovation. But I’ve also been taken aback at times by the very real harm we could cause if we get things wrong—not just to humanity as a whole, but to communities that all too easily slip between the cracks. And as I immersed myself in these movies, I’ve become more certain than ever that, fascinating as the minutiae of individual technologies can be, it’s when they begin to converge that the really interesting stuff begins to happen.
The Power of Convergence
In June 2007, the first generation of the Apple iPhone was released to the public. From the perspective of today’s crowded smartphone marketplace, it’s hard to realize how seismic an event this was at the time. Yet, looking back, it started a trend in how we use and interact with technology that continues to reverberate through society to this day.
The iPhone stands as an iconic example of technological convergence—what happens when different strands of innovation intertwine together (a topic we’ll come back to in chapter nine)—and the social and technological transformations that can occur as a result. These days, smartphones integrate hundreds of different technologies: nanoscale-featured processors and memory chips, advanced materials, cloud computing, image processing, video communication, natural language processing, rudimentary artificial intelligence, biometrics. They’ll even allow you to make phone calls. They are a triumph of our ability to weave together separate technologies to make devices that are not only more than the sum of their parts, but are also transforming the ways we live our lives. But as the capabilities of smartphones and other personal electronics expand, there’s a growing fear of serious unintended consequences, so much so that, in 2018, JANA Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System—two investors in Apple—requested the company actively address the potential impacts of iPhone use on teenagers.1
Smartphones are a useful, but still rather crude, example of technological convergence. Expanding on this, we’re now beginning to see convergence between biotechnologies, materials science, robotics, artificial intelligence, neurotechnologies, and other areas that are rapidly catching up with what used to be limited to deeply futuristic science fiction. This is seen across the movies in this book, from the use of genetic engineering in Jurassic Park (chapter two) to human augmentation in Ghost in the Shell (chapter seven). The power of convergence between different technological trends particularly stands out in the movie Transcendence (chapter nine). Here, the technology we see on the screen is firmly rooted in Hollywood fantasy. Despite this, the film captures the scale of technological leaps that become possible when technical knowhow from one area is used to solve problems and accelerate progress in another.
Transcendence is, at heart, a movie about transcending our biological and evolutionary heritage. Inspired by the ideas of transhumanists like Ray Kurzweil, it imagines a future where convergence between biotechnology, neurotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence leads to a profound shift in capabilities—albeit one with sobering consequences. There’s a scene relatively early on in the movie where artificial-intelligence (AI) genius Will Caster (played by Johnny Depp) is dying, and his only hope is for his consciousness to be uploaded into a revolutionary new artificial-intelligence-powered computer. But, to achieve this, his colleagues need to use equally cutting-edge neuroscience and sensor technology to record and store every nuance of Caster’s brain. In true movie fashion, they succeed just before he passes away, and Caster becomes a human-machine chimera who transcends his biological roots.
The science and technology in Transcendence are fanciful. But as you peel away the Hollywood hyperbole, the movie hints at a coming level of technological convergence that could radically change the world we live in. This is rooted in our growing ability to blur the lines between physical technologies like materials, machines, and electronics; biological technologies like gene editing and biomanipulation; and cyber technologies like machine learning, natural language processing, and massive-scale data collection and manipulation. What unfolds in Transcendence is scientifically impossible. But what is not impossible—and what scientists and engineers are becoming increasingly adept at—is our growing ability to merge together and integrate seemingly different technologies, to transform the world we live in.
This is perhaps most apparent in emerging gene-editing technologies, where scientists are developing the abilities to rewrite the DNA-based code that underpins every living organism, something that is only possible through converging technologies. But we’re also seeing this convergence leading to massive advances in areas like designer materials, artificial intelligence, human-machine interfaces, and many others. For perhaps the first time, we are getting close to being able to far outstrip nature in how we design and engineer the world around us.
This is where the true transformative power of convergence lies, and it’s also where some of the greatest potential pitfalls are. Through converging technologies, we’re developing capabilities that could radically improve lives by eradicating diseases, providing cheap and plentiful renewable energy, and ensuring everyone has access to nutritious food and clean
