Biotechnology vs. Digital Technology Video Lecture | Shaping the Future: The New Western World - Personal Skills

you
biotech is is different for some
important reasons first of all it's not
just the code of communications the code
of life I mean this is getting deep down
into the basics of who and how we are
and how all life is and a life in the
universe if there's any besides here
which we still don't know but what to a
conference called sin x 0 beta which
happened this last week and it was two
days of you know the eager funders and
the eager inventors getting the other
and rubbing each other up of cool new
things that are coming along they had a
certain rate and one of the guys was
there who had been part of the digital
stuff back in the 70s he and I kind of
probably found each other because we're
of a certain age and he said when you go
to digital gatherings these days
everybody is in their 20s he said if you
look around this group there's a lot of
people in their 20s and in the 30s and
in their forties and in their 50s and he
said there's a reason for that and he
said the reason is digital code is easy
bio code is hard it takes decades to get
a handle on how to actually manage with
buyout code with DNA the revolution is
deeper and more powerful but is probably
going to come more slowly than the
digital code revolution did because
you're dealing with code which even the
e 3.2 billion base pairs passenger
pigeon 1.3 billion base pairs a woolly
mammoth four billion base pairs and
what's actually going on in there is
largely mysterious it is code which runs
is code which is based on code which has
been running for three point yeah 3 or 4
billion years and it was never
engineered never designed never
documented never sourced is spaghetti
code top to bottom everything is
contingent on everything else is patches
it's 3.2 billion years of patches yeah
and to go in as a code designer and look
at that is to go cray
yeah where do I even start which doesn't
sound like a best practice yeah but on
the other hand it runs yeah and this is
legacy code of the the most intractable
but nevertheless important nature and so
did try to you to follow the importance
aspect of it and then start to deal and
just chew away at the intractable it's
pretty much like trying to understand
the brain or understand the immune
system any of these biological things
they consist entirely of Darwinian
moronic piling on of what looked like
wrong yeah patches on patch patches on
patches on patches part of the idea of
synthetic biology is to make parts of it
that are quote rational letter design
yeah and so maybe at some point we'll
just add another chromosome 223 make it
24 chromosomes in the 24th chromosome
consists entirely of rational documented
engineered code wow what are those
things we want it to do what an idea and
that might go better