In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a spacecraft and its crew are miniaturized and injected into an astronaut’s body to remove a life-threatening blood clot. While this Academy Award-winning movie, later novelized by Isaac Asimov, seemed like pure fantasy at the time, it foreshadowed a potential revolution in medicine: the integration of ever-smaller, sophisticated sensors into our bodies, connecting human beings directly to the internet.
This concept, often referred to as the “internet of beings,” could represent the third and ultimate phase of the internet’s evolution. Following the initial phase of linking computers and the subsequent phase of connecting everyday objects, the next step involves global information systems interfacing directly with our organs. This scenario, recently discussed by natural scientists at the Prototypes for Humanity conference in Dubai, is becoming technically feasible, with significant implications for individuals, industries, and societies.
The Promise and Peril of Digitizing Human Bodies
The idea of digitizing human bodies evokes both dreams and nightmares. On one hand, some Silicon Valley visionaries dream of achieving immortality, while on the other, security experts express concerns that the risks of hacking bodies could surpass current cybersecurity challenges. In my forthcoming book, Internet of Beings, I explore at least three radical consequences of this technology.
Revolutionizing Health Monitoring
Firstly, permanent health monitoring could make it significantly easier to detect diseases before they develop. Prevention is often more cost-effective than treatment, and sophisticated tracking could replace many drugs with less invasive measures, such as dietary changes or personalized exercise routines. Millions of deaths could be prevented through timely alerts. In the United States alone, 170,000 of the 805,000 annual heart attacks are “silent,” as individuals fail to recognize the symptoms.
Biorobots: Beyond Monitoring
Secondly, these sensors, better described as biorobots, may soon not only monitor the body but actively heal it. They could release aspirin upon detecting a blood clot or activate vaccines when viruses attack. The development of mRNA vaccines for COVID-19 may have opened this frontier. Advances in gene editing technologies could even lead to biorobots capable of performing microsurgery with minuscule protein-made “scissors” to repair damaged DNA.
Transforming Medical Research
Thirdly, medical research and drug discovery will undergo a profound transformation. Currently, scientists propose hypotheses about substances that might work against certain conditions and then test them through expensive, time-consuming trials. In the era of the internet of beings, this process could reverse: vast databases would generate patterns indicating what works for a problem, and scientists would work backward to understand why. Solutions could be developed more quickly, affordably, and precisely.
Radical Transformations in Medicine
The era of one-size-fits-all medicine is already ending, but the internet of beings could take it much further. Individuals might receive daily advice on medication doses tailored to micro-changes such as body temperature or sleep quality. The organization of medical research itself could transform radically. Enormous datasets from bodies living natural lives might reveal unexpected insights, such as the link between headaches and walking patterns or the interactions between brains and feet.
Currently, research focuses on specific diseases and organs. In the future, this focus could shift towards increasingly sophisticated “digital twins”—virtual models of a person’s biology updated in real-time using their health data. These simulations could be used to test treatments, predict bodily responses, and explore diseases before they manifest. Such a shift would fundamentally redefine the field of life sciences.
Dreams and Nightmares
The dream isn’t about defeating aging, as some transhumanists claim, but rather making healthcare accessible to all, saving national health services, defeating cancers, reaching poorer countries, and helping everyone live longer without disease. However, the nightmare lies in the potential loss of humanity as we digitize our bodies. The internet of beings represents one of the most fascinating possibilities technology offers, but it requires cautious exploration.
We are resuming the journey humanity embarked on during the optimistic years of the 1960s, when we first landed on an alien planet. Now, the alien territory we are exploring is ourselves.
