How AI May Guide Us with Gregory Stock (Part 1)

In this conversation, Ilia Delio speaks with biophysicist, entrepreneur, and author Gregory Stock. Known for his groundbreaking ideas about biotechnology and the future of humanity, Gregory shares the story behind his influential book Metaman and offers insights into how technology is shaping—and destabilizing—our species and planet.

Ilia and Gregory discuss:

• What does nature teach us about the evolution of technology?
• Why does technological progress feel so unsettling?
• Can AI help protect humanity—or even guide us into life beyond Earth?

This is part one of a two-part interview with Gregory Stock, Ph.D., a leading voice on the future of biotechnology, AI, and human evolution.

ABOUT GREGORY STOCK

“As we decipher our biology and learn to modify and adjust it, we are learning to modify ourselves—and we will do so. No laws will stop this.”

Gregory Stock, Ph.D., is a scientist, writer, entrepreneur, and public communicator whose work represents a deep exploration into what it means to be human in the 21st century. During his career, he has developed the foremost paradigm for personal inquiries into values and beliefs, which has significant implications for humankind as it faces the profound shifts brought by silicon and biotech. Today, Greg serves as an expert speaker and advisor to biotech and healthcare companies and to non-profits at the cutting edge of human health. 

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Transcript

Robert: Welcome back to Hunger for Wholeness, a podcast from the Center for Christogenesis. I'm your host, Robert Nicastro. In this first episode, Ilia Delio interviews biophysicist Gregory Stock. First, Ilia asks Gregory about his background, the inspiration for his groundbreaking book, Metaman, and his insights about the implications of technology for our species and planet. And later, can AI guide us into a better future?

Ilia: Gregory Stock, we are so delighted to have you with us today on our Hunger for Wholeness podcast. I've come to know you through the Human Energy conferences and projects there and read your book on Metaman, which I was just amazed by. So just by way of introduction, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into this area of AI and futuring and what led you to write that book Metaman in 1993?

Gregory: As far as Metaman was written in 1993, and Metaman was kind of a presentation of why this global superorganism that we have, that is sort of the body of an entity that supports the noosphere, the global mind that Teilhard de Chardin has talked about a lot and that we both have interacted about. So I realized, actually, as I was just finishing graduate school in biophysics, I was at Johns Hopkins, and Lynn Margulis was at the time working out the concepts of endosymbionts and how bacterial, the sort of origins of eukaryotic life and that prokaryotic predecessors of mitochondria in particular had come together symbiotically to form larger cells. And then cells had kind of come together to form metazoans, multicellular life. 

And I realized that that was what was happening on the Earth, that there was we working together, glued together by technology to form this planetary superorganism. And I had not seen anything of that sort. It was only years later that I became aware of Teilhard Chardin's work, which was from a more theological perspective in that vocabulary. 

But I was a hard scientist. And so I wanted to take what had been spoken about often, but in a metaphoric way, that we're like a community, we're like an organism, we're all of these things. And I felt that it was actually reality, that this was an actual creature and that it had all of the bodily systems that a creature has that would be at that level of complexity, that it was like a termite colony or an ant colony and had a coherence. 

So I actually drafted the initial sort of outline and structure of that back in the late '60s. I think it was like '69, 1970. But I had all sorts of things to do. And it was only later after, basically, after I had had the success with my Book of Questions, which had become an international bestseller around open-ended questions, and put me in a position where I could get a publishing deal and actually pull together that in a solid way. And so that's when I wrote it much, much later. So my background is one where I was in the hard sciences. I have a PhD in biophysics. I then went into sort of developmental biology and then I realized I didn't, it seemed, to me, strange. 

Once again, an epiphany, I was walking on the campus at Hopkins and I realized that I didn't know the difference between a maple tree and an elm tree or an oak tree. And I thought, I'm a PhD in biology and I'm so ignorant. You become so narrowly focused. So I went into developmental biology for a few years and I left science in that I thought, wouldn't it be tragic to, that would be all I would do with my life, would be to stay in and study fruit fly morphology or new regeneration when there's all this stuff out in the world. 

And I went out and I got a job at the technological arm of Citicorp then, which was transaction technologies. I was practicing for an interview. I'd never had a real job or done an interview and they offered me a very good position. I helped develop the early cache machines and network effects and everything in the computer arena. 

Then I went back to school and I went to Harvard Business School to see what possibilities I might be able to do. I wrote Metaman, I published the book of questions and came back to UCLA after various sets of things and set up the Institute for Science and Technology, sort of to look at the larger implications of these things, and put a conference on called Engineering the Human Germline, which was about the revolution in genetics that was going on at the time and was very present within... That was after Metaman had been written, and that was at the heart of all of that sort of stuff that was going on. And a book came out called Redesigning Humans, Our Inevitable Genetic Future about what would happen when this organism, this Metaman, this superorganism reflected its powers back on us and reshaped us through the genetic hearing and all that sort of stuff. 

And then later I founded a couple of biotech companies and then went to Mount Sinai and was interested in next generation healthcare and was the co-director of the Institute on Precision Wellness and a bunch of other things. And I've come recently to this because it becomes so clear to me that what's going on in AI is going to reshape our future and our present actually, and has these larger implications in macroevolution in terms of the larger flow of things from very specific levels of organizational complexity of which there are just a few, we're transitioning to that superorganism, and then where does that go? So that's sort of the history of my background, science and business and academics.

Ilia: In a sense, your journey was sort of, what we say, proleptic. It anticipated where we are today, you know? And I find it fascinating, beginning with Lynn Margulis' work. I didn't realize that that was sort of an initial inspiration for, in a sense, realizing the possibilities on a macro level, sort of the micro level to the macro level. And so, there's this kind of developmental trajectory that we've been on, you've seen and I see as well, who certainly Teilhard saw it, that, and he saw it back in the '20s and '30s, which was pretty amazing.

Gregory: I've always been awed by that, that he could have that. For me to do that in the '60s long before the internet or any of these sorts of things felt prescient. For him to see that back in the '20s and before there was any real technology is just amazing.

Ilia: Really amazing. I agree. What I find is just a lot of people, because today we're really struggling now with this technospheric age quickly taking us into a new level of interconnected life. But so many people, first of all, don't understand technology and the way nature and technology might actually be entwined that nature has always been techne in some ways. I mean, it's what nature does. It just finds tools and develops new patterns of relationships, et cetera. the fact that we've always been technological, but I think we've always treated technology as something that's like a tool, a tool for human use. And now we're finding that the human is part and parcel of the techne. And it's placing us in a whole new level of existence that you saw with Metaman. 

So this idea that, so I thought it was kind of interesting, you're trained in biophysics, but you couldn't tell a maple tree from an elm tree. Oh, that's so interesting, right? 

It's so telling about our systems of education. They've been so hyper-specialized, they hyper-specialize. So you probably could tell me a million trillion things about biophysics on some obscure technical level, but on this broader interconnected level we're still very naive in that way. And I think our educational systems quite honestly, and I hope we can talk about this more because I think they're really outdated on the whole. And they train us to think for a world that was, not for a world that is becoming. And I think institutions now are struggling today between the world that was maybe kind of the Newtonian paradigm world, and the world that's emerging in this complexified world. 

So maybe my one question was, how do you think, first of all, in the broadest sense, How do you think AI or technology in a broader sense, how do you think it's changing us? Like what do you see are the top three ways that technology is really changing the human matrix?

Gregory: I'll think about three ways or key ways, but first I wanna come back to a couple of points that you've mentioned in terms of the difference between ourselves and our technology and the sensitive technique as you described it. So I think that that is a false dichotomy in the sense that technology is biological. Yes. I mean, where else could it be? It emerges from us and we are biological creatures. 

So the last time this happened, and I think in terms of evolutionary biology, that's my background and the framework by which I understand the world. And the last time this happened was about 500 and some million years ago And the cellular organisms that could not form large scale life really, because they didn't have supportive structures, began to form shells and skeletons. And they did this by incorporating simple non-biology, calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, and incorporated that into themselves. 

So now we look at those simple non-biologic inorganic things. They're not carbon and nitrogen and oxygen. And we look at them as part of biology because that's what they are. And in the same way, we are now creating complex biology, our cerebral cortices and all of the networks that we have now. And we're taking complex non-biology, all of the chips that have the 80 billion transistors on the chip and the things that go into AI. And we're drawing those into this superorganism. So this larger entity organism has all of these components of which the biological component is just one part of it, and the technological is another part of it, all interwoven in very, very complex ways. 

So the first thing is that dichotomy, that difference, that somehow we alone are kind of outside of nature and looking back on it in our technology is something different. It's just a manifestation of the same things. And when I had that insight, it was a spiritual kind of, I walked through New York and see these towers of glass and stainless steel and brick and concrete. And you know, it's like this giant termite colony and everybody's moving around and bustling. It's this wondrous, amazing thing that it even works at all. It's really, it transforms one's view and that's the way our society is. And it's just you look around in awe and wonder. How has technology changed our lives? How will it continue to do that? Look at what it's done in the past. 
Look at any of these major cities. This is not the stomping ground of our Pleistocene ancestors. This is completely fabricated. We can go from Los Angeles to Paris and never leave from being under a roof of some sort. It's like building this structure around us. 

As far as AI, what's happening is that the mind of this metastructure, the noosphere, is very real. This is a mind. Our individuality comes from our kind of insulation from it. You and I, we do our little works and we write a book and we do this and we do that, and we feel it's ours. But if you step back, you know that we're drawing all of these things in from all of the other people and all of the other aspects of a civilization and society and individual lives that have been forgotten in there individually. And what's happening with AI and large language models is it has enabled, it has sort of made that little bubble around us very permeable so that we're getting information from everyone all the time in really rapid and condensed ways. You can just find out anything about anything in amazing ways. That is transformative because it really begins to, I think it's going to completely change the nature of people's perception of individuality because there's a dissolution of self, which is one of the things that I'm writing about. 

A second thing that it does is that it just amplifies those powers that we have because you're thinking one thing. The truth is it's happening countless little bubbles all over the place. You bring all that together and it's just amazing. To me, what's fascinating is this is happening so rapidly, this birth, this thing. The immediate impact is that we're going to forget all sorts of things like our kids that grow up, the book that I'm writing, the talk that I gave in Marrakesh was about generation AI. The first generation, the kids that are being born now, are going to grow up in an environment where there's immersive AI everywhere. They will have never known anything else. And you think they're gonna learn to write things out without help? Just like we can barely navigate without “turn left, turn right” from our maps and everything. So this interdependency is going to be increasingly profound. And then where does this go in a thousand years or more? I mean, which is just a very short time technologically. I mean, most of the things you imagine are gonna happen in 100 years, but it's a pretty significant chunk of time, a modest chunk of time in history. I mean, a thousand years isn't that long ago. And in our biological history, it's an instant. So this is an explosion that's occurring.

Robert: Nature is techne. So if our species is complexifying through technology, as many species have before us, why does it feel so destabilizing? Next, Ilia and Gregory discuss what's missing from our present technological evolution. Later, can AI help protect us, or even help guide humans into extraterrestrial life?

Ilia: I'm going to go back to the fact that nature, human nature, just biological nature, and techne are not two separate things. That biological nature is technological, it's always been since day one, you know. And that's something that still the average person, hard to get their heads around, but given that nature is technological, that it will constantly create new things. But creativity is built into nature. That's part and parcel of what nature is about. It's got this tremendous capacity to create things. 

We humans have even more capacity because we can reflect on these things that we create. And then we can think of things that never existed and we can create them and bring them into existence. And that's really remarkable. I think one of the things that is difficult for us, well, two things. One, our human brains today are really, it's basically the same brain we had, say near 3000 BC. I mean, the human brain hasn't really, it hasn't grown, it hasn't developed, say a fourth layer, a fourth lobe of the neo-neo cortex. So I think we have so much more information today than ever before. And in a sense, it's just the sheer amount of information that compels the individual. We can no longer remain individual. That's our devices, our interconnectivities in a sense to supplement our capacity to think, to remember, to do new things. But you also mentioned this movement towards a new type of person. And I think that is really true. 

Teilhard saw that in 1950 in his essays on the future of man. He spoke about the ultra human, not just the human, but where the computer linked global could move us to an ultra-human, which would be something of a not only collective brain, but a collective heart. And you know, as something that would, in a sense, move us towards something that would be more trans-personal in terms of its cosmic formation. We're not quite there. We have the global brain because we're linked electronically and we can just access so much information now at the touch of a button. I think where we lack is the global heart, or you might say the global soul, or even Plato's notion of the world soul, like what binds us together in this collective, in this interlinked wholeness. 

And I think that part of our difficulty today is that this planet struggles with evolution and technology because we're evolving at different rates. Evolution is not a universal rate of development, it's rather local and it depends on a whole bunch of factors. So we're all you know, the planet is evolving at different places, at different rates. And then there is tremendous fear around this kind of collective whole. You know, once you start speaking of collectivities, especially in the US, you become really, really nervous about collectivities. But we are on this way. And I think, just let me just say this, that I think what I've called the hyperpersonal, the hyperpersonal person, it's a different type or what post-human is called the post-human. As Katherine Hayles says, like the subject the individual autonomous self is now something of yesterday and we're in a new hybridized subjectivity, which seems chaotic at times, but we're emerging in a new way here and trying to make sense of it. 

And maybe just, let me just say this, Greg, I think our systems are just not there. You know, and I think one of the things that's difficult for us is that we have very little systemic support to support this emerging hyper-personal or the post-human. And so I find us all over the place like I have students who talk about religion like it's 1920 and you know, this notion of God who's watching over things and we have souls and we're going to heaven. And I'm like, oh my gosh, this is really crazy. And we can't even think about what this word God might even mean for us in this kind of new emergent, maybe that word is just an X factor of something, that there's something, there's a ground here of something that's pulling us into something of more being. But I find that our systems are really, really lagging. And I think that's where people are having a hard time today.

Gregory: To me, it's amazing how well we do cope. I think that people, for example, romanticize the past. And many people think, oh, if I could go back to whatever the era is, it would be so wonderful. And if you actually knew what was going on then, you'd be horrified, just the smells would repulse you, all these sorts of things. So think what has happened, Ilia, in the last generation or so, that we've gone from a global kind of labor force that was very active of a couple of billion to about maybe five or six billion at this point, and it's amazing how well we've been able to do that. Sure, there have been some disruptions and there have been all sorts of things. It's because, yes, the systems aren't there yet because they're emerging, they're developing, they're growing all the time. There's all sorts of redundancies. 

And this is very much, metaphorically, this is a birth, an amazing thing that is occurring. And births are messy, they're bloody, they're difficult, they're traumatic, but they promise a kind of new life and possibility. Why would we imagine that the birth of a global planetary organism of which were component parts, the cells in it, is something that is going to be smooth and not at all chaotic and all of these sorts of things. And then there's a tendency to push our sort of vision of who we are as people into the future and see where that fits. And for example, in what you were talking about with thinking, yes, we're thinking a lot, But there's going to be artificial general intelligence. There's going to be super intelligence. Thinking is not going to be relegated to us as biological entities. And in fact, we're going to be the cutting edge of consciousness and awareness and cognitive processes. That's going to move to a different level beyond humans.

We're going to be able to tap into that. And that will come. We can understand the universe and have language. And all of these things are tapping into these large, kind of, processes. So what you need is a sense that this is not where this is going. OK, because that's what's so mind boggling. And I think that one of the reasons that people very much are thinking of apocalyptic sort of trajectories of Mad Max or global catastrophe, all these things, is because that's familiar. We can, oh, we're facing this horrible end. We better protect ourselves in this way or stop this or whatever before we go over the edge. 

Whereas if you say, no, the human enterprise is extraordinarily robust. It's not going to terminate. We are going forward and where is it gonna lead us? Now that is something to think about. And I think it is far more challenging to think about that than it is, "Oh, this is all going to end in 100 years." And so, and these transitions in terms of who we are, and that is the initial focus at least of the book Generation AI, that very soon we're going to be massively transformed Because when you start, you talked about our relationship with technology and everything. One of the things that's so hard today is that AI is really smart. It hacks us, it presents us with things we can't resist, it takes advantage of, it seizes our attention. Well, the reason for that is all of these AI tools are being employed to exploit us in one way or another, to prey at our weaknesses, okay? 

What we really need is an AI protector, a guardian that's gonna filter out that stuff that protects us from all the scams and all this and all that is our agent. And we're going to have AI companions, AI teachers, all of these things and duplicates of ourselves that manifest in different ways, maybe tweaked to be a little brighter, a little bit more compassionate, a little bit funnier. And so the sense of who we are is going to become very squishy because all of these things are going to be going on at the same time. It's going to become very interesting and strange very rapidly.

Ilia: It's no doubt that we are in the midst of significant change and AI will change us and our thinking processes and emotional processes, et cetera. But I think two things, one is, as I was listening to you speak, we need some kind of ethics here. Like what's gonna be our guidelines? That's one of the, I know it's a topic of conversation for a lot of people, like can we guide AI in its development? Like how can we use AI towards a type of flourishing? It may be post-human flourishing, but I would call it planetary flourishing of life. And then the second question you've raised several times, toward what? What's the aim here? We keep developing and AI itself now is going to develop itself without us, a robot speaking to robots. 

And with quantum computing, God only knows where AI is going to lead us. So all of this to say is we need other dialogue partners here. I think the technology is amazing, but I think what I see lagging from where I stand, I think religion is quite old. It's outdated, it's working out of old cosmological paradigms, old philosophical principles, and I think it's what keeps people back from really engaging in a more robust and anticipatory use of AI for a future flourishing of life. And so how might Teilhard himself really, really thought through like, where might we be going here? 

He was alone, I think a lot in this endeavor, but this symbol of Omega, this is a symbol. We need symbols because we're a symbolic species. So symbols kind of speak to us about realities that we can't quite grasp, but they point us to things that can help guide our process. So I take the omega as a symbol of AI development, that we can be moving towards a type of flourishing, which is of increased consciousness, of increased connectivity, of increased thought. 

And I would add to that, I would love to see increased compassion or increased love, like the good sort of maximized. But I also, and I'm sure you see this as well, Teilhard's Omega is not limited to terrestrial life. I mean, he clearly saw, and I think we would say the same thing, AI is not just going to end on earth. I mean, the whole point of AI is the maximization of consciousness or the maximization of connected consciousness. So I see it really, even as we look today with SpaceX and other programs, the search for extraterrestrial life in a sense that I think we will find at some point other types of intelligible life out there on other planets. It just seems, I just can't imagine we'd be the only one in a universe this large.

Gregory: I would agree with that, but I would also say that, and I've been doing some thinking about the immensity of the universe. And there's some very interesting figures that put that in perspective. Because we look at things in our own way, trying to project ourselves into a future that we almost can't comprehend and a future in space. And you know, there are so many of these science fiction kind of space operas and Star Wars and The Foundation Trilogy, where basically we're jumping around the universe and the galaxies and it could easily come out of medieval power conflicts and such, but on a galactic level. 

And when you actually look at the immensity of our universe, where we have tens of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, and then tens of billions of galaxies and such, and the distances, I did a calculation and it turns out that if you were to create a spaceship and you could fly at a tenth the speed of light, which is pushing any of the technology that we have today, that the fraction of the universe that you would be able, if you just started moving, okay, the fraction of the known universe that you would be able to reach one way if you went forever, okay, is about two hundredths of one percent. And if you could go at the speed of light, it would be about three or four percent, okay? So this is so immense, the gulfs between. 

I think there is life all over the place and intelligent life everywhere, but they're in little puddles and they don't have a reason to try and journey the distance that are involved, even within our own galaxy. And I think that we're going to be really sort of rooted to the local region of space. You might go out a few stars or something, but you're going to be pretty localized. And that is you're familiar with the Fermi paradox, which is if life is common, then why isn't it here? And it's either it doesn't last very long, or it self-destructs in one way or another, or it doesn't move very far. You know, so what's really going on?

Robert: Thank you for joining us. time, Ilia and Gregory discussed how our personal motivations should, or perhaps should not, shape our technological progress. A special thanks to our partners at the Fetzer Institute. I'm Robert Nicastro. Thanks for listening.