I was reading a bit of an interview on the Forbes/Wolfe blog with this Steve Jurvetson, a (for lack of a better term) disgustingly intelligent and successful businessman who runs his own blobal venture capital firm. He loooooves technology. Particularly genetic engineering technology, which I think is a huge waste of our time and money and effort because it seems so patently designed to get out of control, morph itself in ways we'd never thought of, and kill us all. So of course I was all set up to bash him. But check this out:
"Forbes: The late science fiction author Sir Arthur C. Clarke once said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." What's some magic you've seen lately?
Jurvetson: Some of the most interesting magic I've seen recently is in the domain of genetic alchemy, where you can change one organism into another by swapping DNA. We are on the cusp of being able to write the code of life as if it were a poem or computer program. That gives us a whole new set of capabilities, in what I would call a second generation of industrial biotech, where we don't just cut and paste from nature but we actually write code from the ground up however we choose.
Five or 10 years ago, folks would have said it's impossible to change one organism into another by swapping out 100% of its DNA, yet this has been demonstrated in the past year by Craig Venter and his team at Synthetic Genomics. This is just a precursor to the next step, which is putting a fully synthetic chromosome into a single-celled organism."
...hmmmm.... Now, personally, on gut instinct, the words "change one orgamism into another by swapping out 100% of its DNA... has been demonstrated" in close proximity are blood-freezingly scary. WHY would we need to know how to do that? In what way is that helping us do anything besides play at being a God we don't even understand well enough to stop fighting wars over?
But I like what he said about writing the code of life like a poem. That is something I had never thought of before, and being a sucker for poetry, I find it rather intriguing. For the first time I'm getting a glimpse of what robot engineers and genetic scientists might see in all this willy-nilly pre-apocalyptic technological tinkering: creation. Creation of something entirely new, something that has never existed before. It's a compelling, seductive idea, isn't it? It's why we have kids. It's why we make timeless works of art. It's why we develop philosophies. It's kind of why we're here.
Still, I don't think that's any excuse. Timeless works of art aren't exactly innocuous all the time, but they're pretty benign, all things considered. Kids are just what we DO, how we maintain. Philosophies are less pleasant things went put into practice, but again, they are an outpouring of the human mind that is intended to help. Not so much with genetically synthetic life forms. Synthetic life forms. Synthetic AI forms. They may be there to help, but we are talking about putting a new thing into this world that has never existed before, that has the capability to do things we have never considered and have no way of predicting. This could be said of a child, perhaps - after all, anybody could be the next Hitler - but we know through precedent, all things told, what a person can and can not do. Robots, artificial life forms? We don't know. They may be the end result of benign creative impulses, and that's great and all, but once they're created they don't stop... there's the danger. Why not stick to poetry, art, reproduction, and philosophy? They've worked pretty well so far.
Le Gross National Happiness
16 years ago
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