Careers
Synbiosis: Securing a Synthetic Sociotechnical Symbiosis
Navigating the exponential growth curves of technology with open biological principles
I have often marveled at the precise slice of the human timeline I was born into.
No previous generation has had as much unfettered access to information on the wonders of our world and the universe it resides in.
From as young as I can remember, libraries and then the internet allowed me to fall in love with learning and the scientific tools we use to do it. That’s why when I graduated from the School of Inquiry and Life Sciences at Asheville, I went to NC State with the intention of becoming a Biomedical Engineer and then a Medical Doctor. I wanted to be able to solve complex problems and help make people’s lives better.
However, as I studied to become an engineer, I took some extra classes on philosophy and sociology that caused me to think differently.
As I was learning about the tremendous upcoming advances in medical technology that I could be a part of, I thought about how few people would actually have access to them and about what causes the majority of human health problems. Poverty, pollution, food insecurity, lack of access to clean water, electricity, healthcare and affordable housing are the real threats to human health. These are resource problems and all of them are exacerbated by the pent-up effects of global inequality and anthropogenic climate change. It’s not a Malthusian problem, but a political one.
As the human population is predicted to climb to almost 10 billion people by 2050, I ask where we are supposed to acquire the resources to care for a rapidly growing and industrializing population?
I remember laying in bed awake late at night filled with a deep existential dread because of the lifestyle choices I am habituated to as a member of the modernized western world. Hyper aware of the technologically enabled luxuries I had access to. How privileged I was to have such unfettered access to the written word as the short walk to my local library and now we carry access to all the world’s knowledge with us at all times. The rate of increase in global systemic complexity was baffling even then, as the internet was something I still walked to.
It’s like being born near the end of a Rube-Goldberg machine. For the first 15 thousand-odd years it was just a ticking domino run. Gradually getting bigger and more complex, but a couple of centuries ago the last domino fell, knocked over a boulder onto a bagpipe which pushed air through a tuba launching a football at a goose that lays an egg that swings an axe, and then BAM! You have 8 Billion humans on the planet and unprecedented per capita energy consumption.
We live in a time period of exponential change.
Our global metabolic rate is insane. A popular study by Y.M Bar-On et. al on biomass distribution shows humans and our livestock account of 96% of the total mammal biomass on the planet, leaving only about 4% for all other wild mammals. As of the year 2000, about 37 percent of Earth’s land area was agricultural land, with a further half of the 30% forested land being managed for wood production. Vast amounts of the planet’s animals and plant matter exist only to satiate humans in some way, and that’s just accounting for our actual biological metabolism. Much of that energy goes to fuel the most energy-intensive organ in the body, our brains. If you doubt that thinking is our most expensive metabolic process then you haven’t thought about how much energy we burn running our external brain, the internet. We are fundamentally changing the way the biosphere of this planet captures and distributes energy. More and more, it captures energy, and then disproportionately distributes it to humanity.
Our current economic framework is to indefinitely extract carbon from the ground as the basis for our energy, agriculture, and consumable plastic products. This is the equivalent of quarrying stone from the foundation of your house in order to build a taller tower.
The vast majority of human consumption currently relies almost exclusively on petrochemicals, also known as fossil fuels.
Hydrocarbon molecules that were once part of organisms that lived and died eons ago and through geological processes were trapped underground, storing ancient solar energy and creating the climate we know today. Learning how to tap into these sources of concentrated energy was the inciting incident that allowed humanity to exert control over our environment and shape it according to our own needs. For this, I am immensely grateful. I and countless other humans have lived much richer, healthier, and longer lives because of this energy.
However, this shaping has had trade-offs and consequences.
In exchange for the knowledge and comforts, we have gained as a global industrialized society we have overtaxed the natural systems that all life relies on, started a new geological age (the Anthropocene), and planted us firmly at the heart of Earth’s 6th global mass extinction event. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Over the last several decades, as we’ve begun to understand the gravity of our environmental effects, scientists, researchers, and activists have worked diligently to find alternatives. This sort of global-scale disruption by a single species is not unprecedented. In fact, the last explosion of life that reshaped the atmosphere and the biological landscape of the world is inextricably linked to our own. Who was our great planet-shifting forebear? Tiny, green, Cyanobacteria who first cracked the secret to turning our carbon dioxide-rich early atmosphere into biomass, storing energy, and releasing breathable oxygen. It’s this oxygen that enables complex life to exist. This ancient carbon that we are largely tapping into to power our daily life and it’s this awesome natural biotechnology we are just beginning to understand. However, we do not have the luxury of millions of years for the planet’s living systems to adapt to thoughtless environmental changes, nor the excuse of ignorance to them. By creatively harnessing the same principles that allowed our tiny green forebears to shift the biosphere so dramatically we can embrace our agency and regain control, shifting our collective trajectory.
The very understanding of our biosphere that makes us culpable for the changes we cause, also have the capacity to help us prevent them.
We’ve learned that anything you can make from fossilized carbon can be made from already circulating carbon. With advances in biochemistry, genetic engineering, computational biology, and metabolic engineering we are learning to leverage the existing machinery of living systems to manufacture clean raw materials and recycle waste into valuable fuels and products. These new bio-based technologies have the potential to revolutionize how we relate to consumption as a society and they didn’t arrive a moment too soon. With deadlines for global carbon neutrality approaching in less than 30 years at maximum, there is still a tremendous amount of work yet to be done.
As I said before, I am grateful for the time in which I was born, but tempering that gratitude is the weight of responsibility.
Every choice I make on a daily basis has a cost for future generations. Merely by existing in our current economic framework I generate pounds of plastic waste and burn gallons of non-renewable petroleum just so that I can eat, drink and get to work. Because of my actions, my children could live in a world where ice sheets and polar bears are just as fantastical as dinosaurs. We’re told, the products and technologies that make our lives function exist in their current form because they are what is technologically and economically viable. How could anyone, as an individual, do anything to challenge this predestination?
Prevailing narratives lead us to believe that these technologies are deterministic and thus value-neutral.
The truth however is far more complicated. Studying the ethics of emerging technologies in undergrad highlighted that technology doesn’t just appear fully formed and free of bias. It is true that technologies develop in response to existing economic circumstances, however, these economic circumstances exist within the context of their political circumstances which, though disproportionately influenced by advantaged interests, are ultimately determined by the people.
People act with regard to their own perceived self-interest, both personal and collective, this forms the basis of their value system. Technology development is one of the strongest forms of expression of this value system. The implicit decisions that form the basis of design, self reinforce and permeate the society that is shaped by that technology. As new technologies emerge at an exponential rate, we are being forced to make an unprecedented number of foundational value decisions. Philosophy and Ethical decision-making, once abstract concepts only made tangible through their interpretation by humans through politics and law must rapidly become codified. Parse-able to non-human minds computing ethical decisions on the nanosecond scale. Our century, like many before it, will be one defined by the struggle to align the interests of the systems that define it, with the interests of those affected by them. The alignment of the economic good with the human good, the alignment of computational capacity with human values, and the alignment of human systems with natural ones.
To face these existential questions it is imperative that we examine our existing socioeconomic structures and build a system that emphasizes the collective good by providing open access to knowledge and democratizing science and the development of technology. In order to provide the best future for humanity and the planet, all stakeholders must be provided the ability to advocate for themselves.
Graduating directly into quarantine gave me time to experience what life is like for scientists and engineers outside of academia, industry, or government research. I’ve discovered that the open science community, especially in the field of biotechnology development, is thriving. With community labs, individual scientists and distributed teams of independent researchers are performing groundbreaking work with very limited resources. Seeing how much individuals motivated by pure curiosity can accomplish has proven to me the potential of open science. However, their work is only possible due to the pioneering work of researchers at academic and government institutions, which is being provided for the public good. It is this transparency, these collaborations, this unfettered access to information, resources, community, and mentorship that will be required to create the kind of world where everyone thrives. In order to face the exponential onslaught of new technology both being developed and implemented in all aspects of life, it is imperative that the public be allowed into the development process from the beginning. Minority voices and perspectives must be considered because otherwise, they will bear the brunt of the unintended consequences of blindly encoding the dominant value systems into the development process. Without transparency, open access, and clear value alignment the public will rightly resist the implementation of beneficial and often necessary technologies for fear of ceding even more power and control to those in the positions to make those decisions for them.
The designers of technology build systems that prioritize benefit to themselves, so it is important that technology designed to benefit everyone are designed by everyone or alternatively are verifiable to everyone.
The world that we are stepping into is a strange one.
The irreducible complexity of existence is still as inexplicable as ever, even as the amount that is visible to the human mind explodes. Our species is in the midst of an informational phase transition. We are finding the tools to describe the mechanisms of the chaos we have always been surrounded by, but to process the patterns we must make the abstract nature of human ethics discrete. The human mind was not built to compute at the scales required to parse the patterns of the infinitesimally small or the inconceivably large, to do that will require minds built from mathematics not biology. But that doesn’t mean that human insight will be useless or outmoded.
Mechanical minds process at unprecedented scales but there is plenty to do here at precedented scales. The great emergent dance of subjective human experience will continue to dwarf the complexity of computation. Billions of billions of neurons forming, billions of conscious beings thinking, learning, experiencing, and growing together in a world that our models can only hope to describe. As our new tools enable the scope of humanity's ability to ask “how can…” questions to balloon to the horizon, “why should…” still fall to us to determine.
The coming centuries will change humanity forever.
Just as your body is composed of many selves, cells once evolutionarily singular now one whole, new interconnected modes of thought are already shifting the global super organism of humanity towards shared consciousness. After all the nature of life is to compete, until that life becomes a part of one’s self. The strength of the human species has always been our ability to cooperate and integrate others into our-self. The cells of a body and the members of a tribe cooperate because they know that without the whole of which they are a part they will not survive. The qualitative experience of a human life will still be singular but it's up to us in this moment to build the systems that allow us all — humans, animals, plants, microbes, and machines — to align into that one whole. Because that is what nature has always done, and will continue to do, whether or not humans are here to see it.
Perhaps even, if we succeed at aligning the mind of our planet with its body we can even grow the available resources for all life, and ensure the safety of biodiversity not just on our planet but across the grand scale of space and time. Ensuring that our beautiful, inexplicable, exponential, Rube-Goldberg machine gets to keep ticking and becoming ever stranger and more wonderful. And with that note, I guess it’s time to get building.
Thomas James Alexander is a Biological Engineer (NCSU ’20) and Biotechnology Master’s student (BOKU Vienna) focused on building a sustainable, equitable, and circular global economy built with biology on open principles.
Living and learning at the intersection of the technical and the sociological he is interested in Open Science, Community Labs, Biohacking, DeSci, Writing, Governance, and Entrepreneurship.
You can follow him on Twitter (@SynbioUnsiloed), LinkedIn, or on many Discord communities as SynbioUnsiloed#4852
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