techonomy (te-kän'-uh-mē) n. [tech(nology) + (ec)onomy]
organized activities related to the invention, development, production, distribution and consumption of technology-enhanced goods and services that a society uses to address the problem of scarcity and to enhance the quality of life.

About our guest:

Brian Wang is a futurist who blogs about all things future-related at NextBigFuture.

Image via Wikipedia

It sounds pretty exciting when you first start reading it, but when you get to the bottom you realize that there might less to this than meets the eye.

It all sounds plausible enough -- use RNA interference to knock out liver cancer by depriving tumors of the ability to to make proteins. No more proteins, no more cells. No more cells, no more tumor...get it? This is a new kind of warfare. Instead of sending in troops to engage the enemy one by one, we're sending in Special Ops to cut off their supply lines. Starve the bastards.

The technique's ability to attack single genes could lead to drugs for the 75 percent of cancer genes that lack any specific treatment, as well as for other illnesses. Alnylam is already testing RNAi therapy for Huntington's disease and high cholesterol in cell cultures; other researchers are tackling macular degeneration, muscular dystrophy and HIV. The potential has driven nearly every major pharmaceutical company to start an RNAi program.

Wow, the cure for everything! Can I get two bottles? But wait:

"I think RNAi could work for anything," [John] Rossi [a molecular geneticist at City of Hope National Medical Center in California] says. "But even if it only works for liver cancer, it would be pretty good."

See, this is how they get you. Just a cure for liver cancer. Ha. Who needs that?

If we're afraid our computers will betray us, we won't be able to use them fully. The harm incurred by that loss must be balanced against the benefits of catching more crooks. We're going to use our computers a lot more than we use our doctors, lawyers and priests.

It might be argued, in fact, that we already use our computers a great deal more. And in dealing with lawyers, doctors and priests, there is a real conversation with a human being and we're typically fully alert about what we say — and of the risks of saying it. With computers, we are usually casual. They are like intimate family. Not too far in the future, they will be implanted in our bodies. For some, such as deaf people with cochlear implants, computers are already connected to their brains. If you can't trust the computer implanted in your skull, who can you trust? Thanks to this familiarity, the criminals among us seem happy to let their computers record as they commit their crimes. Often, they are just not thinking about it. Thus, we might feel that while the confessional becomes almost valueless without clerical privilege, the computer is only modestly diminished.

But it is diminished. Therefor, it seems that some level of privilege should be granted to us and our interactions with our most trusted technologies.

I like the idea. It certainly seems that the recent trend has been towards greater and greater police power, however, and I can't help but wonder how fiercely the criminal justice system would fight putting such a standard in place?

UPDATE: Sort of related: 10 Fallacies About Web Privacy

About Our Guests

Christine Peterson writes, lectures, and briefs the media on coming powerful technologies, especially nanotechnology. She is the co- founder and President of Foresight Institute, the leading nanotech public interest group. Foresight educates the public, technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects.

PJ Manney is a writer and futurist, and a leading voice in the Humanity+ movement. She is an occasional guest host on FastForward Radio as well as being our official Hollywood correspondent.

Canadian futurist, consultant and award winning blogger, George Dvorsky writes and speaks extensively about the impacts of cutting-edge science and technology -- particularly as they pertain to the improvement of human performance and experience.

thrown together in an informational stew for your consumption.

Enjoy!

Follow Stephen on Twitter: @stephentgo

• George Dvorsky: Scientists successfully use human stem cells to treat Parkinson's in rodents.

  Researchers have successfully used human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) to treat rodents afflicted with Parkinson's Disease (PD). The research, conducted at the Buck Institute for Age Research, validates a scalable protocol that the same group had previously developed. It may eventually be used to manufacture the type of neurons needed to treat the disease and paves the way for the use of iPSC's in various biomedical applications.

• The Moral Turing Test?

  Are the decisions made by an AI at least as moral as an average person? One way of determining this would be with a blind Turing-type test.

• Engadget: Flobi robot head realistic enough to convey emotions, not realistic enough to give children nightmares (hopefully).

  Why cross the uncanny valley when you can go around it?

• Claytronics. An early implementation of utility fog?

• Wired Science: Awesome timelapse of Milky Way and last week's Perseid meteor shower at Joshua Tree:

  Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.

• Looking for love in Alderaan places? Sci-fi-themed speed dating.

• Brian Wang: Start up hopes to Reduce Cost of Batteries for Electric Cars by 85% by 2015

• North Korea sends first tweet.

  My guess: "get me outta here!"

• Infrared laser shown to quicken heart rate, gives hope for ultra-small pacemakers

• Half.com Offers iPhone App to Find Cheap Textbooks On The Go

  There is a huge need for this. Peer-to-peer selling of textbooks would have eliminated a particularly greedy set of middlemen during my education.

• Robert Sloss predicted the iPhone ...in 1910.

  He predicted the device would:

  • Serves as a telephone, the whole world over.

  • Either ring or vibrate in your pocket.

  • Transmit any musical recording or performance with perfect clarity.

  • Allow people to send each other photographs, across the entire world.

  • Allow people to see the images of paintings, museums, etc. in distant locales.

• Movie critic Roger Ebert is a big fan of paper books:

  Every home I've ever lived in has had a Library. When I lived in one room, I put my bed in the Library.

  And he looks with a somewhat jaundiced eye at ebooks. He had a series of tweets mocking their incorporeal character:

  I've read my e-book of Shakespeare so many times since graduating college in 1964 that look how lovingly the pages are thumbed.

  Here's my old e-book "10,000 Jokes, Toasts and Stories," and written inside "To my boy Roger from Daddy.

  I don't disagree with Ebert's point. A physical book can be a special thing. I wouldn't throw out a signed copy of "The Stand" if I were given the ebook.

  But what avid reader doesn't love having a library in his pocket at all times? (see also: "5 Ways That eBooks Are Better Than Paper Books")

  When "Fellowship of the Ring" was released there was zero chance that I was going to wait to see it on DVD. That movie needed the big screen. And while I loved "Dodgeball," it is just as funny at home as the theater. It loses little in the transition to the smaller screen.

  Likewise, some books seem to cry out for paper. Imagine a dark and stormy night. You decide to read "The Raven." Do you reach for a dusty tome... or your laptop? Easy choice. But does a tree really need to die so that I can read the latest Patterson thriller? Probably not.

  And if your e-Reader doesn't feel real enough, you can always give it a vintage book cover.

• Lungs Grown on Scaffolds Breathe After Transplantation in Rats
  
  How to Grow Lung Tissue
  Uploaded by teknoport. - Technology reviews and science news videos.

• Article asks "is consumerism robbing our creativity?" The author suggests that too much choice is a bad thing.

  But bad for who? I don't see paralyzed shoppers at the mall and supermarket. I see people making choices. Choice is good. Competition is good. Consumerism supports creativity.

  There's a much more interesting way of looking at this question. In his recent TED talk, Larry Lessig states that we have just gone through a period of read-only culture - consumers just listening to the radio, not singing and making their own music as they had throughout history. The means of music production and distribution were centralized.

  But, Lessig argued, read-write culture is battling back. Every kid with a lap-top possesses a recording studio and a distribution system.

• One square meter of sunlight is equivalent to about one horsepower.

  Matt Ridley - no huge fan of solar power in its current subsidized form - said in his book "The Rational Optimist," that...

  ...once solar panels can be mass-produced at $200 per square metre and with an efficiency of 12 per cent, they could generate the equivalent of a barrel of oil for about $30. Then, instead of drilling for $40 oil, everybody will be rushing to cover their roofs, and large part of Algeria and Arizona with cheap solar panels... it would take about one-third of Arizona to supply Americans with all their energy.

• Closing in on the Solar Singularity: Arthur Nozik, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) and professor at the University of Colorado told PhysOrg.com. "There is a theoretical possibility based on thermodynamic calculations of increasing the efficiency of present day solar cells by a very significant amount of 50-100%. In addition, quantum dots could lower the capital cost of solar cell production in terms of cost per unit area."

  Increasig the efficiency of solar cells while bringing down their costs will make the cost effective in more and more places and in new applications.

• Ben Goertzel's new H+ Magazine article on AGI, long-lived flies, antagonistic pleiotropy and immortality.

• Canadian librarian leads worldwide digital revolt for free knowledge (64 flags)

  It began when an academic database proposed increasing the fee it charges the University of Prince Edward Island by 120 per cent.

  Mark Leggott snapped.

  "The world's knowledge is increasingly being held to ransom and available only to those who can pay the fees," Leggott told the Star on Tuesday.

  He announced in a campus-wide letter that as chief librarian he had cancelled UPEI's subscription to Web of Science and was launching "an effort to create a free and open index to the world's scholarly literature called 'Knowledge For All'."

  Then he contacted librarians in Canada and around the world.

• Google's MapReduce algorithm turns smart phones into a self-contained cloud computing environment.

  The point of this exercise is to create a system that allows the MapReduce magic of distributed processing of large amounts of data to happen closer to the data itself. By eliminating the need to first transmit the data over a relatively slow wireless network, it can, in some situations, be processed even faster than if it were first uploaded, in total, to a remote server. This, despite the fact that the remote server would be much faster than the processor on any one phone.

• "You Have Reached My Mind, Please Leave a Message."

  Our current state of wireless communication is, already, high friction telepathy.

  It seems a safe bet that we will work to reduce this friction in every way possible.

• Book "Power to Save the World" - how the author morphed from nuke-fearing into proponent who believes we need nuclear power.

• Via Brian Wang's "Next Big Future:" Scientists from the University of Cambridge are talking about a "Nuclear Renaissance."

  They suggest:

  • develop new 'fast reactors' could be developed that could use uranium approximately 15 times more efficiently

  • develop reactors with replaceable parts so that they can last in excess of 70 years instead of 40-50 years

  • Flexible nuclear technologies could be an option for countries that do not have an established nuclear industry, suggest the scientists. One idea involves ship-borne civil power plants that could be moored offshore, generating electricity for nearby towns and cities. This could reduce the need for countries to build large electricity grid infrastructures, making it more cost effective for governments to introduce a nuclear industry from scratch.

  • build small, modular reactors that never require refuelling. These could be delivered to countries as sealed units, generating power for approximately 40 years. At the end of its life, the reactor would be returned to the manufacturer for decommissioning and disposal.

  • Thorium is mentioned as having potential to become an important nuclear fuel.

  • Accelerator-Driven Sub-critical Reactors are mentioned as an option

  • Nuclear fusion is mentioned. Fusion-fission hybrids and fusion-driven fission fuel breeders are a route to early commercialization of fusion energy.

• Oh, the Places You'll Go!: Neptune's 'dead zones' hold more rocks than asteroid belt.

Join us for two days of practical, realistic exploration of what each of us can do to slow individual aging and live the longest, healthiest, most active life possible.

A terrific lineup of speakers includes Esther Dyson, Peter Thiel, and Greg Fahy as well as some folks we've been fortunate enough to have as guests on FastForward Radio: Terry Grossman, Sonia Arrison, Gregory Benford, and of course Christine -- with whom we'll also be chatting on our upcoming podcast.

The Conference will be October 9-10 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. I personally can't make it to California that weekend but I'm hoping we get a Speculist regular to cover it for us.

You can be that person! Register here. Get a $100 off the cost of registration by using the discount code SPECULIST.

Meanwhile if you need a futuristic fix, may I recommend this blast from a year ago?

I was telling a friend about Anita Goel's rather provocative conclusion to the talk she gave Sunday morning, in which she asked:

What if information, consciousness, and mind are something pervasive, more primal, and even more fundamental than matter, energy or even space time?

Not a question that a lot of people would be comfortable asking with the likes of Michael Vassar and Eliezer Yudkowsky in the room. What I wanted to make clear to my friend was that a lot of Singularity Summit types would reject this sort of speculation because of the hint of mysticism, not because Singularity Summit types shy away from radical cosmological ideas.

For example...are we living in the Matrix? (And BTW, if we are, Anita's question could be answered in the affirmative without a smidge of mysticism.)

Anyhow, I gave the show a listen myself and something occured to me -- modesty aside, this is some awesome radio (thanks to the guests, of course.). Our new special series will not be a repeat of The World Transformed -- there's currently no reason to repeat it. The series we did still stands up.

On to new topics this fall.

A few angles to consider in your pursuit of the singularity.

Talking about the Singularity is like Aristotle talking about interstellar travel.

How do we know things?

Human beings are good at tricking, fooling, and bamboozling each other.

Randi shows that the "microphone" he is holding is really an electric razor and his "eyeglasses" are actually empty frames. And yet we have to make assumptions. We would be catatonic otherwise.

Think critically about the world as it is presented. We don't debunk. We start not assuming that the thing is bunk. We take a scientific approach assuming that we don't know.

Great story about scientists at Livermore labs fooled by a simple magic trick.

Another story: MIT physicist takes David Copperfield's "flying" illusion as being done with superconductivity.

Fooled by his own education.

We are often not as bright as we think we are. If we still can't distingish between fantasy and reality, how can we undertake creating greater than human intelligence?

Favorite terms -- vibrations and quantum. Watch for Woo Woos to adopt the terminology of the singularity.

He does a mentalist trick -- shows how easily we are fooled. It's not that people are stupid, they just aren't informed.

Two great clips from the Tonight Show, exposing a tv faith healer and "psychic surgeons."

5:35 PM Irene Pepperberg

Nonhuman Intelligence: Where we are and where we're headedwq

Animals, a very complex relationship: friends, property, competitors, metaphors /icons.

Animal robots: people would feel guilty when turning them off.

Key question: why is Pluto a dog while Goofy is a humanoid? Americans spend $46 billion per year on pets.

We don't yet really understand how intelligent animals are.

Selective breeding causes a host of problems: thoroughbred race horses with heart problems, dog breeds with hip displasia.

Amazing videos of a crow modifying a tool to get a treat, a parrot counting objects and identifying colors.

We don't yet know how intelligent animals are. Should we really be augmenting animal intelligence until we have a better handle on that?

Currently we use animals on a lot of ways. Making them more intelligent puts all of those into question. Or do we really want to takeon super-intelligent squirrels?

5:00 PM Jose Cordeiro

The Future of Energy and the Energy of the Future

Interesting background -- political exile from Venezuala. Part of the UN MIllenium Council. Teaching fellow at Singularity University.

Energy is the biggest industry in the world. It is the industry that rules the world. Biggest challenge / opportunity facing us -- how to make solar energy affordable for humanity.

Peak Oil, if it happens, is not relavent. We had Peak Whale Oil in the 19th century and yet managed to push on.

90% correlation between temperature fluctuations on Mars and on Earth. Should be taken into consideration in climate models.

Club of Rome: Limits to Growth. Was wrong because it did not take technological change into consideration.

We have gone through energy waves from lumber to coal to oil. At each stage we produce less carbon and use more hydrogen.

Buckminster Fuller talked about creating a global energy network. Still a long way off, but wireless electricity and other developments will bring it closer.

Will have space elevator in the next 30 years.

Craig Venter's bacteria will eat CO2 and excrete 99 octane gasoline. From fossil hydrocarbons to living carbohydrates. A major phase shift!

Two major experiments currently goin on with nuclear fusion. One in France, one at Livermore labs. Right now fusion works, but it's not economical. It's a matter of time before we get a handle on the basic process that powers the universe.

We currently use about 16 Terawatts. If we used only 1% of 1% of the energy available from the sun we would solve all the world's energy problems.Right now solar energy is growing exponentially.

Japan plans by the year 2030 to power Tokyo with space-based solar.

We need cheap energy to solve the world's problems. In 30 years, we may have hundreds of times as much energy as we currently do -- for free.

Old Chinese saying: "Do not blame the darkness. Light up the world."

4:25 PM David Hanson

Why Characters Are Key to Friendly A.I.

We are hardwired to form relationships. We are hardwired to learn and grow via relationships.

Part of our intelligence is knowing how to respond to persons. Modeling people through robots and simulation helps us to understand the dynamics of nonverbal communication, which at the neuroscience level is not yet thoroughly understood. Having these characters among us as our friends will build trust with these emerging intelligences.

Defining character. Has to have:

Agency
The illusion of reality
Values / empathy

Currently character robots don't have as much intelligence as we would like.

Creating these robots is a mixture of engineering, art, and cognitive and neuroscience. Still driven largely by intuition because we don't yet fully understand the dynamics of the relationships people form.

Consumer demand will drive the development of good machines -- machines that are part of the human family.

David has developed a material called "Frubber" that makes the faces of these robots much more realistic.

Narrow and General Intelligence

Missed this session.

2:40 PM John Tooby

Can discovering the design principles governing natural intelligence unleash breakthroughs in artificial intelligence?

Opening comment -- "It's a pleasure to be among the intellectually adventerous."

All the pieces in place for realizing the enlightenment goal of establishing a rigorous natural science of human nature.

There are two ways of studying the brain -- one as a physical system. It's an amzaingly vast, daunting system from that perspective. The other approach is to map it at a computational level -- look at it from the standpoint of its functions.

All better than random capabilities in the brain reflect problem-solving strategies developed through selection. We need to do research into how these strategies became brain functions as a guide to developing AI.

2:00 PM Shane Legg

Universal measures of intelligence

Intelligence -- are we concerned with what's going on inside or can we accept intelligence strictly through observing external behavior. Plus, are we interested in human or ideal intelligence?

Shane takes the perspective of ideal intelligence as viewed from external behavior.

Definitions of Intelligence

-- Intelligent systems are expected to work and work well in many different environments.

--A cluster of cognitive abilites that lead to successfull adaptation in a wide range of environments

-- Act appropriately in an uncertain environment

--Generates adaptive behavior

Shane's synthesis:

Property of an agent that interacts with its environment so as to successfully achieve goals across a wide range of environments.

+ Occam's Razor

Together you get a formula for intelligence.

Shane shows a mathematical formula for intelligence.

It is formally defined, captures the essence of many informal definitioons, orders simple agents correctly, it is continuous, and it is non anthropocentric.

The goal is to use the formula to measure intelligence in the real world.

Shane is now taking the equation and implementing it to acsertain AIQ -- algorithmic intelligence quotient.Initial tests are encouraging -- providing exactly the results he would expect to see on evaluations of algorithms.

If you can't measure it, it's not science. Need solid measures in place in order to track progress towards artifiicial intelligence.

Information Processing & Physical Intelligence in Nanomachines that Read/Write DNA

Convergence of fundamental physics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology.

About 15 years ago got interested in the reading and writing machines in DNA. There are many mysteries about this process -- how is it modulated by the environment? Is it a complex adaptive system? Got interested in the physics of this machine and this process. How can we control that machine? Could we introduce precision control?

A divergence. Medicine is practiced at the level of chemistry and microbiology. Physicists don't know much about physics. How can these two worlds be brought together?

Can we develop a conceptual framework for developing nano-tools -- knobs and controls to harness these nanomachines for a number of practical applications?

Precision controls have been introduced. Applications:
Converting energy efficiently at the nanoscale
Storing information in DNA
Computing

Gene RADAR -- enables real-time point of care diagnosis. Handheld pathology lab -- take a sample and get a result.

Several nanomachines within DNA. One of these uses a template to replicate the sequence.

Tools for single molecule detection and manipulation.

Anita closes her talk with some audience provocation / interaction.

Are nanomachines intelligent?

Audience answer: No.

Nanomotor might be thought of as a Maxwell Demon? Second law of thermodynamics -- we go from order to disorder. Can we go the other way?

On the nanoscale, you can't get a free lunch but you can get a cheaper lunch.

Feyman calculated in 1999 -- if you stored all of human information into DNA you could store it in a box less than a millimeter thick. These nanomotors make 10/15th computational steps to take one step forward.

Intelligence = Information extracted / Information Present

Need a new framework that brings matter, energy, and consciousness into one framework.

Life, mind, and consciousness are emergent phenomena -- get enough complexity and you get those things.

What if information, consciousness, and mind are something pervasive, more primal, and even more fundamental than matter, energy or even space time?

Refernces to John Archibald Wheeler -- It from Bit.

11:15 AM Ellen Heber-Katz

The MRL mouse - how it regenerates and how we might do the same

Some mice can grow back more parts than others. Have found some mice that can grow back limbs, restore holes punched in ears.

Have looked at genetics. Have looked at the biology. Inflmation is key. Some part of the anti inflmatory reponse is related to the regeneration process. Anti-inflammatory drugs block the regeneration process

MRL mouse has mitochondria sitting on top of the nucleus. Resembles a stem cell.

Ear cells are very rapidly growing.

Have identified what may be the regeneration gene. Does regenration lead to immortality? Not currently, the MRL mouse dies of tumors related to an inflammatory autoimmune disease. Now working on separating tumors and inflammation from regeneration.

Question: why did we evolve away from regeneration -- went with scar tissue instead? It is incorrectly believed that scarring is faster. May have to do with evolving away from the autoimmune / inflammatory problems.

10:40 AM Lance Becker

Modifying the Boundary between Life and Death

We used to have a clear bright line bwetween life and death. What we see now is an increasingly flexible boundary between the two.

We are "death" phobic. People don't like the word -- don't like to talk about it. But if we're going to prolong life, we need to understand death better.

What is death?

We don't know much about it. We don't understand its processes very well.

A more fundamental question -- when is death? Did research some time ago on heart cells. Deprived them of oxygen for an hour -- looking for when they died. Cells deprived of oxygen did not die. Cells died when oxygen was restored to them.

This occurs with brain cells and many other types of cells in the body.

This is intentional death -- it's a very active process. Mitochondria are key to this. We know that their function is energy. But apparently they also have a cell death switch built in. When you have no oxygen in your body, electrons build up in the mitochondria. When oxygen is reintroduced, the presence of those electrons is the signal to throw the death switch.

Cooling helps inhibit that process -- "A cold heart can save your brain." But cooling is a very time-dependent process. And our coolants aren't good.

Working on developing a "slurry" to cool patients in a matter of minutes. Normally take about 8 hours to cool a person down.

"Mostly dead is slightly alive."

That's a good summary of what we know about the boundary between life and death.

Uncontrolled reperfusion -- no oxygen for an hour. Lethal for animals. Controlled reperfusion with a cocktail -- 6/6 test subjects survive.

Emergency room doctors trying to save lives are all about restoring oxygen to all parts of the body that aren't getting it.

The border between life and death can be modified. We don't know what the time window is. It could be that there is no point of death. We ned to understand and monitor mitochondria better -- key to preventing death from many dieases (Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer).

Simplified Humanism and Positive Futurism

Opposition to life extension has a long pedigree. From pious clergymen saying it was wrong to cure smallpox because it's God's perogative to smite whom He wishes to a recent (tragic) case about a British couple delayed from having a second child who would be a bone marrow match and would have offered hope for their terminal son.

Death doesn't make life meaningful. Life makes life meaningful.

"You know what makes this sunset beautiful? The fact that one day I will no longer exist."

Yeah, right.

If no one had ever heard of old age or death, would anybody buy the "benefits" of it? Absolutely not.

Life doesn't have to complicated. Sometimes the obvious answer is right.We need simplified Humanism.

Typical: Curing disease is good, unless genes are involved
Simplified: Curing disease is good.

Shape matters not: fishes and chickens are non-persons because they're differently brained, not differently shaped. (We wouldn't eat Yoda, for example.)

Simplified humanism -- embrace the goal of success rather than making excuses for failure.

In the hunter-gatherer age, 15-65% of men died violently. 100 million people died in wars in the 20th century, if we were still killing each other at the hunter-gatherer rate, it would have been 2 billion. (Stepehn Pinker.)

Futurism: Rational first, then positive.

1. What you want doesn't control how the world is.
2. There's no destiny that helps you.
3. Magic doesn't work.
4. You can't just make stuff up.

Positive futurism doesn't mean foretelling a golden age. It means that "a much nicer place to live" is still on the table as a stake.

Technophile -- technology is good
Technophobe -- technology is bad
Technonormal -- talk of golden age and catastrophe is childish
Technovolatile -- most likely scenario is a godlen age or a catastrophe (not "normailty')

Eliezer is a technovolatile. Most serious thinkers on these subjects are. They are the heirs of the Enlightenment.

9:40 AM Ramez Naam

The Digital Biome

Massive climate change is a possibility. Not the projections of the IPCC, but consequences of enough warming to release huge amounts of methane into the atmosphere. We don't know it will happen, but it is a possibility and one that we should take precautions against.

Fish catch is leveling off. The amount of effort required to bring fish in is going up dramatically. Boats are going ten times the distance they used to go and bringing back fewer fish.

Fresh water. Major North American aquifer dropping fast.

Food yields have been mostly good news. In 08 there was a major spike in food prices (due partly to push to biofuels.)

Endangered species. Each species is a source of information -- we're losing data.

Peak oil. We'll run out eventually. May be occuring now, may not be until mid century.

Bio science is now digital. Shows us a picture of a bio sequencing center -- looks like a data center.

George Church wants to sequence 100,000 genomes by 2020 -- thinking too small. It should cost about ten bucks by then. It will be possible to do millions.

If the genome is digital, can we edit it? Short answer -- yes.

Benefits:

Energy -- current biofeuls are not efficient. Craig venter is creating designer organisms that will produce highly efficient and clean fuels. Turning alage into ethanol or hydrogen. Algae doesn't compete with food crops -- uses waste water. By 2013, DARPA plans to produce biofuels on site for the entire US armed forces fleet. Tobacco virus has been modified to create photovoltaice cells via tobacco.

Increase the photosynthetic capabilites of the planet by 6%, offsets our Co2 increases.

Genetically modified salmon -- grows to maturity much faster.

Pathogens are moving more quickly, but we're moving more quickly as well.

Direct solar energy looking more and more promising. Unlocking more energy is the key to solving the water problem -- we can desalinate the ocean to get more fresh water.

There is no guarantee of success. How do we make it more likely that we get a good future, not one of the many bad ones? US energy R&D spending $1.8 billion; defense R&D $78 billion (some of which does trickle down to energy.)

Meanwhile, we spend a trillion a year on energy.

Reverse-engineering brains is within reach

Fascinating description of how a software program taught itself to play backgammon using a very simple learning heuristic. The program went from rudimentary skills to grand master status -- similar to IBM's Deep Blue, but without teams of programmers hard-coding game strategies into it. It taught itself.

This learning ability has broad application across a host of technologies: soon we will have a cognitive power grid, cognitive cars, congitive homes, etc.

5:50 Dennis Bray

What Cells Can Do That Robots Can't

Bray argues that the information encoding capability of RNA and other proteins far surpasses what is typically found in even very advanced robotic systems. We have a vast, he argues "almost infinite" (but that seems excessive) capability to store data.

If true, it still seems to me that Kurzweil's exponential processing growth eventually closes this gap.

6:15 Sejnowski/Bray debate

Will we soon realistically emulate biological systems?

I had to miss this one in order to do me Steven mann interview and video. I'm guessing they disagreed.