A radical future is already here

Oh dear. I have seen the future and I think it works. So if we’re going to worry we’d better get moving because it certainly is.

I say all this after my first day at Moses Znaimer’s 18th ideacity conference (you can watch the free live stream at ideacity.ca, and that is also where the talks will be archived), where it was clear by lunch that many medical breakthroughs I thought decades away are at the door or in the vestibule. As for lunch itself, get ready for “beef” made from plants that you can’t tell from the real thing. I know. I ate some. I’m telling you, this stuff isn’t just coming. It’s here.

We got a fascinating look at the rapid evolution of organ transplants, including a machine wheeled out on stage with a pig lung inside being aerated, irrigated and generally kept alive. I never thought before about what the outside of a lung looks like. Very cool, and very practical. But we’re not just talking better lung transplants.

We’re talking titanium bones, designer children and artificial wombs. And while I don’t know that preventative repair medicine will ever really let us live forever, barring accidents, one presenter argued convincingly that in the near future it would not just be possible for two men or women to have a biological child. One person could be both father and mother, using a sperm and an egg manufactured from their skin cells. But wait. You also get …

Gene sequencing for that or any other child. Eliminating genetic defects that cause inherited degenerative diseases is hard to oppose. But why stop there? All sorts of things are drawbacks in life, including being short. And we may soon be able to edit them out with the new, astonishingly fast and cheap CRISPR/Cas9 method. Or its successor’s successor.

Don’t get me wrong. The conference has been thought-provoking, rigorous yet accessible and highly relevant, including a fascinating, high-spirited talk on the human digestive tract. But it’s also been disquieting.

Presenter Andrew Stark did warn that living forever might bring all the pains we associate with mortality without even any prospect of an end to them. He said the problem isn’t that we die, it’s that we live in time. And if he’s right, then doing it longer, taller and sexier with custom earlobes won’t help. (The immortality that writers like C.S. Lewis and Russell Kirk depict involves a radically different relationship to time that no amount of technique can deliver.)

A number of other speakers also touched on the need to debate the ethical issues. I myself would prefer to debate the morality but on the way to turning plants into meat and skin into sperm, scientific technique evidently transformed that old junk from the everyday concern of ordinary people to the arcane preserve of experts who have, sadly, no fixed points by which to navigate. Once we can choose what is right, in biology or morality, we have no basis for preferring any particular choice, which paradoxically gives us no place to stop and no basis for proceeding either.

To pick one example from the buffet, a presenter enthused about, as he put it, producing beef, pork or chicken from plants. But if we’re not stuck getting meat from a cow, why are we stuck with cow meat? Why not bork or picken? Or something radically new? To infinity and beyond!

If I were at the conference to cast my habitual pall of gloom over such prospects I would caution that many of our current problems stem from decades of exactly this blithe confidence and blind determination to improve on nature through technique. Food science, ingeniously combining heat, pressure and chemicals to turn plants into things never before eaten, from margarine to high fructose corn syrup,