Humans In Exponential Times
Jaakko Halmetoja — Nutrition Expert, Co-Author @ Biohacker's Handbook, Product Development Manager @ Foodin
Jaakko Halmetoja is a nutrition & wellness expert, author, entrepreneur and public speaker with a pace of around 100 lectures per year. Halmetoja has a passion for making health & wellness cool – by popularizing the disruptive force of new health technologies and abundant opportunities around us. For a past decade, Jaakko has been traveling the world in search of the most interesting food ingredients and health technologies available – working as an advisor for multiple healthcare companies in Finland and abroad.
Jaakko Halmetoja presents a techno-optimistic vision
We are living in exponential times, moving from the Internet of information into the Internet of experience and behavior. We are heading towards building this instrument by the code language that we are made of; that is like poetry in our biology.
Summary
- Technology is evolving into a global nervous system through a sensor revolution, transitioning humanity toward radical biological transparency and a communal data-sharing culture. - Genetic technologies like CRISPR are turning human biology into a canvas for artistic expression, allowing individuals to rebuild their physical selves through biological code. - The shift from an Internet of information to an Internet of experience enables real-time modulation of emotional states and personalized interventions for health and nutrition. - Future food production will evolve from traditional agriculture into bioreactor-based cell cultures and 3D-printed meals customized to an individual's real-time biological needs. - The integration of AI and the "Intelligence of Things" allows for automated decision-making and reveals the limits of human identity, catalyzing a transition toward a transhuman future.
Article
Humans In Exponential Times
At Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm, Jaakko Halmetoja Sketched A Future In Which Biology, Data And Desire Were Becoming Indistinguishable
Late in the day at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm**, with the audience carrying the pleasant fatigue of a conference that had spent hours staring into the machinery of the future, **Jaakko Halmetoja** took the stage to do something more ambitious than summarise proceedings. In his talk, **“Humans In Exponential Times”**, delivered on **18 May 2018 in Stockholm, Sweden**, the Finnish nutrition and wellness expert offered not merely a survey of emerging technologies, but a philosophy of what it might mean to remain human while biology itself was becoming programmable.
Halmetoja, an author, entrepreneur and adviser to healthcare companies in Finland and abroad, has built a career on making wellness sound less like a sermon and more like a frontier. In Stockholm, he wrapped the day’s technical demonstrations and biohacking evangelism in a distinctly techno-optimistic frame. The question was no longer whether technology would enter the body. It already had. The real question was what kind of body, mind and society would emerge once the border between organism and machine had been made porous.
The Sensor Revolution As A Global Nervous System
His central metaphor was both elegant and unsettling. “**We are building a global nervous system through this sensor revolution**,” Halmetoja said, asking the audience to imagine a world in which the distributed intelligence of devices, wearables and implants began to resemble a planetary sensory apparatus.
It was not just a matter of more data. It was a matter of intimacy. Sensors were no longer external instruments measuring the world at a distance. They were creeping inward, shrinking in size, dropping in cost and moving closer to the flesh. Halmetoja pointed to the rise of miniature sensing technologies, including oral sensors capable of tracking inputs such as sugar, salt and alcohol. Crude for now, he suggested, but headed somewhere transformative.
In that vision, the body ceased to be opaque. Health, mood, metabolism and behaviour would increasingly be rendered legible in real time. The biohacking movement, in his view, was accelerating this shift toward “radical transparency”, turning the private workings of biology into something measurable, shareable and eventually communal.
“**The biohacking movement is making our biology transparent**,” he said. “**We are moving from a fragmentation of culture into a communal phase where we put our data together and find new ways of expression through our own biology.**”
That line carried both promise and warning. The body, once the last redoubt of privacy, was being converted into an interface.
Biology As Code, And The Body As Canvas
Halmetoja’s most arresting idea was that biology was no longer merely a substrate to be repaired, but a medium through which people might someday create. Borrowing from the language of art rather than medicine, he argued that gene technologies were shifting the meaning of embodiment itself.
“**Our biology is becoming a canvas for artistic expression**,” he said. “**We are no longer just diagnosing things in a reductionist way, but starting to see the patterns in how our nutritional choices and environment interact with our genes in real time.**”
It was a striking reframing of tools such as **CRISPR gene editing**, which he described as part of a pipeline of technologies allowing people to rebuild “this instrument” through the code language of life. In Halmetoja’s telling, genetics was becoming less a fixed inheritance than a writable surface. The metaphor was dramatic, almost lyrical: poetry in biology.
Still, beneath the exuberance sat a serious proposition. If genes, environment and nutrition could be interpreted together through rapid feedback loops, then medicine might become less about static diagnosis and more about dynamic pattern recognition. Anxiety, depression, metabolism, inflammation and cognition would not be treated as isolated categories, but as interconnected expressions of a responsive biological system.
From The Internet Of Information To The Internet Of Experience
Halmetoja also argued that digital culture was undergoing a deeper transition. The internet, long understood as a network for exchanging information, was becoming something more immersive and more invasive: an **Internet of Experience**.
The devices people carried in their pockets, he said, had already become extensions of the nervous system, teaching users through fast feedback loops while competing ruthlessly for attention. Here his optimism met a familiar anxiety. The same platforms that enabled self-knowledge were also engineered to capture reward pathways, hijack dopamine and monetise distraction.
His answer was not retreat, but adaptation. Better “information diets”, better “cognitive ergonomy”, better habits of attention. If we were living in exponential times, as his title insisted, then the human task was to evolve psychologically as quickly as our tools were evolving technically.
Yet Halmetoja pushed beyond the now familiar critique of the attention economy. The convergence of sensors, pharmaceuticals, nutraceuticals and responsive environments, he argued, meant that people were approaching a world where emotional and cognitive states could be modulated on demand. The mention of **FDA-approved drugs containing embedded sensors** served as one marker of that convergence between medicine and machine.
This was not just about tracking behaviour. It was about shaping it.
Personalized Nutrition In Real Time
As a nutrition expert, Halmetoja reserved some of his sharpest observations for food. The old model of generic dietary advice, he implied, was already collapsing under the pressure of personalized biology.
What came next, in his account, was a system in which nutrition and medicine merged into a continuous feedback process. Interventions would not be assessed weeks or months later through broad outcomes, but monitored immediately through biomarkers, gene expression and environmental inputs. A meal, a supplement, a sleep deficit, a stressor: all could become variables in a live biological conversation.
He invited the audience to imagine visual tools showing how specific dietary changes activated or suppressed certain genes over time. Such tools, he argued, would make invisible processes visible, replacing abstract health advice with direct evidence of personal response.
The implications were practical, but also philosophical. Food was no longer simply fuel or culture. It was becoming data, signal and code.
The Reinvention Of Food Itself
If personalized nutrition was one front in this transformation, food production was another. Halmetoja suggested that agriculture, as people knew it, might be giving way to an entirely different model.
Drawing on recent scientific discussions, he described a future in which food production looked less like farming and more like brewing. **Bioreactors**, cell cultures and **3D-printed meals** tailored to individual biological needs were no longer science fiction in his telling, but emerging realities. Within a decade, he suggested, such systems could begin producing highly customized food with remarkable energy efficiency.
This was one of the talk’s quiet revolutions. The future of nourishment, as Halmetoja saw it, would not simply improve food. It would redesign the infrastructure of eating from the molecular level upward.
The Intelligence Of Things
If there was a phrase that captured the talk’s mood, it was Halmetoja’s description of the coming **“Intelligence of Things.”** This was his extension of the Internet of Things, one in which connected devices did not merely collect information but interpreted it, acted upon it and anticipated needs before users consciously recognised them.
“**When we put AI, the Internet of Things, and the Internet of Food into action, we start to talk about the intelligence of things**,” he said. “**This intelligence starts to make decisions before we even know them ourselves.**”
That future was enchanted in the oldest sense. Halmetoja invoked the idea of objects imbued with agency, connecting ancient fantasies of magical artefacts to modern devices such as smart rings and wearables. The spell, in this account, had become code.
The result was a world in which the environment itself grew perceptive. Homes, devices, foods and medicines would not stand apart from the self, but would participate in the ongoing governance of the self.
Turning Ourselves Inside Out
The most provocative moment in the talk came when Halmetoja described technology as a process of inversion. “**We are starting to turn ourselves inside out through technology**,” he said. “**When we make everything inside of us transparent, it raises questions about how much we are identified by the limits of our own bodies.**”
That was the deepest current running beneath his presentation. Not simply optimization, nor efficiency, nor even longevity, but identity. If the body became transparent, editable and continuously interpretable, then the self would no longer seem bounded in the old way. Human beings might come to see not just their biomarkers, but the limits of their assumptions, habits and imagination.
For Halmetoja, this was the threshold of a transhuman future, though he treated the phrase less as a slogan than as an unfolding confrontation with human limitation. Transparency would not only reveal our biology. It would reveal our conceptual constraints, our narrow creativity, the smallness of what we had thought possible.
A Techno-Optimist’s Closing Challenge
There was, in the end, something bracing about Halmetoja’s performance at **Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm**. He did not offer the audience a neatly regulated future, nor a cautious ethics seminar dressed in innovation jargon. He offered a challenge: to recognise that sensors, gene editing, AI, smart drugs and redesigned food systems were not isolated trends, but pieces of a larger civilisational turn.
His language was often grand, occasionally utopian, but never trivial. He was trying to describe a moment in which technology no longer sat across from biology as an external tool. It had begun to fuse with it, measure it, rewrite it and aestheticise it.
In exponential times, Halmetoja suggested, the future would belong not only to those who built the technologies, but to those who learned how to live inside their consequences.
Part of Biohacker Summit 2018 Stockholm