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Agreed that nature has plenty to teach us, where I slightly disagree is that controlling and optimizing biology is the better path to future tech. Yes, cells a

Agreed that nature has plenty to teach us, where I slightly disagree is that controlling and optimizing biology is the better path to future tech. Yes, cells are nanobots, but they're nanobots "designed"/evolved by nature with deeply complex goals and incentives often orthogonal to ours. Cells come with a lot of evolutionary baggage and many constraints owing to its extensive optimization. From my perspective, it's like hijacking a crazy project that doesn't belong to us. It's not clear to me that taming insanely complex cells to serve our goals is better than building traditional engineering up to do the same thing. I compare this tension to ARM vs x86 for mobile devices. Mobile devices uniquely require extreme power efficiency, and ARM processors are dominant because they satisfy that critical requirement even though they're less capable than other processors. Intel wanted to enter the mobile market and they already own the more capable x86 platform, but its power efficiency is a lot worse. Can Intel retrofit ARM-level power efficiency onto its deeply complex and desktop/server-optimized x86 processors before ARM builds up to x86's level of capability? Honestly, I don't confidently know the answer and you could be right. But I think it's telling that centuries of medicine and decades of biotech have been a slow grind producing very narrow solutions (eg. invented a chemical cocktail to treat one type of cancer, tweaked a plant to contain more of a certain type of nutrient and be resistant to a handful of common diseases/bugs) while ground-up engineering is seemingly exponential, where today's tiny portable processor is orders of magnitude more advanced than the state of the art only a few decades before. Yeah, nature and biology has a headstart, but we don't have to spend a thousand years figuring out how to develop an appendix.

DrScientist 7y ago
I'd agree that we can only guess at the future - I'd just saying there is almost a fetishism for man made technology, and a blind spot for nature as it is pervasive. You say we have made little progress in biology technology - yes and no. Yes - there is so much more that could be done. No - you are again ignoring the stuff in plain sight - the vast majority of our food comes from 'engineered' animals or plans - very little from wholly engineered chemical processes. Breeding is low tech engineering - but it's still engineering - the productivity of commercial wheat is vastly superior to wild grasses for example. Or look at the variety of dog breeds - each one developed for a particular purpose - from sheep herding & rabbit hunting to guiding blind people. Now it's perhaps too easy, and not intellectually completely understood - but if you are focusing on outcomes - it's bloody effective. The right virus - a tiny thing much smaller than a single cell - could wipe out a huge proportion of the population - it's happened in the past. You can imagine a future where Iron Man fights for human survival with rockets, missiles and high tech, but you ignore biology at your peril.

DrScientist 7y ago

I'd agree that we can only guess at the future - I'd just saying there is almost a fetishism for man made technology, and a blind spot for nature as it is pervasive. You say we have made little progress in biology technology - yes and no. Yes - there is so much more that could be done. No - you are again ignoring the stuff in plain sight - the vast majority of our food comes from 'engineered' animals or plans - very little from wholly engineered chemical processes. Breeding is low tech engineering - but it's still engineering - the productivity of commercial wheat is vastly superior to wild grasses for example. Or look at the variety of dog breeds - each one developed for a particular purpose - from sheep herding & rabbit hunting to guiding blind people. Now it's perhaps too easy, and not intellectually completely understood - but if you are focusing on outcomes - it's bloody effective. The right virus - a tiny thing much smaller than a single cell - could wipe out a huge proportion of the population - it's happened in the past. You can imagine a future where Iron Man fights for human survival with rockets, missiles and high tech, but you ignore biology at your peril.