The dawn of Homo-deus

Vaccine access. Vaccine passports. A fork in the human genome has begun. We are at the genesis of new kind of human.

Over the last year and some change we as a global civilisation have been experiencing a pandemic, if you didn’t know already. Covid has impacted pretty much every corner of the globe, yes the earth is globular I see you flat-earthers, at this point. And it’s affected both rich and poor alike.

Now however, with the launch of vaccines, it is the richer countries in the world that are first in line to get the vaccine out to their populations.

Within the wealthy nations that are getting vaccines there are conspiracy theorists, and skeptics are opting out entirely.

So what we now have is a big chunk of the planetary population not getting vaccinated due to choice or no choice.

Governments around the world are now looking into vaccines passports. Basically some form of verifiable credential to prove you have received an efficacious vaccine or treatment. This pass would grant access to pre-covid activities such as travel, live sports, concerts, etc. Sounds great. The flip side of this is that it locks out the rest, the unvaccinated. They effectively become segregated within society.

Beyond the socioeconomic side there’s the part that sparks my intrigue most, the biological.

By receiving a vaccine, any vaccine, that individual should gain some form of immunity to the disease or ailment that are in being Inoculated against. Thus giving them a competitive advantage over all those haven’t. In the wild this would be akin to an evolutionary change that divides a species into subspecies. Such as Darwin’s finches.

There are rapid advancements being made in the genomic space. New technologies see prices decreasing fast and this in turn drives up usage and increases the potential applications. Technologies such as CRISPR which is apparently short for Clustered Regular Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeat, catchy ay? CRISPR isn’t a drug but a technique of gene-editing. So scientists will be and are able to fix glitches in DNA so this will lead to the eliminating numerous conditions such as cystic-fibrosis and many cancers.

Neuralink, another of Elon’s babies, are developing a brain-machine interface that will ultimately give us a fighting chance against advancing AI (Elon’s words not mine). But in the shortly term it aims to give people with motor-neural conditions a new lease on (of) life. The Neuralink gets implanted in the brain and interprets neutrons firing in the brain, that interpreted data is then used for controlling your bionic arm for example.

These are just some of the technologies that will shape our future and as you can see these will provide significant advantages to the people that receive/benefit from them. Yeah they promise a “normal” life to many that currently struggle or suffer but there will come a time when these are leveraged to augment people that already lead “normal” lives. They will become the precursors of a new type of human. This transcendence will not be equally available to all.

This is the dawn of Homo-deus.

Further reading