Jim Karkanias is a Partner in Applied Research at Microsoft. Starting in 2006, he joined Microsoft in a quest to apply his Information Theory background to a venture called “Health Solutions Group.” A firm believer in the transformative potential of emerging technologies – and an advocate for it’s progress – Jim is Advisor at Northwest Association for Biomedical Research, and a Board member at Washington Biotechnology & Biomedical Association.
I caught up with Jim about his perspectives on the transition of emerging technologies into the mainstream, and his thoughts on the technologies and trends most likely to bring us beyond our present human potential and human experience (what we refer to here at Sentient Potential as the “ultimate ethical precipice”).
Jim was quick to lay out the trends and perspectives that he considers to be leading us in the direction of augmentation, and below I’ll cover each:
Understanding my background in Positive Psychology, Jim begins by talking about how a “perspective towards growth over amelioration is something that’s effecting the medical world as well. He sees a number of reasons as to why our present medical model has such a reactive approach today, but believes that the tides are turning in some small circles to get a philosophy of Positivism imbued into the world of medicine.
It may not be every average doctor with a practice to run who considers the further reaches and potential of the research and technology of the field, but folks like Jim (and teams like his – upwards of 400 people) who focus specifically on this subject are certainly furthering the field.
Jim also talks about the topic of making the “Black Box” if Biology into a “White Box.” The “Black Box” implies that we don’t know exactly what’s happening in our bodies, or why, but we see correlations and effects and can “tinker” to find solutions that seem to work. Though certainly further along than we were 50 years ago, this experimental approach is still somewhat crude – and Jim believes that as we understand the true workings of our bodies and minds (through discoveries in various fields that allow us to truly understand systems), we’ll have a greater ability to build off of our natural systems and augment ourselves.
This “Black Box” approach is also what Jim believes has contributed to our “reactive” model of medicine:
Essentially, if you can’t fix something until it breaks, you probably don’t want to build off of that some “thing” that you don’t understand. That “thing” being health, and/or our physical and mental capacities.
In any given system, from the brain to the liver, the functions can be understood as bundles of information patterns (chemical and electric in the case of us humans). When we “see things happen” in a system, an information flow is being manipulated. It can be broken down to numbers, and numbers can be added mechanically and electronically – and it’s interesting to think about “health” as an information flow as well.
When I spoke to Jim about his feelings towards the massive and drastic changes that emerging technologies seem to be presenting us with, he stated that overall he sees opportunity. “The old paradigm has to make way for the new one,” he says. All in all, I’d have to say that although I feel both the tremendous potential for “good” and “bad” yields of such technology, it’s seeming inevitability makes it ideal to think positively (while of course keeping our eyes on the risks as well). Jim resonated with my notion of the efficiency/efficacy-based model of technolog adoption by stating:
True, and heck… I’ll probably be one of those people – though I’ll be darn vigilant about how I do it.
To learn more about what Jim is up to, check out Microsoft Health here.
Back to overclocking myself with a little Java and getting back to work, another big thanks to Jim for taking the time for today’s interview.
-Daniel Faggella
ByDan
The sixth and final episode of our series AGI Governance on The Trajectory is with Eliezer Yudkowsky, famed AI safety thinker and Co-founder at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Eliezer…
ByDan
Given a long enough time horizon, all things (individuals, species, forms) die out completely or transform into something else. Lucretius and the second law of thermodynamics concur here. In this…
ByDan
This new installment of the Worthy Successor series is an interview with the brilliant Martin Rees – British cosmologist, astrophysicist, and 60th President of the Royal Society. In 2024, he…
ByDan
1) Augmentation is nothing new Until recently, “augmented reality” seemed to only have a place in video games and science fiction movies. Though at the time of this writing, “AR”…
ByDan
Much of the current AGI dialogue takes place under the umbrella of an unquestioned anthropocentric perspective. We can often take for granted that: The purpose of this very brief article…
ByDan
I am still of the belief that two of the most important conversations we can have with regards to the future of humanity and of sentient life in general are…
ByDan
I’ve been diving into “Human Enhancement” (Oxford) as of late, and came across a topic that was bristling in my own mind before I saw the name of the chapter….
ByDan
Close to a year before I enrolled at UPENN for Martin Seligman’s Masters in Applied Positive Psychology program, I had first heard of the term “positive psychology” from a man…
ByDan
Staying on the path of digging into Nietzsche, I was able to catch up recently with Professor Mark Anderson of Nashiville’s Belmont University. Specializing in Nietzsche and the ancient greeks, Prof….
