EDNA – Enhanced DNA

I’ve written a new short (31k words) e-book with my good friend and fellow futurologist Tracey Follows. It is available on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or in fact in any other Amazon region. It’s only available as an e-book now, but we do plan to make a paperback version soon.

It’s about the kind of technology we ought to expect to see in the next few decades from the biotech industry. I invented EDNA, but if I can, so can the biotech industry. It would greatly increase longevity, keep us in good health and eventually allow us to connect our minds to advanced AI and communicate with each other telepathically, even share minds. On the downside, if it were implemented by a nasty regime, it could be used for genocide, eugenics, to enslave people or to give us a Very Big Brother.

An EDNA system would put advanced biotechnology and IT into every cell of our bodies and enable interfacing to almost every aspect of our current biology, and also provide a means to edit, replace, enhance, mediate and control almost every aspect of it. It will in due course give us the full capability to change not only the nature of humanity, but all the rest of nature. The first stages could make us transhuman, the later stages could make us full cybernetic hybrids with AI, and the third stages could make us post-human, with most of the biological DNA, proteins, organelles and other cellular inclusions and processes given by nature fully edited and interfaced to our future desires, and the system could be applied across as much of nature as we wish. It is therefore not only a tool for transhumanism, but for transbiology.

What we call EDNA is not an actual implementation, but a proposed mechanism that we believe is entirely feasible, and thus an illustration of the kind of system we should reasonably expect to appear in the coming decades, a warning of what to look out for and what it could do.