The coming years are going to be insane. I say this figuratively and literally. The primary reason is because society is about to enter a phase transition.  This is what a phase transition looks like. Water at 99°C is hot, stable, behaves like a liquid and follows the laws of hydrodynamics. At 101°C, water becomes a gas, making it chaotic, expansive, and following a different set of physical laws. The difference between 2026 and 203X is the difference between 99°C and 101°C. To make this tangible. Imagine you’ve become a proficient swimmer. Mastering your stroke, breathing and pacing. The water is a predictable substrate that you use to model your decisions. This is life at 99°C. At 101°C the pool turns to steam. You stroke your arms but don’t move. You kick and don’t find resistance. Your swimming proficiency is no longer an asset, it’s a liability. Your muscle memory is a mismatch for the new environment. You have to unlearn to relearn. This is what life planning is going to feel like going forward. For most of history, you could make a pretty decent guess about what the future would look like. If you were a farmer in 1400, you knew your grandchild would probably be a farmer in 1450. That was even true in 2003 when I entered college. One could confidently attend college, select a career, plan a profession, and map out retirement by age 65. We felt confident in these plans because we depended on broad trends (coarse graining) that reliably predicted the future. Things may change here and there, but not enough to give you any pause in your life-planning decision making. That stability is now gone. For example, my son is 20 and neither he nor I have any idea how to think about his life. Should he go to college? Is college still relevant? What should he learn? Life planning shortcuts are now dead. No one knows. Before, having a five year plan was responsible. Now it’s reckless because the world is moving faster than we can model. The speed of reality exceeds the speed of the observer. This is the source of the low level anxiety that many people feel. Humans are prediction machines. When an error emerges from what you predicted (water) to what you get (steam), the body registers it as trauma.  It leaves us in a state of chronic hyper-vigilance, scanning a horizon that refuses to sit still. In this new reality, the move is not to have better maps, but to build better systems. This is what I’ve been building with Blueprint. An algorithmic system of health and decision making that moves as fast as technology, allowing me to evolve alongside.  The more I detach from ideas, norms and expectations, the smoother the glide. The hardest part is letting go of what we know and trust. This is part of a series of essays that I’ve been writing for my upcoming book Warriors & Caretakers of Existence. A plan on what the human race does when giving birth to super intelligence. If we want the extraordinary existence that is on offer, we’ll need to fight for it.

In a medical milestone, a customized base editor was developed, characterized in human and mouse cells, tested in mice, studied for safety in non-human primates, cleared by @US_FDA for clinical trial use, manufactured as a complex with an LNP, and dosed into a baby with a severe, rapidly progressing genetic disease... all in an astounding 7 months. Best of all, the infant patient shows apparent benefit. Congratulations to @kiranmusunuru, Rebecca Ahrens-Nicklas, and other team members for this heroic and inspiring effort, which has implications for the hundreds of millions of patients that suffer from thousands of genetic diseases. drive.google.com/file/d/1Jfk…