This is a moved post. I'm including the comments from the old site at the bottom.
On Wednesday, I attended the pre-TED EDGE Lecture: "SCIENCE AT THE EDGE: REBOOTING BIOLOGY -- Three of the World's Leading Scientists Ask Each Other the Questions They are Asking Themselves" The three scientists are: Rodney Brooks, Ray Kurzweil, J. Craig Venter; the panel was moderated by John Brockman. Overview, bios, etc. can be found on the EDGE website.
I don't want to simply regurgitate what these fellows said. Chances are I would get it not-quite-right. I'm interested rather in what *wasn't* talked about (or even dismissed out of hand by the moderator) and in some thoughts that occured to my while they were talking.
1. Scientific Drivers.
The personal (individual) fear of death drives a lot of scientific development, particularly in the Western world. And we all thought that scientists were doing this for the good of humankind. Some are. But some aren't. And that's OK, but we need to understand that personal agendas drive scientific ones.
2. Implications.
The technology and of course, ultimately, the PROMISE of the technology is incredible but no one is talking about the implications of the technology. There are HUGE social implications and environmental implications to us living for 20% longer (or more) as well as having extended fertility. WHO gets to live longer is a big question. I have a hard time believing that the technology will be exported to Africa or other third world countries. Mainly because the West will own these technologies and it will be Western values that are used to make judgment calls about whose quality of life is more deserving of extension. There are obviously environmental implications as well. Are we really meant to inhabit and take over the planet in this way? Our environmental technology and policies need to catch up before we are ready to deal with that.
3. Social Engineering.
An audience member asked a great question about social engineering as a priority -- why when a plane crashes do we send mechanical etc. engineers to swarm over the site and figure out what went wrong but when we have a Pol Pot or some other social situation, we invest very few resources in addressing the situation and trying to figure out how to prevent it from happening again. Great question (dismissed by the moderator). Relates to Bono?s comments about the relationship between poverty and terrorism. From a social point of view, we know these things are related ? with as much certainty as we know the physics of a plane in flight.
Random Observations
The arrogance of blogging is that we often record random observations, unfinished (and often unoriginal) thoughts with no care for the reader. That's what happens when we all are a publisher and a broadcaster :-)
- Biology as metaphor. Seems to be systems-thinking plus chaos theory. Everything is a pattern, but most are patterns larger than we can see. Hopefully not larger than we can imagine, though.
- "Telemeers"? Kurzweil mentioned this. Am not familiar, must look up.
- I think I am naive, but even if we can reduce everything to a mathematical equation (which means that we can model it) I still think there is an element of "magic" to life, to consciousness. Perhaps this is the quality of adaptability. Can we really put adaptability into a mathematical equation and then build it? In the same way that the flatworms that Brooks talked about adapt when their brains are cut out and reinserted in a different position?
- Identical twins ... are really identical in appearance only. Their brainwaves are different, their fingerprints are different. Longterm, how will these differences that are not naked-eye-visible change our perception of identity and ultimately, our perception of beauty?
- Kurzweil commented that ultimately biology is quite sloppy and inefficient. There is a lot of redundancy built into biology, perhaps in ways we don't need it. Is this a result of the material nature of our biology; that we are atoms (not bits) and that we are often involved in unpredictable circumstances? Does this redundancy enhance our adaptability?
- Brooks mentioned that the model for the brain has always been based on our most complex technology at the time, e.g. when the steam engine was the most complex tech, that is what the model for the brain was. Now, it's a computational model. But we need to get beyond that. Perhaps quantum?
COMMENTS ON ORIGINAL BLOG POST
Kate,
To aid in the lookup, he word from Kurzweil was Telomere (or Telomerase):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere
http://www.genlink.wustl.edu/teldb/tel.html
I think biology will drive the future of intelligence and information technology ? not literally, but figuratively and metaphorically and primarily through powerful abstractions.
Many of the interesting software challenges relate to growing resilient complex systems or they are inspired by other biological metaphors (e.g., artificial evolution, biomimetics, neural networks for pattern recognition, artificial immunology for virus and spam detection, genetic algorithms, A-life, emergence, IBM?s Autonomic Computing initiative, meshes and sensor nets, hives, and the subsumption architecture in robotics). Tackling the big unsolved problems in info tech will likely turn us to biology ? as our muse, and for an existence proof that solutions are possible.
some blog writings on the biological metaphor:
Posted by Steve Jurvetson at February 26, 2005 11:08 PMhttp://jurvetson.blogspot.com/2004/11/giving-thanks-to-our-libraries-bio.html