The New Empires of Intelligence

Ok, that was the bad news, now the reasons why I think DIYbio is probably going to become the biggest driver for just about everything, from here to the singularity.

Imagine all of these videos as one of those overlapping circle charts that people always use in powerpoint presentation. There’s an overlapping bit in the middle… and out of this I suspect will emerge, what Craig Venter in the second video describes as a new version of the Cambrian Explosion. The biggest challenge in the next 30 years, may not be climate change, it may be surviving this explosion, but that minor worry belongs (for the moment) elsewhere.

There’s a couple of hours worth of videos here, which is about 4 Gilligans, (A Gilligan being a measure of time spent doing something other than watching a sitcom. (from here (kindof)))

Ok. I’ve mentioned this one elsewhere, but it’s an easy-in, as it were. Short, simple and to the point, and I really like the design.

Now a talk by one of the people who sequenced the genome. Everyone claps at the end, and not without reason. This is why we ought to do this.

Then this one… more on possibility etc, but the imperative kicks in at about 17.00. This is why we need to do this.

Then this one on crowd-sourced innovation. This is why it has to be us that does this.

And finally a guy talking about mushrooms. It’s not actually about genetic engineering, but I like him and it does show what can be achieved with what we’ve already got.

So there you go. I’d also add, that seeing what centrally owned energy/pharma/(etc) industries did to the 20th century, it’s absolutely vital that this technology is democratised. We need this.