If you look at kind of the three biggest criminal enterprises in the world right now it’s
arms dealing, drugs and exotic animals – the exotic animal trade. Those are the three biggest
illegal trades right now. We can use 3D printing to print guns already, right.
That’s already possible. There are people working on a 3D printer for drugs, right.
The idea is prescription pharmaceuticals you could print them in 3D. It’s a chemistry
set 3D printer. The off label use of this stuff is obviously going to be the manufacturer
of drugs, right. Synthetic biology lets us create brand new organisms from scratch so
do you want your exotic parrot or do you want something that’s brand new?
So what’s interesting about this – and some of this stuff is a little farther out
but over the next 20-25 years it means that the three largest criminal enterprises in
the world are going to be available to anyone, right. With 3D printers, with a DNA typewriter
which his sort of an at home synthetic biology interface so anybody can program DNA. It means
that we’re going to all the illegal drug trades we’re going to pull the rug out from
underneath them and nobody has any idea what happens next, right. That’s never happened
before. We’ve always had organized crime because there’s always been stuff that we
couldn’t get that we wanted. Well pretty soon we’re going to be able to get whatever
we want. This is kind of the weird side of the abundance idea, right. When you live in
world of abundance when we can use 3D printers and synthetic biology and when anybody can
do it it means that a lot of the illegal trades, right, the bottom’s just fallen out. And
what happens then we have no idea.
Synthetic biology is progressing so quickly, right. All kinds of new weapons are now possible,
right. One of the things I look at in Tomorrowland is the question of could you design a bioweapon,
a synthetic bioweapon that targets the president’s DNA alone. It’s very, very difficult to
protect DNA, right. It lasts a very, very, very long time. It’s a long lived molecule
and it’s everywhere, right. Every time you shake somebody’s hand, the President hands
somebody a pen they’re getting DNA samples along the way. The government is already taking
steps to protect the presidential DNA, right. If the President goes into public and he drinks
a beer out of a mug there is somebody there to grab that glass afterwards.
Hillary Clinton -- and this was released in some of the NSA stuff that Snowden released
-- told foreign diplomats that they should secretly collect DNA from foreign dignitaries.
So the United States is already on the offense when it comes to genetics. I’d be very,
very surprised if other countries weren’t doing the same back at us. And it’s going
to become more and more of an issue. So, you know, right now we have to worry about all
kinds of assassinations by bullets and by bombs and along those lines. With what’s
coming... I can make a disease. I can make a disease that I spray into the air, you pass
through it, nobody else gets sick and you get a slow neurodegenerative disease say that
unfolds over a couple of years. Nobody even knows you’ve been attacked, right. They
think you’ve just gotten sick. So we’re looking at a whole new kind of assassination
and to think that, you know, terrorists aren’t going to be interested in this technology
is ridiculous. Every time there’s a new technology criminals immediately take advantage
of it. And this is the next technology so we’re going to start seeing criminals get
involved in it.