Paul Giamatti on Human Engineering | Breakthrough

I'm Paul Gatti, and I am directing and doing the interviewing in an episode of Breakthrough called "More Than Human." It was out of left field for me. I've obviously never done anything like this, but a guy that I know was helping produce at David Jacobson came to me and told me what the whole project was. Then they said these are the subjects and which one interests you. They were all interesting to me, but the human engineering one— I don't know, that just really interests me.

I suppose it's got something to do with being sort of interested in human beings. I mean, it's what I do for a living, and I'm just interested in how the body works and things like that. It was just intriguing to me. I'd never seen any of this stuff; I hadn't even really heard much about any of this stuff. I think I thought it was going to be different than it turned out to be. The suits even were different. I mean, I had kind of real, sort of crude Rbow copy ideas about what everything was going to look like, and then everything turned out to be much more sort of subtle and kind of internal, and much more about the brain.

It's definitely been something— I mean, it's been a hugely eye-opening thing. I hadn't realized how much of this stuff was going on. One guy we talked to was talking about a suit that you can stream information into, and so that you could have a kind of global knowledge of the stock market through this machine that will just feed stuff into your spine. People will be able to interface directly into machines. There's a guy talking about genetically engineering people to survive longer in space.

There's a guy we talked to who is joining brains into a kind of organic computer so that people can think simultaneously— to who knows what that's going to be able to do. We talked to a guy in Sweden. I mean, he can disembody you right now, and you can be convincingly put into the body of an inanimate object or any number of things. I mean, the stuff has been really wild. It's kind of limitless.

The whole idea with a lot of this stuff was that at some point, you don't just feel like you have a tool that's been put on your body; it is your body. There's no difference between you and the mechanical piece. One of the most amazing things is to see these people wearing these things and how effective it is, and you know this kind of incredible joining of body and machine. That's really beautiful. This stuff will change my life. I mean, it will change my kids' life. It's pretty extraordinary.