Yves here. I very much hope KLG, IM Doc, Ignacio and other medical or medical-science experts will weigh in on what I see as a deranged line of thinking….unless you are a tech squillionaire unduly invested in the idea of miracle cures or seeking to profit from hawking them. The “internet of beings” branding (like the bizarre revival of “coalition of the willing”) ought to be seen as an unintended “run the other way” warning. How many have been subjected to bricked devices and systems like locks due (among things to small vendors going kaput, so no service and upgrades? To hacking? To provider and government spying? Do you want that happening to your person, as opposed to (already bad enough) your car or your house?
The fallacy here also underlies the new monitoring fetish, aggressively promoted by RFK Jr., whose surgeon general happens to be an investor in a continuous blood glucose monitoring company. KLG pointed to research that explained why its sales pitch, that this level of data would allow for better control and therefore better health, was bogus. A study found that when patients were fed the exact same meal at the same time over successive days, their glucose levels varied quite a bit after the meal.
This piece touts crazy ideas like prescribing medications and adjusting doses daily based on intensive monitoring. The human body has many many systems to deal with day-to-day variations and insults, from excessive pollution or pollen exposure, to fighting off a cold, to fighting cancers, which we grow all the time but nearly always our bodies stop before they get much of anywhere. So does this system propose to interfere with them via its own hyper-fast interventions? When I was in Australia in the early 2000s, doctors there were much less inclined toward US quick trigger reactions, as in overtreatment. Their default was, “Let’s monitor this and see what happens in XYZ timeframe.”
And you can be sure these monitoring systems will rat out patients on their smoking, drinking and eating habits, as well as their sex lives.
By Francesco Grillo, Academic Fellow, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Bocconi University. Originally published at The Conversation
In the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage, a spacecraft and its crew are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of an injured astronaut to remove a life-threatening blood clot from his brain. The Academy Award-winning movie – later developed into a novel by Isaac Asimov – seemed like pure fantasy at the time. However, it anticipated what could be the next revolution in medicine: the idea that ever-smaller and more sophisticated sensors are about to enter our bodies, connecting human beings to the internet.
This “internet of beings” could be the third and ultimate phase of the internet’s evolution. After linking computers in the first phase and everyday objects in the second, global information systems would now connect directly to our organs. According to natural scientists, who recently met in Dubai for a conference titled Prototypes for Humanity, this scenario is becoming technically feasible. The impact on individuals, industries and societies will be enormous.
The idea of digitising human bodies inspires both dreams and nightmares. Some Silicon Valley billionaires fantasise about living forever, while security experts worry that the risks of hacking bodies dwarf current cybersecurity concerns. As I discuss in my forthcoming book, Internet of Beings, this technology will have at least three radical consequences.
First, permanent monitoring of health conditions will make it far easier to detect diseases before they develop. Treatment costs much more than prevention, but sophisticated tracking could replace many drugs with less invasive measures – changes in diet or more personalised exercise routines.
Millions of deaths could be prevented simply by sending alerts in time. In the US alone, 170,000 of the 805,000 heart attacks each year are “silent” because people don’t recognise the symptoms.
Second, the sensors – better called biorobots, since they’ll probably be made of gel – are becoming capable of not just monitoring the body but actively healing it. They could release doses of aspirin when detecting a blood clot, or activate vaccines when viruses attack.
The mRNA vaccines developed for COVID may have opened this frontier. Advances in gene editing technologies may even lead to biorobots that can perform microsurgery with minuscule protein-made “scissors” that repair damaged DNA.
Third, and most important, medical research and drug discovery will be turned on its head. Today, scientists propose hypotheses about substances that might work against certain conditions, then test them through expensive, time-consuming trials. In the internet of beings era, the process reverses: huge databases generate patterns showing what works for a problem, and scientists work backwards to understand why. Solutions will be developed much more quickly, cheaply and precisely.
Radical Transformations
The era of one-size-fits-all medicine is already ending, but the internet of beings will go much further. Each person could receive daily advice on medication doses tailored to micro-changes such as body temperature or sleep quality.
The organisation of medical research itself will transform radically. Enormous amounts of data from bodies living natural lives might reveal that some headaches are caused by how we walk, or that brains and feet influence each other in unexpected ways.
Research currently focuses on specific diseases and organs. In future, this could shift to the use of increasingly sophisticated “digital twins” – virtual models of a person’s biology that update in real time using their health data. These simulations can be used to test treatments, predict how the body will respond and explore disease before it appears. Such a shift would fundamentally change what we mean by life science.
The dream here isn’t to defeat ageing, as some transhumanists claim. It’s more concrete: making healthcare accessible to all Americans, saving the UK’s NHS, defeating cancers, reaching poorer countries and helping everyone live longer without disease.
The nightmare, however, is about losing our humanity while digitising our bodies. The internet of beings is one of the most fascinating possibilities that technology is opening up – but we need to explore it carefully. We’re resuming the voyage that humankind was travelling in those optimistic years of the 1960s, when we landed on an alien planet for the first time. Only now, the alien territory we’re exploring is ourselves.
This article was commissioned in conjunction with the Professors’ Programme, part of Prototypes for Humanity, a global initiative that showcases and accelerates academic innovation to solve social and environmental challenges. The Conversation is the media partner of Prototypes for Humanity 2025.
I am deeply skeptical of all three outcomes. The most likely effect of these kinds of sensors being adopted is to put money in the pockets of companies producing the sensors and associated services while delivering very little or no value.
My model for this type of thing is “smart” home heating systems, which cost a fortune to install, but allow you to “control” the system using your smartphone. They are usually unreliable, buggy, and offer very little utility. Verses the old $5 ‘clock’ timers which you set by hand and turn on and off at set times in the day as needed. Let’s not even get started on “smart” light bulbs, because I think everyone knows what the score is there.
The tech industry can deliver value, but it doesn’t always. In fact, it rarely doesn’t anymore. AI is just the top of the chain of an entire industry of unnecessary boondoggles being marketed as hip new solutions, but which even general consumers are getting jaded of. We just had the story about people copping on that new cars were unreliable a few days ago. Tech jaundice is real!
isnt this what elizabeth holmes was pushing? well, up until she got 10 yrs on fraud.
Her primary pitch was avoiding needles. The second was testing for multiple things with one tiny sample. The third was that smart people wear black turtlenecks.
Rather than a point-by-point demolition of the article, a few aspects that I found grating:
1) Regarding: “sophisticated tracking could replace many drugs with less invasive measures – changes in diet or more personalised exercise routines”; this is an argument I have read many, many times, but without substantiation. Have there been any serious studies assessing the proportion of illnesses that can actually be managed only via diet and exercise routines? Is it 1%? 10%? 50%?
2) Regarding: “the sensors – better called biorobots, since they’ll probably be made of gel – are becoming capable of not just monitoring the body but actively healing it”, I can foresee “interesting” problems with ensuring (a) that the immune system does not seek and destroy those biorobots once they are inserted into the body, and (b) that the immune system does seek and destroy them if, for whatever reason, they become faulty.
3) Regarding: “Enormous amounts of data from bodies living natural lives might reveal that some headaches are caused by how we walk, or that brains and feet influence each other in unexpected ways” — it’s the return of Big Data! Its previous instantations in medicine have been failures, whether it is IBM Watson, or the projects based on the genetic databases of the Icelandic and Estonian populations.
As an Internet meme goes: “This is all so tiresome”.
Also known as Internet of Bodies, as at this creepy site which shows the connection to data collection for “security”: https://www.internetofbodies.com/
This site too is creep, more commercially focused but mentions military purposes: https://lesi.org/article-of-the-month/the-internet-of-bodies-connectivity-enhancing-humans/
Purdue has Center for Internet of Bodies: https://engineering.purdue.edu/C-IoB
First things first. The only part of Fantastic Voyage worth watching was the 25-year-old Raquel Welch in that bodysuit. Sorry, couldn’t resist, but this 10-year-old was impressed. My friends in the movie theater put this movie in the same category as Time Tunnel, which was a TV series in the mid-1960s. Stupid, borderline mindless fluff. The science of Star Trek was mindless fluff, but the stories were serious (even Tribbles), and therein lies the difference between Star Trek and Fantastic Voyage and the like.
We discussed human digital twins here in 2023. Yves prologue was perfect. A few papers have appeared since, but the likelihood of improving clinical outcomes with digital twins is so slight as to be zero. Which is not to say research is a waste of time, but the link to organoids in the article show how theoretical this is. Answerable biological questions are not unlimited. It is not possible to unambiguously and simultaneously solve thousands of nonlinear differential equations whose components interact.
Biohacking – rather than living properly with adequate sleep, exercise, a good diet – is generally a complete waste of time. Ask any healthy person who got cancer through no fault of his own, including me.
This nonsense comes from squillionaires with an unnatural fear of death. They can afford this level of neurosis, which seeps down the slopes of the wealth pyramid to their acolytes. Some of this was discussed as part of the barely useful engineering ideal applied to biology. Death cannot be abolished! It is the finitude of life that makes it worth living.
Well said!!! On that note, I will share this lovely early baroque musical meditation on the topic. (4m40).
Grazie! Due volte.
With, as I recall from watching the movie with a bunch of other Saturday night dateless college boys offering commentary, corpuscles clinging to her.
Yes. As the intrepid voyagers started growing back to normal size the immune system attacked! Some things stick in the pre-adolescent mind. I had forgotten Stephen Boyd and Donald Pleasance were part of that all-star cast.
That was one of the first movies I can remember seeing at the ripe age of 5, blissfully unaware of Raquel Welch’s being so very hot.
The Russians Are Coming-The Russians Are Coming, being the first movie I remembered seeing in a drive-in theater, the same year.
Yves Smith and KLG touch on class analysis. Here in Italy, only someone like Silvio Berlusconi goes all meta-medicine so as to alter his hair and keep the bunga-bunga going.
As I read, I considered the source. Francesco Grillo is at Bocconi, Italy’s main business university (along with LUISS, founded later by the Chamber of Commerce). Grillo’s career is in this élite that mainly is self-serving. Like Pete Buttigieg, Grillo is also McKinsey.
The book is coming out in English, the language of empire. The conference he’s flogging is in Dubai, much money sloshing around. Culturally, this is colonialism, which Italy doesn’t need.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine here likes to tell a story about a friend of hers who is a medical doctor. His best medical advice? Aspetta che passi. Wait for it to go away.
The compulsion to do something, anything, about a non-problem can lead to real harm. And I don’t like the cultural aspect of a young couturier throwing around a prospectus for something that will never serve the needs of Italians.
Unsaid is the next stage that will make use of all that biodata – nanotechnology. Tiny machines that will be injected into the body and be networked with that data to clear out fat-clogged veins, perhaps repair damaged DNA, heal injuries and help reverse aging. It would slot in nicely with the desire of our techbros to never age and to live forever. Well, that is the dream at least.