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LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION SPECIAL REPORT
LIFEBOAT FOUNDATION SPECIAL REPORT
GETTING READY FOR THE COMING BIO-ECONOMY:
AN ADVANCE SURVEY
WITH TEN PRACTICAL TIPS
By Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Scott
Borg, 2000.
Print report!
The Arrival of the Bio-Economy
The existing landscape of business is about to undergo an
enormous upheaval. The new terrain that will emerge from this upheaval
will be different from anything we've seen before. Many familiar
structures will still be there, but they will be split apart and
re-arranged. Gigantic new landmarks will appear, supplanting the old
ones. The reason for this coming upheaval is an unprecedented
revolution in technology. Its effects will probably be greater than
even the information technology revolution. It will take us beyond
computers, beyond the communication revolution, beyond the networked
economy.
People have been slow to recognize the full extent of this
technological revolution, because it is not coming from one discipline.
Some people have described what is happening as "the life sciences
revolution". But it goes much deeper and encompasses much more than
the life sciences.
Many of the key developments are coming from the disciplines
that deal with molecules. In fact, it is tempting to say that the new
technology will once again put physical materials and physical
processes at the center of our economic development. But the most
important research efforts are not just concerned with the physical
aspects of the molecules they create and study. They are equally
concerned with the ways molecules embody information and with
information processes carried out at a molecular level.
A crucial aspect of what's happening is that physical processes
and information processes are merging at small physical scales. We've
long been used to this where DNA is concerned. We recognize that any
operation involving DNA is both a physical process and an information
process. But now we're seeing a similar approach being taken with a
host of other molecules. Researchers dealing with everything from
pharmaceuticals to ceramics have recently been growing accustomed to
thinking of those materials in terms of information.
Similar changes have been also taking place in disciplines that
deal with things larger and more diffuse than molecules. Even
engineers designing physical production lines are increasingly aware
that both their process and their product consist largely of carefully
deployed information. In fact, instead of treating matter and
information as different kinds of things, we are moving rapidly toward
a time when information processing and material production will become
a single activity. Matter will be treated simply as bits of
information to be manipulated. Fabricating something will be seen
mostly as a problem of getting the right bits of information into the
right order.
The most powerful new techniques for manipulating matter as
though it were information will initially be processes we describe as
"biological". We will start by using vats and herds of genetically
engineered organisms to make things we had previously made using
complex factories and chemical processing facilities. But soon
processes we describe as "mechanical" will be integrated into these
biological systems — so smoothly that the distinction between
biological
and non-biological processes will no longer apply.
As these new processes become commercially viable, old products
that were previously scarce will become plentiful. Indeed, any product
that can be made out of relatively common elements should be no problem
to manufacture at all. Diamonds, of a quality equaling or surpassed
anything in nature, will probably be turned out quite cheaply in sizes
inconceivable in the past. Medicines, tailored to specific immune
systems, will be synthesized rapidly to order. These kinds of
substances, after all, are just rearrangements of commonplace atoms,
like carbon. As we become increasingly able to manipulate matter at
the molecular level, such products will be among the first
benefits.
Meanwhile, new products will be created with amazing new
properties. Although these products will be made of the same atoms,
our increasing ability to place these atoms where we want them will
allow us to control the fine-grained structure of materials as never
before. One consequence is that we will be able to infuse materials
with minute physical and biological mechanisms. This will allow
products to respond and adapt to the way they are used — not just
at a
gross physical level, but at a molecular level. The resulting
materials won't just adapt passively, like clay receiving an
impression. They will adapt actively, like living creatures. What we
now think of as micro-processing will increasingly be diffused
throughout the material world.
This is the bio-economy. Bits of it have already arrived. The
rest of it will be arriving very soon.
Oh, My God, I Think It's Alive!
Frankenstein. Courtesy University
Studios.
Grasping the implications of these changes is a huge challenge.
It's obvious that the landscape for business will be very different.
But it is far from obvious what it will look like. To orient
ourselves, we will need a sense of what is bringing on the new features
and where they are likely to emerge. This is something we can make a
start at achieving by drawing on contributions from a diverse
collection of scientists, business people, engineers, and other
creative thinkers assembled by the Cap Gemini Ernst & Young Center for
Business Innovation in October 2000. Although the viewpoints
represented were diverse, the overall vision of the new landscape that
emerged from the discussions was surprisingly coherent.
Perhaps the most startling and important thing to mention, as
we begin describing this new bio-economic landscape, is that it seems
to be alive. Christopher Meyer and Stan Davis, the authors of
Blur,
have pointed out that this new technological era could even be called
the "alive economy". At every juncture, there is a sense of things
initiating their own behavior, modifying their behavior, and, in
general, doing things that weren't specifically part of their
design.
The most familiar examples are the systems intentionally
engineered to learn from our behavior. There are now cars, personal
computer applications, and household appliances that will modify their
future behavior on the basis of your past behavior, so that they
anticipate your preferences and prepare themselves for what you are
likely to do next. There are gasoline pumps, being test marketed, that
not only greet you by name, when you insert your credit card, but also
recommend other businesses and local attractions, selecting them on the
basis of the time of day, whether you're from out of town, and whatever
else the system knows about you. These systems adjust to our
responses, so that they become increasingly able to anticipate our
needs.
Other physical systems are capable of innovative learning at an
even more sophisticated level. Meyer delights in describing a
communications system now under development that allows an automobile
to adjust its traction controls with the aid of a remote computer,
while it is in the midst of a skid. In fractions of a second, the
remote computer generates a model of the car's interaction with its
physical environment and calculates appropriate corrective measures.
Even more remarkable, the central computer system will eventually take
account of the data collected from each car of that type, so that, as
more cars skid, the system will become better able to make the
necessary adjustments in all its cars. Each time the computer models
have been substantially improved, the computer will automatically beam
a software upgrade to every car in the system. In effect, each
automobile will be constantly learning, not just from its own
experiences, but from the experiences of all the other participating
automobiles. What's more, the system will be learning new things its
designers couldn't have foreseen.
Remarkable though these systems may seem, they are actually
among the simplest examples of the new technologies that are blurring
the distinction between living and non-living things. This is because
they operate on a relatively large scale and within well-defined
physical structures. A subtler and more complex example would be the
recent computer viruses and the latest technologies for hunting them
down and destroying them. Both of these involve numerous, small
packet-like programs that disperse and operate separately from each
other. As they operate, they spread, reproduce, modify themselves, and
carry out tasks, almost as though they were independent living
creatures.
The effect of these various life-like activities is to make the
behavior of many non-living systems "reflexive". Rather than wait for
a designer to alter their behavior, the systems are altering their own
behavior. In other words, they are doing things that constantly prompt
the prefix "self-". They have become self-managing, self-organizing,
self-correcting, self-extending, self-catalyzing, even
self-replicating. They are making active use of feedback loops to
examine the effect of their own past actions and to modify their future
actions. This constant reflexive activity is a major source of
innovations in these systems. Equally important, it gives the
innovations a purpose or direction that is to some extent determined by
the system itself.
Developments of this kind are not something the science, the
engineering, and the business theories of the past have prepared us
for. The mechanistic sciences most of us were taught as children went
to great lengths to stamp out the last traces of vitalism, teleology,
spontaneous generation, and any other doctrine that seemed in danger of
suggesting independent spirits might inhabit inert matter. Yet
everywhere we look along the frontiers of technology, physical systems
are exhibiting properties that are quite remote from what we think of
as inert.
To do full justice to this crucial feature of the new economy,
we need to accept the fact that biological organisms are not the only
things capable of behavior we associate with life.
Stuart Kauffman,
the theoretical biologist, has gone so far as to propose a new
definition of life that would encompass non-biological things. He
suggests that we simply consider any "autocatalytic, autonomous agents"
to be living things. By "autocatalytic", he means things that can
perform work and replicate themselves. By "autonomous", he means
things that can do this with no outside help or instructions, apart
from what was necessary to create the original, ancestor
entity.
This definition might include many things we would not want to
describe as "living". But by doing so, it draws attention to the fact
that non-living things can exhibit many properties that we have been in
danger of recognizing only in living things. Non-living things, like
living things, can interact with their environment in ways that change
both. More strikingly, collections of non-living things can
spontaneously organize themselves into larger systems that display a
high degree of order. Often the overall configurations and other
emergent features of these larger systems could not have been predicted
from the components alone. Finally, if they are sufficiently complex,
the non-living things and the systems into which they organize
themselves can undergo a kind of evolution over time.
Tip #1: Learn to Let Things Operate
Slightly Out of Control
Learning to deal effectively with systems that behave like
living things means learning to accept a considerable degree of
disorder or unpredictability. Whatever else it is, life is controlled
chaos — as anyone who has raised children can testify. This chaos
can be
managed, but it can't be eliminated. And even if you could eliminate
it, you wouldn't want to, because it is out if this chaos that the most
valuable things arise.
The first mottos for anyone dealing with systems that seem
alive are, therefore, very simple: Don't try to control what you
can't control. Don't try to plan what you can't plan. And more than
that: Allow uncertainties. Give each system room to learn. Make
spaces in which useful things can happen.
For managers overseeing systems that behave as though alive,
this need to accept uncertainties can be very unnerving, but it is also
exciting. Eric Clapton captured the predicament when he described what
it was like to start performing a song with his early band Cream: "We
knew we were going to come out the other end together, but we had no
idea how we were going to get there, or what we were going to be doing
in the meantime." Often what looks like disorder is really new kinds
of order in the process of emerging. An effective manager needs to
recognize the new possibilities and the new kinds of order that will
emerge from the barely controlled chaos. Then the manager needs to
seize on the better prospects and give them the support they need to
come to fruition.
Many companies, especially in the chemical and pharmaceutical
industries, are already applying these strategies very successfully in
their research programs. Instead of taking a "rational design"
approach, carefully selecting the molecules they will test, the new
researchers will randomly generate molecules that have some of the
qualities they are looking for. Then they will use further random
processes to explore combinations that they might not have otherwise
investigated.
Other companies, especially some of the high-tech incubators
and venture capitalists, are applying these same strategies
successfully in their business development policies. Instead of
employing stringent criteria for choosing investment candidates, or
trying to pick the absolute best prospect in a given business
category, they will purposely fund a range of enterprises in a general
business area. Then when these enterprises have had a chance to
operate, the investing business will select the most promising
candidates and provide them with further capital, so that they can grow
rapidly. George Overholser, whose division of Capital One is one of
the companies employing this strategy, summarizes the method as "seed,
select, and amplify."
The Big Things Now Are the Tiny
Things
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Lifeboat Foundation Scientific Advisory Board member Thom
LaBean
used the self-assembling properties of DNA to
produce trillions of the letters "D",
"N", and "A". |
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Managing things that are slightly out of control requires a
clear sense of where they're headed and where you want them to go.
This is where the new role of technologies dealing with very small
things becomes a crucial guide. We're already used to a high degree of
miniaturization, because so much of the information revolution was
founded on micro-circuitry. Microchips are among the smallest, as well
as among the most complex products humans have ever manufactured. But
even the miniaturization we're used to seeing in microchips is a very
modest achievement compared to what's coming next.
New levels of miniaturization are resulting from converging
lines of research, coming from several fields. Interestingly enough,
many of the discoveries that are bringing on the bio-economy were
originally byproducts of other investigations. Molecular genetics, in
addition to what it has revealed about genetics and biological
evolution, has provided a wealth of insights into processes involving
complex molecules. This has already resulted in the use of DNA as a
molecular-scale structural material and in DNA motors that can propel
molecular-scale structures. Materials science, in addition to what it
has discovered about the molecular foundations of larger scale material
properties, has generated new phenomena by the juxtaposition of
heterogeneous molecules. This is resulting in new products, such as
ceramics for electronic uses, where the crucial functions are being
carried out at a molecular level.
Meanwhile, other disciplines dealing with things only slightly
bigger than molecules have opened the way to a miniature realm of more
diverse possibilities. Cell biology, while investigating the
mechanics of membranes and tissues, has uncovered a wealth of devices
and processes that could have other applications. The structure and
functions of things like mitochondria, for example, suggest ways of
physically engineering processes that deal with only a few molecules at
a time. Micro-electronics, in addition to creating smaller and more
powerful microchips, has made physical construction at a microscopic
level into a fairly routine activity. One consequence is that
microchips are now being used as containers and channels for chemical
processes, such as DNA tests, that use only microscopic quantities of
the reactive substances.
These new methods for dealing with miniature processes have
already produced a whole series of technological marvels. Engineers at
the German company MicroTech are developing a mechanical submarine
small enough to travel through human arteries, ducts, and fluids. It
will have chemical or thermal guidance systems and be used to dislodge
blockages or to deliver medications. Sandia National Laboratories,
meanwhile, has demonstrated its micro-engineering capabilities by
producing an intricate mechanical timepiece with a clock face only a
millimeter across.
Devices like these, however, are physically huge, compared with
the advances that have recently been achieved by true nanotechnology.
After a long period of engineering for engineering's sake, this
discipline has finally begun building potentially useful products of
great intricacy at molecular scales. Much of the most exciting work
involves carbon nanotubes. These are essentially sheets of carbon
atoms, arranged in hexagons, and curled into ever-extendable cylinders
as small as a billionth of a meter in diameter. Engineers at a number
of universities and corporate laboratories are now using nanotubes to
conduct electricity in circuits so tiny the nanowires are only a few
dozen atoms across. Other experimenters are looking at non-electronic
uses for nanotubes. To help manipulate things of this size, there are
now several rival brands of nano-tweezers, including one type made of
carbon nano-fibers and another type made of DNA. These devices make it
possible, not only to build prototype machines at a nanoscale, but to
start thinking about what a nano-production line might look
like.
Living organisms are, of course, already operating
nano-production lines inside their own cells and across collections of
cells. Our increasing ability to manipulate genetic material gives us
increasing control over these naturally occurring molecular factories.
We can already change their locations, their numbers, and their scale
of production. We are even beginning to find ways to alter the nature
of their output, so that organisms produce chemical products slightly
different from what any living thing has produced before.
Tip #2: Think Small, Think Very, Very Small
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Fluorescence microscopy image of bacteria which have been genetically
engineered to produce the green fluorescent protein. The amount of
protein produced by each bacterium is under the control of a genetic
circuit. Mathematical analysis of naturally occurring circuits as well
as the engineering of artificial gene circuits is a rapidly expanding
area of research at the interface of physics and
biology. |
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The rise of micro- and molecular processes is one of the forces
greatly altering the business landscape. The new opportunities-and the
new competitors-for some aspect of your activities will soon involve
developments at the micro- or molecular level. If you're running a
company, the material components of your supply chain will probably be
the first things affected. Some of your supplies — and possibly
some of
your products as well — will soon be produced by vats of bacteria
or
other micro-organisms.
Industrial production in a wide range of industries will need
to be drastically reengineered — not because of new insights into
the
large-scale organization of factories and processing plants, but
because of new approaches to processes too small to see. Metabolix has
already developed a process that uses genetically engineered yeast to
produce plastics. DuPont has developed a kind of bacteria that turns
out polyesters. Several companies are developing organisms that will
yield larger quantities and higher concentrations of ethanol for
automobile fuel.
Many of these developments are already far beyond the
experimental stage. They have already been established as commercial
operations and, in some cases, are already very profitable. A number
of drug companies, for example, are using genetically engineered
animals to produce drugs in large quantities that had previously been
difficult to synthesize even in small quantities. In fact, through the
work of companies like Genzyme, huge chemical plants have been replaced
in some instances by small herds of farm animals or a few tanks of
micro-organisms. At a more classically industrial scale, several big
agri-chemical companies have discovered that the biggest competitive
threat to their operations comes not from other big agri-chemical
businesses, but from molecular-scale innovations by biotech companies.
By making crops pest-resistant or changing their nutritional
requirements, these genetic innovations threaten to make entire
categories of agri-chemicals superfluous.
Meanwhile, whole families of materials, devices, and processes
that never before existed are showing promise of becoming commonplace,
thanks to our growing ability to manipulate matter at a molecular or
near-molecular level. Merely being able to stack carbon atoms more
precisely, for example, will result in new substances with amazing
properties. A simple cable made of carbon nanotubes would be more than
twenty times stronger than steel, with only one-sixth the weight. It
would conduct electricity as well as copper and conduct heat better
than diamond — the most efficient heat conductor known. It would
feel
like plastic or polished wood when you held it by the sides, but it
would feel cold at the ends, because it would conduct heat rapidly away
from your finger. With some additional discoveries involving composite
materials, you could build a car out of it that would bounce, rather
than be crushed in a collision. But the greatest use for such a
substance would be to construct entirely new things, things that could
be built of no other substance, things we haven't even thought of yet,
because they would have seemed impossible to make.
Nothing's Separated Any Longer by the Old
Divisions
Divisions are fading...
The boundary between living and non-living things is only one
of the divisions that is being dissolved. Cybernetics — and
information
science in the broadest sense — is providing a conceptual bridge
between
numerous fields that have previously been regarded as separate. We've
learned to see almost everything in terms of information, whether it's
the genome of a fruit fly or the behavior of economic agents. What's
more, in order to store and process our knowledge using computers and
other kinds of information technology, we have set about coding almost
everything we know in digital form. Above all, we've grown used to
taking data from one domain and translating it into another domain,
either for storage or for active processing. We've learned, in
Christopher Meyer's words, that "Code is code."
While information science is providing a conceptual common
ground, molecular science is reducing almost everything to a physical
common ground. Once we're dealing directly with molecules, it doesn't
matter whether those molecules are part of a human, a car, a tomato, a
sheep, or a moon rock. The likelihood of finding certain atoms and
compounds in certain settings might be remote. But once a particular
set of molecules are present, it doesn't matter what they're part of.
Their behavior will need to be understood and shaped entirely by forces
and mechanisms present at the molecular level.
The effect of these cybernetic and molecular approaches has
been to create a multitude of practical intersections between fields
that were formerly quite separate. Spinning through the combinations
can almost make one feel dizzy. Computer models originally developed
to deal with problems in molecular genetics have turned out to be of
use to highway planners. Mechanical engineering, cell biology, and
organic chemistry are being combined deal with collections of molecules
inside cells that function like machines. Materials science, which was
already a mixture of chemistry and physics, is being combined with
electronic engineering to produce new kinds of microchips. Molecular
biology, chemical engineering, and agronomy are being combined to
develop new processes for producing chemicals. Agriculture, medicine,
genetic engineering, pharmacology, and food processing are being
combined to produce foodstuffs with special nutritional and medicinal
properties.
This merging of disciplines is very different from the unifying
movement of past science, in which every field tended to become
physics. In fact, it sometimes seems as though the current movement is
going the other way. When the theories of physics and chemistry are
expanded to take account of complex, emergent phenomena, they begin to
resemble areas of biology and even areas of the arts.
The industries associated with all these scientific and
engineering disciplines will soon be transformed just as thoroughly as
the disciplines on which they are based. Making sense of the
changes — figuring out where they are coming from and where they
are
headed — can be difficult precisely because the new developments
are no
longer contained by old categories. But the breakdown of the old
categories is itself a powerful indicator of where to
look.
Tip #3: Look First in the Cracks and
Shadows
Over the next couple decades, the most important new
developments are likely to happen between and across the standard
categories we use to define industries and scientific disciplines.
Already numerous commercial process have been created by putting pairs
of disciplines together at a molecular and informational level. Animal
husbandry and pharmacology have been combined into "biopharming", which
uses genetically engineered animals to produce difficult-to-synthesize
drugs. Molecular biology and micro-electronics have been combined into
"moletronics", which is leading to new treatments for neurological
damage. In fact, nearly every area of science and engineering is
currently being applied in some novel way to solve problems that
weren't previously regarded as part of that field.
These kinds of developments can be characterized by the very
fact that they are so hard to classify. Nexia, for example, is already
producing an incredibly strong spiderweb-based material called
BioSteel, using the milk glands of genetically engineered goats. Is
this an achievement in materials science, biology, or chemistry? It's
all of these, but if you were making a survey of what has been
happening recently in those separate fields, you'd be likely to miss
this development altogether.
Sometimes the new technologies combine and cross disciplines in
such startling ways as to seem almost comical. Neurobiologists at the
University of Arizona, for example, are equipping moths with tiny
transceivers wired directly into the insect's nervous system, so that
the moths become radio-controlled. The Defense Department is funding
the project, because moths can smell TNT and could be used to detect
land mines. A more general application will probably be agricultural
pest control. Clearly the new initiatives that are bringing on the
bio-economy don't fit into the old, well-established
categories.
I Dream of Genies — Don't You?
Jeannie. Courtesy Sony Pictures
Television.
This new world — a world where inert objects take on a
life of
their own, where life emerges where you least expect it, and where once
remote categories are combined in startling ways — is the world of
pop
culture dreams and nightmares. One of the more benign versions of this
pop culture vision can be found in Disney. The same Magic Kingdom
where pixilated scientists invent the future is the one where
Volkswagen Beetles take the initiative to rescue you when you're in
trouble, where fires ignite in fireplaces when you enter rooms, where
furniture adjusts to make you more comfortable, and where the dishes
sing "Be Our Guest".
It's a toy maker's world, so it shouldn't be too surprising
that toy makers have been among the first to make this dream more real.
Hasbro has a number of toys that could be used as emblems of inert
matter made animate through technology. In collaboration with iRobot,
for example, it is currently offering a doll called My Real Baby that
reacts to the way it is treated by making appropriate sounds and using
appropriate facial expressions. If you hug it, it coos. If you
neglect it, it cries for attention. Gradually, as it "learns to
talk",
the doll tells you how it "feels" about what it is experiencing,
shaping your behavior as you shape its behavior.
As we become better at controlling our environment, our ability
to step physically into a virtual reality becomes ever greater. The
stimuli for an increasing range of human experiences can be stored,
transmitted, and re-experienced with increasing completeness and
reliably. This raises interesting questions about our ability to
distinguish "real reality" from virtual reality, and about when the
distinction really matters. As Overholser puts it with chilling
simplicity, "Imagine a world where you can't trust your senses or your
emotions." What would it do to people to live in such a world? Or,
evoking the magnetic tape commercial, "Imagine a world where you truly
don't know, 'Is it live or is it Memorex?'" Is this the world we are
rapidly moving into?
Changing our environments is, of course, just a start. While
many dream of having a genie, others are inspired by the new technology
to dream of being a genie — or having a genie for a
child.
Remarkable new enhancements to human life are rapidly becoming
available through active implants and performance-enhancing drugs.
Many of these devices are being pioneered as part of efforts to help
the injured and disabled. But once they have been developed, they
could easily be used to help normal, healthy people become more able.
Will students in the future be forbidden to use performance-enhancing
drugs when taking their SATs, the way athletes today are forbidden to
use drugs when competing in sports events? Or will the use of new,
safer drugs actually be encouraged, the way we currently encourage
people to take their vitamins?
But why wait until humans are so fully formed as to need
remedial help? Why not start the process even earlier through
genetically enhanced offspring? Now that we can identify many of the
genes responsible for specific traits, what's to stop us from inserting
them into embryos whose parents want to raise children with those
traits? At the moment, this might seem an extreme length to go to, but
what if an embryo's genes were already going to be altered to replace
some obviously defective ones? Why not add a few extra good ones at
the same time?
The genes are not the only aspect of reproduction where the
features of the offspring could be technologically adjusted. In
addition to selecting their baby's genes, Gio Gutierrez of the
Institute for Alternative Futures suggests that people might soon be
able to accomplish most of the mechanics of reproduction through
ex-corporal gestation and birth. If this happened, we could face the
moral dilemmas associated with the artificial wombs in
Aldous Huxley's
vision of the future. Once the conditions for gestation were a matter
of setting the controls, would every baby be given the same "optimum"
setting? Or would some babies be given "less than optimum" settings,
so they would blend in better with their communities and adjust better
to their probable life styles?
Almost everything humans aspire to in their physical and mental
development could be achieved more readily with the assistance of
bio-engineering. But almost every form that this biological assistance
could take would have some disturbing consequences.
What, Me Worry?
Should we be worried? You betcha. But worried about what? If
the world is really changing in profound ways, many of our worries are
likely to be misplaced. While we're fretting about the ghosts of past
dangers, real monsters could be quietly growing in places we used to
think were safe. Instead of debating policies regarding reproduction
and robots, where we are in danger of having too much control, maybe we
should be paying more attention to the areas where we might lose
control. Unintentionally released micro-weeds could upset our ecology
far more rapidly and seriously than intentionally created humanoids.
In the words of Stan Davis, "it's the green goo we need to be worried
about," not the robot monsters. But how do we tell the illusory ghosts
from the real monsters? And how do we prevent the real monsters from
getting loose?
The fascinating and frightening thing about so many of these
technical innovations is how easily and quickly the benign dream can
turn into a nightmare. What does living in a virtual reality, for
example, do to people mentally and emotionally?
Richard Pascale, the
management and technology expert, points out that it might increasingly
teach people to treat all of their surroundings, including other
people, as though they are virtual, with virtual emotions and virtual
consciousnesses. The whole world then becomes something like a video
game. For the small, but significant portion of the population that
already has trouble telling what is real, this could easily result in
an increasing tendency to engage in Columbine-style shooting
sprees.
The story that regularly haunts us when we are presented with
an awesome new technology is "The Sorcerer's Apprentice". Dozens of
films, plays, and television dramas have retold the fable in a variety
of guises. Translated into contemporary terms, "The Sorcerer's
Apprentice" is a story in which a scientist leaves an extraordinary
technology in the hands of someone without a deep grasp of the
underlying concepts. Like any number of technological innovations,
from nuclear power to program trading, the technology gets out of hand,
producing unexpected and terrifying consequences. The person who put
the technology into operation has no idea of how to control it. In
Goethe's poem, Dukas' music, and Disney's cartoon, the scientist
returns and puts things to rights. In real life, we know such a rescue
is unlikely. The fable seems especially appropriate to the
bio-economic revolution, because the marching broomsticks of the
original have much in common with the formerly inert systems the
bio-economy has brought to life.
The fact that the general population is well aware of the
general danger adds another layer of worries to our more fundamental
ones. In addition to the question of how comfortable we ourselves are
with the new technologies, we need to consider the question of how
comfortable the general population will be with these
technologies.
Juan
Enriquez, who has written about the impact of biotechnology in the
Harvard Business Review, argues that the biggest obstacle to the wider
application of genetic engineering is the public's fear of it. This
fear is already threatening the sale of genetically engineered produce
by forcing its prices down and causing trade barriers to be erected to
it. The result is that the application of genetic engineering to food
production is in danger of being considerably slowed down. This could
lead to higher food prices, which much of the world can't afford, less
nutritious food, and greater use of pesticides.
Thus, in
addition to
our own worries, we need to worry about the fact that other people are
worried.
Tip #4: Open Everything to the Spotlight Right Away
Most of the dangers people are worrying about actually look
less dangerous on closer inspection. One common fear, for example, is
that genetically engineered foods will contain mysterious, alien
chemicals, which will somehow cause cancer or damage our systems in
other ways. But most of the chemicals in genetically engineered foods
are not mysterious or alien. They are commonly occurring substances
that have been extensively studied for years. Furthermore, most of the
chemicals in foods altered by genetic engineering are things we eat
routinely in other foods or in the same foods, but in different
proportions. In sweet corn, for example, what the genetic engineers
have done is reduce the quantity of the enzymes that turn sugar into
starch, so that when the corn is several days old, it is chemically
closer to the way it is when first picked.
Another common fear, as the new technology is introduced, is
that machines will somehow become rivals to humans. Many people are
frightened that machines will somehow take over human prerogatives,
exhibit human consciousness, and pursue agendas at odds with human
agendas.
Antonio Damasio, the distinguished neurologist,
assures us,
however, that the analogies between human consciousness and the
properties exhibited by machines are too limited and superficial to be
worth worrying about. There is a huge difference between storing the
stimuli for an experience in digital form, which we already do in CDs
and DVDs, and recreating the consciousness necessary to have that
experience. A consciousness, Damasio argues, is so deeply bound up
with its physical sub-systems that to recreate a human consciousness
would be to recreate a human.
Whatever the foundations for people's fears, a full disclosure
of the new technology, its current uses, and its implications seems far
more likely to reduce people's worries, than to trigger new
ones.
Executives from Monsanto have regularly argued that the general public
doesn't know enough science to evaluate information on genetic
engineering and that more extensive labelling will only serve to
frighten and confuse them. But since so many of the common fears are
fears of the unknown, reluctance to inform the public is probably doing
even Monsanto's own interests considerable harm.
The fact that there are some serious and undeniable dangers in
the new technology should make the businesses involved even more
willing to accept disclosure and regulation. Even the most skeptical
of researchers have suggested that there should some stringent controls
on our experiments with biologically engineered organisms and with
nanotechnology.
There are ways of making food
pest-resistant, for
example, that can introduce substances into it that humans shouldn't
eat. There are fibers producible by nano-processes that may turn out
to have long-term biological effects like those of asbestos. A single
bad judgement on the part of one bio-economy company could set back
development for everyone. Government regulation could provide a
precious service to new business development by helping to prevent
this. If people in the bio-economic businesses get involved in the
regulatory effort soon enough, they will be able to make sure the
regulations are shaped most by the people who are most informed, not
the people who are least informed.
Are We Trying to Manage Living Organisms?
The problem for business, as the bio-economy takes hold, is to
find management strategies that will allow the new technologies to be
applied, not just in a responsible way, but also in a highly efficient
way. We shouldn't assume that the old management strategies will
survive a technological revolution of this magnitude. Most of the old
strategies were introduced to facilitate the kind of mechanical heavy
industry that the bio-economic technology is replacing. But what will
the new ways of doing business look like?
Christopher Meyer points out that the habits of mind we develop
for dealing with the bio-economy at the technical level will also
affect how we organize things at the business level. Interviews with
biotechnology executives by researchers from the Center for Business
Innovation confirm that the language they use and the way they think
about business strategy are different from what would be found in more
traditional businesses.
An executive at Maxygen, for example, talked
of his company extending exploratory pseudopods, as though it were an
amoeba, and contemplating division when its pseudopods flowed too far
in different directions. How useful are biological metaphors for
understanding business in the bio-economy?
There are a host of ways in which the business organizations in
which we operate resemble living organisms. They maintain a high
degree of order and complexity, while constantly changing many of their
components and activities. They encompass processes that are
indeterminate, spontaneous, unpredictable. They explore their
environment and conduct experiments that reveal the consequences of
various actions. They seize and exploit opportunities in a purposeful
manner. They grow. They adapt over time. They come into existence
— or
are born — and go out of existence — or die.
But there are also a host of ways in which business
organizations are not at all like living organisms. Replication,
especially replication of the same company type, carrying the same
"genes", is not the purpose of a business organization. In fact, it is
usually not considered desirable. Business organizations
are managed
to benefit shareholders, not offspring.
Business
organizations adapt
and evolve to produce greater wealth, unlike organisms, where evolution
does not necessarily favor systems that produce greater wealth.
Indeed, what is the equivalent of wealth for an organism?
Fat?
Highly
networked or matrix-managed business organizations often have
intersecting systems and units; whereas complex living organisms can
be divided fairly unambiguously into systems, which, in turn, divide
unambiguously into organs. Business organizations can be reorganized
to a great extent and survive; whereas "reorganizing" a living
organism to any considerable degree entails its death.
Organizational
death, especially when it involves absorption into another
organization, is not something a business organization necessarily
wants to avoid. Organizational death does not, for example, result in
the death of the organization's parts.
Tip #5: Don't Let Your Big Picture Be a
"Picture"
Trying to fit everything into a "big picture" may only cause
confusion
Because of the huge differences between business organizations
and biological organisms, analogies between the anatomies of the two
are often dangerously misleading. It might sound promising, for
example, to compare a business to a human body or to an individual
organ within the body. But Damasio draws our attention to the fact
that as soon as you try to say which part of the organization
corresponds to which part of the body, you run into
trouble.
Furthermore, anatomical metaphors do not guarantee or even necessarily
encourage bio-economic thinking. Some years ago, a General Motors
executive was heard to describe himself and the other senior management
as the brains of the organization, the company's middle management as
the rest of the nervous system, the workers as the muscles, and the
company's factories as the bones and internal organs. This kind of
thinking isn't exactly conducive to tapping the creative potential of
workers. It did not cause General Motors to prosper. And it is hardly
what the bio-economic revolution is all about.
But this does not mean all biological analogies are wrong.
Although there seem to be no good analogies between the anatomy of an
organism and that of a business, analogous processes and principles
abound. Damasio suggests, for example, that the problems of
communicating different kinds of information are shared by both
organisms and business organizations. Since human nervous systems deal
very effectively with these problems by employing different kinds of
channels for different kinds of information, Damasio proposes that
business organizations consider something similar.
The trick in such cases is not to use the biological metaphor
as an overall map or picture, but to look instead at the underlying
processes. The principles that organisms and business use to solve
problems might be fairly similar, even if the morphology is not. In
other words, "think iso-process, not isomorphism."
The Hollywood Style of Business Organization
The new ways of thinking, combined with the new means of
production, will give rise to new kinds of business organizations.
Business people who deal constantly with self-organizing, autonomous
systems in their work processes will be increasingly inclined to accept
and utilize similar systems in their business organizations.
Meanwhile, the new kinds of business enterprises will make new demands
on the teams of workers. This will make the way businesses are
organized very different than in the past.
Many of the future business organizations will have hardly any
permanent structure at all. Loosely organized groups will come
together to tackle short-term problems only to disperse again upon
achievement of their objectives. This sort of temporary,
self-organized structure will often be generated within large
corporations. But temporary organizational structures of this kind
will also be created independently.
There are a number of existing industries that already have
this sort of organizational structure that is likely to characterize
the bio-economy. These industries include film production, theater,
parts of the software industry, and many types of internet and
high-tech start-ups.
The author of this article has been
studying
these industries to get a better idea of what the future of business
organization might hold for all of us. All of these are highly fluid
industries where most of the effort is directed at producing a
prototype. The "prototype" could be a film negative, a theatrical
production, a software program, an internet business model, a
genetically engineered organism, or a bio-engineered process. In
general, it needs to be intellectual property that is easily scalable
and has the potential to produce large amounts of additional value with
only limited additional investment.
In these industries, a number of individual collaborators and
other relatively expensive organizational components will be assembled
to cooperate in the creation of the prototype. Although the resulting
organization will last only as long as it takes to create the
prototype, it will often be highly complex. Time will be a crucial
factor in budgeting at this stage, because the prototype will usually
be worth more if it is finished sooner, and because anything that
speeds the development process will reduce the amount of time the
complex and expensive production organization needs to be kept
together.
After the prototype has been created, the original organization
will be disbanded, and a leaner, less expensive organization will be
assigned the task of exploiting the prototype. All of the actual
profits will be made during this later stage, after the original
collaborators have moved on. Since many of the original collaborators
will be paid, in part, by being given a share in the profits generated
by the prototype, there will often be a wait before the collaborators
are fully rewarded for their efforts.
While the less expensive organization is beginning to exploit
the prototype, the original collaborators will already be working on
new prototypes in different collaborative combinations. Some of the
collaborators will have sustained or recurring relationships with other
collaborators or with regular customers, although others might not.
The ongoing relationships will often be crucial in getting a new
collaborative organization assembled quickly. Everybody in this sort
of business is a free agent, but there might still be unions and rules
as to how various categories of contributors must be
treated.
This whole style of doing business is self-organizing in the
sense that the organizing impetus can come from any potential
participant. Individual collaborators will often take the initiative
in getting new projects underway. One part of the necessary
organization will often be in place well before the others. But there
are no rules as to where the project will come from or how it will get
going. A project will be actually carried through to the completion of
a prototype whenever it can attract enough talent or enough financing.
Thus, although there are participants who are very powerful, this whole
method of organizing business activity is remarkably
decentralized.
Tip #6: Promote Collective, Self-Organizing
Processes
To harness the power of numerous self-organizing systems, it
will probably be necessary for other industries to create the
conditions for something analogous to the Hollywood style of business
organization. This is not just a matter of making spaces in which
useful things can happen, although that's certainly a necessary
precondition. It's a matter setting things up so that the kind of
structures you want will form, and so that they will do the sort of
things you need done.
You need to start by making sure the environment is seeded with
the necessary components. This means making sure that people with the
necessary talents are present and available. A significant portion of
these people should have worked on similar projects before, so that
they have an idea of how a collaborative process works. Some of the
people might already be formed into working groups. These slightly
larger-scale components will help the new whole to form faster,
although there is a danger that the whole will be less perfectly
tailored to the project at hand.
Once the necessary components are present, you need to foster
connections between them. Be sure to let anyone at any level have a
shot at initiating a project that could result in the required kind of
prototype. As the organization begins to come together, you will want
to encourage feedback between all the parts. If the structure is going
to be self-modifying and self-managing, it will need the resulting
information to assess how it is doing. Establish a general standard
for identifying the critical mass at which a project should get the
final go-ahead. This will help the emerging colony to establish a
common purpose as soon as possible.
Above all, you will want to create a collaborative atmosphere.
This usually means offering rewards that the individual components of
the colony won't be able to achieve alone, but which they will be able
to achieve fairly readily by combining forces.
Ideally,
there should
be some small-scale, interim rewards, rather than just the big reward
at the end. A good example here are the startup firms that compensate
their workers when key milestones are reached and new rounds of venture
funding are secured. The governing idea throughout should be to get
the components of the organization working closely together without
dictating precisely what they should do.
These principles do not have to be instituted all at once, nor
is their use confined to business organizations with no permanent
structure.
Angus Bell of Glaxo Wellcome points out that the same
policies that provide the foundation for the new business organizations
will also benefit more traditional organizations. Existing
organizational structures may need to be broken down or trimmed back,
but they do not always need to be eliminated. The important thing is
to encourage the sort of self-organizing processes associated with
living things.
What It Means for Something to Bloom
Life flourishes when things are out of equilibrium and when
there are gradients to be exploited. In fact, strictly speaking, life
is dependent on energy differentials that are being reduced or
dissipated. It exists on the border between two energy states and
rides the flow between them.
Dorion Sagan, the science writer, drives
the point home by saying that living things — and business
ventures — are
like tornados. They operate only where there is a severe pressure
gradient and last only as long as the gradient lasts.
Biological growth is frequently opportunistic and explosive.
This is especially true when new species are emerging and when they are
occupying new ecological niches. The species that occupy a new niche
first will not only make it harder for competitors to become
established there; they will also have more time to become better
adapted to that niche.
Biological systems will typically generate huge numbers of
seeds, shoots, or other radiations, in order that a small number will
survive and flourish. When this happens, the variations among new
seeds or other radiations are often crucial to ensuring the success of
at least some of them. Pascale reminds us that diversity in a life
form allows it to evolve more rapidly and makes it less vulnerable to
changing environmental conditions. In fact, if a life form lacks
sufficient variation, it will often fail to have any surviving
descendents.
Biological systems often accomplish seemly simple things in
very roundabout ways. Take metabolism, for example. It doesn't
utilize the energy in organic molecules by "burning" them in one
elegantly simple process and powering things with the resulting heat.
Instead, it gradually breaks down the molecules in many complicated
steps, involving numerous chemical reactions and complex physical
structures.
Even today, a chemical engineer who
presented a schematic
diagram for a system as complicated as metabolism would be considered
incompetent or insane. But the very intricacy of the metabolic process
is what makes metabolism so enormously efficient. Every step captures
nearly all the power it releases.
The complexity of biological processes, such as the ones found
in metabolism, is also what makes them so extraordinarily robust. When
one piece of the mechanism breaks down, there are generally alternative
routes for reaching the same end. This is very different from the kind
of design that is still most commonly admired in engineering and
business.
Engineers, who seek traditional mechanical
efficiencies, are
taught to remove from their designs anything that seems dispensable.
In this kind of engineering, redundancy is considered a luxury. In
biology, it is almost the reverse: lack of redundancy is the luxury.
In this respect, as in most others, biological efficiency looks very
different from mechanical efficiency.
Tip #7: Look for Biological Efficiencies,
Not Mechanical Ones
The main requirement for any business person who wants to
utilize biological efficiencies is a frame of mind very different from
the one that ruled industrial era businesses.
To start with, you need to think of business activities that
are founded on one-time, irreversible transitions, not as unusual
situations, but as the norm.
Don't worry about creating
sustained,
steady-state processes. Above all, don't hesitate to exploit a
business opportunity, simply because it's not sustainable. Instead,
plan an exit strategy. Figure out how you are going to apply your
resources to a succeeding project without too much downtime or too
many transition costs. As Overholser puts it, "think next game, not
end game."
Don't try to create a business that will
reach a mature
form and then endure with only modest changes. Instead, try to create
a business that will survive by constantly transforming
itself.
Be prodigal to save money and time. There are often huge
benefits to be had from letting vast numbers of things proliferate, so
that a few can survive. This requires a very different attitude than
the practice of always aiming for a high success rate. It means
utilizing "efficient waste." The areas where this is likely to be a
good strategy are those where rapid innovation and expansion is
necessary.
In other words, they are moments analogous to
the ones when
new species expand into new niches. As you let things proliferate in
the chosen areas, don't assume that consistency is always a good thing.
Encourage variance, including some extreme deviations from the norm.
It is through this variance that new opportunities are created and
seized.
When it comes to the things that require plans, it is important
not to let these plans be shaped by the assumptions of the industrial
era. Above all, don't assume you need to keep the designs of your
organization, your operations, or your products short and simple.
Utilizing biological efficiencies means recognizing that large numbers
of tiny parts can often be more efficient than small numbers of large
parts. It also means recognizing that complex structures can often be
superior to elegantly simple designs.
These principles lead to powerful new strategies for solving
problems at the level of molecular technology. Researchers at the
University of Wisconsin, for example, have made the first functional
DNA computer chip by aiming for biological efficiency, rather than the
mechanical kind.
Instead of trying to carry out one
sequence of
calculations with maximum speed and reliability, their strategy is to
let numerous potential answers proliferate and then eliminate the wrong
answers through a series of operations applied to the entire batch.
Researchers looking for new drugs have recently been employing a
similar strategy. They start with large populations of potentially
useful molecules. Then, by a mixture of chemical and computational
process, applied in successive steps to the entire batch, they
gradually eliminate the molecules less likely to be
effective.
The same principles can be equally beneficial at the level of
business organizations, especially when it comes to creating and
sustaining innovation.
As we move out of the industrial
era,
businesses as different as Boeing and Novartis have discovered that
having an elegantly simple flow chart or a cleanly rational
organizational schematic can be counterproductive when it comes to
developing new products. Their most intricate operations — the
ones that
would have generated the messiest flow charts — have often proved
to be
their most efficient ones.
Information Is Still the More Fundamental Reality
The fact that the bio-economy is moving beyond the information
technology economy doesn't mean that information is becoming any less
important. On the contrary, information — especially,
functionally
operative information — is the key to the
bio-economy.
If physical
processes and information processes are merging, then information
becomes a crucial aspect of everything. Focusing on the information,
in the bio-economy, is really just a way of focusing on how things are
structured. The things that contain the greatest density of usable
information — whether genetic DNA, human brains, or electronic
data
bases — are the things that have the greatest capacity to
structure other
things. In fact, information, if its usable, is essentially the power
to structure things.
The success of both organisms and businesses depends on how
they are handling information. To tell if an organism is adapting and
evolving successfully, you have to look at what's happening to its
genetic material. To tell if a business is adapting and evolving
successfully, you have to look at what's happening to its intellectual
resources.
The bio-economy makes the role of information in business more
conspicuous than ever before. If a business is going to exploit
one-time, irreversible transitions, and if it is going to be radically
reorganized for each project, then the way it preserves and manages
information becomes crucial. Indeed, when a business is reorganized
in a truly thoroughgoing way, often the only thing that will be
preserved, apart from the company's name and its legal shell, will be a
nexus of operative information.
Information can survive the death of a business, just as
genetic material can survive the death of an individual
organism.
The
components of a businesses often stand to gain when the business is
dismantled, not in immediate financial ways, but in the freeing of
intellectual resources. "When should businesses die?", you ask. "A
lot
sooner than they do", says Overholser, speaking in his role as a
venture capitalist for Capital One.
Businesses operating
after they
should have been shut down are not just wasting physical and financial
resources; they are also wasting information. Often when a business
dies, the information that's released will actively help its successor
businesses to flourish.
Tip #8: Expect the Value to be in the Source Codes
Biotechnology will make the patterns of investment and return
for industrial production look like the patterns for software
production. Large investments will be needed to produce
the prototype,
but remarkably small additional costs to reproduce and deploy
it.
Any
asset or component of a company that becomes a repository for
information will tend to have a much larger and more enduring value
than other assets and components. But in the bio-economy, the
information assets won't just be data bases, patents, and expert
personnel.
Juan Enriquez, for example, draws attention to the fact
that seed companies have soared in value over the last few years,
because seeds are repositories of information. Anything else that can
function as a "seed" will have a similar importance.
Managing information in the bio-economy will become even more
critical than in the era of information technology. The most valuable
assets of a company, apart from the combined expertise of its
employees, will often be ideas and data that could literally be
transmitted electronically at high speed to any part of the world. Yet
identifying these assets and channeling them in useful directions will
be very tricky.
Sharon Oriel reports that, in her job
managing
intellectual assets for Dow Chemical, the biggest problem is often
figuring out what those intellectual assets are and where they are
located. As businesses are more and more frequently reorganized,
restructured, acquired, or divested, the only way to be sure of coming
out ahead will be to keep track of where the operative information is
going and what's being done with it.
When Robots Get the Vote
Image of robot courtesy Small Art
Works.
All this, of course, has some dramatic political implications.
The political effect of the bio-economy will be not just "power to the
people", but "power to the networks". Dispersed, self-organizing
groups will become increasingly important. In the near future, they
may even be able to exert more influence than the highly centralized
organizations and massive concentrations of capital that have dominated
public policies throughout the recent industrial age.
Already, people
who agree on a political agenda can mount well-coordinated collective
actions with no central organization, no formal plan, and no
administrative system, apart from the internet itself. The protesters
targeting the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle were only the
best publicized of many recent examples.
Meanwhile, automated systems will make their influence felt
more directly in public affairs. They will not just be a means of
communication or a tool for groups that are already committed to a
political agenda. The automated systems will themselves be shapers of
policy. Public oversight and the guarding of public interests will be
increasingly facilitated by "bots" and other automatic agents.
Automated systems will increasingly become the arbiters of whether
things have been done properly and whether our shared values are being
served. As people see the merits of their contributions, the
intelligent systems will themselves be accorded considerable respect,
almost as though they were groups of animate beings.
Sherry
Turkle of
MIT tells us this effect will be reinforced by people's tendency to
form emotional relationships with anything that behaves as though it
possesses consciousness. Future political analysts will not just
discuss which policies the people support or the corporations support,
but also which ones the automated systems support.
The rise of networks and automated systems could even reshape
the formal boundaries of our democratic institutions.
Nova Spivack of
Lucid Ventures goes so far as to suggest that the new kinds of
production associated with the bio-economy will result in new kinds of
political units. He imagines countries breaking into numerous,
separate political entities, some coinciding with geographical regions,
but others residing in no particular locality at all. Furthermore,
these political units might regularly dissolve and regroup, so that the
entire geopolitical landscape becomes permanently fluid. This would
make our formal political institutions more like the decentralized,
self-organizing systems that will characterize other aspects of the
bio-economy.
While these kinds of changes are going on, the old systems of
corporate governance developed for the industrial economy will be
increasingly at odds with the new public interests and with the new
ways of doing business.
Dean
LeBaron, founder of Ballerymarch
Financial, claims that the most urgently needed reforms are the ones
that would make corporations more transparent. He argues it should be
easy for anyone who is interested to get information on directors'
votes, questions from analysts and shareholders, the reasoning behind
corporate decisions, and a wide variety of other things that are
currently kept secret. This information, in turn, would lead to other,
more structural reforms. Only in this way, LeBaron maintains, will
corporations be able to adjust to the dislocations that will come with
the rise of the bio-economy.
Tip #9: Don't Assume Politics Will Remain Less Changed Than Business
The big lesson here is to be careful about extrapolating
current political conditions into the future. In particular, don't
assume that the social or regulatory environment you are dealing with
now — whether favorable or unfavorable — will still be the
same in a few
years time.
These things are likely to change as much as
the
technology to which they are responding. The current conflicts between
innovative business practices and public institutions will probably in
large measure disappear — perhaps to be replaced by others.
Meanwhile,
corporate regulation and corporate governance will be accomplished in
different ways and have different consequences.
Monitoring the Arrival of the Bio-Economy
Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer anticipate that the
bio-economy will arrive in three waves: a biotech wave, a materials
science wave, and a nano-machine wave. These three waves will
overlap.
In fact, there are functioning examples cited in this article that
belong to each of these waves. But the peaks of these waves are likely
to come in this order.
The biotech wave is the first to arrive, initially
yielding new
drugs, better foods, better medical testing, and cheaper ways of
producing all these things. As the biotech wave gains momentum, it
will generate better and cheaper ways of producing an increasingly wide
range of materials and other products. Gradually, genetically
engineered organisms will be created that are capable of producing
substances very different from any naturally occurring organic
compounds. When this happens, every remaining area of material
production will be transformed by the bio-economy.
The materials science wave will come next and with it
the
production of new materials with properties that go beyond those of any
materials that have previously existed. Many of the products of the
materials science wave will be substances associated with
nanotechnology, but they won't require anything more than the most
rudimentary nano-machines for their fabrication. Mostly they will be
created by physical processes that involve self-extending or
self-catalyzing substances. As the materials science wave proceeds,
the distinction between biological processes and mechanical process at
a nanoscale will become increasingly blurred.
The nano-machine wave will be the culmination of the
bio-economic revolution. It will be characterized by mechanical
devices with multiple components that operate at a molecular
scale.
In
the early phase of the nano-machine wave, the molecular scale machines
will be relatively simple. Mostly, they will be devoted to fabricating
materials that can't easily be produced by other techniques, because
they are not self-extending and require more than simple
catalysis.
In
the middle phase, nano-machines will be used to perform tasks that are
more complicated and that require them to operate in more complicated
environments. This is the phase at which nano-machines will be used to
clean out arteries and repair human tissues.
In the final phase of the
nano-machine wave, the molecular scale machines will become
self-replicating. This self-replication will first become possible in
extremely special, artificially constructed environments, where all the
necessary components are present, and where there are a minimum of
obstacles. Later, self-replication may also become possible in less
special, naturally occurring environments, but this level of technology
will be vastly harder to achieve.
Tip #10: Watch for the Tipping Points in
These Technological Waves
The big unanswered question is how long it will be before these
three waves and their successive phases make their effects felt. It is
not safe to assume that the time spans here are large.
Our experience
with information technology, and especially with the internet, has
taught us how fast things can change. It took personal computers less
than a dozen years to transform the business world. It is taking the
internet even less long. Portions of the bio-economic revolution could
come on just as fast, and probably will.
But it would also be dangerous to assume that every stage of
the bio-economic revolution will move along quickly.
If
we have
recently witnessed many technologies developing faster than anyone
could have imagined, we have also witnessed technologies that started
off well and then, for a variety of reasons, stalled. Computers have
seemed on the verge of accomplishing things like machine translation
and speech recognition for over thirty years. Yet there are still huge
obstacles in those fields that need to be overcome. Space travel is
perhaps an even more striking example. When the first two manned
spaceflights landed on the moon in 1969, was there anyone who would
have believed we would still be preoccupied with sublunar orbital
missions over thirty years later?
In short, there is no safe, conservative approach to preparing
for the coming bio-economy. If you assume it will happen slowly, you
are likely to be wiped out by a wave of technology you never saw
coming. But if you bet your company's future on the rapid arrival of
any single phase of the bio-economic revolution, you may go under
before you catch the wave.
There is really no answer, except to anticipate the kind of
things that are likely to happen and to watch closely for them. The
successive waves of the bio-economy will produce a number of tipping
points at which business conditions will abruptly change.
One type of
tipping point will come when the waves of technology first break into
new domains. These are the tipping points that will typically occur in
laboratories, where technical breakthroughs are achieved for the first
time.
Another type of tipping point will come when the
successive
waves of technology become economically viable in the domains the
technology has entered. Estimating where we are between these two will
be one of the greatest challenges for anyone developing a new business
enterprise, but this is also where the greatest opportunities will lie.
Conclusion: The Big Themes Underlying All These New
Developments
If we step back and try to take a long-range view of these
developments, there are three big themes that emerge. These
themes are
not unique to the bio-economy. They were already becoming conspicuous
in the economy generated by information technology. But as we move
into the bio-economy, all three themes seem to be coming into their own
as never before.
The first big theme is that everything, in the future,
will be
saturated with ideas. This is not just a matter of information
permeating everything. It's a matter of thought or concepts dominating
the economy in a new way. Because the bio-economy is founded on the
merging of physical processes and information processes, the way
information is organized becomes even more important than it was in the
era of information technology. This has significant consequences for
the kind of people who will end up running things.
If the information
technology economy seemed like nerd heaven, the bio-economy will be
ultra-nerd heaven. Being "intellectual" still won't be a good way to
get rich. But being anti-intellectual will be a very good way to get
poor. In the bio-economic world we are moving into, ideas matter more
than material things, even if you want to accumulate material things.
Materialism, in other words, is dead. Idealism, at least a kind of
"cybernetic idealism", is what rules.
The second big theme is that everything will be
recognized to
depend on creativity. This new emphasis on creativity in business can
already be seen in all the recent talk of "moving beyond zero-sum
games".
But the bio-economy will make it increasingly
obvious that all
viable businesses are about creating value, not just shifting it
around. Those who think "there's nothing new under the sun", or
they've "heard it all before", will discover they've become irrelevant
long before they figure out why. Meanwhile, the truly creative will
find that the development of unique prototypes in numerous areas of
business will gave ample scope to their talents.
The third big theme is that everything will become
increasingly
individualized.
This, too, is something that was already
happening as
a result of information technology. For several years now, there has
been talk of "mass customization", of "personalizing" information media
and advertising, and of providing "unique solutions." But the
bio-economy takes this to a whole new level.
Kathryn Johnson of Health
Forum points out that the bio-economy will rapidly result in the
increasing customization of nearly everything having to do with an
individual's health. From there, she says, the new customization will
soon spread to other aspects of human life.
Dan
Teitelbaum
of Bios
Group predicts, "Product differentiation will be so complete, everyone
will get a unique product every time they buy something."
Jordan
Pollack,
the celebrated robot designer at Brandeis University, predicts
there will soon be automatic design systems that will design individual
products for individual customers, even if no similar product exists.
This new automation could hardly be further away from the uniformity
associated with industrial machines. In this new business environment,
looking for the lowest common denominator — or indeed, for any
"universal
need" — will be a good prescription for business failure.
Business in
the bio-economy will cater to individuality as never
before.
One of the things that makes these themes stand out is that
business is moving toward a deeper appreciation of ideas, creativity,
and individuality at a time when these concepts have gone completely
out of fashion in much of the academic world.
In the
humanities,
social sciences, and arts, throughout much of America and Europe, ideas
are currently being cynically dismissed as the rationalizations of
special interests. Materialism, especially marxist materialism, is
regarded as more realistic than theories that emphasize
thought.
The
idea that people are capable of radical creativity, introducing
something new and making a break with the past, is viewed with great
skepticism. Above all, individualism is widely regarded as bad or as
an illusion. Tailoring things to individual humans is regarded as
politically suspect. Attributing great consequences to the thoughts or
actions of individuals is thought to be naive or
reactionary.
Business, as we move into the bio-economy, is becoming the
sector of American and European life that appreciates ideas, encourages
creativity, and celebrates individuality. It's taking the liberal
humanist tradition of the West to a higher level at the very point when
the liberal arts and humanities seem to have given up on it. There is
a great irony in this for anyone old enough to remember the "corporate
man" of yesteryear. There is also an important clue to the future.
For it's business today, more than academia or the arts, that is making
the future happen.
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