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Crystallized DNA

Mapping and studying DNA is elucidating evolution. Enriquez calls it a “River out of Eden” because DNA is a history of the last billion years. Therefore understanding DNA will change medicine and archeology.

Example: White Europeans diverged from Africans because they were exposed to the plague. Those that survived had a mutation on their CCR5 gene. Through the study of DNA, scientists found this mutation developed 700 years ago, and as a result, Africans are more susceptible to the rapid spread of AIDS.

NEW ZOO OF LIFE

A new zoo of life is discovered through mapping our own genetic history and exploring new terrains on earth:
-There are ten trillion, trillion prochlorococcus–the most abundant species on the planet that we didn’t know existed before a few years ago.
-Our genome is more efficient than some simple amoeba. Humans have approximately 3.2 billion base pairs in our cells whereas this specific amoeba has 620 billion base pairs.
- The Ferroplasma eats iron and lives in an environment like battery acid. It secretes sulfuric acid. It is an ‘archaea’ or an ‘ancient one’ that could survive when the earth was just melted core. He suggests that as we discover life in harsher climates that there is growing evidence for life beyond our planet.
- Thiomargarita namibiensis is a bacteria visible to the human eye that is the size of a period(.) It utilizes sulfates and nitrates to get its energy and is found off the coast of Namibia in the sediment at the bottom of the ocean.

According to the speaker, we are paying attention to “stuff” (Bush and the war) that is temporal. Life isn’t. Whether or not our nation or our species survive, these bacteria will.

EXPERIMENTING WITH THE CODE

Geneticists have begun experimenting with endangered species in order to save them. Scientists take cells from adult animals and put them in a cow’s egg. They “reprogram it” and the cow gives birth to another species.

They are close to closing gene gaps in deteriorated DNA and pull a full string of DNA together

Sounds Familiar...

The speaker effuses that we will be able to take the tree of life and collapse it back. Maybe we will give birth to the primordial ooze.

In 1995 scientists sequenced the DNA of a bacterium. The price is going down to sequence organizes DNA. The first human cost 5 million, 3 million second time and he predicts that soon it will only cost a few thousand dollars. Maybe we will have our own personalized genomes on CDs.

He compares A, T, C, and Gs to 1s and 0s of binary code. (Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine, and Guanine are the nucleotide bases that make up the structure of DNA.) Once you have the source code you can make changes to it.

Example: Cliff Tabin’s Lab at Harvard Medical School is reprogramming chicken embryos to grow more wings. Each cell can be programmed to express different body functions. Right now lizards regenerate, but humans don’t. If we keep stem cell research and genomics going, we can learn how this works. During the time of this talk, the Bush administration had passed some sever restrictions on the research with embryonic stem cells. We will be able to stop undifferentiated cells–aka cancer.

We can make very small changes in the gene code and get drastically different outcomes.

We can test for all kinds of genetic information and for 60,000 conditions. While this brings up issues of privacy and insurability, it allows scientists to go after diseases.  Knowing what genes are causing the disease allows them to know what treatments will and will not work

Who Controls This Growing Information In Our Fragmented World?

Knowledge of genetics is growing on a log scale. The data is free, but only a very small select population is paying attention. Everyone is focused on the war and on Bush and not on ‘life.’

In a knowledge society the difference between the richest and poorest is 427 to 1 as compared to an agricultural society that is 5 to 1. One third of the global population is producing only 5 percent of the wealth because they don’t understand this change. Literacy in language, computers, and in life code makes the difference. The nations that produce “life” will be those that rise and countries that continually treat their citizens as serfs and fail to educate them will fall.

He discusses that we know how the capacity to build great empires because of the fragmentation of the world. When UN 1950 was founded there were approximately 50 nations now there are about 192.

Then they play him off the stage for time reasons before he can tell us the secrete of using our knowledge of life and code to build a better tomorrow with our children… Darn!

Gary Wolf, March 24, 2008
“Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity”
WIRED Magazine

This article features Ray Kurzweil an inventor, author, and poster boy for the Singularity movement. He and his ideas are the topics for two upcoming movies this year.

Ray Kurzweil

Inventor of: Kurzweil reading machine, algorithms that made Lexis-Nexis possible, speech recognition software that developed robot customer service agents, FatKat an automated program that makes decision in the financial markets.

Despite his successes as a young genius, his genetic history is checkered. His father and grandfather died of heart disease before they were sixty. At age 35, Kurzweil was diagnosed with type-2 diabetes and high cholesterol.  Through a restrictive diet he has overcome his diabetes and cholesterol.

Yum!

At 61 He takes 180-210 vitamins/mineral supplements per day and goes to a clinic run by Terry Grossman—leading longevity physicians—once a week to receive longevity treatments. Grossman charges $6,000 per appointment. Two met in 1999 and became partners who continually give Kurzweil new age treatments to extend his life. After all, it would be a shame to die just before the singularity occurred.

The Singularity

“The singularity is near. The continued opportunity to alleviate human distress is one key motivation for continuing technological advancement”

It is a term from cosmology that signifies a border in spacetime, like the edge of a black hole, where the normal laws of measurement do not apply.  Mathematician John von Neumann used the term in the 1950s, to discuss the accelerating pace of technological development that “gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue.”

The idea was expanded upon by Vernor Vinge in 1993 who put the idea on a time table and guessed that within 30 years, superhuman intelligent machines would arise and “take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors.”

Kurzweil argues that “while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant.” AIs will first be add-ons to human intelligence to extend our bodies and minds to defeat death and disease and immortalize us.

Kurzweil thinks exponentially and not linearly, and his ideas about technological development work on a exponential scale. Exponential change is difficult to differentiate from a linear regression at the beginning of the scale. This idea is evident in Moore’s law—the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles every 18 months.

Moore's Law

He believes that while our current computers and inventions don’t work perfectly, the fact that we are making robots and computers that mimic human behavior is proof that the world is about to change in major was because of exponential development.

“Computers will soon be smarter than humans. Nobody has to die.”

Grossman and singularitairans show how immortality will arrive in stages:
1. Anti-aging therapies and changes in lifestyle will allow people to reach the 125-year limit to our natural lifespans
2. Biological science will find some of the underlying causes of ageing and allow us to surpass that limit
3.  Computers will model human consciousness and we can download our personalities into “nonbiological substrates”

Romana is the inventor’s intelligent computer alter ego who he hopes to become when the singularity happens. Unfortunately Romana loses a turing test because she is too clever and doesn’t have limited intelligence like a human. Kurzweil thinks that human emotion is the most complex of all human behaviors, but happiness should not be the goal of our lives. It should be expanding our knowledge.

Unfortunately for Kurzweil he lives a lonely existence because most of his followers are hedging their bets and don’t completely buy into the idea of immortality. But he predicts by 2030s most of our internal organs will be replaced by machines/robots. And that 2045 the singularity will happen.

Criticisms of The Singularity
-Hard to conceptualize defeating death
-Moore’s law’s viability is being called into question- our technological growth maybe slowing already.
-There are other forms of intelligence that super-intelligent computers can be modeled off of other than human
-We maybe limiting ourselves and incapably of “radical self-improvement” because we will reinforce the fact that the brain has certain technical limitations because of its structure.

“Every day he stays alive brings him closer to this climax in intelligence, and to the time when Ramona will be real. Kurzweil is a technical person, but his goal is not technical in this respect. Yes, he wants to become a robot. But the robots of his dreams are complex, funny, loving machines. They are as human as he hopes to be.”

Nicholas Ruiz III
Review of Eugene Thacker’s Biomedia

-Human beings narrate their own existence.  But we are now editing ourselves via our internal code–DNA.  The literary extrapolation of life past our own existence has become a study of technology.  Many societies have yet to grasp fully this change because of capital, but with globalization they will eventually gain access to the “technological implementation of the code.”

-What we have yet to fully engage with as a society is that our beings are the ‘new media.’ Biomedia is the recontextualization of the human being with technology that creates a new understanding of how biology functions.

-Mediated by capital, the code of life (i.e. DNA) and the code of technologies are merging (technology and biology are merging in new ways for those with money).

-We encode our DNA in our genome in biocomputing hardware/software.  This digital map of ourselves is then decoded to understand human possibilities and to “digitally edit flesh” to optimize the existing substrate—i.e. our bodies.

-While our societies used to make a distinction between body and soul, this separation has been lost in modern society. We are unable to find the soul; we feel as if we have lost it.  Biomedia suggests that we have lost nothing other than the concept.

-The genetic code will be collapsed into digital code giving us “the Code.” The boundaries between bodies of silicon (computers) and DNA bodies will blur.

-DNA is information, DNA is a program. It has computational power. It is a mechanism.

-Biomedia needs to be defined so we can ground our discussions of bioethics in the culture of biomedia. How we narrate our human condition in terms of our bodies is also important to understand along with categories of understanding like the presumptive terms “natural,” “technical,” and “real.”

WRAPPING IT ALL UP

-Everything is happening in the near future with an explosion of technological and biomedical advancement that will surpass our wildest dreams!!! Is this necessarily a good thing? Both authors present a rosey picture without much down side to genetic manipulation and transhumanism.

Eek! You will be assimilated.

-Kurzweil’s arguments are based on idealized computers, not real world ones that function on imperfect software. Read Lanier’s response to Kruzweil’s singularity theory and others like it.

-Kurzweil has been accused of ‘New Age Spiritualism’ or as a ‘Geek searching for God’ with the quest for AI, but Thacker claims that Biomedia will lead to an understanding that the Soul is a farce.

-They have been able to generate tissue to build new tracheas and are learning how to regenerate ‘wings,’ but how quickly will mainstream medicine take to adapt this? Will it just be as Thacker claims a change that is mainly available to those with capital?

-Thacker claims we need to understand Biomedia before we understand bioethics, but where is the moral ground in all of these papers and articles?

-DNA=Code.  We are bio computers. What makes us human?

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The website is the main hub for a church to broadcast information out to their congregation. It is also a place where prospective members can go to get a “feel” for the church.  There has be anecdotal evidence that richer content on the website may drive down visits when individuals or families are trying to find a new church.  Of course some churches have richer digital cultures than others, and that varies somewhat based on relative age of the congregation.

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What do you all think?Similar Posts:

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