The distance from imagination to creation

"At no other time has the distance between imagination and creation been so narrow".

This is quite a statement and it really made me think. In the past we have had several people able to imagine something that was really out of the box. Something that was impossibile to turn into reality. Today the distance between science and science fiction, between imagination and implementation is mostly a matter of economics, it is about when it will become practical rather than if it will ever be possible. 
We see scientists discussing about extending the human life and researchers experimenting on various animals and creating ways of doubling their life span. The step from these experiments to human is both small (technology is available) and huge (what would be the fall outs?).
Bryan Johnson, the founder of Braintree, is using part of the money he made from selling his company (800M$) to eBay to create a fund for entrepreneurs who want to rewrite the OS of life. The 100M$ fund goes to support radical new ideas. In his manifesto he says:

Today, we want to use OS-level thinking to redefine medical discovery and cure aging; recreate the biological toolset of our existence; become a multi-planetary species; reinvent global transportation infrastructure; enhance our minds; safely create advanced machine intelligence; and produce abundant clean energy.

He has already invested in a few start ups, like Vicarious aiming at building a computer system that can learn like a human brain, Human Longevity aiming at curing the disease of age pushing life span into 120 years and keeping a high quality of life and a few others with an investment of 15M$.
As he notes in the clip presenting the OS Fund a few men through generations had the capability of setting goals that once achieved radically changed our life. He feels that setting these goals today is still needed and the intersection of available technologies can make these goals achievable in a few years rather than in centuries.
Indeed the distance between imagination and creation is getting smaller and it pays to think out of the box!

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.