#joel garreau

Radical Evolution: The Promise and Peril of Enhancing Our Minds, Our Bodies – and What it Means to be Human

Edge City, de Joel Garreau.

We are at an inflection point in history. For the first time in hundreds of thousands of years, our technologies are not so much aimed outward: at modifying our environment, in the fashion of fire or clothes or cities, agriculture, space travel; increasingly this technologies are aimed inward: at modifying our minds, our memories, our metabolisms, our personalities, and our kids. And this is not in some distant science fiction future, this is right now, and what is shocking about this is if you can do all that, you are talking about humans becoming the first species to really take control of their own evolution.

There are real hard know scientists who have got a big bet going on right now, and the bet is that the first person to robustly live to the age of 150 is already alive today, that's the bet they've got going, and the only question is how old is this person today, and some of them think that this person could be in his 50s or 60s today. Perhaps, all you have to do, is to live in a healthy fashion for the next 20 years, and you could end up living for a very long time, because all that has to happen in this scenario is for the technology to be advancing faster than you're aging, and you can be something like immortal. It's a credible scenario, it could happen.

As a matter of what economists call revealed preference, edge cities are a big hit.