Publisher's Synopsis
A bold, inspiring, and multi-disciplinary exploration of cutting-edge human knowledge and capabilities-and how to harness their awesome, but terrifying potential
In Superconvergence, leading futurist and OneShared.World founder Jamie Metzl explores how genome sequencing, gene editing, artificial intelligence, and other technologies are not only changing our lives, but catalyzing each other in radical and accelerating ways. These technologies have the potential to improve our health, feed billions of people, supercharge our economies, and store essential information for millions of years, but can also-if we are not careful-do immeasurable harm.
The challenge we face is that while the ability to engineer the world around us is advancing exponentially, our processes for understanding the scope, scale, and implications of these changes is only increasing linearly and our capacity to govern our godlike capabilities wisely is only inching forward glacially. Luckily, in Jamie Metzl we have a thinker who has followed this phenomenon for decades and who integrates science, history, politics, and international affairs to envision a future that many specialists, almost by definition, cannot see. In Superconvergence, Metzl gives us the definitive account of the technological precipice on which we stand and the map to where we go from here.
