[Broco]

Just wanted to point out this interesting article by Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books. We all know that the 21st century will see major improvements in biological science and technology, but this article is unusually imaginative in foreseeing the scale of the consequences. And he doesn't even start to get into the genetic engineering of humans, which is at the forefront of my mind at least...

[haze]

Very interesting read, I'm always fascinated by these subjects. I never realized the impact on economics it could have, that's an important point to get out of the article too.

[psiga]

That is all goatshit and cockypop. Next you'll be telling us that they've made toothpaste that regrows teeth.

...
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[CubaLibre]

I fucking hate Freeman Dyson.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Krabjuice Gaiden]

I've got my second liver.

Do you?
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{V}_{^w^}_{V}

[Broco]

[CubaLibre]

[Broco]

Oh, okay, I thought you had a better reason.

You sound like you want science to be a substitute for religion. Even if science did produce the grand unified model that you seem to imply is its "purpose", there would be no way to prove that it is complete and that there isn't another layer below it, out in phenomena that we can't presently observe. What about the properties of a greater multiverse, or before the beginning of time? What about events that are so transitory in space and/or time that they cannot be reproduced in a laboratory setting? What about things that are so complex they cannot feasibly be completely described using our minds or computers?

Dyson's position of treating scientific models as by nature incomplete and flawed, and seeing what are the most interesting and useful things we can discover within those limitations, seems to me actually philosophically mature. "Everything that's wrong with particle physicists today" is if anything all the purely theoretical wanking that's going on, for the sake of unification without gaining any additional descriptive power.

[CubaLibre]

The purpose of science is to know things. Particle physicists know shit about particles - they know a lot about complicated strings of math that may or may not have anything to do with particles.

Of course science can't replace metaphysics - that's a silly proposition, much as scientists would love it to be true. But it must work under the auspices of metaphysics. Divorced from them it is nothing but parlor tricks.

Basically all I'm saying is that quantum physicists could probably afford to pay a little more attention to the man that founded their fucking discipline.
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Let's Play, starring me.

[psiga]

Teeth. I mean really.

I think that all futurists end up being too biased toward their pet projects. Nearly all of them have some great ideas about their pet projects, though, and visionaries tend to cough up some choice quotes even just in general. But yeah. Quirky biases. No one man can accurately predict the trends of 6 billion people struggling to achieve things.
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[Jeff Garneau]

the argument that this will help poor people is pretty retarded

also like every day i worry that i will die before i can be immortal

[Jeff Garneau]

yo seriously when will there be an internet but with brains instead of computers

[negativedge]

[adol]

None of this stuff is happening in the near future. Although I'm not directly involved in bioE research, I have a bunch of contacts heavily involved in the field, and through them I can tell you that there isn't going to be a big boom of biotechnology in the consumer spectrum for a long long time.

The part that really calls bullshit on this is people creating their own organisms as a form of expression or "art" or something. The ethical implications of that scenario alone wouldn't allow for its existence, besides the obvious fact that science hasn't created a manufactured organism just yet.

[psiga]

Yeah. The assumption that we're going to have some breakthrough that makes for grade-school easy genetic mutants which aren't horribly grotesque failed abortions that seethe with untold viral terrors is kinda like Kurzweil's assumption that we'll just effortlessly knock together some AI that makes replicating and replacing human cognizance a total snap.
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[CubaLibre]

[haze]

I think you people are too cynical
I wasn't quite getting the impression of within 20 years science will solve all our problems! and you can grow angel wings and fly rather than looking at long term responsibilities generations from now