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TED 2005 Conference | Monterey, CA | 11:00 am—12:30 pm | Wednesday, February 23 An
Edge Reality Club Meeting at TED
(Technology, Entertainment, Design) SCIENCE
AT THE EDGE: REBOOTING BIOLOGY Panelists:
Rodney
Brooks , Ray Kurzweil,
J. Craig Venter
"Everything is up for grabs. Everything will change. There is a magnificent sweep of intellectual landscape right in front of us." ~~~ Last year's Edge-TED event was a great success. In "What's New In The Universe", physicists alan guth, Paul Steinhardt, and Leonard Susskind, electrified the audience and energized each other with their well-argued arguments setting forth their theories. This year, we explore the intersection of computation and biology. One aspect of our culture that is no longer open to question is that the most significant developments in the sciences today (i.e. those that affect the lives of everybody on the planet) are about, informed by, or implemented through advances in software and computation. In no other field is this as evident as in the biology. In this Edge event, three of the world's leading scientists ask each other the questions they are asking themselves. ~~~ RODNEY BROOKS, a computer scientist and AI researcher, is interested in making living systems. Rod Brooks' midlife research crisis has been to move away from looking at humanoid robots and toward looking at the very simple question of what makes something alive—what the organizing principles are that go on inside living systems. In his lab at MIT, his is trying to build robots that have properties of living systems that robots haven't had before. Brooks is puzzled that "we've got all these biological metaphors that we're playing around with — artificial immunology systems, building robots that appear lifelike — but none of them come close to real biological systems in robustness and in performance. They look a little like it, but they're not really like biological systems." He worries that in looking at biological systems we are missing something that is already there — that has always been there. To Brooks, this might be called "the essence of life," but he is talking about a biochemical phenomenon, not a metaphysical one. Brooks is searching for a new conceptual framework that, like computation, does not involve any new physics or chemistry — a framework that gives us a different way of thinking about the stuff that's there. "We see the biological systems, we see how they operate," he says, "but we don't have the right explanatory modes to explain what's going on and therefore we can't reproduce all these sorts of biological processes. That to me right now is the deep question." Brooks is Director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science. He is also Chairman and Chief Technical Officer of iRobot Corporation. His most recent book was Flesh and Machines: How Robots Will Change Us. ~~~ RAY KURZWEIL believes "we are entering a new era. I call it the Singularity. It's a merger between human intelligence and machine intelligence which is going to create something bigger than itself. It's the cutting edge of evolution on our planet. One can make a strong case that it's actually the cutting edge of the evolution of intelligence in general, because there's no indication that it has occurred anywhere else. To me that is what human civilization is all about. It is part of our destiny, and part of the destiny of evolution, to continue to progress ever faster and to grow the power of intelligence exponentially." Kurzweil, an inventor and entrepreneur, has been pushing the technological envelope for years in his field of pattern recognition. He was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition machine, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition system. He is the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines; The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence; and (with Terry Grossman, M.D.) Fantastic voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. ~~~ J. CRAIG VENTER is one of leading scientists of the 21st century for his visionary contributions in genomic research. He is advancing the science of genomics and in applying genomic advances to some of the world’s most vexing public health and environmental challenges. Major research foci include human genomic medicine, environmental and evolutionary genomics (which includes the Venter Institute Global Sampling Mission), biological energy production, synthetic biology, and the intersection between genomics and environmental and energy policy. In 1998, Venter became the first president of Celera Genomics to sequence the human genome using the whole genome shotgun technique, new mathematical algorithms, and new automated DNA sequencing machines. The completed sequence of the human genome was published in February 2001 in the journal, Science. In addition to the human genome, Venter and his team at Celera sequenced the fruit fly, mouse, and rat genomes. In 2003, Venter launched a global expedition to obtain and study microbes from environments ranging from the world’s oceans to urban centers. This mission, now in progress, is yielding insights into genes that make up the vast realm of microbial life. He is founder and president of the J. Craig Venter Institute and the J. Craig Venter Science Foundation. |
John Brockman, Editor and Publisher |
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