From: Emlyn O'regan (oregan.emlyn@healthsolve.com.au)
Date: Tue Apr 30 2002 - 01:07:28 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hal Finney [mailto:hal@finney.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, 30 April 2002 9:46 AM
> To: extropians@extropy.org
> Subject: RE: BioLuddites publish primer on Enhancement Wars
>
>
> There was supposed to be a debate this past weekend at the Foresight
> conference between Greg Stock and Ray Kurzweil about whether
> biological
> or machine technology would be more important in the major
> changes ahead.
> I was not present, but it seems to me that Kurzweil has the stronger
> argument, that machine technology will continue to advance much faster
> than biology can.
I'm not sure why you are using genetic enhancement and biological technology
as synonyms. Perhaps this was the line being pursued, but it seems clear to
me that biological enhancement and modification of humans can happen in many
more interesting and rapid ways than by modifying the genome of embryos.
I'm probably going to get this wrong, but I'll give it a go. Firstly, my
understanding is that with gene therapy, we will use modified bacteria to
modify the genes in somatic cells, thereby allowing us to alter fully adult
humans. The logical extent of this is the ability to perform some rather
radical modifications on adults, purely biological.
Next, of course, is nanotechnology. The accepted path to full blown nanotech
is via taking control of cellular mechanisms of protein production, and
harnessing them to build new machines (proteins) of our own design, which
can eventually bootstrap us into non-biological nanotechnology. This is
underway; the current study and simulation of protein folding is I think the
frontline.
This kind of harnessing of the existing abilities of cells is a new
biological technology with incredible ramifications. The potential in the
medium term is to create self replicating micro-scale biological machinery
which can perform very specific tasks. With this level of technology, and
wholy aside from non-biological nanotech, we will have the power to
understand human biology to a far more fine-grained degree (because sensors
can travel within us to gather information); we will have the power, with
that knowledge, to begin to simulate human biology at a fine-grained level
in software, and thus study potential manipulations of that biology in
software; we will have the power to implement those manipulations in living
humans. We will also have the beginnings of mind upload technology.
There's a lot more besides this to talk about with molecular biological
technology - Anders or Robert could do it far greater justice. Certainly,
its a lot more than merely modifying the genome in the germline.
I'm not writing off the computer technology->AI stream of development, by
any means; my impulse is to say that machine AI will come before we can do
significant modification of the human body/brain at the molecular level.
However, I wouldn't say it with 100% certainty.
This is because the same factor drives both technological domains, and that
factor is computers. The same hyper-exponential increase in computing power
which is used as proof of eventual machine dominance will also increase our
molecular biological abilities, and at the same rate, because the key
advancement is the ability to simulate cellular mechanisms.
In fact, the biological strand has something very strong in its favour,
which is the existence of examples. Nanomachines abound in biology (are
biology!), from basic mechanical components up to general intelligence. In
the pure machine strand we've got nothing, and a long string of failures to
show any real progress. Drexler was able to write a list of the achievable
steps from here to full Santatech, and a similar list could be drawn up to
move from here to full simulation of the human brain in software. There is
none such for producing machine intelligence.
Emlyn
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