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Imagine a solar-powered, self-replicating, self-repairing machine that can do carbon capture, clean the air, and improve biodiversity in one go and it's ridicul

Imagine a solar-powered, self-replicating, self-repairing machine that can do carbon capture, clean the air, and improve biodiversity in one go and it's ridiculously cheap and easy to operate and maintain. Yep a tree. It always amazes me that people get excited about a new car, new phone or a new software release from a technical angle ( not what you can do with it - that's fine ) - but also don't see the amazing machines called life all around us as interesting at all! You are always the most complex type of machine in the room - by many orders of magnitude. Yep, the risks are higher in biotech, yep the rewards are perhaps not as good as a Google etc, and it's way harder. On the other hand it's more interesting and in the end these companies are creating new treatments for cancer or heart failure etc. Disclosure: I was part of a biotech 'unicorn'. In terms of whether we are at the cusp of a biotech revolution - I'd say it really kicked off 20-30 years ago and is already here - the new wave of immuno-oncology drugs transforming cancer treatment are a good example. I think the role of computers in the future is a little overhyped - it's necessary, but not the fundamental driver - the drivers are the new experimental technologies generating the data at unprecedented scale.

eikenberry 7y ago
IMO this is easy to explain by people's infatuation with novelty. Say you took that tree, engineered it to grow to 2 feet tall with bio-luminescent leaves and people would be fascinated by it... until that became old-hat, then it'd be ignored again.
themacguffinman 7y ago
I think the tree example is silly, trees aren't good tech because they're not very controllable and often very difficult to modify. And like many biological things, they're not really optimized for our convenience. Imagine a disease/bug-prone, space inefficient, waste dropping, telemetry-less, allergy-inducing machine that requires continuous water deliveries and a multi-year build process. Yep a tree. I won't try to tell you that you can't find trees and other biological constructs more interesting, and they certainly pose harder problems, but I'd think (and hope) that the future isn't overly complicated biotech adapted from even more complicated and wasteful natural systems. Right now we have to deal with heart failure and cancer because our crappy bodies are the best we've got, but I would think that the long-term future belongs to engineered systems that we can control, optimize, and understand.
- rojobuffalo 7y ago
  Good tech isn't just stuff that's subject to control and modification. Look how many species you can choose from. Look at all the stuff around you made out of wood. Trees create habitat, buffer wind, provide shade, retain soil, and on and on. They're good at what they do.
  - themacguffinman 7y ago
    And every species I can choose from has a seemingly random selection of benefits and problems (and all of them have several issues I listed above) with no clear optimization for any particular human use. Wood isn't a bad material on its own, but trees are a bad tech to produce this kind of material (again due to several issues I listed above). Being good at what it does is somewhat negated by the other problems it creates, and the fact that some problems it solves are only needed for other suboptimal biological constructs in the first place. There are better ways to provide shade. There are better ways buffer wind. It's good at retaining soil and habitat...only for other biological constructs that suffer from similar problems. I'd be disappointed if our vision of the future is akin to really good soil retainers. Future tech shouldn't need soil at all. I suspect this sort of nature-fawning is some kind of evolutionary bias; we find beauty in natural biology because we evolved to rely on it. Nature can certainly teach us a thing or two in a way that only millions of years of natural selection can, but tech that we control, optimize, and understand (ie. tech we can actually engineer) should eventually beat it in value.
    - boringg 7y ago
      Uh - premise that we control "tech"? Have you looked at how tech is being used in the wild? Our natural systems on this planet blow our "tech" systems out of the water by orders of magnitude by their order of complexity and their capabilities. To try and trivialize a tree to the listed attributes without looking how it fits into our entire living ecosystem is so incredibly diminutive and a classic simple narrative of humanity thinking we control this planet and that it was built for our benefit. We are merely here at this moment in time, we might not exist in a thousand more years, a million years? Who knows.

eikenberry 7y ago

IMO this is easy to explain by people's infatuation with novelty. Say you took that tree, engineered it to grow to 2 feet tall with bio-luminescent leaves and people would be fascinated by it... until that became old-hat, then it'd be ignored again.

themacguffinman 7y ago

I think the tree example is silly, trees aren't good tech because they're not very controllable and often very difficult to modify. And like many biological things, they're not really optimized for our convenience. Imagine a disease/bug-prone, space inefficient, waste dropping, telemetry-less, allergy-inducing machine that requires continuous water deliveries and a multi-year build process. Yep a tree. I won't try to tell you that you can't find trees and other biological constructs more interesting, and they certainly pose harder problems, but I'd think (and hope) that the future isn't overly complicated biotech adapted from even more complicated and wasteful natural systems. Right now we have to deal with heart failure and cancer because our crappy bodies are the best we've got, but I would think that the long-term future belongs to engineered systems that we can control, optimize, and understand.

rojobuffalo 7y ago
Good tech isn't just stuff that's subject to control and modification. Look how many species you can choose from. Look at all the stuff around you made out of wood. Trees create habitat, buffer wind, provide shade, retain soil, and on and on. They're good at what they do.
- themacguffinman 7y ago
  And every species I can choose from has a seemingly random selection of benefits and problems (and all of them have several issues I listed above) with no clear optimization for any particular human use. Wood isn't a bad material on its own, but trees are a bad tech to produce this kind of material (again due to several issues I listed above). Being good at what it does is somewhat negated by the other problems it creates, and the fact that some problems it solves are only needed for other suboptimal biological constructs in the first place. There are better ways to provide shade. There are better ways buffer wind. It's good at retaining soil and habitat...only for other biological constructs that suffer from similar problems. I'd be disappointed if our vision of the future is akin to really good soil retainers. Future tech shouldn't need soil at all. I suspect this sort of nature-fawning is some kind of evolutionary bias; we find beauty in natural biology because we evolved to rely on it. Nature can certainly teach us a thing or two in a way that only millions of years of natural selection can, but tech that we control, optimize, and understand (ie. tech we can actually engineer) should eventually beat it in value.
  - boringg 7y ago
    Uh - premise that we control "tech"? Have you looked at how tech is being used in the wild? Our natural systems on this planet blow our "tech" systems out of the water by orders of magnitude by their order of complexity and their capabilities. To try and trivialize a tree to the listed attributes without looking how it fits into our entire living ecosystem is so incredibly diminutive and a classic simple narrative of humanity thinking we control this planet and that it was built for our benefit. We are merely here at this moment in time, we might not exist in a thousand more years, a million years? Who knows.