My view of the health care worker of the future is not a doctor, but an 18-year-old, otherwise unemployed, who has two things. He has a backpack full of these tests, and a lancet to occasionally take a blood sample, and an AK-47. And these are the things that get him through his day.

Wow. (HT to Bryan for re-posting this article to the DIY Bio list).

Interestingly, the article also mentioned that Prof Nir Barzilai was involved. He is the scientist who predicted a longevity drug ready for testing in two years.

Ideally you wouldn’t even need to know anything about DNA to
manipulate it, just as a 5-year-old doesn’t need to understand the
chemical composition of the plastic in his Legos to build a fortress
on the living-room carpet.

We will soon be living in a much different world.

As someone who doesn’t really love needles, this is a good sign for the future. Read the full story here. Thanks to Elissa for sending this story to me.

Link to TED talk and transcript.

Life in the Universe by Prof. Stephen Hawking

…I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to
modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression.

Laws will be passed, against genetic engineering with humans. But some
people won’t be able to resist the temptation, to improve human
characteristics, such as size of memory, resistance to disease, and
length of life. Once such super humans appear, there are going to be
major political problems, with the unimproved humans, who won’t be able
to compete. Presumably, they will die out, or become unimportant.
Instead, there will be a race of self-designing beings, who are
improving themselves at an ever-increasing rate.

If this race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk
of self-destruction, it will probably spread out, and colonise other
planets and stars. However, long distance space travel, will be
difficult for chemically based life forms, like DNA. The natural
lifetime for such beings is short, compared to the travel time.
According to the theory of relativity, nothing can travel faster than
light. So the round trip to the nearest star would take at least 8
years, and to the centre of the galaxy, about a hundred thousand years.
In science fiction, they overcome this difficulty, by space warps, or
travel through extra dimensions. But I don’t think these will ever be
possible, no matter how intelligent life becomes. In the theory of
relativity, if one can travel faster than light, one can also travel
back in time. This would lead to problems with people going back, and
changing the past. One would also expect to have seen large numbers of
tourists from the future, curious to look at our quaint, old-fashioned
ways.

It might be possible to use genetic engineering, to make DNA based life
survive indefinitely, or at least for a hundred thousand years. But an
easier way, which is almost within our capabilities already, would be to
send machines. These could be designed to last long enough for
interstellar travel. When they arrived at a new star, they could land on
a suitable planet, and mine material to produce more machines, which
could be sent on to yet more stars. These machines would be a new form
of life, based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than
macromolecules. They could eventually replace DNA based life, just as
DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

This mechanical life could also be self-designing. Thus it seems that
the external transmission period of evolution, will have been just a
very short interlude, between the Darwinian phase, and a biological, or
mechanical, self design phase. This is shown on this next diagram, which
is not to scale, because there’s no way one can show a period of ten
thousand years, on the same scale as billions of years. How long the
self-design phase will last is open to question. It may be unstable, and
life may destroy itself, or get into a dead end. If it does not, it
should be able to survive the death of the Sun, in about 5 billion
years, by moving to planets around other stars. Most stars will have
burnt out in another 15 billion years or so, and the universe will be
approaching a state of complete disorder, according to the Second Law of
Thermodynamics. But Freeman Dyson has shown that, despite this, life
could adapt to the ever-decreasing supply of ordered energy, and
therefore could, in principle, continue forever….

Nice. One day people won’t know what dentures were.

That’s the concept of technological singularity, popularized by author and inventor Ray Kurzweil. Talking about something that might happen, will be world-changing and can’t be predicted is quite the task. Yet some speakers gladly took it on.

“It’s hard to understand why a rational singularist would come to this conference,” economist James Miller told the crowd. “You don’t want to die [en route to the conference] and miss out on utopia.”

From an economist’s point of view, Miller said, people who believe in the singularity will save less because they will expect computers eventually to fix everything, including financial problems. Of course, that assumes one lives long enough to see the singularity, and one might need to save in order to live long enough to make it there. Such radically futuristic conversations brought up questions of a religious nature.

When asked how a belief in the singularity differs from a belief in the end of time for Christians, Miller said they were essentially the same. “A singularist shouldn’t drive to conferences, and a Christian shouldn’t commit adultery,” he said.

Yet not all the speakers were so off the cuff in dealing with the core issue of accelerating change.

Intel CTO Justin Rattner, obviously trying to distance himself from whipped-up ideas of utopia, said he felt a bit “like an accidental tourist” at the conference. He then proceeded to give one of the best talks of the day, showcasing technology that might actually lead to the place many singularists want to go.

[...]
Read more here.