I’v been thinking alot about the possibility of using the tools nature uses for receiving, storing and transferring information to build (or should I say “grow”) a “biological computer”.
Basically something along the lines of a genetically engineered organism whose sole purpose would be to process data using neurons, rna and all the basic chemical reaction driven functions that your every day cell employs in it’s processes.
Just think about it; You can grow your very own render farm in a petry dish, and you’ll never have to pay for hardware again. :eyebrowlift:
I think we have A LOT to learn before we can do something like that. Doctors and scientists today know hardly anything about how the human brain ticks, much less enough to grow a neural net to our own design. That said, the idea may be a possibility in the future, along with quantum computing.
Though it’s not organisms, using single cells to store and process data is one theory of quantum computing, but if it’s biological computers you’re looking for, here’s a glimpse of where we stand. It’s posted under Health, but should be under warTech, because the terminators are coming.
Well yea, that’s a given, but still the prospects are intriguing, even at this distance.
Heh, yea, well of course you wouldn’t just copy a human brain in a jar or something. I was thinking more along the lines of engineered plant life, that sort of thing.
Definitelly don’t want the thing to become “aware”, I mean that spells trouble, of course.
Hey, thanks for the link blengine. Very informative.
PS: It just hit me. Your avatar, it’s the civil defense logo from the 50s. Heh, just noticed that, pretty neat.
I think we’re a long way off from harnessing single neurons to do complex computations. Because nerve cells are inherently analog devices, it’s still very difficult to model accurately what their output will be given an arbitrary input.
However biological molecules like DNA have been used to do certain types of massively parallel computations. Like a quantum device, with enough different DNA molecules you can search a huge domain rapidly and simultaneously and solve relatively quickly things like the traveling salesman problem. Or maybe one day, rendering a 500 billion polygon scene?
Social: I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel last night called 2057. It was a show about what it might be like in 50 years, and yes they showed us useing flying cars lol, that was promised 50 years ago! Anyways they showed that you can PRINT a heart valve, yes you can get heart valve juice and put it in a printer and print out a heart valve. I think eventually we will have biocomps, but don’t know how far down the road that will be.
I can’t believe they replaced it, and with something so wimpy of all things. It’s a shame.
Social: I was watching a show on the Discovery Channel last night called 2057. It was a show about what it might be like in 50 years, and yes they showed us useing flying cars lol, that was promised 50 years ago! Anyways they showed that you can PRINT a heart valve, yes you can get heart valve juice and put it in a printer and print out a heart valve. I think eventually we will have biocomps, but don’t know how far down the road that will be.
Ahh, I missed that show. I’v seen the commercials for it on Discovery, but never took note of the run time.
Anyway, yea, I lost my trust (as if I ever had any to begin with) in all those “futurists” after seeing some of those videos from the 50s predicting the “flying cars, rocket boots and picknics on mars” all in the year 2000, a real “Jetsons” theme. Heh, my favorite is the one where “we only work 3 days a week, because the economy is so well developed”.
I would think that todays futurists probably have a more conservative view on the future (due in no small part to those prediction blunders from the 50s), but even so, if history has taught us anything, it’s that even the best guesses are still only that, and that the future always turns out quite differently.
Developing a “Biocomp” is something that will take quite some time with the current model of technological and scientific development. The model I’m talking about here is the one where you either have one really smart guy with a revolutionary idea and the means to realize it, or a small group of highly educated people working on a well funded goverment/corporation project.
The problem is education. There are just not that many people who do that type of development, and even though information about genetic engineering is available on-line, it’s not the kind of info that you can easily implement to run your own experiments, because it requires equipment that many of us just don’t have access to. It’s not as easy as editing and compiling a piece of source code.
The way I see it: If you give everyone the tools and the knowledge to pursue their own interests in any particular field of science, people would just come together and form development communities, just as they do now with software. It’s all about providing the means for the masses to do the type of reasearch that they want to do, then the lightning fast Open Source ideology could be truly implemented to more than just software, and then we could probably meet the futurists’ expectations this time around.
Heh, sorry for the rant. It’s just that for me this topic is very interesting, and I tend to lose track of my post lenght in situations like these.
To be honest I find the idea sick.
Creating life just to do your bidding…
Also, the dangers inherent in doing such a thing are ridiculous.
Homunculus anybody?
How is that any more sick than creating life just to kill and eat it?
Porkchop anybody? How about some chicken?
Also, the dangers inherent in doing such a thing are ridiculous.
Risks are inherent to progress. Also, I think you missed a subtle point I made above, where I state that what I’m talking about would be more along the lines of plant, rather than animal life.
Either way, I’m not talking about anything as sinister as you’re probably imagining. However I admit that at this point anything is a possibility.
It’s a bit too conterversial (have no idea of correct spelling) for the world. Having a living organism, that could possibly have reason, as a slave. Watch out world, first stem cells and now stem cells for bio-comps…
Just my $0.02. I think mankind is having a difficult enough time “handling” the technology that exists in the present time. It kind of looks like that advances in technology lead to “better” weapons systems in a lot of instances. I can’t recall a society ever having a new weapon, and not using it.
As for the dangers and ethical problems involved with genetic engineering, some have already become reality (eg. gm rice and such “escaping” into the wild), not to mention some of the instances that have been very close to releasing modified biologicals through mishaps in labs due to carelessness or natural disasters (think hurricane Katrina for example, and then maybe google up the biological research labs in the area). There are folks far more aware of the problems involved in this path of experimentation than I am that are very concerned. Some of their thoughts on the subject can be found here.
I think that mankind needs to grow in other areas first.
It might be nice to see development along the bio computer lines…someday.
Well anyway, I think that when talking about biological processes, it’s more about how things are wired (how they work together, how many things they can do at the same time) that determines overall “performance”, rather than just “how fast can you do this one thing” (like for a single calculation).
Even if optical computing didn’t suffer from certain drawbacks, it still doesn’t beat the prospect of “growing hardware”. Also, think about it from the power requirement aspect. If you use the existing gene code for plant leaves, you can engineer your biocomp to grow leaves, and in turn derive it’s energy through photosynthesis, eliminating the need to provide a steady electrical charge from an outside source.
There just seem to be so many benefits when compared to everything else that is currently produced through a factory process.
Think of it more along the lines of a Plant that can crunch numbers (what I’m talking about), rather than a sentient lifeform.
A lot of people seem to think social is talking about some kind of HAL or genetically engineered brain. This is because a lot of people are ignorant.
What I assume he is referring to is a computer based in the interactions of engineered cells and proteins that fold specific ways according to specific situations, i.e. much like a processor. Only infinitely smaller, being cell-sized and what-not. a strand of DNA stores more information than the library of congress. There’s your hard drive, right there. And so on, and so forth.
Etc. Note the computer made out of leech neurons. It is not, in fact, a brain, it won’t come alive, it’s just connected leech neurons that can be directed to fire much like a network of and/or/on/off switches, it does simple sums. Still though, the potential is there.
Anyway, it’d be very interesting, and possibly extremely useful, but I agree with pixelmass that we, humanity as a whole, should evaluate and master the technology we have now, making sure we safely know what we’re doing, before running off like screaming, hyper-active toddlers towards the next magic invention.
I don’t think so, scientists are working on quantum computers right now. They jumped right over organic ones, I guess because they felt like organic has too much overhead not to mention tremendous moral implications. Now, I think we may have some organic interfaces to help man connect with said quantum computers however.
Oh yeah, a quantum computer is a set of molecules that can be arranged in just the proper enviornment so that they can receive an input and then return an output that can then be interpretted to mean something that coorelates with the input. Basically these things are waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
more powerful than any organic model we’ve encountered.
So, I really wouldn’t see the point in building a living computer that would just dominate us and enslave us at the end of the day.
