In our new CONVOCO! Podcast Corinne M. Flick speaks with William Haseltine, a scientist, businessman, and philanthropist in the field of human health, about:
What is the Future of Human Biology?
Here’s what he said:
Our intelligence is now creating new intelligence that’s faster and better than ours. That may be just a consequence of a fundamental law of complexity, that we’re complex, but we’re not the end of complexity.
One of the great new tools that we have is the power of artificial intelligence. Because if you look at what life systems are, they’re extraordinarily complex. Even the simplest life forms are really complex. And unless you have a way of organizing vast amounts of information, you can’t begin to understand what happens.
We’ll be able to not only slow down and reduce the incidence of cancer, we’ll be able to successfully treat it, and that means to live almost a normal lifespan for people who’ve had cancer.
Whatever it is that goes wrong with us, some failure, whether it’s mechanical or neurological, we’re beginning to compensate for that by very intelligent articulation.
It’s a question not only of the technology, but the social network, the country network, and the culture in which that technology and those capabilities are embedded. Just because you have an answer doesn’t mean you’re going to get the solution.
Don’t underestimate the power of politics to destroy a country. Germany [in history] is a great example. Venezuela is a contemporary example. You’re going to have countries that seem to have many advantages, and then the politics can destroy them.
We are one intellectual community, and humanity will go forward. Whether individual countries will go forward is a matter for individual countries’ choice.