Some comments about Venter's JVCI chemically synthesised genome.

Ken Macleod:

As a proof of concept, the creation by Craig Venter et al of a bacterial cell controlled by a chemically synthesised genome is definitive. For the first time an organism exists that got its genome not from the direct replication of another organism's, but from a description of another organism's, stored in a computer – and slightly modified, at that, to include a distinguishing "watermark" that might as well be, and perhaps already is, a trademark. It's also a landmark. This is a moment in evolution, the origin of a new kingdom: the Synthetica, as artist Daisy Ginsberg has suggested we call it, supplementing nature's bacteria, eukarya, and archaea.

Freeman Dyson:

This paper reminds me of a saying that is well-known to pure mathematicians: "Every big discovery starts with a bad proof'". This is true in mathematics. The first proof in a new subject is bad, because the discoverer is a first-rate mathematician, struggling to overcome one obstacle after another and not caring about elegance. Afterwards, second-rate mathematicians tidy up the details and find good proofs.

I think the same saying holds good in science if you replace "proof'" by "experiment". This experiment, putting together a living bacterium from synthetic components, is clumsy, tedious, unoriginal. From the point of view of aesthetic and intellectual elegance, it is a bad experiment. But it is nevertheless a big discovery. It opens the way to the new world of synthetic biology. It proves that sequencing and synthesizing DNA give us all the tools we need to create new forms of life. After this, the tools will be improved and simplified, and synthesis of new creatures will become quicker and cheaper. Nobody can predict the new discoveries and surprises that the new technology will bring. I feel sure of only one conclusion. The ability to design and create new forms of life marks a turning-point in the history of our species and our planet.

Oddly, Something that Robin said comes to mind: Yawn, World Remade

What dramatic new events are in store for humanity? Here we contemplate 12 possibilities and rate their likelihood of happening by 2050. … They all have the power to forever reshape how we think about ourselves and how we live our lives.

That is the June Scientific American, which doesn’t seem to realize that one of their 12 possibilities matters far more than the rest. They assign a greater than 50% chance to advanced AI by 2050!

LIKELY: machine-selfawareness

. . . Scientific American seems unaware that the AI possibility’s expected effects far outweigh all the rest. If accurate, this one forecast deserves vastly attention than a 700 word comment. If they really took it seriously, they might devote an entire issue to the subject, or perhaps even their entire future magazine. Either they don’t really believe their >50% number, they don’t understand its enormous civilization-remaking consequences, or they (and their readers) don’t find such vast consequences several decades hence of much interest. Which is it?

Another of the 12 possibilities, almost a certainty, was the creation of life. I tend to agree with Robin that strong AI is more interesting due to the speed with which it might evolve once it exists. But I wonder if it might be a brief but brilliant explosion of change, and then collapse, while the slower biological evolution go further before collapse.