Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Michael's avatar

This is an amazing, comprehensive survey of what amounts to a fifth industrial revolution, moving in tandem with the developments in creating AGI. There are existential risks associated with both and this field needs someone like Nick Bostrom to produce a non-technical risk assessment comprehensible to the general public. Great job!

Expand full comment
Sarah F. Sasaki's avatar

Extremely interesting overview!

I suspect that figuring out how genes behave will prove a far more daunting task than bringing down the costs of DNA printing. There are simply so many layers on top of the genome... People often talk about a "second genetic code," but to me it always felt like there was a "2nd, 3rd, 4th and nth genetic code"

I suppose that's where the advantage of fully synthetic cells lies. By starting from a "simplistic" (for biological standards) foundation that is extremely well-known and predictable, we can then build on top of that step by step in a similarly predicted fashion and tailor our synthetic organism to do exactly what we want. But to get all the wonders of life using this approach would be a lot like building them from scratch...

We'll probably always want to highjack naturally occuring biological systems in one way or another. They're just too powerful for us not to

The use AI models to predict the effects of large-scale genome engineering has interesting implications. Considering that AI models are increasingly afflicted by the "black boxes" problem as they grow larger, meaning that they may deliver accurate predictions but we may never know why, I suspect we may come create biological machines that we can't really understand. All we'll know is that our models told us that genome X would produce phenotype Y, and it works

Expand full comment
3 more comments...

No posts