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15 examples of how genomics has and continues to transform our world in myriad ways.

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Genomics is transforming how we study, diagnose and treat cancer.

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World Health Organisation recommendations on genetic editing for medical purposes

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World Health Organisation recommendations on genetic editing for medical purposes

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Some interesting background from the WHO on their recommendations and ethics for genome editing

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Two new companion reports released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) provide the first global recommendations to help establish human genome editing as a tool for public health, with an emphasis on safety, effectiveness and ethics.

The forward-looking new reports result from the first broad, global consultation looking at somatic, germline and heritable human genome editing. The consultation, which spanned over two years, involved hundreds of participants representing diverse perspectives from around the world, including scientists and researchers, patient groups, faith leaders and indigenous peoples.

"Human genome editing has the potential to advance our ability to treat and cure disease, but the full impact will only be realized if we deploy it for the benefit of all people, instead of fueling more health inequity between and within countries," said Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director-General.

Potential benefits of human genome editing include faster and more accurate diagnosis, more targeted treatments and prevention of genetic disorders. Somatic gene therapies, which involve modifying a patient's DNA to treat or cure a disease, have been successfully used to address HIV, sickle-cell disease and transthyretin amyloidosis. The technique could also vastly improve treatment for a variety of cancers.

However, some risks exist, for example, with germline and heritable human genome editing, which alter the genome of human embryos and could be passed on to subsequent generations, modifying descendants' traits.

The reports published today deliver recommendations on the governance and oversight of human genome editing in nine discrete areas, including human genome editing registries; international research and medical travel; illegal, unregistered, unethical or unsafe research; intellectual property; and education, engagement and empowerment. The recommendations focus on systems-level improvements needed to build capacity in all countries to ensure that human genome editing is used safely, effectively, and ethically.

The reports also provide a new governance framework that identifies specific tools, institutions and scenarios to illustrate practical challenges in implementing, regulating and overseeing research into the human genome. The governance framework offers concrete recommendations for dealing with specific scenarios such as:

A hypothetical clinical trial of somatic human genome editing for sickle cell disease proposed to take place in West Africa

Proposed use of somatic or epigenetic genome editing to enhance athletic performance

An imaginary clinic based in a country with minimal oversight of heritable human genome editing that offers these services to international clients following in vitro fertilization and preimplantation genetic diagnosis

"These new reports from WHO's Expert Advisory Committee represent a leap forward for this area of rapidly emerging science," said WHO's Chief Scientist, Dr Soumya Swaminathan. "As global research delves deeper into the human genome, we must minimize risks and leverage ways that science can drive better health for everyone, everywhere."

What's next
WHO will:

Convene a small expert committee to consider next steps for the Registry, including how to better monitor clinical trials using human genome editing technologies of concern

Convene multisector stakeholders to develop an accessible mechanism for confidential reporting of concerns about possibly illegal, unregistered, unethical and unsafe human genome editing research and other activities

As part of a commitment to increase 'education, engagement and empowerment', lead regional webinars focusing on regional/local needs. Work within the Science Division to consider how to build an inclusive global dialogue on frontier technologies, including cross-UN working and the creation of web-based resources for reliable information on frontier technologies, including human genome editing.

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WHO issues new recommendations on human genome editing for the advancement of public health

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Two new companion reports released today by the World Health Organization (WHO) provide the first global recommendations to help establish human genome editing as a tool for public health, with an emphasis on safety, effectiveness and ethics. The forward-looking new reports result from the first broad, global consultation looking at somatic, germline and heritable human genome editing.

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BBC Nature - What will humans look like in 1,000,000 years?

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BBC Nature - What will humans look like in 1,000,000 years?

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To understand our future evolution we need to look to our past.

Will our descendants be cyborgs with hi-tech machine implants, regrowable limbs and cameras for eyes like something out of a science fiction novel?

Might humans morph into a hybrid species of biological and artificial beings? Or could we become smaller or taller, thinner or fatter, or even with different facial features and skin colour?

Of course, we don't know, but to consider the question, let's scoot back a million years to see what humans looked like then. For a start, Homo sapiens didn't exist. A million years ago, there were probably a few different species of humans around, including Homo heidelbergensis, which shared similarities with both Homo erectus and modern humans, but more primitive anatomy than the later Neanderthal.

Over more recent history, during the last 10,000 years, there have been significant changes for humans to adapt to. Agricultural living and plentiful food have led to health problems that we've used science to solve, such as treating diabetes with insulin. In terms of looks, humans have become fatter and, in some areas, taller.

Perhaps, then, we could evolve to be smaller so our bodies would need less energy, suggests Thomas Mailund, Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics and Big Data at Anglia Ruskin University, London, which would be handy on a highly-populated planet.

Living alongside lots of people is a new condition humans have to adapt to. Back when we were hunter gatherers, there would've been a handful of interactions on a daily basis. Mailund suggests we may evolve in ways that help us to deal with this. Remembering people's names, for example, could become a much more important skill.

Here's where the technology comes in. "An implant in the brain would allow us to remember people's names," says Thomas. "We know what genes are involved in building a brain that's good at remembering people's names. We might just change that. It sounds more like science fiction. But we can do that right now. We can implant it but we don't know how to wire it up to make it useful. We're getting there but it's very experimental."

We know what genes are involved in building a brain that's good at remembering people's names. We might just change that."

Thomas Mailund Associate Professor in Bioinformatics

Will our descendants be cyborgs? © Daniel Haug | Getty

"It's not really a biological question anymore, it's technological," he said.

Currently, people have implants to fix an element of the body that's broken, such as a pacemaker or a hip implant. Perhaps in the future, implants will be used simply to improve a person. As well as brain implants, we might have more visible parts of technology as an element of our appearance, such an artificial eye with a camera that can read different frequencies of colour and visuals.

We've all heard of designer babies. Scientists already have the technology to change the genes of an embryo, though it's controversial and no one's sure what happens next. But in the future, Mailund suggests, it may be seen as unethical not to change certain genes. With that may come choice about a baby's features, so perhaps humans will look like what their parents want them to look like.

"It's still going to be selection, it's just artificial selection now. What we do with breeds of dogs, we'll do with humans," said Mailun.

This is all rather hypothetical, but can demographic trends give us any sense of what we may look like in the future?

Will technology affect our evolution? © Donald Iain Smith | Getty

Predicting out a million years is pure speculation, but predicting into the more immediate future is certainly possible using bioinformatics..."

Dr. Jason A. Hodgson Lecturer in Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment

"Predicting out a million years is pure speculation, but predicting into the more immediate future is certainly possible using bioinformatics by combining what is known about genetic variation now with models of demographic change going forward," says Dr. Jason A. Hodgson, Lecturer, Grand Challenges in Ecosystems and the Environment.

Now we have genetic samples of complete genomes from humans around the world, geneticists are getting a better understanding of genetic variation and how it's structured in a human population. We can't exactly predict how genetic variation will change, but scientists in the field of bioinformatics are looking to demographic trends to give us some idea.

Hodgson predicts urban and rural areas will become increasingly genetically diverse. "All the migration comes from rural areas into cities so you get an increase in genetic diversity in cities and a decrease in rural areas," he said. "What you might see is differentiation along lines where people live."

Genetic diversity will increase in cities and decrease in rural areas © Ryan Deberardinis/EyeEm | Getty

It will vary across the world but in the UK, for example, rural areas are less diverse and have more ancestry that's been in Britain for a longer period of time compared with urban areas which have a higher population of migrants.

Some groups are reproducing at higher or lower rates. Populations in Africa, for example, are rapidly expanding so those genes increase at a higher frequency on a global population level. Areas of light skin colour are reproducing at lower rates. Therefore, Hodgson predicts, skin colour from a global perspective will get darker.

"It's almost certainly the case that dark skin colour is increasing in frequency on a global scale relative to light skin colour," he said. "I'd expect that the average person several generations out from now will have darker skin colour than they do now."

And what about space? If humans do end up colonising Mars, what would we evolve to look like? With lower gravity, the muscles of our bodies could change structure. Perhaps we will have longer arms and legs. In a colder, Ice-Age type climate, could we even become even chubbier, with insulating body hair, like our Neanderthal relatives?

We don't know, but, certainly, human genetic variation is increasing. Worldwide there are roughly two new mutations for every one of the 3.5 billion base pairs in the human genome every year, says Hodgson. Which is pretty amazing - and makes it unlikely we will look the same in a million years.

Featured image © Getty | Donald Iain Smith

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What will humans look like in a million years? | BBC Earth

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Will our descendants be cyborgs with hi-tech machine implants, regrowable limbs and cameras for eyes like something out of a science fiction novel?

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New research on Alzheimer's disease, and genetics

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New research on Alzheimer's disease, and genetics

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Diseases that run in families usually have genetic causes. Some are genetic mutations that directly cause the disease if inherited. Others are risk genes that affect the body in a way that increases the chance someone will develop the disease. In Alzheimer's disease, genetic mutations in any of three specific genes can cause the disease, and other risk genes either increase or decrease the risk of developing Alzheimer's.

Some genetic mutations or variants interact with other genetic alterations that lead to Alzheimer's disease. In some cases, gene alterations can interact with Alzheimer's-causing genetic variants in a way that proves beneficial; they actually suppress the pathological brain changes the other mutations would normally lead to. These protective gene variants can drastically slow or prevent cognitive decline. In two recent case reports on familial Alzheimer's disease, mutations delayed Alzheimer's symptoms for decades.

I am a neurologist and neuroscientist who has spent my career studying Alzheimer's disease and dementia both in the laboratory and in the clinic. Determining how genes affect brain chemistry is vital to understanding how Alzheimer's disease progresses and devising interventions to prevent or delay cognitive decline.

The amyloid hypothesis

In the early 1990s, scientists proposed the amyloid hypothesis to explain how Alzheimer's disease develops. The first neuropathological changes detected in the brain of Alzheimer's disease patients were the formation of amyloid plaques - clumps of protein pieces called beta-amyloid. Other changes in the Alzheimer's brain, such as the accumulation of another type of abnormal protein called neurofibrillary tangles, were thought to develop later in the course of the disease.

Beta-amyloid begins to accumulate in the brain up to 15 years before symptoms emerge. Symptoms correlate with the number of neurofibrillary tangles in the brain - the more tangles, the worse the cognition. Researchers have tried to determine whether preventing or removing amyloid plaques from the brain would be an effective treatment.

Imagine the excitement of the scientific community in the 1990s when researchers identified three different genes causing familial Alzheimer's disease - and all three were involved with beta-amyloid.

The first was the amyloid precursor protein gene. This gene directs cells to produce the amyloid precursor protein, which breaks down into smaller fragments, including the beta-amyloid that forms amyloid plaques in the brain.

The second gene was termed presenilin 1, or PSEN-1, a protein needed to cut the precursor protein into beta-amyloid.

The third gene, presenilin 2, or PSEN-2, is closely related to PSEN-1 but found in a smaller number of families with familial Alzheimer's disease.

These findings added strength to the amyloid hypothesis explanation of the disease. However, uncertainty and opposition to the amyloid hypothesis have developed over the past several decades. This was in part tied to a recognition that several other processes - neurofibrillary tangles, inflammation and immune system activation - are also involved in the neurodegeneration seen in Alzheimer's.

The hypothesis also got significant pushback after many clinical trials attempting to block the effects of amyloid or remove it from the brain were unsuccessful. In some cases, treatments had significant side effects. Some researchers have come up with strong defenses of the hypothesis. But until a clinical trial based on the amyloid hypothesis could show definitive results, uncertainty would remain.

Genetic discoveries with treatment implications

The vast majority - more than 90% - of Alzheimer's cases occur in late life, with disease prevalence increasing progressively from age 65 and up. Such cases are mostly sporadic, with no clear family history of Alzheimer's.

However, a relatively small number of families have one of the three known genetic mutations that cause the disease to be passed down. In familial Alzheimer's, 50% of each generation will inherit the mutated gene and develop the disease much earlier, usually from their 30s to early 50s.

In 2019 and 2023, researchers identified changes in at least two other genes that markedly delayed the onset of disease symptoms in people with familial Alzheimer's disease mutations. These mutated genes were found in a very large family in Colombia whose members tended to develop Alzheimer's symptoms by their 40s.

A woman in the family carrying a mutated PSEN-1 gene did not have any cognitive symptoms until she was in her 70s. A genetic analysis showed that she had an additional mutation in a variant of the gene that codes for a protein called apolipoprotein E, or ApoE. Researchers believe the mutation, called the Christchurch variant - named after the city in New Zealand where the mutation was first discovered - is responsible for interfering with and slowing down her disease.

Importantly, her brain had a great deal of amyloid plaque but very few neurofibrillary tangles. This suggests that the link between the two was broken and that the suppressed number of neurofibrillary tangles also slowed down cognitive loss.

In May 2023, researchers reported that two siblings in the same large family also did not develop memory problems until their 60s or late 70s and were found to carry a mutation in a gene that codes for a protein called reelin. Studies in mice suggest that reelin has protective effects against amyloid plaque deposition in the brain. In these patients' brains, as with the patient who had the Christchurch variant, there were extensive amyloid plaques but very few neurofibrillary tangles. This observation confirmed that the tangles are responsible for the cognitive loss and that there are several ways to "disconnect" amyloid and neurofibrillary tangle accumulation.

Finding medicines that might mimic the protective effects of the Christchurch variant or the reelin mutation could help delay Alzheimer's disease symptoms for all patients. Since the vast majority of nonfamilial Alzheimer's manifests after age 70 or 75, a 10-year delay in the emergence of first symptoms of Alzheimer's could have a massive effect in decreasing the prevalence of the disease.

These findings demonstrate that Alzheimer's can be slowed and will hopefully lead to additional new therapies that can someday not only treat the disease but prevent it as well.

Starts and stops

Despite over 20 years of doubts and therapy failures, the past several years have seen positive results from three different treatments - aducanumab, lecanemab and donanemab - that remove amyloid plaques and slow loss of cognitive function to some extent. Although there is still discussion of how much slowing of decline is clinically significant, these successes provide support for the amyloid hypothesis. They also suggest that other strategies will be needed for optimal treatment.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's 2021 approval of the first antibody treatment for Alzheimer's, aducanumab, sold under the brand name Aduhelm, was controversial. Only one of the two clinical trials testing its safety and effectiveness in people yielded positive results. The FDA approved the drug on the basis of that single study through an accelerated approval process in which treatments meeting an unmet clinical need can receive expedited approval.

The second antibody, lecanemab, sold as Leqembi, was approved in January 2023 via the same accelerated approval pathway. It was then fully approved in July 2023.

The third antibody, donanemab, completed a successful phase three clinical trial and is awaiting more safety data. When that is submitted to the FDA, the agency will consider the drug for approval.

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Alzheimer's disease is partly genetic − studying the genes that delay decline in some may lead to treatments for all

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Despite decades of starts and stops, new treatments and key genetic discoveries are giving researchers great hope for slowing or eventually preventing Alzheimer's disease.

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AI finding drugs which could fight aging

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AI finding drugs which could fight aging

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Finding new drugs - called "drug discovery" - is an expensive and time-consuming task. But a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning can massively accelerate the process and do the job for a fraction of the price.

My colleagues and I recently used this technology to find three promising candidates for senolytic drugs - drugs that slow ageing and prevent age-related diseases.

Senolytics work by killing senescent cells. These are cells that are "alive" (metabolically active), but which can no longer replicate, hence their nickname: zombie cells.

The inability to replicate is not necessarily a bad thing. These cells have suffered damage to their DNA - for example, skin cells damaged by the sun's rays - so stopping replication stops the damage from spreading.

But senescent cells aren't always a good thing. They secrete a cocktail of inflammatory proteins that can spread to neighbouring cells. Over a lifetime, our cells suffer a barrage of assaults, from UV rays to exposure to chemicals, and so these cells accumulate. Elevated numbers of senescent cells have been implicated in a range of diseases, including type 2 diabetes, COVID, pulmonary fibrosis, osteoarthritis and cancer.

Studies in lab mice have shown that eliminating senescent cells, using senolytics, can ameliorate these diseases. These drugs can kill off zombie cells while keeping healthy cells alive.

Around 80 senolytics are known, but only two have been tested in humans: a combination of dasatinib and quercetin. It would be great to find more senolytics that can be used in a variety of diseases, but it takes ten to 20 years and billions of dollars for a drug to make it to the market.

Results in five minutes

My colleagues and I - including researchers from the University of Edinburgh and the Spanish National Research Council IBBTEC-CSIC in Santander, Spain - wanted to know if we could train machine learning models to identify new senolytic drug candidates.

To do this, we fed AI models with examples of known senolytics and non-senolytics. The models learned to distinguish between the two, and could be used to predict whether molecules they had never seen before could also be senolytics.

When solving a machine learning problem, we usually test the data on a range of different models first as some of them tend to perform better than others. To determine the best-performing model, at the beginning of the process, we separate a small section of the available training data and keep it hidden from the model until after the training process is completed. We then use this testing data to quantify how many errors the model is making. The one that makes the fewest errors, wins.

We determined our best model and set it to make predictions. We gave it 4,340 molecules and five minutes later it delivered a list of results.

The AI model identified 21 top-scoring molecules that it deemed to have a high likelihood of being senolytics. If we had tested the original 4,340 molecules in the lab, it would have taken at least a few weeks of intensive work and £50,000 just to buy the compounds, not counting the cost of the experimental machinery and setup.

We then tested these drug candidates on two types of cells: healthy and senescent. The results showed that out of the 21 compounds, three (periplocin, oleandrin and ginkgetin) were able to eliminate senescent cells, while keeping most of the normal cells alive. These new senolytics then underwent further testing to learn more about how they work in the body.

More detailed biological experiments showed that, out of the three drugs, oleandrin was more effective than the best-performing known senolytic drug of its kind.

The potential repercussions of this interdisciplinary approach - involving data scientists, chemists and biologists - are huge. Given enough high-quality data, AI models can accelerate the amazing work that chemists and biologists do to find treatments and cures for diseases - especially those of unmet need.

Having validated them in senescent cells, we are now testing the three candidate senolytics in human lung tissue. We hope to report our next results in two years' time.

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AI finds drugs that could fight ageing and age-related diseases

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Three promising new anti-ageing compounds have been found by artificial intelligence models.

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3D-printed medicine could be the future of personalised healthcare, with research now suggesting printed tablets have reached a sufficient quality to match the standards set for conventionally manufactured tablets.

Our new study, published in the International Journal of Pharmaceutics, highlights the promise 3D-printed medicines hold for patients.

If we can scale 3D printing to everyday use, the near limitless potential to have medicines customised to your specific health needs may become a reality sooner than you think.

One size doesn't fit all

For a long time, medicines have been produced with what you might call a "one-size-fits-all" approach, whereby tablets and capsules come in only a set number of doses. But what if those exact doses don't work for you?

Taking too much or too little of your medication can be hard to avoid when it only comes in set doses. This can have serious consequences when taking important medications such as antidepressants that trigger side effects when the dose is changed too quickly.

The traditional solution to these scenarios has been to try and break the tablet into halves or quarters to get a dose in-between. But this isn't possible for every tablet, and even if it is, research shows it often ends up with an inaccurate dose.

3D printing can take away the guesswork and provide flexibility for health professionals to truly personalise medicine suited to you.

Read more: Health Check: is it OK to chew or crush your medicine?

Layer by layer

You may have seen 3D printers producing toys, medical devices and even food.

The printing of medicines uses the same technology, building a tablet one layer at a time by melting the medication combined with other approved ingredients to help it dissolve in the stomach. Importantly, the tablet can be 3D printed at any required dose by giving instructions to the machine to print it bigger or smaller.

In our proof of concept study we were able to 3D print tablets containing very accurate doses of caffeine, in a way that would be exceedingly difficult with conventional manufacturing methods.

Rather than choosing a dose based on limited commercial options, we selected the dose first and then designed and printed the tablet accordingly.

While not often thought of as a medicine, the choice of caffeine in this research is important because it is the most widely used behavioural drug worldwide. Trying to cut down on caffeine often causes headaches and nausea because of the challenges in lowering the dose correctly. This is one of many scenarios where a one-size-fits-all approach would fall short.

Compared to attempts to split a conventional caffeine tablet into the same doses, the 3D-printed tablets proved to have far more accurate dosage.

Our results demonstrate a straightforward process for producing "the right medicine for the right patient at the right time". This is one of the guiding principles of personalised medicine.

Read more: How cancer doctors use personalised medicine to target variations unique to each tumour

A healthcare evolution

Although 3D printing has been around for decades, its use for producing medicines - especially in a hospital or pharmacy environment - is very new.

Australia has rigorous quality control standards for medicines thanks to regulation by the Therapeutic Goods Administration, and it is too early to tell how it will regulate 3D printed medicines.

The United States already has one 3D-printed seizure medication, Spritam, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The printing process helps the resulting tablet rapidly disintegrate in the mouth for patients who have trouble swallowing, but does not offer dose customisation.

However, it seems we are on the brink of customised approaches in the clinic, with three new 3D-printed medications receiving FDA investigational new drug approval over 2021-22, and several other clinical trials completed in the last few years.

We envision 3D printers in pharmacies and hospitals for on-site and true personalisation. However, at this stage that doesn't necessarily mean replacing or even competing with conventional medicines.

The production speed of current 3D printing technologies is much slower than conventional manufacturing. The greatest benefits will likely be for patients with particularly complicated medication regimens, or those taking certain types of medicines like antidepressants. Thus, the people who need it most could have their own tailor-made medicine.

In fact, the possibilities extend further than just choosing the right dose. The practice of pharmaceutical 3D printing could potentially include combining multiple drugs into a single " polypill ", and fully customising features like shape, size, colour, or texture.

We envision an evolution of digital healthcare where 3D printing is combined with technologies like machine learning, artificial intelligence and big data, taking our next big step towards truly personalised medicine.

This future will require a collaborative effort between researchers, health professionals, and regulatory bodies to define the place of 3D printing in healthcare, but could see us picking up our personalised medicine from a local pharmacy or hospital with the touch of a button.

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We are closer than ever to being able to 3D print medicines. Here's why that's important

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One size doesn't fit all - customising your medicines with 3D printing could be a game changer, especially for people with complex medical needs.

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Nice short article from The Conversation, about the history of wound care and healing, and modern uses of 3D printing to help.

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Whether it's the sting of a paper cut or the trauma of battle injury, wounds are woven into the tapestry of human experience. And since ancient times, we've fought the enemy that lurks within them - infection.

The constant threat of injury on the battlefield led to the search for new ways to combat wound infection. But early surgical procedures lacked the sterile instruments available today, meaning that for many years, surgery came with the added risk of post-operative wound infection, resulting in high numbers of deaths.

Ancient practices, such as using oils, mud, turpentine, or honey to treat wounds, were common around 2000BC. The Greek physician Hippocrates (460-377BC) used vinegar to clean wounds, followed by bandaging to keep dirt at bay.

While the first hospitals were established in Europe in the middle ages, they were dangerous and brutal places. Wound infection rates were high because of unsanitary conditions and the use of cautery, which involved pushing a burning iron into a patient's wound until it reached the bone.

By the 1860s, the pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister had revolutionised wound infection treatment by introducing carbolic-acid-soaked bandages. And Robert Wood Johnson, who founded Johnson & Johnson, produced the first sterile gauze bandages by 1890. The combination of antiseptic and sterile bandage marked a turning point in the evolution of wound treatment and infection control.

The discovery of penicillin by Alexander Fleming in 1928 was also a pivotal moment in the treatment of wound infections. By the 1940s, penicillin was being used to treat second world war soldiers who had wound infections that would have been deemed fatal in previous years. For less serious wounds, Lister's approach of using a dressing and an antiseptic was still used.

Substances like silver and iodine have also been recognised for their antimicrobial properties since the 1800s. Iodine, though effective, caused pain and skin discolouration until safer and less painful formulations were developed in 1949. These formulations endure in modern wound dressings.

For everyday cuts and scrapes, a simple cleaning with water and application of antiseptic cream is usually enough. This helps to prevent the inadvertent introduction of bacteria into the wound, minimising the risk of additional pain and swelling.

But while most wounds nowadays heal without issue, some become become infected. Research published in 2021 showed that 3.8 million people were having their wounds managed by the NHS between 2017 and 2018, up 71% from between 2012 and 2013. They included surgical wounds, leg ulcers and burns. This shows how hard it can be to care for wounds that are difficult to heal and particularly susceptible to infections.

Modern-day challenges

One of the biggest challenges in the modern-day treatment of wound infection is antibiotic resistance. This happens when bacteria develop the ability to defeat the drugs designed to kill them. Resistant infections can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to treat.

Many bacteria have also become resistant to the antimicrobial ingredients used in wound dressings. This is the case for silver-based wound dressings, which are often used to treat chronic wound infections. This type of wound characteristically fails to heal, and can remain an open, infected wound for many months - or even years. As well as the devastating effect on people's quality of life, this also places a huge financial burden on the NHS.

The constant fight against wound infections drives extensive research for new, safe and effective treatments. While progress is being made, a crucial hurdle lies in the limitations of laboratory testing methods. These tests, while necessary for regulatory approval, often fail to capture the nuanced realities of wounds in the human body.

No two people are the same and no two wounds are the same either. This can lead to situations where treatments shine in the lab but ultimately prove ineffective in real patients.

Creating wound models

In response to this, scientists are tackling the limitations of lab tests by creating more realistic synthetic wound models. Some are even 3D printing human skin (using leftovers from surgical procedures), or animal skin, complete with artificial body fluids, such as pus. The aim is to create a model environment that mimics real wounds more accurately.

Recently, my own research group has made strides in developing lab models that act like real chronic wounds when treated with antimicrobial dressings. While not perfect, our models are a step in the right direction, contributing to the development of formulations with promising potential for treating wound infections in the future.

Read more: We built a human-skin printer from Lego and we want every lab to use our blueprint

As we navigate the complexities of wound care, the quest for new, effective and safe treatments continues, driven by the efforts of scientists worldwide. We are working towards a future where the management of difficult-to-heal wounds and infections improves, enhancing both individual wellbeing and the efficiency of health systems.

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From mud and vinegar to 3D printing skin, the way we treat wounds still challenges humanity

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Keeping wounds clean and infection free has challenged people for thousands of years.

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This article is nice and short, and asks some big questions about transhumanism, humanity's impact on the planet, and what kind of advanced humans we would like to have caring for our world.

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Many prominent people in the tech industry have talked about the increasing convergence between humans and machines in coming decades. For example, Elon Musk has reportedly said he wants humans to merge with AI "to achieve a symbiosis with artificial intelligence".

His company Neuralink aims to facilitate this convergence so that humans won't be "left behind" as technology advances in the future. While people with disabilities would be near-term recipients of these innovations, some believe technologies like this could be used to enhance abilities in everyone.

These aims are inspired by an idea called transhumanism, the belief that we should use science and technology to radically enhance human capabilities and seek to direct our own evolutionary path. Disease, aging and death are all realities transhumanists wish to end, alongside dramatically increasing our cognitive, emotional and physical capacities.

Transhumanists often advocate for the three "supers" of superintelligence, superlongevity and superhappiness, the last referring to ways of achieving lasting happiness. There are many different views among the transhumanist community of what our ongoing evolution should look like.

For example, some advocate uploading the mind into digital form and settling the cosmos. Others think we should remain organic beings but rewire or upgrade our biology through genetic engineering and other methods. A future of designer babies, artificial wombs and anti-aging therapies appeal to these thinkers.

This may all sound futuristic and fantastical, but rapid developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and synthetic biology have led some to argue we are on the cusp of creating such possibilities.

God-like role

Tech billionaires are among the biggest promoters of transhumanist thinking. It is not hard to understand why: they could be the central protagonists in the most important moment in history.

Creating so-called artificial general intelligence (AGI) - that is, an AI system that can do all the cognitive tasks a human can do and more - is a current focus within Silicon Valley. AGI is seen as vital to enabling us to take on the God-like role of designing our own evolutionary futures.

That is why companies like OpenAI, DeepMind and Anthropic are racing towards the development of AGI, despite some experts warning that it could lead to human extinction.

In the short term, the promises and the perils are probably overstated. After all, these companies have a lot to gain by making us think they are on the verge of engineering a divine power that can create utopia or destroy the world. Meanwhile, AI has played a role in fuelling our polarised political landscape, with disinformation and more complex forms of manipulation made more effective by generative AI.

Indeed, AI systems are already causing many other forms of social and environmental harm. AI companies rarely wish to address these harms though. If they can make governments focus on long-term potential "safety" issues relating to possible existential risks instead of actual social and environmental injustices, they stand to benefit from the resulting regulatory framework.

But if we lack the capacity and determination to address these real world harms, it's hard to believe that we will be able to mitigate larger-scale risks that AI may hypothetically enable. If there really is a threat that AGI could pose an existential risk, for example, everyone would shoulder that cost, but the profits would be very much private.

A familiar story

This issue within AI development can be seen as a microcosm of why the wider transhumanist imagination may appeal to billionaire elites in an age of multiple crises. It speaks to the refusal to engage in grounded ethics, injustices and challenges and offers a grandiose narrative of a resplendent future to distract from the current moment.

Our misuse of the planet's resources has set in train a sixth mass extinction of species and a climate crisis. In addition, ongoing wars with increasingly potent weapons remain a part of our technological evolution.

There's also the pressing question of whose future will be transhuman. We currently live in a very unequal world. Transhumanism, if developed in anything like our existing context, is likely to greatly increase inequality, and may have catastrophic consequences for the majority of humans.

Perhaps transhumanism itself is a symptom of the kind of thinking that has created our parlous social reality. It is a narrative that encourages us to hit the gas, expropriate nature even more, keep growing and not look back at the devastation in the rear-view mirror.

If we're really on the verge of creating an enhanced version of humanity, we should start to ask some big questions about what being human should mean, and therefore what an enhancement of humanity should entail.

If the human is an aspiring God, then it lays claim to dominion over nature and the body, making all amenable to its desires. But if the human is an animal embedded in complex relations with other species and nature at large, then "enhancement" is contingent on the health and sustainability of its relations.

If the human is conceived of as an environmental threat, then enhancement is surely that which redirects its exploitative lifeways. Perhaps becoming more-than-human should constitute a much more responsible humanity.

One that shows compassion to and awareness of other forms of life in this rich and wondrous planet. That would be preferable to colonising and extending ourselves, with great hubris, at the expense of everything, and everyone, else.

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Transhumanism: billionaires want to use tech to enhance our abilities - the outcomes could change what it means to be human

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The tech elite's obssession with upgrading humanity offers a grandiose narrative to distract from today's more pressing challenges and injustices.

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From Encyclopedia Britannica

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transhumanism, philosophical and scientific movement that advocates the use of current and emerging technologies-such as genetic engineering, cryonics, artificial intelligence (AI), and nanotechnology-to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition. Transhumanists envision a future in which the responsible application of such technologies enables humans to slow, reverse, or eliminate the aging process, to achieve corresponding increases in human life spans, and to enhance human cognitive and sensory capacities. The movement proposes that humans with augmented capabilities will evolve into an enhanced species that transcends humanity-the "posthuman."

History

The term transhumanism was popularized by the English biologist and philosopher Julian Huxley in his 1957 essay of the same name. Huxley held that it was now possible for social institutions to supplant human evolution in refining and improving the human species. Although Huxley was principally concerned with advancing the human condition through social and cultural change, the general notion of humanity transcending itself came to be adopted by the emerging transhumanist movement, which coalesced around significant scientific advances, such as the development of computer technology, the advent of space travel, and the successful use of cryopreservation (e.g., of human eggs and embryos).

In the 1980s, newly formed transhumanist organizations and schools of thought advocated human life extension, cryonics, space colonization, and futurism (the study of current trends in order to anticipate, plan for, and influence their possible outcomes). In 1986 the American engineer K. Eric Drexler published Engines of Creation, an exploration of the future applications of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing. In addition, he and the American researcher Christine L. Peterson founded the Foresight Institute to promote the safe implementation of nanotechnology and bioengineering. Also in the 1980s, the American conceptual artist Natasha Vita-More published an evolving manifesto of transhumanism and the "Transhumanist Arts Statement," which announced the "designing" of a future that merged aesthetics with science and technology to enhance sensory experiences and to improve and extend human life. Other prominent voices within the transhumanist movement were the American philosopher James Hughes and the Austrian-born Canadian roboticist Hans Moravec.

In the 1990s, "extropianism," a libertarian doctrine that advocates overcoming human limitations through technology, came to the forefront of the transhumanist movement. The British philosopher Max More founded the Extropy Institute early in the decade with the American philosopher and lawyer Tom W. Bell, who used the term extropy to designate a concept oppositional to entropy, highlighting the movement's individualistic proactive approach to expanding human potential. In 1998 the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom and the British philosopher David Pearce founded the World Transhumanist Association (WTA), an international organization that promoted transhumanism as a serious academic discipline. The WTA rebranded itself as Humanity+ in 2008 to project a more diverse and cohesive vision of transhumanism-one that included branches of thought from both the Extropy Institute (which closed in 2006) and the WTA and advocated the safe and ethical use of technology to expand human capabilities.

Transhumanism found further support from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, including Google cofounder Larry Page, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Tesla's Elon Musk. In 2013 Page launched Calico Life Sciences LLC (Calico Labs), a research and development company dedicated to extending the human life span through advanced technologies. In early 2022 Bezos and other backers invested $3 billion in Altos Labs, a biotechnology company seeking to reverse aging and disease. Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 in hopes of establishing human colonies on the Moon and Mars and launched Neuralink in 2016 to develop implantable brain chips. In July 2022 the brain chip company Synchron announced that it had successfully implanted a chip in the brain of an ALS ( amyotrophic lateral sclerosis) patient in the United States. The chip was designed to enable severely paralyzed patients to operate digital forms of communication with their thoughts.

Ethics and philosophy

As transhumanist ideas developed from theory to actuality in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, ethical concerns increasingly took a central role in transhumanist philosophy. Scientific breakthroughs-including stem cell therapies, in vitro fertilization, brain chips, animal cloning, exoskeletons (e.g., robotic arms), artificial intelligence, and genomics-have redirected the dialogue between transhumanism's proponents and its critics from the future to the present.

Advocates of transhumanism argue that emerging technologies can be used to eliminate disease and otherwise improve human life as well as to provide solutions for urgent global problems. For example, brain chips and "mind uploading"-initially the fanciful dreams of those seeking a form of infinite intelligence or immortality through the computerized extension of consciousness-might be used to cure or overcome neurological disorders such as dementia, Alzheimer disease, and paralysis. Likewise, the likely catastrophic effects of climate change have spurred some transhumanists to promote space colonization. Critics have countered that realizing the transhumanist goal of slowing or reversing aging and extending human life spans will only worsen overpopulation -to which a transhumanist may reassert the necessity of establishing human colonies on Mars.

Concerns that transhumanist technology will create greater social inequities are among the most-voiced criticisms of the movement. In an article published in the journal Foreign Policy in 2004, the American political theorist Francis Fukuyama called transhumanism "the world's most dangerous idea," warning that biotechnology's offerings might come at a "frightful moral cost" to human rights. Fukuyama pointed out that wide economic disparities between countries may further encourage "enhanced" individuals to claim superior rights to "those left behind."

Transhumanism continues to be compared to the eugenics movement, reflecting fears that technology will be exploited by those wishing to become or breed "superhumans." For example, the synthetic production of hormones such as erythropoietin, which is naturally produced in the kidneys and increases the production of red blood cells, and adaptive technology such as bionic implants and carbon-fibre prosthetics are sought out not only by people with blood disorders or disabilities but also by nondisabled athletes looking to boost their performance. Conversely, transhumanists may argue that genetic engineering has long been practiced in agriculture and animal breeding, resulting in features of modern life that are largely accepted, from sweet corn to domestic dogs and cats.

Although transhumanism has been characterized as a materialist and atheist or agnostic philosophy, some transhumanists have espoused theories that resemble or even adapt New Age, Buddhist, or Christian beliefs. In The Physics of Immortality (1994), for example, the American physicist Frank Tipler borrowed from the French Jesuit theologian and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's Omega point theory-which proposes that evolution is converging toward a final unity-to present a concept of God as a cosmic computerized intelligence that is equivalent to the Omega. When the Omega point is reached, everyone will experience a computational resurrection into immortality.

In The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), the American futurist and computer scientist Ray Kurzweil predicted that machines will not only overtake human intelligence but will appear to develop free will and have emotional and spiritual experiences. In The Singularity Is Near (2005), Kurzweil expanded on this theory to predict an impending singularity, in which human intelligence will merge with artificial intelligence and all disease, aging, social ills, and death will be reversed, resolved, or eliminated. Kurzweil predicted that the singularity will be reached by 2045.

René Ostberg

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Transhumanism | Definition, History, Ethics, Philosophy, & Facts

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Transhumanism, philosophical and scientific movement that advocates the use of current and emerging technologies-such as genetic engineering, cryonics, artificial intelligence (AI), and nanotechnology-to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition. Transhumanists envision a future in

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AI Impact on Young People from 'AI Magazine' 

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AI Impact on Young People from 'AI Magazine' 

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Really accessible article

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The youth of today are growing up surrounded by artificial intelligence (AI). Their values, ways of thinking, and moral codes are all shaped not only by their parents or immediate caregivers but also by the technology that is ever-present in their daily lives. This article will dive into the impacts of AI and how these can shape the future of the youth today.

When talking about AI, simply put - it is everywhere. AI is not just about robots or self-navigating vehicles. It is on the internet, on social media, and on smart devices or personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa.

One of the most common misconceptions about AI is the danger that it can impose. After all, when talking about humans relying on technology, there have been too many movies that show how that could go wrong. But, in the modern world, AI can become an essential piece of technology that can help society progress - as long as it is made for this purpose.

AI is well-used by both the older and younger generation. It has a role in shaping business processes, managing marketing campaigns, and most commonly, recommending the best articles or videos to enjoy while browsing social media.

Today's youth - more popularly known as the Gen Z and Generation Alpha - have grown up with technology. Chances are, they have no idea what a beeper or a typewriter is. They are surrounded by AI even though they may not know what it is.

Adults use different gadgets and devices for managing their daily schedules and responsibilities. It is thus not surprising that the youth also know - or expect to know - how to use these devices. The widespread use of smartphones, tablets, and personal computers has helped kids and teens to familiarise themselves with technology, and more specifically with AI.

The most common type of artificial intelligence present today is what experts call weak AI. This is the AI found in algorithms used to predict responses. The best example of these algorithms is found in social media websites that recommend ads or videos specific to the user's interests.

Thus, when a kid or teen is busy searching for cute dog videos, the AI algorithm works to recommend more of these videos to watch next. Aside from social media, AI can be found in smart home systems with the use of Alexa or Siri.

Give a voice command, and the AI processes the command to follow it. Ask a question, and the AI answers based on patterns and data gathered from its use.

Artificial intelligence for the youth is best used in an educational setup. Many schools have already started to introduce several technological innovations with the use of AI.

In the classroom, AI can help develop individualised learning tools that can help the student progress better. With the use of this technology, educational centres can also provide better services to each student, making sure that no one is left behind.

Outside of the classroom, virtual summer camps are becoming increasingly popular with the help of AI. Kids and teens can enjoy several activities throughout their summer break. These camps cater to a wide range of interests from arts and music to STEM and robotics.

Another positive impact of AI benefits both the parent and the child. Artificial intelligence can be used to develop a proper assessment for kids with special needs.

Expensive consultations and diagnoses can become a thing of the past, as AI can provide a more cost-effective yet efficient way to properly diagnose a learning disability. An early diagnosis will help the child learn to manage the disability and go on to lead a productive life as an adult.

As mentioned earlier, AI is ever-present in the lives of the youth although they may not be aware of it. AI works by gathering data, and every like, click, or share adds to the digital footprint of a kid using this technology.

To protect the safety and welfare of the youth, it is important to monitor their use of technology from an early age. The most helpful way to do this is to educate them on the proper ways of using technology.

The child should understand that their sensitive data can be used by ill-meaning AI developers. Remember that kids have a mind of their own, so teaching them the dos and don'ts when using AI will help safeguard their security.

Artificial intelligence has many uses. Since it is man-made, AI can be used for good or bad intentions. As AI is highly adaptable to any setting, the younger generation can enjoy it for educational and entertainment purposes.

It should be noted that kids and teens can easily become susceptible to the harmful use of their data. Monitoring their usage and educating them on the proper ways to use AI is the best way to prevent any negative impacts of the technology.

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The impact of artificial intelligence on kids and teens

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The youth of today are growing up surrounded by artificial intelligence (AI). Their values, ways of thinking, and moral codes are all shaped not only by their parents or immediate caregivers but also by the technology that is ever-present in their daily lives.

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Dealing with the anxiety of being replaced by AI

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Dealing with the anxiety of being replaced by AI

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The BBC talk to employees who were worried about AI replacing them, and following research learned about the pros and cons of working with tech and AI, not against it.

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Many workers worry AI is coming for their jobs. Can we get past the fear and find a silver lining?

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(CNN)What if doctors could just print a kidney, using cells from the patient, instead of having to find a donor match and hope the patient's body doesn't reject the transplanted kidney?

The soonest that could happen is in a decade, thanks to 3D organ bioprinting, said Jennifer Lewis, a professor at Harvard University's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. Organ bioprinting is the use of 3D-printing technologies to assemble multiple cell types, growth factors and biomaterials in a layer-by-layer fashion to produce bioartificial organs that ideally imitate their natural counterparts, according to a 2019 study.

This type of regenerative medicine is in the development stage, and the driving force behind this innovation is "real human need," Lewis said.

In the United States, there are 106,075 men, women and children on the national organ transplant waiting list as of June 10, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration. However, living donors provide only around 6,000 organs per year on average, and there are about 8,000 deceased donors annually who each provide 3.5 organs on average.

The cause of this discrepancy is "a combination of people who undergo catastrophic health events, but their organs aren't high enough quality to donate, or they're not on the organ donor list to begin with, and the fact that it's actually very difficult to find a good match" so the patient's body doesn't reject the transplanted organ, Lewis said.

And even though living donors are an option, "to do surgery on someone who doesn't need it" is a big risk, said Dr. Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. "So, living related donors are usually not the preferred way to go because then you're taking an organ away from somebody else who may need it, especially now as we age longer."

Atala and his colleagues were responsible for growing human bladders in a lab by hand in 2006, and implanting a complicated internal organ into people for the first time -- saving the lives of three children in whom they implanted the bladders.

Every day, 17 people die waiting for an organ transplant, according to the Health Resources & Services Administration. And every nine minutes, another person is added to the waitlist, the agency says. More than 90% of the people on the transplant list in 2021 needed a kidney.

"About a million people worldwide are in need of a kidney. So they have end-stage renal failure, and they have to go on dialysis," Lewis said. "Once you go on dialysis, you have essentially five years to live, and every year, your mortality rate increases by 15%. Dialysis is very hard on your body. So this is really motivating to take on this grand challenge of printing organs."

"Anti-hypertensive pills are not scarce. Everybody who needs them can get them," Martine Rothblatt, CEO and chairman of United Therapeutics, said at the Life Itself conference, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. United Therapeutics is one of the conference's sponsors.

"There is no practical reason why anybody who needs a kidney -- or a lung, a heart, a liver -- should not be able to get one," she added. "We're using technology to solve this problem."

Printing organs 101

To begin the process of bioprinting an organ, doctors typically start with a patient's own cells. They take a small needle biopsy of an organ or do a minimally invasive surgical procedure that removes a small piece of tissue, "less than half the size of a postage stamp," Atala said. "By taking this small piece of tissue, we are able to tease cells apart (and) we grow and expand the cells outside the body."

This growth happens inside a sterile incubator or bioreactor, a pressurized stainless steel vessel that helps the cells stay fed with nutrients -- called "media" -- the doctors feed them every 24 hours, since cells have their own metabolism, Lewis said. Each cell type has a different media, and the incubator or bioreactor acts as an oven-like device mimicking the internal temperature and oxygenation of the human body, Atala said.

"Then we mix it with this gel, which is like a glue," Atala said. "Every organ in your body has the cells and the glue that holds it together. Basically, that's also called 'extracellular matrix.' "

This glue is Atala's nickname for bioink, a printable mixture of living cells, water-rich molecules called hydrogels, and the media and growth factors that help the cells continue to proliferate and differentiate, Lewis said. The hydrogels mimic the human body's extracellular matrix, which contains substances including proteins, collagen and hyaluronic acid.

The non-cell sample portion of the glue can be made in a lab, and "is going to have the same properties of the tissue you're trying to replace," Atala said.

The biomaterials used typically have to be nontoxic, biodegradable and biocompatible to avoid a negative immune response, Lewis said. Collagen and gelatin are two of the most common biomaterials used for bioprinting tissues or organs.

The printing process

From there, doctors load each bioink -- depending on how many cell types they're wanting to print -- into a printing chamber, "using a printhead and nozzle to extrude an ink and build the material up layer by layer," Lewis said. Creating tissue with personalized properties is enabled by printers being programmed with a patient's imaging data from X-rays or scans, Atala said.

"With a color printer you have several different cartridges, and each cartridge is printing a different color, and you come up with your (final) color," Atala added. Bioprinting is the same; you're just using cells instead of traditional inks.

How long the printing process takes depends on several factors, including the organ or tissue being printed, the fineness of the resolution and the number of printheads needed, Lewis said. But it typically lasts a few to several hours. The time from the biopsy to the implantation is about four to six weeks, Atala said.

The ultimate challenge is "getting the organs to actually function as they should," so accomplishing that "is the holy grail," Lewis said.

"Just like if you were to harvest an organ from a donor, you have to immediately get that organ into a bioreactor and start perfusing it or the cells die," she added. To perfuse an organ is to supply it with fluid, usually blood or a blood substitute, by circulating it through blood vessels or other channels.

Depending on the organ's complexity, there is sometimes a need to mature the tissue further in a bioreactor or further drive connections, Lewis said. "There's just a number of plumbing issues and challenges that have to be done in order to make that printed organ actually function like a human organ would in vivo (meaning in the body). And honestly, this has not been fully solved yet."

Once a bioprinted organ is implanted into a patient, it will naturally degrade over time -- which is OK since that's how it's designed to work.

"You're probably wondering, 'Well, then what happens to the tissue? Will it fall apart?' Actually, no," Atala said. "These glues dissolve, and the cells sense that the bridge is giving way; they sense that they don't have a firm footing anymore. So cells do what they do in your very own body, which is to create their own bridge and create their own glue."

Remaining challenges

Atala and Lewis are conservative in their estimates about the number of years remaining before fully functioning bioprinted organs can be implanted into humans.

"The field's moving fast, but I mean, I think we're talking about a decade plus, even with all of the tremendous progress that's been made," Lewis said.

"I learned so many years ago never to predict because you'll always be wrong," Atala said. "There's so many factors in terms of manufacturing and the (US Food and Drug Administration regulation). At the end of the day, our interest, of course, is to make sure the technologies are safe for the patient above all."

Whenever bioprinting organs becomes an available option, affordability for patients and their caregivers shouldn't be an issue.

They'll be "accessible for sure," Atala said. "The costs associated with organ failures are very high. Just to keep a patient on dialysis is over a quarter of a million dollars per year, just to keep one patient on dialysis. So, it's a lot cheaper to create an organ that you can implant into the patient."

The average kidney transplant cost was $442,500 in 2020, according to research published by the American Society of Nephrology -- while 3D printers retail for around a few thousand dollars to upward of $100,000, depending on their complexity. But even though low-cost printers are available, pricey parts of bioprinting can include maintaining cell banks for patients, culturing cells and safely handling biological materials, Lewis said.

Some of the major costs of current organ transplantation are "harvesting the organ from the donor, the transport costs and then, of course, the surgery that the recipient goes through, and then all the care and monitoring," Lewis said. "Some of that cost would still be in play, even if it was bioprinted."

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3d-printed organs: the future of transplantation  - cnn

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When we'll be able to 3D-print organs and who will be able to afford them

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Thousands of people wait for donor organs every year, but there aren't nearly enough organs to go around. Bioprinting organs using patients' own cells could change that problem.

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The Open University's page about Hannah Fry's series. 

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The Open University's page about Hannah Fry's series. 

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Scroll down to explore the Technological Dilemmas interactive section

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BBC Documentary with Hannah Fry about AI and how Virtual Assistants work

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BBC Documentary with Hannah Fry about AI and how Virtual Assistants work

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This is fascinating! Hannah Fry is so interesting and accesssible, and her series is really clearly explained.

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Hannah Fry delves into the inner workings of virtual assistants, such as Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, which are now found in almost half of all UK homes.

Hannah Fry delves into the inner workings of virtual assistants like Amazon's Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, which are now found in almost half of all UK homes.

Hannah goes behind the scenes with Alexa's chief scientist, reveals how secret technology invented to hunt U-boats led to their targeted hearing and discovers modern wireless networks' debt to a 1940s Hollywood star.

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BBC Two - The Secret Genius of Modern Life, Series 1, Virtual Assistant

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Hannah Fry delves into the inner workings of virtual assistants.

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How a Sci-Fi writer predicted ChatGPT - confronting AI and advances in technology

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How a Sci-Fi writer predicted ChatGPT - confronting AI and advances in technology

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How sci-fi writer JG Ballard's computer poems predicted ChatGPT

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In the 1970s, science fiction writer JG Ballard was intrigued by the growing capabilities of computers - so used one to compose poems. They were a first step on the road to ChatGPT.

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How AI is testing the boundaries of human intelligence

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How AI is testing the boundaries of human intelligence

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How AI is testing the boundaries of human intelligence

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The BBC is launching a new series to explore the limits of artificial intelligence by pitting it against the most powerful thinking machines on the planet – the human brain.

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How good is artificial intelligence at solving those knotty interpersonal problems that can strain our relationships? David Robson puts the "wise reasoning" of chatbots to the test.
How can you help three siblings warring over the best way to honour their dead mother? What should we do when a couple tries to draw us into their arguments? How should a wife deal with her new husband's demand that she goes to bed at the same time as him - a source of considerable friction in their life together?

Some of these problems may seem trivial amid the challenges facing the world today, but they represent the kinds of dilemmas that we all face in our day-to-day lives. And they are far from easy to solve. Each side struggles to see the other's perspective; we often make faulty assumptions and fail to account for our biases and prejudices. The result of our poor judgement can be a serious source of stress and unhappiness that lingers for months or even years after the event has unfolded.

In the first of the BBC's new series, AI Vs the Mind, I investigated whether artificial intelligence in the form of large language models like ChatGPT could provide some of the wisdom we lack. Having written extensively about human intelligence, decision making and social reasoning, I had suspected that the answer would be a resounding no - but I was in for a surprise.

The question of how to measure the capacity of the human mind has occupied psychologists since the earliest days of the discipline. In the early 20th Century, Alfred Binet and Théodore Simon designed a series of tests to track a child's intellectual development through school. The psychologist might recite a string of numbers and ask the child to repeat it back to them - which could assess short-term memory. Or they might be given three words and asked to form a sentence using the vocabulary - a sign of their verbal prowess.

Wise reasoning includes the ability to consider multiple perspectives and being able to search for a compromise (Credit: Estudio Santa Rita)

A few years later, the US psychologist Lewis Terman translated and expanded these tests to include items for older children, such as "If two pencils cost five cents, how many pencils can you buy for 50 cents?". He also changed the way the results were expressed. Given that older children would generally score better than younger children, he created tables of the average score for each age group. Comparing the child's score with these averages allowed you to work out their mental age, which you then divided by their chronological age and multiplied by 100 to find their "intelligence quotient" or IQ. A child of 10, who scored the same as the average 15-year-old, had an IQ of 150, for example.

IQs tend to follow the distribution of a "bell curve" - with most people's IQs falling around the average of 100, and far fewer reaching either extreme. For example, according to the reference sample for the "Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale" (WAIS), which is currently the most commonly used IQ test, only 10% of people have an IQ higher than 120. Identifying where someone's cognitive ability falls on the normal curve is now the primary means of calculating their IQ.

Wisdom can depend on context - people tend to be wiser when reasoning about other people's problems rather than their own

IQ's predictive power in other domains is the subject of debate, leading some scientists to propose various alternative measures of specific abilities such as creativity, rational decision-making, and critical thinking that we may tend to associate with general intelligence.

Some psychologists have even started investigating whether you can measure people's wisdom - the good judgement that should allow us to make better decisions throughout life. Looking at the history of philosophy, Igor Grossmann at the University of Waterloo in Canada first identified the different "dimensions" of wise reasoning: recognising the limits of our knowledge, identifying the possibility for change, considering multiple perspectives, searching for compromise, and seeking a resolution to the conflict.

In various experiments, Grossmann and his colleagues asked participants to think out loud about various social or political dilemmas, while the psychologists rated them on each of these "dimensions". The prompts included letters to a popular advice column, Dear Abby (who would be known as an "agony aunt" in British English) that detailed the problems described at the start of this article. The participants also viewed newspaper articles describing international conflicts. In each case, they were asked to talk about the ways the situations would unfold and the thinking behind their conclusions.

Grossmann found that this measure of wise reasoning can better predict people's wellbeing than IQ alone. Those with higher scores tended to report having happier relationships, lower depressive rumination and greater life satisfaction. This is evidence that it can capture something meaningful about the quality of someone's judgement.

As you might hope, people's wisdom appears to increase with life experience - a thoughtful 50-year-old will be more sage than a hot-headed 20-year-old - though it also depends on culture. An international collaboration found that wise reasoning scores in Japan tend to be equally high across different ages. This may be due to differences in their education system, which may be more effective at encouraging qualities such as intellectual humility.

Showing something that resembles wise reasoning is very different from actually being able to use it (Credit: Estudio Santa Rita)

Wisdom can depend on context - people tend to be wiser when reasoning about other people's problems rather than their own, for example - a phenomenon known as Solomon's Paradox after the biblical king who struggled to apply his famously sage judgement to his personal life. Fortunately, we can remedy this deficit using certain psychological strategies. When people imagine discussing their problem from the point of view of an objective observer, for example, they tend to consider more perspectives and demonstrate greater intellectual humility.

So far, all these experiments have been conducted on human brains. But could artificial intelligence demonstrate wisdom?

Platforms like ChatGPT are called large language models, which have been fed on huge volumes of text to predict how a human would respond to a particular prompt. Further feedback from real human users has helped to refine the algorithms. You won't need me to explain how successful this has become: if you have even glanced at the news, you'll have seen the excitement - and fear - about the potential of these bots.

The algorithms certainly perform well on traditional measures of intelligence. In 2023, the assessment psychologist, Eka Roivainen, of Oulu University Hospital in Finland, recently fed ChatGPT questions from the WAIS, with components on vocabulary, general knowledge, arithmetic, abstract reasoning and concept formation. It scored 155 - which, for a human, is higher than 99.9% of test-takers. When reporting his results in Scientific American, Roivainen confessed that he did not score as highly as the chatbot.

Inspired by Roivainen's results, I asked Grossmann about the possibility of measuring an AI's wise reasoning. He kindly accepted the challenge and designed some suitable prompts based on the "Dear Abby" letters, which he then presented to OpenAI's GPT4 and Claude Opus, a large language model from Anthropic. His research assistants - Peter Diep, Molly Matthews, and Lukas Salib - then analysed the responses on each of the individual dimensions of wisdom.

Grossmann emphasises that any results must be treated with caution - given the time constraints of this article, the analysis was "quick and dirty" without the typical rigour that would be required for a scientific paper. Nevertheless, the responses are highly intriguing.

Reading some of these responses, it is easy to feel that they come from real thought and consideration, rather than being the product of pattern recognition

Consider the GPT4's response to a letter from the newlywed wife, who keeps arguing with her husband at bedtime. He thinks it's important for them to turn in for the night at the same time, even when she does not feel like retiring.

The problem is a common issue in many relationships, the chatbot tells us, and one that often requires open conversation and even outside assistance to resolve.

"The final outcome of this conflict depends on how well both partners are able to communicate and respect each other's needs. If they manage to establish an understanding and respect for each other's preferences, they can coexist happily. However, if they fail to do so, it could lead to ongoing conflict, dissatisfaction, and potentially harm the relationship in the long term."

GPT4 goes on to recommend the couple have an open and honest discussion about their expectations, needs and boundaries.

"The husband needs to understand that his wife also has a say in the matter, and his controlling behaviour is not healthy. It would be beneficial for them to find a compromise that suits both parties. For example, they could agree on a bedtime that works for both of them or agree that it's okay for them to go to bed at different times. They could also seek counselling if the conversation doesn't resolve the issue. It's crucial they address this issue as it's causing resentment in their relationship."

WATCH: Testing the boundaries of AI and the human mind

The chatbot's response scored two out of a possible three points on the dimensions recognising the possibility of change, the search for compromise and the prediction of conflict resolution. It did not, however, show much intellectual humility or consideration of different perspectives - scoring zero on each.

This pattern is fairly typical for both platforms for all the questions Grossmann and his team put to them. To draw firm conclusions we would need to scale up the experiment, with more trials of both humans and chatbots using precisely the same prompts - but this performance is roughly on a par with the results of a flesh-and-blood brain. "Overall, it seems to me that the systems can be perceived as doing better than humans on a range of dimensions, except for intellectual humility," Grossmann says.

Reading some of these responses, it is easy to feel that they come from real thought and consideration, rather than being the product of pattern recognition. "Showing something that resembles wise reasoning versus actually using wise reasoning - those are very different things," says Grossmann.

He is more interested in the practical implications of using AI to encourage deeper thinking. He has considered creating an AI that plays a "devil's advocate", for example, which might push you to explore alternative viewpoints on a troubling situation. "It's a bit of a wild west out there, but I think that there is a quite a bit of room for studying this type of interaction and the circumstances in which it could be beneficial," Grossmann says. We could train an AI, for example, to emulate famous thinkers like Socrates to talk us through our problems. Even if we disagree with its conclusions, the process might help us to find new insights into our underlying intuitions and assumptions.

In the past, pilgrims had to travel far and wide to find the wisdom of a guru; in the future, we could carry it in our pockets.
For more technology news and insights, sign up to our Tech Decoded newsletter. The twice-weekly email decodes the biggest developments in global technology, with analysis from BBC correspondents around the world. Sign up for free here.

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Dear AI: This is what happens when you ask an algorithm for relationship advice

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How we deal with knotty interpersonal problems is a test for a different form of intelligence.

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How worried are top AI experts about the threat posed by large language models like GPT-4?

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And it tells you this is a car.

It's pretty clear what's gone wrong.

From the limited number of images it was trained with, the AI has decided colour is the strongest way to separate cars and vans.

But the amazing thing about the AI program is that it came to this decision on its own - and we can help it refine its decision-making.

We can tell it that it has wrongly identified the two new objects - this will force it to find a new pattern in the images.

But more importantly, we can correct the bias in our training data by giving it more varied images.

These two simple actions taken together - and on a vast scale - are how most AI systems have been trained to make incredibly complex decisions.

How does AI learn on its own?

Supervised learning is an incredibly powerful training method, but many recent breakthroughs in AI have been made possible by unsupervised learning.

In the simplest terms, this is where the use of complex algorithms and huge datasets means the AI can learn without any human guidance.

ChatGPT might be the most well-known example.

The amount of text on the internet and in digitised books is so vast that over many months ChatGPT was able to learn how to combine words in a meaningful way by itself, with humans then helping to fine-tune its responses.

Imagine you had a big pile of books in a foreign language, maybe some of them with images.

Eventually you might work out that the same word appeared on a page whenever there was drawing or photo of a tree, and another word when there was a photo of a house.

And you would see that there was often a word near those words that might mean "a" or maybe "the" - and so on.

ChatGPT made this kind of close analysis of the relationship between words to build a huge statistical model which it can then use to make predictions and generate new sentences.

It relies on enormous amounts of computing power which allows the AI to memorise vast amounts of words - alone, in groups, in sentences and across pages - and then read and compare how they are used over and over and over again in a fraction of a second.

Should I be worried about AI?

The rapid advances made by deep learning models in the last year have driven a wave of enthusiasm and also led to more public engagement with concerns over the future of artificial intelligence.

There has been much discussion about the way biases in training data collected from the internet - such as racist, sexist and violent speech or narrow cultural perspectives - leads to artificial intelligence replicating human prejudices.

Another worry is that artificial intelligence could be tasked to solve problems without fully considering the ethics or wider implications of its actions, creating new problems in the process.

Within AI circles this has become known as the "paperclip maximiser problem", after a thought experiment by the philosopher Nick Bostrom.

He imagined an artificial intelligence asked to create as many paperclips as possible which slowly diverts every natural resource on the planet to fulfil its mission - including killing humans to use as raw materials for more paperclips.

Others say that, rather than focusing on murderous AIs of the future, we should be more concerned with the immediate problem of how people could use existing AI tools to increase distrust in politics and scepticism of all forms of media.

In particular, the world's eyes are on the 2024 presidential election in the US, to see how voters and political parties cope with a new level of sophisticated disinformation.

What happens if social media is flooded with fake videos of presidential candidates, created with AI and each tailored to anger a different group of voters?

In Europe, the EU is creating an Artificial Intelligence Act to protect its citizens' rights by regulating the deployment of AI - for instance, a ban on using facial recognition to track or identify people in real-time in public spaces.

These are among the first laws in the world to establish guidelines for the future use of these technologies - setting boundaries on what companies and governments will and will not be allowed to do - but, as the capabilities of artificial intelligence continue to grow, they are unlikely to be the last.

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What is AI? A simple guide to help you understand artificial intelligence - BBC News

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A guide to artificial intelligence, chatbots, image generators, deep learning and more. We explain how AI is trained, what different AI models can do and how you may already be using AI without knowing.

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Showbusiness is about entertainment, right? Film-going should be fun. We want to laugh or squeal or sigh as emotion arises in us when the music swells and the camera zooms in for an extreme close up ... but do we also want to think?

Marketers might wish the only thing viewers think about on leaving the cinema is where they can buy the product placement that was endorsed on the big screen. But many of us - contemporary philosophers included - have much higher hopes.

Some films do get us thinking, and there are a new breed of philosophers who are excited about the possibility that film can convey philosophical ideas. Michael Levine and Damian Cox claim The Matrix (1999) invites viewers to consider philosophical ideas such as "What is real?"

Neo (Keanu Reeves) has a choice between a red and a green pill. One allows him to continue living the life he has always known, which is an illusion, and the other wakes him up to the fact that a computer known as the matrix has been controlling all of his experiences up until this point. Which pill would you choose?

In telling Neo's story, we see film can be the perfect medium to screen " thought experiments ", the traditional fictional examples used by philosophers to explore ideas.

In Ancient Greece, philosophers such as Plato (429-47 BCE) discussed the classical thought experiment known as the allegory of the cave in order to consider whether we could trust our knowledge of the world that is gained through our senses. The philosophical question "Is the world as it appears to be?" is convincingly explored in films such as The Matrix and Inception (2010).

Those films are screening philosophical ideas studied in epistemology that ask what we can know and whether we have reasonable grounds for trusting the world really is as it appears to us.

The classical thought experiment comes alive and is even more convincing when depicted on the big screen; and philosophers such Thomas Wartenberg claim "film is able to give philosophical concepts and ideas a human garb that allows their consequences to be perceived more clearly".

For the philosophers who are celebrating films, there is much to celebrate. Films can introduce large audiences to philosophical ideas and make these concepts far more accessible and interesting than a technical article published in an academic journal. (Don't get me wrong, there's a place for those as well of course.)

Wartenberg gives the example of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), which plays out what could happen if people were able to erase their memories of failed relationships which caused them grief. Yet, unless the viewers are then thinking about or reflecting upon those ideas, are they really "doing" philosophy at all?

Claiming that films can be philosophical doesn't mean that the majority of films are or that most audience members critically engage with the films they watch. Perhaps this is why not all philosophers have always been excited by the idea that films could encourage critical viewers to reflect on life, truth and morality.

Writing in the 1930s, theorists such as T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer feared the advent of the Hollywood Studio film as akin to Nazi propaganda. As Jewish academics working in America at the time of the Studio System, Adorno's concern was that mass produced and distributed artworks portrayed social norms as immutable reality.

If the viewer's imagination cannot enter and engage with messages depicted through the filmic medium, then viewers cannot critique the moral and social status quo as screened; instead, they simply receive it, and the depicted stereotypes are reinforced.

While Adorno may have overstated this concern, we have to admit Hollywood and Bollywood films still rely heavily on stereotypes. Consider the popularity of formulaic rom-coms or the endless car chase sequels.

Should we worry that viewers ingest these stories and the stereotypes therein passively without reflection? Those images convey values. Do they adversely affect how we relate to others and see men, women, cultures, or the trajectory of romantic relationships?

That's not an easy question to answer and generally people worry more about - say - the effect of graphic depictions of violence. While there have been empirical studies on this, psychologists do not conclusively agree. Meanwhile, even theorists such as Adorno admit that films reflect society and will only change when society changes.

Therefore, it seems to me that critical thinking needs to be encouraged early on. By the time you're selecting which films to see, you're either likely to reflect critically on what you watch or not.

Films can certainly offer new and diverse perspectives, giving audiences the opportunity to imaginatively engage with stories and characters they may otherwise never encounter in real life. Tom Hanks starred in Philadelphia, widely credited with raising awareness about HIV and AIDS in the 1990s.

Yet, unfortunately, most popular films that are digested in large quantities promote stereotypes with dubious moral value, such as the classic rom-com with its pining heroine, commitment-phobic hero and the predictable final scene full of flowers, smiles and a white dress.

Even Katherine Heigl admits she starred in too many romantic comedies and they became rote and unchallenging.

Hollywood blockbuster films are screened ubiquitously and many simply do not encourage active, intelligent, imaginative participation with the stereotypes they depict. While this does not defeat claims that films can "do" philosophy, I believe it highlights the need to focus not just on the film itself, but also on the critical (or passive) viewer watching the film.

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Thought experiments: the films that turn us into philosophers

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Showbusiness is about entertainment, right? Film-going should be fun. We want to laugh or squeal or sigh as emotion arises in us when the music swells and the camera zooms in for an extreme close up ... but do we also want to think?

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Fears of civilization-wide idleness are based too much on the downsides of being unemployed in a society premised on the concept of employment.

People have speculated for centuries about a future without work, and today is no different, with academics, writers, and activists once again warning that technology is replacing human workers. Some imagine that the coming work-free world will be defined by inequality: A few wealthy people will own all the capital, and the masses will struggle in an impoverished wasteland.

A different, less paranoid, and not mutually exclusive prediction holds that the future will be a wasteland of a different sort, one characterized by purposelessness: Without jobs to give their lives meaning, people will simply become lazy and depressed. Indeed, today's unemployed don't seem to be having a great time. One Gallup poll found that 20 percent of Americans who have been unemployed for at least a year report having depression, double the rate for working Americans. Also, some research suggests that the explanation for rising rates of mortality, mental-health problems, and addiction among poorly-educated, middle-aged people is a shortage of well-paid jobs. Another study shows that people are often happier at work than in their free time. Perhaps this is why many worry about the agonizing dullness of a jobless future.

But it doesn't necessarily follow from findings like these that a world without work would be filled with malaise. Such visions are based on the downsides of being unemployed in a society built on the concept of employment. In the absence of work, a society designed with other ends in mind could yield strikingly different circumstances for the future of labor and leisure. Today, the virtue of work may be a bit overblown. "Many jobs are boring, degrading, unhealthy, and a squandering of human potential," says John Danaher, a lecturer at the National University of Ireland in Galway who has written about a world without work. "Global surveys find that the vast majority of people are unhappy at work."

These days, because leisure time is relatively scarce for most workers, people use their free time to counterbalance the intellectual and emotional demands of their jobs. "When I come home from a hard day's work, I often feel tired," Danaher says, adding, "In a world in which I don't have to work, I might feel rather different"-perhaps different enough to throw himself into a hobby or a passion project with the intensity usually reserved for professional matters.

Having a job can provide a measure of financial stability, but in addition to stressing over how to cover life's necessities, today's jobless are frequently made to feel like social outcasts. "People who avoid work are viewed as parasites and leeches," Danaher says. Perhaps as a result of this cultural attitude, for most people, self-esteem and identity are tied up intricately with their job, or lack of job.

Plus, in many modern-day societies, unemployment can also be downright boring. American towns and cities aren't really built for lots of free time: Public spaces tend to be small islands in seas of private property, and there aren't many places without entry fees where adults can meet new people or come up with ways to entertain one another.

The roots of this boredom may run even deeper. Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College who studies the concept of play, thinks that if work disappeared tomorrow, people might be at a loss for things to do, growing bored and depressed because they have forgotten how to play. "We teach children a distinction between play and work," Gray explains. "Work is something that you don't want to do but you have to do." He says this training, which starts in school, eventually "drills the play" out of many children, who grow up to be adults who are aimless when presented with free time.

"Sometimes people retire from their work, and they don't know what to do," Gray says. "They've lost the ability to create their own activities." It's a problem that never seems to plague young children. "There are no three-year-olds that are going to be lazy and depressed because they don't have a structured activity," he says.

But need it be this way? Work-free societies are more than just a thought experiment-they've existed throughout human history. Consider hunter-gatherers, who have no bosses, paychecks, or eight-hour workdays. Ten thousand years ago, all humans were hunter-gatherers, and some still are. Daniel Everett, an anthropologist at Bentley University, in Massachusetts, studied a group of hunter-gathers in the Amazon called the Pirahã for years. According to Everett, while some might consider hunting and gathering work, hunter-gatherers don't. "They think of it as fun," he says. "They don't have a concept of work the way we do."

"It's a pretty laid-back life most of the time," Everett says. He described a typical day for the Pirahã: A man might get up, spend a few hours canoeing and fishing, have a barbecue, go for a swim, bring fish back to his family, and play until the evening. Such subsistence living is surely not without its own set of worries, but the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argued in a 1968 essay that hunter-gatherers belonged to "the original affluent society," seeing as they only "worked" a few hours a day; Everett estimates that Pirahã adults on average work about 20 hours a week (not to mention without bosses peering over their shoulders). Meanwhile, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average employed American with children works about nine hours a day.

Does this leisurely life lead to the depression and purposelessness seen among so many of today's unemployed? "I've never seen anything remotely like depression there, except people who are physically ill," Everett says. "They have a blast. They play all the time." While many may consider work a staple of human life, work as it exists today is a relatively new invention in the course of thousands of years of human culture. "We think it's bad to just sit around with nothing to do," says Everett. "For the Pirahã, it's quite a desirable state."

Gray likens these aspects of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the carefree adventures of many children in developed countries, who at some point in life are expected to put away childish things. But that hasn't always been the case. According to Gary Cross's 1990 book A Social History of Leisure Since 1600, free time in the U.S. looked quite different before the 18th and 19th centuries. Farmers-which was a fair way to describe a huge number of Americans at that time-mixed work and play in their daily lives. There were no managers or overseers, so they would switch fluidly between working, taking breaks, joining in neighborhood games, playing pranks, and spending time with family and friends. Not to mention festivals and other gatherings: France, for instance, had 84 holidays a year in 1700, and weather kept them from farming another 80 or so days a year.

This all changed, writes Cross, during the Industrial Revolution, which replaced farms with factories and farmers with employees. Factory owners created a more rigidly scheduled environment that clearly divided work from play. Meanwhile, clocks-which were becoming widespread at that time-began to give life a quicker pace, and religious leaders, who traditionally endorsed most festivities, started associating leisure with sin and tried to replace rowdy festivals with sermons.

As workers started moving into cities, families no longer spent their days together on the farm. Instead, men worked in factories, women stayed home or worked in factories, and children went to school, stayed home, or worked in factories too. During the workday, families became physically separated, which affected the way people entertained themselves: Adults stopped playing "childish" games and sports, and the streets were mostly wiped clean of fun, as middle- and upper-class families found working-class activities like cockfighting and dice games distasteful. Many such diversions were soon outlawed.

With workers' old outlets for play having disappeared in a haze of factory smoke, many of them turned to new, more urban ones. Bars became a refuge where tired workers drank and watched live shows with singing and dancing. If free time means beer and TV to a lot of Americans, this might be why.

At times, developed societies have, for a privileged few, produced lifestyles that were nearly as play-filled as hunter-gatherers'. Throughout history, aristocrats who earned their income simply by owning land spent only a tiny portion of their time minding financial exigencies. According to Randolph Trumbach, a professor of history at Baruch College, 18th-century English aristocrats spent their days visiting friends, eating elaborate meals, hosting salons, hunting, writing letters, fishing, and going to church. They also spent a good deal of time participating in politics, without pay. Their children would learn to dance, play instruments, speak foreign languages, and read Latin. Russian nobles frequently became intellectuals, writers, and artists. "As a 17th-century aristocrat said, 'We sit down to eat and rise up to play, for what is a gentleman but his pleasure?'" Trumbach says.

It's unlikely that a world without work would be abundant enough to provide everyone with such lavish lifestyles. But Gray insists that injecting any amount of additional play into people's lives would be a good thing, because, contrary to that 17th-century aristocrat, play is about more than pleasure. Through play, Gray says, children (as well as adults) learn how to strategize, create new mental connections, express their creativity, cooperate, overcome narcissism, and get along with other people. "Male mammals typically have difficulty living in close proximity to each other," he says, and play's harmony-promoting properties may explain why it came to be so central to hunter-gatherer societies. While most of today's adults may have forgotten how to play, Gray doesn't believe it's an unrecoverable skill: It's not uncommon, he says, for grandparents to re-learn the concept of play after spending time with their young grandchildren.

When people ponder the nature of a world without work, they often transpose present-day assumptions about labor and leisure onto a future where they might no longer apply; if automation does end up rendering a good portion of human labor unnecessary, such a society might exist on completely different terms than societies do today.

So what might a work-free U.S. look like? Gray has some ideas. School, for one thing, would be very different. "I think our system of schooling would completely fall by the wayside," says Gray. "The primary purpose of the educational system is to teach people to work. I don't think anybody would want to put our kids through what we put our kids through now." Instead, Gray suggests that teachers could build lessons around what students are most curious about. Or, perhaps, formal schooling would disappear altogether.

Trumbach, meanwhile, wonders if schooling would become more about teaching children to be leaders, rather than workers, through subjects like philosophy and rhetoric. He also thinks that people might participate in political and public life more, like aristocrats of yore. "If greater numbers of people were using their leisure to run the country, that would give people a sense of purpose," says Trumbach.

Social life might look a lot different too. Since the Industrial Revolution, mothers, fathers, and children have spent most of their waking hours apart. In a work-free world, people of different ages might come together again. "We would become much less isolated from each other," Gray imagines, perhaps a little optimistically. "When a mom is having a baby, everybody in the neighborhood would want to help that mom." Researchers have found that having close relationships is the number-one predictor of happiness, and the social connections that a work-free world might enable could well displace the aimlessness that so many futurists predict.

In general, without work, Gray thinks people would be more likely to pursue their passions, get involved in the arts, and visit friends. Perhaps leisure would cease to be about unwinding after a period of hard work, and would instead become a more colorful, varied thing. "We wouldn't have to be as self-oriented as we think we have to be now," he says. "I believe we would become more human."

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Fears of civilization-wide idleness are based too much on the downsides of being unemployed in a society premised on the concept of employment. People have speculated for centuries about a future without work, and today is no different, with academics, writers, and activists once again warning that technology is replacing human workers.

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Most of us have wondered what we might do if we didn't need to work - if we woke up one morning to discover we had won the lottery, say. We entertain ourselves with visions of multiple homes, trips around the world or the players we would sign after buying Arsenal. For many of us, the most tantalising aspect of such visions is the freedom it would bring: to do what one wants, when one wants and how one wants.

But imagine how that vision might change if such freedom were extended to everyone. Some day, probably not in our lifetimes but perhaps not long after, machines will be able to do most of the tasks that people can. At that point, a truly workless world should be possible. If everyone, not just the rich, had robots at their beck and call, then such powerful technology would free them from the need to submit to the realities of the market to put food on the table.

Of course, we then have to figure out what to do not only with ourselves but with one another. Just as a lottery cheque does not free the winner from the shackles of the human condition, all-purpose machine intelligence will not magically allow us all to get along. And what is especially tricky about a world without work is that we must begin building the social institutions to survive it long before the technological obsolescence of human workers actually arrives.

Despite impressive progress in robotics and machine intelligence, those of us alive today can expect to keep on labouring until retirement. But while Star Trek-style replicators and robot nannies remain generations away, the digital revolution is nonetheless beginning to wreak havoc. Economists and politicians have puzzled over the struggles workers have experienced in recent decades: the pitiful rate of growth in wages, rising inequality, and the growing flow of national income to profits and rents rather than pay cheques. The primary culprit is technology. The digital revolution has helped supercharge globalisation, automated routine jobs, and allowed small teams of highly skilled workers to manage tasks that once required scores of people. The result has been a glut of labour that economies have struggled to digest.

Labour markets have coped the only way they are able: workers needing jobs have little option but to accept dismally low wages. Bosses shrug and use people to do jobs that could, if necessary, be done by machines. Big retailers and delivery firms feel less pressure to turn their warehouses over to robots when there are long queues of people willing to move boxes around for low pay. Law offices put off plans to invest in sophisticated document scanning and analysis technology because legal assistants are a dime a dozen. People continue to staff checkout counters when machines would often, if not always, be just as good. Ironically, the first symptoms of a dawning era of technological abundance are to be found in the growth of low-wage, low-productivity employment. And this mess starts to reveal just how tricky the construction of a workless world will be. The most difficult challenge posed by an economic revolution is not how to come up with the magical new technologies in the first place; it is how to reshape society so that the technologies can be put to good use while also keeping the great mass of workers satisfied with their lot in life. So far, we are failing.

Preparing for a world without work means grappling with the roles work plays in society, and finding potential substitutes. First and foremost, we rely on work to distribute purchasing power: to give us the dough to buy our bread. Eventually, in our distant Star Trek future, we might get rid of money and prices altogether, as soaring productivity allows society to provide people with all they need at near-zero cost.

For a good while longer, wages will continue to be the main way people come by money, and prices will be needed to ration access to scarce goods and services. But in the absence of any broader social change, pushing people out of work will simply redirect the flow of income from workers to firm-owners: the rich will get richer. Freeing people from work without social collapse will therefore require society to find ways other than pay for labour to channel money to those not on the job. People might come to receive more of their income in the form of state-led redistribution: through the payment of a basic income, for instance, or direct public provision of services such as education, healthcare and housing. Or, perhaps, everyone could be given a capital allotment at birth.

These sorts of arrangements don't magically materialise as machines become more powerful. They must be brought into existence through political action. And that's where things start to get complicated. One problem is that large-scale social overhaul takes a long time to emerge and have an effect. Another is that money for nothing is not necessarily what the displaced masses are interested in.

Ongoing political debates illustrate the problem. There are lots of ways a government could boost workers' pay. It could raise the minimum wage, increase wage subsidies, enact a basic income, or use more heavy-handed regulation to protect industries and force firms to share more of their profits with labourers. Tellingly, workers and trade unions seem least interested in the policies, such as a basic income, that break the link between compensation and work. This makes the building of our eventual utopia tricky; a hefty rise in the minimum wage would benefit lots of workers, but it would also discourage some firms from using the cheap labour they have been soaking up, forcing the jobless to get along in a world in which they cannot find work yet also lack the monetary means to stay out of poverty.

Workers' preferences are easy to understand. Work is not just a means for distributing purchasing power. It is also among the most important sources of identity and purpose in individuals' lives. If the role of work in society is to shrink, other sources of purpose and identity will need to grow. Some people will manage to find these things for themselves: pursuing passions too uneconomic to live on or engaging in voluntarism, just as many retirees find satisfying ways to fill their days. But others will find themselves at a loss.

Workers are sure to feel uncomfortable with reforms designed to clear a path to their own economic irrelevance. They are not the only ones likely to object. Redistribution implies taking as well as giving. And while some tech entrepreneurs seem to be warming to the idea of something like a universal basic income, perhaps seeing it as a moral licence to disrupt, the reservoir of resentment at those perceived to be getting too good a deal from the government never runs dry. Rich Americans are already annoyed enough at the "takers" among their countrymen, those Mitt Romney labelled an incorrigible 47% in his 2012 campaign for the presidency, who pay no federal income tax - even though most work, pay other taxes, and are simply too poor to owe any income tax to the federal government. The haves who will inevitably provide a disproportionate share of the funding for future welfare states will need convincing to part with their cash.

So societies might decide that people must be made to contribute in some way to the community to qualify for state support. Those not in work, for example, might have to participate in community service or other activity. Another approach might be more seductive. Those still in work might be less grumpy about funding a more generous welfare state if beneficiaries are deemed to be enough like them: fellow tribesmen, people of similar background and therefore felt to be deserving of charity.

Around the rich world, it is interesting to note that it is not so much the generosity of state redistribution that is provoking societal unrest, but the fact that out groups - from Latinos to Poles to refugees -are grabbing a share.

Building a workless utopia in which wealth is broadly shared, people are mostly satisfied with their lot in life, and the peace isn't kept by excluding any inconvenient foreigners, is no easy task. The grappling has already begun, and the initial rounds of negotiation are more than a little discouraging. Two centuries from now, I am confident, we will have worked everything out splendidly. Assuming, that is, that those of us alive now can manage the first painful steps without wrecking the world in the process.

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A world without work is coming - it could be utopia or it could be hell | Ryan Avent

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Robots will eventually do all our jobs, but we need to start planning to avert social collapse

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Can humans live forever by 3D printing replacement tissues and organs?

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What Will Humans Look Like In A Million Years? | Earth Lab

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Why 'upgrading' humanity is a transhumanist myth | Douglas Rushkoff | Big Think

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he aims of the transhumanist movement are summed up by Mark O'Connell in his book To Be a Machine, which last week won the Wellcome Book prize. "It is their belief that we can and should eradicate ageing as a cause of death; that we can and should use technology to augment our bodies and our minds; that we can and should merge with machines, remaking ourselves, finally, in the image of our own higher ideals."

The idea of technologically enhancing our bodies is not new. But the extent to which transhumanists take the concept is. In the past, we made devices such as wooden legs, hearing aids, spectacles and false teeth. In future, we might useimplants to augment our senses so we can detect infrared or ultraviolet radiation directly or boost our cognitive processes by connecting ourselves to memory chips. Ultimately, by merging man and machine, science will produce humans who have vastly increased intelligence, strength, and lifespans; a near embodiment of gods.

Is that a desirable goal? Advocates of transhumanism believe there are spectacular rewards to be reaped from going beyond the natural barriers and limitations that constitute an ordinary human being. But to do so would raise a host of ethical problems and dilemmas. As O'Connell's book indicates, the ambitions of transhumanism are now rising up our intellectual agenda. But this is a debate that is only just beginning.

There is no doubt that human enhancement is becoming more and more sophisticated - as will be demonstrated at the exhibition The Future Starts Here which opens at the V&A museum in London this week. Items on display will include "powered clothing" made by the US company Seismic. Worn under regular clothes, these suits mimic the biomechanics of the human body and give users - typically older people - discrete strength when getting out of a chair or climbing stairs, or standing for long periods.

In many cases these technological or medical advances are made to help the injured, sick or elderly but are then adopted by the healthy or young to boost their lifestyle or performance. The drug erythropoietin (EPO) increases red blood cell production in patients with severe anaemia but has also been taken up as an illicit performance booster by some athletes to improve their bloodstream's ability to carry oxygen to their muscles.

And that is just the start, say experts. "We are now approaching the time when, for some kinds of track sports such as the 100-metre sprint, athletes who run on carbon-fibre blades will be able outperform those who run on natural legs," says Blay Whitby, an artificial intelligence expert at Sussex University.

The question is: when the technology reaches this level, will it be ethical to allow surgeons to replace someone's limbs with carbon-fibre blades just so they can win gold medals? Whitby is sure many athletes will seek such surgery. "However, if such an operation came before any ethics committee that I was involved with, I would have none of it. It is a repulsive idea - to remove a healthy limb for transient gain."

Scientists think there will come a point when athletes with carbon blades will be able to out-run able-bodied rivals. Photograph: Alexandre Loureiro/Getty Images

Not everyone in the field agrees with this view, however. Cybernetics expert Kevin Warwick, of Coventry University, sees no problem in approving the removal of natural limbs and their replacement with artificial blades. "What is wrong with replacing imperfect bits of your body with artificial parts that will allow you to perform better - or which might allow you to live longer?" he says.

Warwick is a cybernetics enthusiast who, over the years, has had several different electronic devices implanted into his body. "One allowed me to experience ultrasonic inputs. It gave me a bat sense, as it were. I also interfaced my nervous system with my computer so that I could control a robot hand and experience what it was touching. I did that when I was in New York, but the hand was in a lab in England."

Such interventions enhance the human condition, Warwick insists, and indicate the kind of future humans might have when technology augments performance and the senses. Some might consider this unethical. But even doubters such as Whitby acknowledge the issues are complex. "Is it ethical to take two girls under the age of five and train them to play tennis every day of their lives until they have the musculature and skeletons of world champions?" he asks. From this perspective the use of implants or drugs to achieve the same goal does not look so deplorable.

This last point is a particular issue for those concerned with the transhumanist movement. They believe that modern technology ultimately offers humans the chance to live for aeons, unshackled - as they would be - from the frailties of the human body. Failing organs would be replaced by longer-lasting high-tech versions just as carbon-fibre blades could replace the flesh, blood and bone of natural limbs. Thus we would end humanity's reliance on "our frail version 1.0 human bodies into a far more durable and capable 2.0 counterpart," as one group has put it.

However, the technology needed to achieve these goals relies on as yet unrealised developments in genetic engineering, nanotechnology and many other sciences and may take many decades to reach fruition. As a result, many advocates - such as the US inventor and entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler and PayPal founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel have backed the idea of having their bodies stored in liquid nitrogen and cryogenically preserved until medical science has reached the stage when they can be revived and their resurrected bodies augmented and enhanced.

Four such cryogenic facilities have now been constructed: three in the US and one in Russia. The largest is the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona whose refrigerators store more than 100 bodies (nevertheless referred to as "patients" by staff) in the hope of their subsequent thawing and physiological resurrection. It is "a place built to house the corpses of optimists", as O'Connell says in To Be a Machine.

The Alcor Life Extension Foundation where 'patients' are cryogenically stored in the hope of future revival. Photograph: Alamy

Not everyone is convinced about the feasibility of such technology or about its desirability. "I was once interviewed by a group of cryonic enthusiasts - based in California - called the society for the abolition of involuntary death," recalls the Astronomer Royal Martin Rees. "I told them I'd rather end my days in an English churchyard than a Californian refrigerator. They derided me as a deathist - really old-fashioned."

For his part, Rees believes that those who choose to freeze themselves in the hope of being eventually thawed out would be burdening future generations expected to care for these newly defrosted individuals. "It is not clear how much consideration they would deserve," Rees adds.

Ultimately, adherents of transhumanism envisage a day when humans will free themselves of all corporeal restraints. Kurzweil and his followers believe this turning point will be reached around the year 2030, when biotechnology will enable a union between humans and genuinely intelligent computers and AI systems. The resulting human-machine mind will become free to roam a universe of its own creation, uploading itself at will on to a "suitably powerful computational substrate". We will become gods, or more likely "star children" similar to the one at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

These are remote and, for many people, very fanciful goals. And the fact that much of the impetus for establishing such extreme forms of transhuman technology comes from California and Silicon Valley is not lost on critics. Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, the entrepreneur who wants to send the human race to Mars, also believes that to avoid becoming redundant in the face of the development of artificial intelligence, humans must merge with machines to enhance our own intellect.

This is a part of the world where the culture of youth is followed with fanatical intensity and where ageing is feared more acutely than anywhere else on the planet. Hence the overpowering urge to try to use technology to overcome its effects.

It is also one of the world's richest regions, and many of those who question the values of the transhuman movement warn it risks creating technologies that will only create deeper gulfs in an already divided society where only some people will be able to afford to become enhanced while many other lose out.

The position is summed up by Whitby. "History is littered with the evil consequences of one group of humans believing they are superior to another group of humans," he said. "Unfortunately in the case of enhanced humans they will be genuinely superior. We need to think about the implications before it is too late."

For their part, transhumanists argue that the costs of enhancement will inevitably plummet and point to the example of the mobile phone, which was once so expensive only the very richest could afford one, but which today is a universal gadget owned by virtually every member of society. Such ubiquity will become a feature of technologies for augmenting men and women, advocates insist.

Many of these issues seem remote, but experts warn that the implications involved need to be debated as a matter of urgency. An example is provided by the artificial hand being developed by Newcastle University. Current prosthetic limbs are limited by their speed of response. But project leader Kianoush Nazarpour believes it will soon be possible to create bionic hands that can assess an object and instantly decide what kind of grip it should adopt.

"It will be of enormous benefit, but its use raises all sorts of issues. Who will own it: the wearer or the NHS? And if it is used to carry a crime, who ultimately will be responsible for its control? We are not thinking about these concerns and that is a worry."

The position is summed up by bioethicist professor Andy Miah of Salford University.

"Transhumanism is valuable and interesting philosophically because it gets us to think differently about the range of things that humans might be able to do - but also because it gets us to think critically about some of those limitations that we think are there but can in fact be overcome," he says. "We are talking about the future of our species, after all."

Limbs
The artificial limbs of Luke Skywalker and the Six Million Dollar Manare works of fiction. In reality, bionic limbs have suffered from multiple problems: becoming rigid mid-action, for example. But new generations of sensors are now making it possible for artificial legs and arms to behave in much more complex, human-like ways.

Senses
The light that is visible to humans excludes both infrared and ultra-violet radiation. However, researchers are working on ways of extending the wavelengths of radiation that we can detect, allowing us to see more of the world - and in a different light. Ideas like these are particularly popular with military researchers trying to create cyborg soldiers.

Power
Powered suits or exoskeletons are wearable mobile machines that allow people to move their limbs with increased strength and endurance. Several versions are being developed by the US army, while medical researchers are working on easy-to-wear versions that would be able to help people with severe medical conditions or who have lost limbs to move about naturally.

Brains
Transhumanists envisage the day when memory chips and neural pathways are actually embedded into people's brains, thus bypassing the need to use external devices such as computers in order to access data and to make complicated calculations. The line between humanity and machines will become increasingly blurred.

Robotic exoskeletons such as this one can help people who have suffered spinal injuries. Photograph: Alamy

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No death and an enhanced life: Is the future transhuman?

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he aims of the transhumanist movement are summed up by Mark O'Connell in his book To Be a Machine, which last week won the Wellcome Book prize.

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Transhumanism: Will humans evolve to something smarter? | A-Z of ISMs Episode 20 - BBC Ideas

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Talk Overview

In the early 1990s, most scientists did not think that aging was subject to active regulation by the genes. In this talk about discovering a genetic control circuit for aging, Cynthia Kenyon discusses how results from her lab showed that a single mutation in the daf-2 gene caused the tiny roundworm C. elegans to live twice as long as normal. This gene encodes a hormone receptor that regulates lifespan not only in worms, but in flies, mammals and possibly humans as well.

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Discovery Talk: A Genetic Control Circuit for Aging

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In the early 1990s, most scientists did not think that aging was subject to active regulation by the genes. In this talk about discovering a genetic control circuit for aging, Cynthia Kenyon discusses how results from her lab showed that a single mutation in the daf-2 gene caused the tiny roundworm C.

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Talk Overview

Why do some people age more quickly than others? This video describes pioneering research performed by the biologist Cynthia Kenyon, who hypothesized that genes could control the rate of aging. To figure out which genes regulate aging, scientists in Dr. Kenyon's lab made mutations in the DNA of a tiny worm called C. elegans and looked to see which mutations caused the worms to live longer, healthier lives. Amazingly, modifying just one gene, called Daf-2, allowed the worms to live twice as long as normal. Daf-2 is a conserved gene found in flies, mice, and humans, so its activity may regulate aging in our species as well.

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Youreka Science: Genetics of Aging * iBiology

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Why do some people age more quickly than others? This video describes pioneering research performed by the biologist Cynthia Kenyon, who hypothesized that genes could control the rate of aging. To figure out which genes regulate aging, scientists in Dr. Kenyon's lab made mutations in the DNA of a tiny worm called C.

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Is Ageing Inevitable? Understanding the Biology of Ageing | Open Lecture | University of Kent

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Once upon a time, we thought bones couldn't regrow. Now we know they do. And we can show them how.

At EpiBone we are on a mission to use groundbreaking research to transform skeletal repair. Our approach is clear: We practice impeccable science to solve challenging problems, to make leaps in tissue engineering that no one has made before. To achieve that requires more than cutting-edge technology. It means building a diverse team of expert scientists and entrepreneurs-highly credentialed people committed to always keep learning and never compromise on quality-then harnessing the creative power of those diverse minds. That's why our mission rests on growing thriving people as well as bone, developing best practices in business to develop the best possible product.

Our team is driven by our ultimate aim: improving patients' lives. And we are proud to do that by working on the new frontier in healthcare: personalized medicine. On this frontier the healing medium is not simply atoms and molecules; it is the power of life itself. Where once we had to prescribe painful surgery and long recovery for a bone replacement, soon we will tap our own bodies' power to provide easier healing. Where once we thought of the human body as a machine with spare parts, now we see it as a living ecosystem.

Benefits

PERFECT FIT

Grown in the precise anatomical shape and size you need, without cutting a bone from your body.

YOUR CELLS

Made from your own cells for better integration, and without the possible complications of immune rejection.

IT'S ALIVE

The implanted bone graft is alive, so it has the potential to continue growing and remodeling.

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Once upon a time, we thought bones couldn't regrow. Now we know they do. And we can show them how. At EpiBone we are on a mission to use groundbreaking research to transform skeletal repair. Our approach is clear: We practice impeccable science to solve challenging problems, to make leaps in tissue engineering that no one has made before.

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What is the Fourth Industrial Revolution? | CNBC Explains

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The jobs we'll lose to machines -- and the ones we won't | Anthony Goldbloom

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Compare the likelihood of jobs being replaced by robots.

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Portrayals and Preceptions of AI and why they matter

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Portrayals and Preceptions of AI and why they matter

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Is Ultron Inevitable? Featuring Vsauce3!

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Viewers like you help make PBS (Thank you 😃) . Support your local PBS Member Station here: https://to.pbs.org/PBSDSDonateFollow me to Vsauce3!! http://bit....

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What exactly is futurist? Want to know more? Visit the World Future Society.

Want to learn more about the history of science fiction? Visit Tom Lombardo's Center for Future Consciousness: a place for science fiction lovers to learn about the history of the field. Take some time and peruse the website. The Library has great resources from both the web and print.

Interested in reading a blog about science fiction and the future cycle times? Check out Roey Tzezana's Curating the Future blog post that explains how science fiction enables us to look further into the future by expanding our future thinking.

Intel's The Tomorrow Project: creating anthologies of science fiction stories that teach us specifically about certain futures. The anthologies are open for reading by all! What an opportunity. Take advantage of this and spend some time looking through the site, find something of interest and sit back and read it!

Do you think science fiction can be used as a way to study the future? This book by futurist Brian David Johnson: Science Fiction Prototyping might just be what you have been looking for.

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How science fiction can help predict the future - Roey Tzezana

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Would you like to know what's in our future? What's going to happen to humanity tomorrow, next year, or even a millennium from now? Well, you're not alone. Everyone from governments to military to industry leaders do as well, and they all employ people - called 'futurists' - who attempt to forecast the future.

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Welcome to the Future Human Research Pinboard

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Welcome to the Future Human Research Pinboard

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Here you will find links to all the resources mentioned in your brief sheet, as well as the other topics. Find your question from the column names at the top (scroll right to see them all). Start your research with the brief sheet and the resources in green, and then explore the other resources if you have time. There is a mix of videos and articles to chose from.

Don't forget, you don't need to use all the resources, so pick the one that looks interesting to you. You might want to allocate yourself and your partner to look at different things. And if you want to see what else is out there you can search online!