First part (from computers to molecular biology): I was explaining why “AGI … arbitrary atomic manipulation nanotech … transhuman life extension” are now likely, in a way that wasn’t in the 16th (or the 6th) century.
Second part: I’m trying to wake up your sense of change! You didn’t answer Aris when he asked you where you think 21st-century progress will stop. Do you think the human race can understand the causality of the atom, the gene, and the brain, and then only apply that knowledge superficially? Chemists routinely apply their understanding of how atoms interact, to create molecules that have never existed in nature, and that is the future of life and intelligence too: living things and thinking things that have been designed from the molecular level up, having only broad structural properties in common with their natural prototypes.
You did say all this won’t happen for “the foreseeable future”. So maybe you just mean it’s an affair of the year 3000, but not the year 2050. Let’s try to pin this down. Consider a scenario for the future solar system where most of it is inhabited by artificial life and artificial intelligence. In some places it’s still based on DNA, in some places it’s all solid-state. But there are many inhabited worlds, with their own chemical ecosystems and nonhuman cultural histories. Do you consider such a future flatly impossible? Possible but unlikely? Likely but irrelevant to this discussion?
First part (from computers to molecular biology): I was explaining why “AGI … arbitrary atomic manipulation nanotech … transhuman life extension” are now likely, in a way that wasn’t in the 16th (or the 6th) century.
Second part: I’m trying to wake up your sense of change! You didn’t answer Aris when he asked you where you think 21st-century progress will stop. Do you think the human race can understand the causality of the atom, the gene, and the brain, and then only apply that knowledge superficially? Chemists routinely apply their understanding of how atoms interact, to create molecules that have never existed in nature, and that is the future of life and intelligence too: living things and thinking things that have been designed from the molecular level up, having only broad structural properties in common with their natural prototypes.
You did say all this won’t happen for “the foreseeable future”. So maybe you just mean it’s an affair of the year 3000, but not the year 2050. Let’s try to pin this down. Consider a scenario for the future solar system where most of it is inhabited by artificial life and artificial intelligence. In some places it’s still based on DNA, in some places it’s all solid-state. But there are many inhabited worlds, with their own chemical ecosystems and nonhuman cultural histories. Do you consider such a future flatly impossible? Possible but unlikely? Likely but irrelevant to this discussion?