 Now, there are four technologies that are coming together to cause this huge change in what it means to be human. And I call these the grin technologies for genetics, robotics, information, and nanotechnology. And they're all accelerating on their own curve. The G in the grin technology is genetics. Actually, what this is really about is manipulating and understanding cells at their very most basic levels. This is not just genomics, it's also figuring out how to make proteins work that allow you to start having human beings create any substance they want inside their bodies in order to achieve whatever ends you might want. What you're seeing in the earliest phases, like in the next two or three years, are pharmaceutical results that should have pretty amazing outcomes. One of them is memory pills. Those should be on the market in three to five years. And these are pills that dramatically enhance your memory. And all of these enhancements usually follow the same path. They're usually originally aimed at somebody who's really sick, and in the case of memory pills that would be somebody with Alzheimer's. But then it moves out to the needy well, and then to the merely ambitious. Well, think of what memory pills can do to suppose you were trying to absorb a new language, suppose you were trying to get a law degree. While these memory drugs have amazing implications, for example, educational testing service, the people who do the SATs, they're already just scratching their head about whether this is going to change their business entirely. They make the case that whatever it is that these SATs test is something that's basic and innate in human nature. And well, suppose with these memory drugs, suppose that you can in effect buy an extra 200 or 400 points on your kid's SAT test with these memory. Well, think of what parents do now to get their kids into their most elite colleges. Everybody who's involved in creating these memory pills are convinced that this is the biggest thing since Viagra. This is going to be one of the great commercial products of all times. And there's never a reason to think that they're right. Other products that are in the near term pipeline include vaccines that cure addictions like smoking. Imagine what a smoking vaccine, and of course that's all working on the brain. It's all shutting off parts of the brain, returning it on at will with this chemistry. DARPA is very interested in conquering sleep. There's already an enhancement drug on the market called Madafinal, also known as Provigil. And what it does, it's not a stimulant. It's not like speed. It doesn't get you all wired and hyped. It just shuts off the human trigger to sleep. You just don't feel like going to sleep. And the only major side effect that anyone's noticed is that it increases your concentration somewhat. So when I wrote about this, I spent 40 hours awake under the influence. You tried it? I tried it. It's a prescription drug. You can get it from your internist. The magic words is to say, I have to fly to Tokyo and give a presentation. And I need to be sharp. Do you have anything for that? And the answer is, yes. As a matter of fact, we do. And the answer, well, anyway, so it's available on the market right now. And this is still the primitive stuff. And when I handed in my copy, my editor said, gee, this reads a lot cleaner than your stories usually do. So, enhancement or what? And that's just the first generation. The DARPA notes, for example, that whales and dolphins don't sleep the way we do. They can't. They're mammals. If they slept, they drown. So they've learned to turn on and turn off different parts of their brain to sleep a portion of the brain at the time. And DARPA says, wouldn't that be great if we could have that happen to our troops? And then what about hunger? A special forces troop goes through about 12,000 calories a day. It's like, you know, Phelps's metabolism. Well, 12,000 calories, you can't eat that much. I mean, it's like three meals ready to eat and 48 power bars. You can't even carry that much. And so they're trying to figure out how to solve this. And they thought, well, suppose that we just don't feed them at all for a week. You know, suppose they can just go without food. The way you do that is that we carry lots of energy around in our body all the time. And it's stored in our fat. And the trouble is that the mechanism to get at the fat energy is locked up because you normally can't access it unless you're starving. So they're saying, well, suppose we identified this mechanism and allowed it to trigger at will. And I'm writing this all down. And all of a sudden I realize that they're talking about triggering your ability to burn your fat at will. And I say, me, me, give some to me. You know, I mean, I've been working out for how long, you know, and to what effect, you know. And when you say something like that, they kind of DARPA, they kind of smile this little smile. And they say, the civilian implications of this technology have not eluded us. You know, dieting is like a $40 billion a year industry in this country. And if this ever works, it's over. That ends it. I was talking to a friend of mine who's a science and technology analyst who's very, very skeptical about all of these human enhancement technologies. And I'm finally telling her about this fat thing. And she says, it does what? And I tell her, you can burn your fat at will. She says, OK, so I fry and hell for this. Sign me up. There's the R, the robotics. And what that is is a melding of the made and the born. It's talking about getting machines and the living to work interchangeably. Smart machines that do our bidding. Now, again, this has been around for a while. Vice President Cheney is a cyborg, as you well know. He's got all sorts of gear in there around his heart that has done. He's a real human machine combination there. But again, you haven't seen anything yet. This is just the start. In 2002, there was a flying robot called a predator, which is a robot that is unmanned air vehicle that can stay up in the air for a very long time and just do whatever you want it to do. And in 2002, it came up for the first time behind an SUV in Yemen. And it turned out this SUV was full of people who were identified as al-Qaeda leaders. And this robot had a hellfire missiles under its wings. And it proceeded to fire one and leave this large smoking crater where the SUV had been. So this raises the question, was this the world's first robot to murder human beings? And now you can get into a debate about this. This predator was not completely autonomous. There was a human in the loop. And it made the decision to pull the trigger and all that jazz. So the question is, can you really consider this a robot? And reasonable people differ. But this could be seen as to be a conversation that could be a little bit overly fine if you were one of the guys in the SUV, as to whether or not this is a true robot. The point is that you do have intelligent machines that are doing our bidding to the point now where all the powers of our comic book superheroes from the 30s and 40s, every single one of them either right now exists or is in development. For example, we just had a movie called Iron Man that came out in which you put on a suit and you end up with incredible strength. That exists. That's not, it's called an exoskeleton. And at the University of California at Berkeley where they've developed one version of this, I jitterbugged in this suit. And what it's designed to do is to allow you to lift 180 pounds as if it was 4 pounds and to walk all day with a 200 pound pack as if it were nothing. When I was there, I said, think of it as like a wearable robot suit. You kind of put it on like a suit and it senses the motions of your legs and your arms and your muscles and it simply amplifies it so that you can lift things that would otherwise be impossible. And so I said, well, if this amplifies my legs, does this mean that I can leap over 12 buildings with a single bound? And they said, sure, landing. Now that's a problem.