Digital Matters - Issue 38

Converging digital technologies will enable more voices to be heard. Initiative and referendum will become not biannual events at the polls but daily votes on the Web. And the issues raised by the discoveries and breakthroughs of the new economy will not be school uniforms or "micropork" -- they will be profound moral issues.

Consider health care. Now that Celera Genomics has success fully sequenced the human genome and has set about sequencing all 1 million proteins of the human body, it will not be long before all of us will carry, in our wallets, digital genetic-identification cards. These cards will more or less accurately predict such things as what will cause our death -- say, cancer or stroke -- and whether we will have late-onset diabetes or Alzheimer's. More important, these cards will also predict our children's health. And all of that data will be available to insurance companies.

No sane insurance company would knowingly underwrite someone who, in 10 years, is all but certain to die of cancer. Today, smokers pay double for life-insurance coverage -- even though they are not twice as likely to get sick as nonsmokers are. As genomic health information becomes systemic, there can be only one answer to the question of coverage: national health insurance. The Clintons botched it in 1993. The new economy will require it by 2007.

The political argument over the scope and design of national health insurance will be enormous -- because it won't be just about the instruction sets that are our genes. It will also be about altering those instruction sets, erasing some of them, and aborting fetuses that have instruction sets that are deemed "inconvenient" by parents. As Celera's Craig Venter points out, today you can make genomics-based choices about what kind of baby to have. In the not-too-distant future, you may be able to change, in utero, the genetic structure of your child. People who say that technology renders moot the issue of abortion have no idea what they are talking about. Genomics escalates the issue of abortion.

Converging digital technologies and genomics merge in the political sphere with the issue of personal privacy. What is private when everything about you is publicly known? Who protects your data from being misused, from being disseminated, from spinning beyond your control? I'm not talking about visiting porno.com or gambling on the Internet. I'm talking about all of your data being in play, being swapped and traded and flipped and leveraged through a maze of marketing companies and big corporations. I'm talking about someone, somewhere, compiling all of your information into an Internet profile that may make you unemployable (because your son's genetic code indicates a costly neurological disorder in his teenage years) or unreliable (because you have too much credit-card debt).

Before the decade is over, the privacy issue -- who owns your code -- will explode in the political arena. The debate will pit the vast majority of people (those who think that they own their codes) against the vast power of corporate interests (those who think that they need those codes to make rational business choices).

On the horizon is the issue of cloning and molecular engineering. Someday soon, one country or another is going to act on the idea that the surest path to survival lies in cloning its brightest and most capable people. It may sound like science fiction, but it is something that is routinely discussed in U.S. national-security circles. As mankind takes control of its evolution, it will inevitably seek to enhance its strengths and to depress its perceived weaknesses -- or to recapture what might have been lost. Consider this question: If your son or daughter were killed in an accident, would you avail yourself of the opportunity to clone that son or daughter? What will the law say about that?

These are only a few of the issues raised by new-economy technologies and scientific discoveries. There are literally hundreds of others -- all of which are gathering momentum, gaining speed, and heading straight for the political arena. They are all propelled by these new technologies. And these new technologies are, in turn, producing an era of exponential discovery. We have learned more about the human genome in the last year than we learned in all of the previous years of human existence. When we add speech-recognition technology to broadband, eliminating the need for typing, we will have universal Internet access: People will literally be able to tell the Internet what to do. When IBM completes its supercomputer known as Blue Gene, the science of proteomics (proteins) will advance 100-fold.

All of these things will happen, and they will each require a political response -- because they will touch pretty much everyone. The affectation that "politics is irrelevant" will no longer be tenable. New-economy technologies will literally redraw the lines of the atlas: Nations will break up, recombine, and reconstitute themselves. Borders will evaporate. New alliances will emerge. The shape and substance of geopolitics will be transformed.