2045年的世界什么样

生物科技时代

    德米特里•伊茨科夫将他的阿凡达项目视为人类进化的下一步，他这么做并不一定是头脑发昏。但彼得•戴尔蒙迪斯博士的阐述可能更清晰：地球上刚刚开始出现生命时，为了提高存活能力，一些细胞进化出细胞核以及其他更先进的细胞器，出现了低级单细胞生物体到更复杂的单细胞生物体的飞跃。也就是说，当这些细胞接纳、整合更好的生物技术时，它们获得了巨大且重要的发展。库兹韦尔绘制了一幅类似的进化轨迹，详述了人类生命史上的其他质变时刻，例如：一些早期动物的大脑中进化出新的皮层（新皮层主管感官知觉和意识思维等更高功能）时，我们迎来现代哺乳动物的诞生；再比如，部分灵长类动物在我们现在所知的大脑额叶区进化出更大量的新皮层时，区别人和动物的大脑部分形成。

    包括库兹韦尔和戴尔蒙迪斯在内的一些与会发言人表示，人类是唯一能延伸生物特性的物种——数千年前我们已经能这么做了，通过使用科技，我们现在的出行速度更快，力量更大，能够听到不在听力范围之内、甚至是身处另外一个大洲的人说话。我们现在要着手做的是，更进一步把融入我们的生物特性中，比如，通过将病人自己的细胞培养出的可移植器官或是将可移植的机器放入人体内，来更改或改善身体性能（心脏起搏器就是一个例子）。

    随着纳米技术向更小更强的领域进一步迅猛发展，微型设备将成为医疗和日常生活的常规部分。此外，我们已经开始明白，身体更像是一台机器，即生物学（和遗传学）是软件，驱动我们身体的硬件。我们已经在实验室环境下的基因治疗、3D打印器官和干细胞治疗等技术中见识到：通过对软件重新编码，就能对身体这台机器进行程序改编。

    而且，回顾之前提到的大脑图谱，拥有在超级电脑上模拟身体中最复杂功能的这种能力意味着我们很快就会越来越擅长治疗身体中损坏的部分，优化运行不太理想的部分，最终能够使用移植和其他技术改善身体状况和思维。怎样做呢？“未来机器将越来越分子化，”丘奇说。换言之，通过融合生物兼容材料、3D打印、干细胞技术和遗传学的突破，我们将会创造出新的机器，它们看上去更像生物体、而不是智能手机。未来生物技术气息浓厚，如果半机械人的属性让你觉得不自在，你也只能接受。“其实现在的我们相比以前已经有了很大的延伸，”丘奇对观众说。“要去适应这些变化。”

The biotechnology age

    Dmitry Itskov views his Avatar Project as the next evolutionary step for humankind, and he's not necessarily crazy for doing so. But perhaps Dr. Peter Diamandis sells it more clearly: When life on this planet began, the leap from simple single-celled organisms to more complex single-celled organisms occurred when some cells evolved a nucleus and other more advanced organelles that enhanced their survivability. That is, when these cells embraced and integrated better biotechnology they made a huge and critical leap forward. Kurzweil draws a similar evolutionary trajectory describing other advances in the history of human life, like when some early animals developed the neocortex in the brain (the neocortex is home to the higher functions like sensory perception and conscious thought) giving rise to modern mammals and again when some primates developed a good deal more neocortex in the area now known as the frontal lobe -- or the part of the brain that makes humans human.

    Several speakers, including Kurzweil and Diamandis, noted that humans are the only species that extend our biological reach -- we've done so for millennia with technologies that allow us to travel faster, increase our strength, or hear someone that is out of earshot (or on another continent). What we're starting to do now is integrate that technology more deeply into our biologies, be it through transplantable organs fabricated from a patient's own cells or implantable machines that are placed inside the body to alter or improve its performance (like pacemakers).

    As nanotechnology marches further into the realm of the ever-smaller-and-more-capable, tiny machines are going to become a regular part of medical therapies and our everyday lives. Moreover, we've begun to understand the body more like a machine itself; that is, that biology (and genetics) is the software driving our bodily hardware. We're already seeing this in the lab via gene therapies, 3-D printed organs, and stem cell treatments -- the reprogramming of the human machine by recoding the software.

    Further, harkening back to the aforementioned brain map, the ability to model all of the body's most complex functions on supercomputers means we're rapidly going to become better and better at fixing what's broken, optimizing what doesn't work well, and ultimately enhancing both our bodies and our minds with implants and other technologies. How? "In the future, machines will become more molecular," Church said. In other words, converging breakthroughs in biocompatible materials, 3-D printing, stem cell technologies, and genetics will lead to new kinds of machines that look less like a smartphone and more like biological objects. And if the cyborg-like nature of this biotech-heavy future makes you uncomfortable, there's not much you can do about it. "We already augment ourselves extensively," Church told the audience. "Get used to it."