Currently reading: C.G. Jung: Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (vol. 2) (seminar notes) J.G. Ballard: Empire of the Sun (fiction) Eric Hobsbawm: Age of Extremes (nonfiction) Just finished: J.G. Ballard: Extreme Metaphors (interviews) Ursula K. LeGuin: The Earthsea Quartet (fiction)
Elon Musk, entrepreneur of some renown, believes that the sudden eruption of a very powerful artificial intelligence is one of the greatest threats facing mankind. “Control of a super powerful AI by a small number of humans is the most proximate concern”, he tweets. He’s not alone among silicon valley personalities to have this concern. To reduce the […]
The J Craig Venter Institute has published a paper detailing the genome of their new Syn3.0 synthetic organism. The major accomplishment was to construct a viable cell with a synthetic, extremely small genome: only 473 genes and about 500 kbp. Even though it is considered to be fully “synthetic”, this genome is not built from […]
(This post is an attempt at elaborating the ideas I outlined in my talk at Bio-pitch in February.) The academic and investigative relationship to biology – our discourse about biology – is becoming increasingly technological. In fields such as bioinformatics and computational biology, the technological/instrumental relationship to nature is always at work, constructing deterministic models of […]
I recently gave a talk at the Bio-Pitch event at the French-Japanese institute. I was fortunate to be able to speak about some of the ideas I’ve been developing here among so many interesting projects (MetaPhorest, HTGAA, Yoko Shimizu, Tupac Bio, Bento Lab etc). The topic of my talk was “Is bioinformatics possible”? A deliberate […]