Our hearts and minds will have much more time
Sonia Arrison (United States) is an author and policy analyst who has studied the impact of new technologies on society for the better part of a decade. She is a frequent media contributor and guest, and her work has appeared in many publications, including CBS MarketWatch, CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and USA Today. She is the author the national bestseller 100 Plus.
Imagine having been married for 125 years. You are 150 years old, and your youngest child has just turned 110. You’re happy and healthy. Life is good, and even though the clock is still ticking, you have much more time left than today. No reason to worry or even panic about death yet.
This might sound like science fiction to some, but to Sonia Arrison—bestselling author, analyst, and board member at the Thiel Foundation—this is not a futurist mirage. This is going to happen—rather sooner than later.
I had the pleasure of interviewing Sonia about the impact of technology on human life and innovation, and my first question to her was…
How will technology improve our health and impact the health sector in the future?
In the future, it will be completely natural to live much longer than today. We will also live a more healthy life, and even though we might be thinking less about death than we do now, we will continue to live meaningful lives, motivated by forces such as creativity, love, and honor.
When you look at the radical innovations going on in both labs and in clinical trials, everything is happening so fast. In the relatively near future, deaths from diseases like cancer and heart disease will be much lower, and we will live considerably longer and healthier.
One of the things impacting the health sector and our health as individuals is going to be artificial intelligence (AI). As we speak, AI is beginning to outperform doctors in areas such as radiology and predicting the onset of medically significant events such as heart attacks. It’s pretty incredible.
So AI is going to play a vital role in the future. What about the field of regenerative medicine?
Regenerative medicine opens up the possibility of repairing people rather than just keeping them alive and sick. This will drastically reduce our medical expenses and leave room for investing in other parts of our society.
When technology is going to play a huge part for humans, will it also make us feel less human? For example, I read about a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who has proposed that brain implants might be used to store and retrieve memories. His prosthesis would be intended to help those whose brains cannot form long-term memories because they are damaged.
Actually, I don’t think that this kind of technology will make us feel less human.
I still feel human even though I Google things. I also feel human even though I might need a hearing aid—or glasses for that matter. Vaccines are another example of us influencing the human body with technology, but in these cases, it doesn’t impact our feelings of being human. So my initial answer is no, but of course you never know until you get there.
Let us imagine that we have cured aging. It doesn’t sound that futuristic anymore. If we live forever, or at least don’t die due to aging, do we then still need God?
Well—some would argue that God gave us a brain. Perhaps we’re using the tools that he gave us to improve our lives.
Whether or not we need God… I don’t think it has much to do with aging in the sense of life and death, to be quite honest. If you study religion, you will see that it is mostly about life, not about death. Religion is concerned with how to live a good life. Religion is a way of seeking guidance for your life. So, the longer you live, the more guidance you might need, and the more religion might actually play a role.
It appears that humans are wired for spirituality, so I don’t think that religion will ever really disappear from our lives. We’re just entering a future where our hearts and our minds will get more time. Literally speaking.
Our hearts and minds will have much more time. That sounds nice, doesn’t it?
Absolutely. Increasing health spans will give you much more time to reeducate yourself, dream, and innovate. Go on more holidays. Spend more time with people that you love. Have people around you longer.
You see no problems in this?
Every new development has its problems, but it’s hard to precisely predict them and how they’re going to show themselves.
What about this imaginary problem—namely, a company where some staff members are 150 years old and others are 25. How do we deal with this massive age and generation gap?
On the one hand, companies of the future will benefit from experienced staff members, but on the other hand, you’re right that tensions might arise. Think about it: does a person who is 100 years old share meaningful cultural stories with someone that is 30? It’s hard to say how it will play out. If we are fortunate, we will be around to participate in the debate.
We have established that technology will impact our aging, our health, and our organizational environments. What about the impact on innovation in general?
I think it will be very positive and interesting! Studies show that innovation peaks much later in life than most people think. We’re so used to hearing the Silicon Valley “young entrepreneur” story featuring people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs, but it turns out that innovation typically peaks around the age of 40. One of the reasons for this peak is that at 40 we’re still healthy, yet we have also had quite a lot of time to get educated and look at things in many different fields. This enables us to start making connections between different areas, which generates novel ideas. As we get older, we become better at connecting the dots.
However, shortly after the peak age, our innovation abilities start to decline again—likely due to health issues as people age. So, if people could be healthier for a longer period of time, it would also mean that innovation would continue at peak pace for more years of our lives.
It sounds like the brain could become the tech market of the future.
Absolutely. We already see edtech exploding, and educational services are all about our brain and different ways to strengthen it.
Virtual reality, augmentation, and AI are other examples of the importance of the brain for future innovation and business. For instance, Elon Musk has repeatedly made the argument that in the future we will need brain implants to stay relevant in a world that, he believes, will soon be dominated by AI. Proposing the artificial augmentation of human intelligence as a response to a boom in AI may seem a bit much, but it underscores the role of the brain as the tech market of the future.
Are there any ethical dilemmas in this as far as you are concerned? Are there examples where creativity becomes too creative?
Of course, and we will have discussions about this now and in the future. We already have, when it comes to genetics.
When it comes to different vocations and markets, we should accept the concept of creative destruction. This basically means that it’s not always a bad thing when old ways of doing things fail and therefore die. If a business isn’t fulfilling a need, and people don’t value it anymore, it’s okay that it dies.
For example, I like newspapers, and I’m willing to pay for the news, but I also accept that industries like the media need to be shaken up on a regular basis. Napster did the same to the music industry, and it still hasn’t settled completely.
With the human brain and body, of course, this is an even more delicate area, and there will be moral dilemmas that require serious and careful thought. In Silicon Valley, where I live, we have dreamers and doers, and often they’re combined. This has led to the saying “If you can dream it, you can do it.” The obvious additional question is of course “You can do it, but should you do it?”
We should take care not tomake the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Albert Einstein