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 […]
(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 […]
At Scala Matsuri a few weeks ago (incidentally, an excellent conference), I was fortunate to be able to attend Jonas Bonér’s impassioned talk about resilience and reactive software. His theme: “without resilience, nothing else mattersâ€. At the core of it is a certain way of thinking about the ways that complex systems fail. Importantly, complex […]
Scientific method can be understood as the following steps: formulating a hypothesis, designing an experiment, carrying out experiments, and drawing conclusions. Conclusions can feed into hypothesis formulation again, in order for a different (related or unrelated) hypothesis to be tested, and we have a cycle. This feedback can also take place via a general theory that […]