The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future

by Mustafa Suleyman

the Carlson curve: the epic collapse in costs for sequencing DNA.

the cost of human genome sequencing fell from $1 billion in 2003 to well under $1,000 by 2022. That is, the price dropped a millionfold in under twenty years, a thousand times faster than Moore’s law.

CRISPR gene editing (the acronym stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)

Jennifer Doudna

Emmanuelle Charpentier

CRISPR edits DNA sequences with the help of Cas9,

CRISPR-based systems with names like Carver and PAC-MAN promise effective prophylactic ways of fighting viruses that, unlike vaccines, don’t trigger an immune response,

technologies like CRISPR are simple and cheap to use; they have, in the words of the biologist Nessa Carey, “democratized biological science.”

You can now buy a benchtop DNA synthesizer (see the next section) for as little as $25,000 and use it as you wish, without restriction or oversight, at home in your bio-garage.

Gene synthesis is the manufacture of genetic sequences, printing strands of DNA. If sequencing is reading, synthesizing is writing.

Companies such as DNA Script are commercializing DNA printers that train and adapt enzymes to build de novo, or completely new, molecules.

the new field of synthetic biology—the ability to read, edit, and now write the code of life.

the promise of evolution by design, tens of millions of years of history compressed and short-circuited by directed intervention. It brings together biotechnology, molecular biology, and genetics with the power of computational design tools.

Put it all together and you have a platform of profoundly transformational scope.

Now semiconductor fabrication is a hyperefficient atomic-scale manufacturing process churning out some of the world’s most complex products. Biotech is following a similar trajectory, only at a much earlier phase; organisms will soon be designed and produced with the precision and scale of today’s computer chips and software.

Synthia.

Altos Labs,

Frances Arnold

Solugen,

Bioforge

LanzaTech,

all the functional parts of a computer—data storage, information transmission, and a basic system of logic—can in principle be replicated using biological materials.

75 percent of your dry body weight: all proteins.

Critical Assessment for Structure Prediction

(CASP)—to

Mohammed AlQuraishi,

Think, then, of two waves crashing together, not a wave but a superwave. Indeed, from one vantage artificial intelligence and synthetic biology are almost interchangeable.

Neuralink

brain interfacing technology

promises to connect us directly w...

Synchron,

Cortical Labs

protean

Amazon’s “first fully autonomous mobile robot,” called Proteus, can buzz around warehouses in great fleets, picking up parcels.

vexed

instantiations

“qubits,”

quantum bits, the core units of quantum computing.

(Life + Intelligence) x Energy = Modern Civilization

Energy—expensive and dirty as it often is—is at present a limiter on technology’s rate of progress. Not for too much longer. Renewable energy will become the largest single source of electricity generation by 2027.

In 2000, solar energy cost $4.88 per watt, but by 2019 it had fallen to just 38 cents.

inertial confinement,

which involves compressing pellets of hydrogen-rich material with lasers and heating them to 100 million degrees to create a fleeting fusion reaction.

This is a time of huge optimism. Including wind, hydrogen, and improved battery technologies, here is a brewing mix that can sustainably power the many demands of life both today and in the future

What if rather than being manipulated en masse, atoms could be manipulated individually?

Nanomachines would work at speeds far beyond anything at our scale, delivering extraordinary outputs: an atomic-scale nanomotor, for example, could rotate forty-eight billion times a minute. Scaled up, it could power a Tesla with material equivalent in volume to about twelve grains of sand.

gossamer

A world, in short, where anything can become anything with the right atomic manipulation.

It’s a techno-fantasia, many decades away,

Aerorozvidka.