Just reflecting tonight on the techno-digital-post-human future. Last year for example, Craig Venter and a team of twenty scientists publicly announced that after 10 years and $40 million dollars they were able to create the first reproductive synthetic life form.
Craig Venter and Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0.
The team manufactured over a million base-pairs of the genome without using any natural DNA. In addition, they engineered genetic "watermarks" out of genes and proteins so that future scientists could identify which cells were synthetic. These watermarks can be spelled out to make a variety of names, phrases, and even an email address to contact the creators. In the case of Mycoplasma mycoides JCVI-syn1.0, one of my favourites would have to be Joyce's "To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life."
What else tonight? Well here's another one regarding human-tech interface. A quote from Ray Kurzweil:
“Today, we treat Parkinson’s with a pea-sized brain implant. Increase that device’s capability by a billion and decrease its size by a hundred thousand, and you get some idea of what will be feasible in 25 years. It won’t be, ‘OK, cyborgs on the left, humans on the right.’ The two will be all mixed up.” The Guardian, 2007.
There are many examples in the media lately about new human-tech interfaces that will boost human efficiency or health. The ethical war rages. I wonder what this will do to our definition of "life" and "human"?
Ian Sample, Guardian.
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