The Future This Week: Transforming Humanity As We Know It

In The Future This Week, Serious Wonder explores humanity 2.0 in search of this week’s headlines of the future, from the development of a synthetic human genome to the creation of a macromolecule that’ll combat viruses. This week we’re also given a glimpse into a future where our transportation systems heavily rely on magnetic levitation and where our teachers could secretly be artificially intelligent robots.

Whether we’re transforming the way we transport or we’re transforming the human condition in its entirety, the future of which we’re developing will be beyond anything we’ve ever envisioned throughout the history of science fiction. As Mark Twain once said, “Truth is stranger than fiction,” and the truth of our emerging world will most certainly be stranger than anything we can possibly fathom. Welcome to the future!

A group of scientists gathered together to talk privately at Harvard Medical School in Boston, discussing the possibility of creating a synthetic human genome as a follow-up to the original Human Genome Project. SOURCE

Dubbed Jill Watson, this artificially intelligent program pretended to be a teaching assistant for 5 months for a class on artificial intelligence at the Georgia Institute of Technology – and no one even realized it. SOURCE

On May 10, Elon Musk’s vision for a hyperloop transportation system came into fruition for the very first time as it conducted its first ever test, with the pod propelling 300 mph down a test track using magnetic levitation. SOURCE

A group of researchers at IBM and the Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology in Singapore have come up with a macromolecule which they say may have the potential to treat and prevent multiple types of viruses. SOURCE