2.4 Genetically digital

This 1984 video shows how the connection economy began. Simple technology, joined up using just a few wires. When the terminal linked up to the phone line, moving data around in the form of primitive email became possible.

As we look ahead and think about the code that might end up governing the humankind of our futures, our understanding of our genetic make-up, and how it has evolved so far, is useful.

Science is challenging existing assumptions we’ve had about our biology and yielding insights that reveal there are ‘real time’ changes in our biological systems.

So it is the case with what we code.

In human genetics, exosomes are ‘cell-derived vesicles that are present in many and perhaps all biological fluids’. They are the carriers of a series of flows of information. As digital humans, a similar function is performed by data. This has been happening since that first dial-up.

Now, our relationship to one another and what governs us as digital humans is a connective tissue we choose, in the form of the AI we install.

And we can postulate whether our carriers of genetic information are the coded protocols, apps and scripts we accept and live with, as extensions of ourselves.