By David Kirkpatrick, Contributor

For us here at Techonomy, next Tuesday’s Techonomy Bio conference is a catalytic and mind-expanding moment. It’s a half-day foray into the systems of life. We come from the world of IT and the Internet, but have concluded that becoming too embedded in it will increasingly be a deep limitation. For any of us to innovate and understand the future progress of mankind, we have to recognize that for all their compelling charms, digital tools are just one part of the toolset. Now that biology yields every day to greater understanding, it is going to pull human society into fundamentally new directions.