Inovadores estão trabalhando em direção a um mundo no qual a matéria viva é totalmente programável por meio da biologia sintética onde as pessoas já não são apenas consumidores de tecnologia, mas os cidadãos de um mundo tecnológico.
A team of Harvard Medical School scientists, which includes genetics professor George Church, have designed a bacterial genome that has been rewritten on a massive scale, with changes in more than 62,000 spots.
They haven’t used it to make living E. coli yet, but the findings, reported today in Science, mark progress towards genetically engineered bacteria that could make new materials without risk of exchanging genes with organisms in the wild.
“It‘s an important step forward for demonstrating the malleability of the genetic code and how entirely new types of biological functions and properties can be extracted from organisms through genomes that have been recoded,” Farren Isaacs of Yale University, who has worked with the team in the past, toldNature.
You might have heard the news: Our world could be a clever computer simulation that creates the impression of living in a real world. Elon Musk brought up this topic a few weeks ago. Truth be told — he is probably right. However, there is a very important point missing in this whole “real vs. fake” discussion: It actually makes no difference. But first…why might our world be a simulation?
Musk is nowhere near the first one to suggest our world might be fake. The idea reaches back to the ancient Greeks, though what we call a computer simulation, the ancient Greeks called a dream.
Is Market Capitalism simply an accident of certain factors that came together in the 19th and 20th centuries? Does the innovation of economics require a new economics of innovation? Is the study of economics deeply affected by the incentive structures faced by economists themselves, necessitating a study of the “economics of economics”? In this broad ranging interview INET Senior Economist Pia Malaney sits down with Eric Weinstein — mathematician, economist, Managing Director of Thiel Capital (as well as her co-author and husband) to discuss these and other issues.
Underlying the seismic shifts in the economy in the last ten years, Dr. Weinstein sees not just a temporary recession brought on by a housing crisis, but rather deep and fundamental shifts in the very factors that made market capitalism the driving force of economic growth for the past two centuries. The most profound of these shifts as Dr. Weinstein sees it, is an end to 20th century style capitalism brought about not by a competing ideology, as many had once feared, but instead by changing technology. As production is driven increasingly by bits rather than atoms, he sees the importance of private goods give way to public goods, undermining a basic requirement of market models. In a different line of thinking, as software becomes increasingly sophisticated it takes on the ability to replace humans not only in low level repetitive tasks but also, with the use of deep learning algorithms, in arbitrarily complex repetitive tasks such as medical diagnosis.