The Speculist

On Friday, Newsfactor Technology News published an article entitled, "The Bleeding Edge of Computing" which contained this speculation:

Professor Drew Endy in biological engineering at MIT says that soon we will be able to write DNA -- perhaps even building and coding living organisms capable of conducting work for us on the nano-scale. It is even possible that programmers might adopt natural coding as a computer language.

"Synthetic biology" means leveraging natural structures as a way of building things on the molecular scale. "If you can write DNA, you're no longer limited to 'what is' but to what you could make," said Endy. "The science you get out of that is more than 'Here's this gene and what it does.' It's 'What are the physical limitations of biological systems?'"

via KurzweilAI

I would expect biological systems to have some physical limitations that would keep them from being the all-purpose nanobots we futurists like to imagine. But what's to keep an enterprising programmer from writing the code for an organism that eats carbon and excretes petroleum?

Any bets that genetic algorithms won't be an important tool in this emerging field? Technology is coming full circle.

I recently asked:

How much tweaking is required before we consider a formerly natural organism [like yeast] to be an artificial nanobot?

Possible answer: when we move from tweaking natural genes to writing the code ourselves from scratch.