Sonia Arrison, writer and futurist and author of 100 Plus, a very interesting new book about a huge revolution in health care, Sonja thanks so much for appearing on Techcrunch TV.
Thanks Andrew, happy to be here.
Sonia, in your book you've laid out completely what is radically new world of health care in which we will serve our own medical parts, it would double our life expectancy in the 21st century. What I would like you to talk about now is the economic opportunities, what that will mean because we have a lot of entrepreneurs who believe, I think, watching this show, that health care is the next horizon and I'm very interested in where you see the real economic opportunities, the entrepreneurial opportunities, in this new world that you lay out?
Well there is certainly a lot of opportunities in health care right now but if you take a longer view and look at a world where we are living to 150 years in a healthy state, so people are healthy, chronic disease gets pushed out and comes on later and later in life. What that means is there is entirely new market segments that didn't exist before.
There's older people in their 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, 100s who are still healthy and energetic and want to do things. And maybe they're even still working, because remember, if you can live to 150 in a healthy state you're not going to be retiring at 65. So, that changes things. That changes the workforce, it changes workforce issues.
It changes education, I think there is going to be a lot of opportunities in the education space because when you are alive and healthy for that long, you may not want to be in the same career the entire time. You might get bored. I mean maybe you'll want to be a doctor for part of your life, maybe you'll want to be a lawyer for part of your life and an entrepreneur for part your life.
And you'll have to go back and retrain and so we may redefine what retirement means. Retirement may come to not mean this large chunk of time at the end of your life. where you go golfing and what have you. It may come to mean a large chunk of time that you take off at different times during your life so that you can re-train for a brand new career, and then go back to work.
I know you've served, for example, on the congressional advisory commission on electronic commerce and the California commission on internet political practices. How central is the internet in this new world?
Oh, I, I think it is key in our world for all sorts of reasons.
In terms of this new world of health care where we double our life expectancy, what will be role of the internet in shaping this eco-system?
Well, I think that right now you can, you can see it, there is burgeoning market in terms of reporting devices. Wearable devices that measure heart rate and blood pressure and all these sorts of things and I am sure that market will continue to grow. And the internet is important in that of course because then you can upload data wirelessly and easily, which makes it more convenient.
Will the internet become a network for sharing healthcare, devices, and certainly information and knowledge will it make it affordable? I know that Jeremy Ripkin is just coming out with a new book, he will be on the show in the next month. On the third industrial revolution, and I see the revolution you are describing as being sent to this third industrial revolution.
He makes energy central, but I think healthcare will be equally central.
Right and nano-technology I think will be a part of the next revolution as well. And the ability and the internet will be important in terms of the ability to download blueprints for 3-D printing of things that we might use in healthcare, as well as other consumer goods. so there's communication of course with your doctor and with communities, maybe, if you're involved with citizen science already.
People are using the internet to share their genomic data. There's so many different ways that the internet is, and will be involved in the future in health care and new economy is going forward.
3D printing is becoming increasingly hard wired, the Editor-in-Chief, Chris Anderson, I mean, he's writing a book about it. What will be the role of greedy printing in this healthcare revolution? We will be able to literally print our own body parts?
That's a good question, because right now of course, 3D printing of organs does already exist. I was holding a 3D printed human blood vessel in my hand just a few months ago. Organovo, a company that does it, was demo-ing it. And it's just really quite fascinating, what they do is instead of putting ink in the printer they put cells, and instead of paper they have a biodegradable scaffold and they put the cells one on top of each other andEventually it forms a biological structure.
And so, yes, you actually could imagine a future in which you print your own organs at home. That would, of course, be assuming the FDA would let you, and all the government controls approved it. But in theory it's definitely possible.
It might have some rather crude reprecussions, I would guess, if we could each print our own body parts, right? Right, well then you would have to know what to do with them, of course. And I don't think anybody is going to be installing their own blood vessels anytime soon. What about the down side, though?
What are the problems of this to occur to me? The first is privacy, you already see with this genomic issue, networks like 23 and Me in which some people argue, we are going to be revealing our DNA to the network which will certainly undermine questions of privacy. And the second of course is over-population.
If everyone could live to 150, we already have a severely over-populated world, what impact will this have on the environment? Right. Those are two very good questions. On the privacy issue, I think that that's something that's going to, it's already a worry, and it's something that going to continue to be a worry, and I think we're going have to track that really closely.
Do you think there may be a need, given the radical changes there, could there be a need for significant new legislation to protect individual privacy in this new world?
I think the government is always trying to keep up with technology. I mean, it is always that something new comes along and the old rules don't quite fit it. And I think in that context, there will, new legistation will be be required. Because it will be catching up with the reality of genomic privacy and other things going forward.
On the environmental question...
Yeah. That clearly is a significant issue.
Yes. Very important andlegitimate issue. In fact, I have an entire chapter on the enviroment and population in my book. And it is a worry it turns out it's not as bad as you would think on first glance. The reason for that, is that world population growth rate has actually been declining quite dramatically over the last little while.
I have a chart in the book. If you look at the chart it's going straight down like that and the UN predicts that the fertility rates will be under 2.1 by 2050,which is less then replacement value so world population is actually predicted to decline at some point. Now, that could change, of course, because if we are living longer and healther there will be more people around because they won't dying at a faster rate than they're dying now.
But if you talk to demographers, what they will tell you is that really heavy population growth really comes from birth not from fewer deaths. And that's because, of course, when you have births you can have multiple births, and when one person doesn't die it's only one person at The University of Chicago who did a simulation and looked at the population of Sweden because Sweden is one of those countries that is always a good test case because they have good records.
And they said, OK, what would happen if the entire population of Sweden were to become immortal tomorrow? And so this isn't living to 150. This is immortal, like never dying, right? What would happen to the population?
And you would, I would have thought that the population would completely explode. And using modeling that the World Bank uses, the UN uses, the figure that they came up with was that, the population of Sweden would only grow by 22 percent over a hundred years, which isn't nearly as much as you think it would grow.
So I think the answer to the population question is yes, the population will grow if people are not dying quite as quickly as they would normally die. But it's not going to grow exponentially and it's not going to grow as much as we would assume it would grow and so that's at least Something to mitigate that fear.
And then, on the other side is the resource issue, which I think is related to it, in terms of, if we have more people, how do we provide for them, right? I mean, all the food and the water and all the different resources that humans consume, and I answer that question in the book as well.
The quick summary of it is that fear is based on some of the Malthusian idea that people just keep consuming and eventually we'll just run out of everything. And the thing that's wrong with that assumption, the reason why Malthus was wrong is that he forgot about a resource, and that resource is human capital.
And human capital is important because humans come up with ideas, then they innovate and they come up with different ways to provide resources and because of that, more humans usually means more innovation and that's why we don't run of things as population grows.
Finally, Sonya, this has been a fascinating interview. We're obviously at the very early stages of this revolution. Where are, in very concrete terms the entrepreneurial opportunities. What areas are literally changing now, where people might get involved in a startup or think about becoming pioneers of this new medicine?
I think there's two areas that are super important right now. One, of course, is in the bio-engineering itself. In the do-it-yourself biospace and the self-measurement space, and the genomic space, and I think a lot of folks in Silicon Valley and the tech community have already identified that. The second area I would say is in education, because as people live longer and we are already living longer, they are going to need to retrain, and of course we have all these different tools, of virtual reality that's coming along, that's going to make education even more exciting, the internet, of course, the Khan Academy.
All those types of things, and I think that's another area that entrepreneurs have already identified, but I think it's definitely going to grow and get bigger.
Sonya Arrison, the author of Hundred Plus. I want to thank you so much for appearing on Tech Crunch TV. This is a great subject, and I look forward to having you on again in the future.
Thanks, Andrew.
I mean, we've got a hundred more years, right? So we can do this many more times.
I'll be back.
The opportunities for entrepreneurs from this revolution, Sonia Arrison told me when she came into our San Francisco TechCrunchTV studio last week, are immense. From education to medical engineering start-ups to the 3-D printing of organs, this, she says, is the new promised land for technology entrepreneurs. I think Arrison is right. So it’s probably time to forget that new social network and focus on a start-up that guarantees the privacy of genomic data or enables the 3-D printing of blood vessels.
The dangers of this world are immense too, of course. From privacy and overpopulation to the dreadful boredom of living forever, Arrison’s healthcare revolution could represent a nightmare for us all. It’s Huxley’s Brave New World all over again, of course. Only this time, it might not be fictional.
