[In] common table salt, or NaCl[,] one of the elements is a metal, and the other is a poisonous gas.

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{ How synthetic biology will change the world }

For example: scientists routinely wield microbes against disease, using computers to turn bacteria into microscopic drug factories rapidly assembled from off-the-shelf biological parts; crops ease world hunger and convert sunlight into biomass; and the cells of astronauts remember if they’ve been damaged by gamma rays, alerting doctors before cancer starts to grow.

Image via { University of Washington }

Complexity is a property of living organisms at all scales, and synthetic biology may help scientists disentangle “Darwin’s bank”.

{ Rule 30 }

&

Stephen Wolfram on
{Computation and the Future of Mathematics }

When we return to shore, jaded from all these natural wonders, think how we’ll look down on those pitiful land masses, those puny works of man! No, the civilized world won’t be good enough for us!

One hundred years from now, the role of science and technology will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it. So much of science and technology has been about pursuing efficiency, scale and “exponential growth” at the expense of our environment and our resources. We have rewarded those who invent technologies that control our triumph over nature in some way. This is clearly not sustainable. We must understand that we live in a complex system where everything is interrelated and interdependent and that everything we design impacts a larger system. My dream is that 100 years from now, we will be learning from nature, integrating with nature and using science and technology to bring nature into our lives to make human beings and our artifacts not only zero impact but a positive impact to the natural system that we live in.

The best way to understand the manufactured world is not to see it as a work of human imagination only, but to see it as an extension of the biological world. Most of us walk around with a strict mental dichotomy between the natural world of genes and the artificial world of concrete and code. When we actually look at how evolution works, the distinction begins to break down. The defining force behind life is not energy but information. Evolution is a process of information transmission, and so is technology, which is why it too reflects a biological transcendence.

Here’s the thing: For most of us, cyborg ends at the human-machine hybrid. The point of the cyborg is to be a cyborg; it’s an end unto itself. But for Clynes, the interface between the organism and the technology was just a means, a way of enlarging the human experience. That knotty first definition? It ran under this section headline: “Cyborgs — Frees Man to Explore.” The cyborg was not less human, but more.

…we developed a Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity that formally explains science & art & music & humor, to the extent that we can begin to build artificial scientists and artists.

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{ When creative machines overtake man }
March 31, 2012 by Jürgen Schmidhuber

When I was a boy, I wanted to become a physicist like my hero Einstein until I realized as a teenager the much bigger impact of building a scientist smarter than myself (my colleagues claim that should be easy), letting him do the remaining work.

…

Let me show you this pattern of exponential acceleration of the most important events in human history, which started 40,000 years ago with the emergence of Homo Sapiens Sapiens from Africa.

[an excellent timeline that you should click on the link to read about, but a bit long to re-post]

…

Now you say: OK, maybe computers will be faster and better pattern recognizers, but they will never be creative! But that’s too pessimistic. In my group at the Swiss AI Lab IDSIA, we developed a Formal Theory of Fun and Creativity that formally explains science & art & music & humor, to the extent that we can begin to build artificial scientists and artists. …

••••••

Do read on — it’s a really good piece: interesting, funny, & vastly informative.

Also watch Jürgen Schmidhuber’s lecture about { The Algorithmic Principe Behind Curiosity and Creativity }.

Intelligence (I) is nature’s AI. Thus, if AI were impossible, I would be impossible, too. Since I am possible and I is possible, so is AI, period. The artificial/natural distinction is an arbitrary one. Nature evolved bacteria, plants, animals, humans, social systems, and also technology. The artificial belongs to nature. The emergence of artificial brains implies not us making them so much as nature doing it yet again, just like nature evolved eyes at least tens of times independently again and again. “Artificial” nanotechnological brains exist for millions of years already; nature made them; they are called “brains”; and we may indeed tomorrow find how to copy mayor steps of this in the laboratory without understanding a single neuron, thus ending up with something very close to a human brain and its shortcomings.

Get Ready for a New Human Species

Juan Enriquez, who spoke at Technology Review’s EmTech conference on Tuesday, says our newfound ability to write the code of life will profoundly change the world as we know it. Because we can engineer our environment and ourselves, humanity is moving beyond the constraints of Darwinian evolution. The result, he says, may be an entirely new species.

via MIT’s { Technology Review }

••••••

That’s the general idea behind transhumanism. Enriquez’s assertiveness in the interview is great to see, despite how much disbelief and negativity this topic faces. However, many answers seem unfinished, and this first seems to lack a broader understanding:

The new human species is one that begins to engineer the evolution of viruses, plants, animals, and itself. As we do that, Darwin’s rules get significantly bent, and sometimes even broken. By taking direct and deliberate control over our evolution, we are living in a world where we are modifying stuff according to our desires.

Are they? This response takes the “man vs nature” stance as it implies that the ways in which we evolve are “unnatural.” { That isn’t true. } Whether Darwin’s idea of “natural selection” implies something specific that excludes controlled evolution is a different question, but what’s being discussed here doesn’t seem to be a challenge to that theory.

{ Artificial Selection } seems to be a better term for this:

As opposed to artificial selection, in which humans favor specific traits, in natural selection the environment acts as a sieve through which only certain variations can pass.

In taking a new perspective on the terms “nature” and “artifice”, all that means is that nature, at a certain degree of complexity, has become able to choose the paths of its own evolution and expedite it, instead of relying on environmental nudges over many generations. We (the complex-enough life form) might not necessarily choose the “best” traits for survival in our environment, since we can be short-sighted, but neither does natural evolution.

Also, as evolution is { partially non-random }, it seems that what we have now is just a greater degree of control over the direction of adaptations.

But, as I don’t have a solid understanding of evolution, please respond if I’m wrong.

?

Is matter “evolvable”?
—› Is biology special?
—›—› What is life?

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“Inorganic-Life.jpg”

July 2011, I posted about the creation of artificial almost-life in the lab: { “Biologists do not agree on what the definition of life should be or whether it is even useful to have one.” }

& Last night I wrote about seriously { reconsidering what we consider “natural” and “artificial” }, or the “Man vs Nature” myth, and creating new mythologies accordingly (in response to Steve Fuller’s Humanity 2.0)

Now, scientists at the University of Glasgow are working on {creating inorganic life }:

Professor Lee Cronin, Gardiner Chair of Chemistry in the College of Science and Engineering, and his team have demonstrated a new way of making inorganic-chemical-cells or iCHELLS.

Prof Cronin said: “All life on earth is based on organic biology (i.e. carbon in the form of amino acids, nucleotides, and sugars etc) but the inorganic world is considered to be inanimate.

“What we are trying do is create self-replicating, evolving inorganic cells that would essentially be alive. You could call it inorganic biology.”

…

“Bacteria are essentially single-cell micro-organisms made from organic chemicals, so why can’t we make micro-organisms from inorganic chemicals and allow them to evolve?

“If successful this would give us some incredible insights into evolution and show that it’s not just a biological process. It would also mean that we would have proven that non carbon-based life could exist and totally redefine our ideas of design.”

The { TED } talk.

These home-made aliens might be able to provide us with tangible evidence that our idea of “being” should be reconstructed, from the paper-doll view we have of “things” as isolated forms, to a systemic fluidity.

We need to be always reminding ourselves that we have always been enhancing ourselves, that science has always been enhancing the human condition, that we have been trusting machines over our own bodies for at least 300-400 years now. We’ve already broken through that barrier – we do live in a very artificial world. Even though the stuff on the horizon may amplify our powers tremendously, it is nevertheless part of the same process. It is a step change but it’s the same story, the story of scientific progress.