This “internet of beings” could be the third and ultimate phase of the internet’s evolution. After linking computers in the first phase and everyday objects in the second, global information systems would now connect directly to our organs. In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a spacecraft and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of an injured astronaut to remove a life-threatening blood clot from his brain.
The Academy Award-winning movie – later developed into a novel by Isaac Asimov – seemed like pure fantasy at the time. However, it anticipated what could be the next revolution in medicine: the idea that ever-smaller and more sophisticated sensors are about to enter our bodies, connecting human beings to the internet. According to natural scientists, who recently met in Dubai for a conference titledPrototypes for Humanity, this scenario is becoming technically feasible.
The impact on individuals, industries and societies will be enormous. The idea of digitising human bodies inspires both dreams and nightmares. Some Silicon Valley billionaires fantasise about living forever, while security experts worry that the risks of hacking bodies dwarf current cybersecurity concerns.
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As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Internet of Beings, this technology will have at least three radical consequences. First, permanent monitoring of health conditions will make it far easier to detect diseases before they develop. Treatmentcosts much morethan prevention, but sophisticated tracking could replace many drugs with less invasive measures – changes in diet or more personalised exercise routines.
In the US alone, 170,000 of the 805,000 heart attacks each year are“silent”because people don’t recognise the symptoms. Second, the sensors – better calledbiorobots, since they’ll probably be made of gel – are becoming capable of not just monitoring the body but actively healing it. They could release doses of aspirin when detecting a blood clot, or activate vaccines when viruses attack.
The mRNA vaccines developed for Covid may haveopened this frontier. Advances in gene editing technologies may even lead to biorobots that can perform microsurgery with minuscule protein-made “scissors” thatrepair damaged DNA. Third, and most important, medical research and drug discovery will be turned on its head.
Today, scientists propose hypotheses about substances that might work against certain conditions, then test them through expensive, time-consuming trials. In the internet of beings era, the process reverses: huge databases generate patterns showing what works for a problem, and scientists work backwards to understand why. Solutions will be developed much more quickly, cheaply and precisely.
The era ofone-size-fits-all medicine is already ending, but the internet of beings will go much further. Each person could receive daily advice on medication doses tailored to micro-changes such as body temperature or sleep quality. The organisation of medical research itself will transform radically.
Enormous amounts of data from bodies living natural lives might reveal that some headaches are caused by how we walk, or that brains and feet influence each other in unexpected ways. Research currently focuses on specific diseases and organs. In future, this could shift to the use of increasingly sophisticated“digital twins”– virtual models of a person’s biology that update in real time using their health data. These simulations can be used to test treatments, predict how the body will respond and explore disease before it appears.
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