I imagine many of these posts will end up just being cute baby animals and yummy recipes and pretty design inspiration. But since this is the first substantive post, let’s start off with the future of humanity and technology.
This weekend I read this Wired article about Crispr tech start-ups and that sent me down a rabbit hole. (For a great backgrounder on Cripsr, check out this Radiolab episode.) If you don’t have time to read that whole Wired piece right now, here’s the thesis:
Crispr is making biology more programmable than ever before. And the biotech execs staking their claims in Crispr’s backend systems have read their Silicon Valley history. They’re betting biology will be the next great computing platform, DNA will be the code that runs it, and Crispr will be the programming language.
Ok Wired, let’s pair that sentiment with these articles:
Synthetic Future: Revolutionary Center Will 3D-Print Human Tissues and Organs
Google’s AI creates its own inhuman encryption
Granted, we’re still a long way from real AI, but basically this is the beginning of Westworld, right?
This MIT Technology Review piece gives a nice background on how the cautionary tale robot trope has been used throughout human history and literature and then some guys go on to say they think it’s silly and we don’t need Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics. But the article’s four years old, so who knows what they think about scientific advances since then.
In any case, we’ll probably all become cyborgs too, so in the end there might not be all that much difference between “us” (technology-enhanced humans) and “them” (3D-printed stem cells with AI).
Let’s just appreciate the fact that the guy who gave us the word robot, Karel Čapek, also wrote this little gem:
The Abecedarium 