Top Tech Trend #6: Evolution Trumps Design

AO At the Churchill Club’s 10th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends debate, DFJ's Steve Jurvetson continues the debate with a second hot-button trend: directed evolution.



Steve Jurvetson's Trend #2: Evolution trumps design. Many interesting unsolved problems in computer science, nanotechnology, and synthetic biology require the construction of complex systems. Evolutionary algorithms are a powerful alternative to traditional design, blossoming first in neural networks, now in microbial re-engineering, and eventually in AI.

For the next couple years, I would be willing to defend the idea that directed evolution will be an important component of the most successful and robust microbial engineering projects. A current engineering challenge is how to blend and integrate the benefits of what have, so far, been largely diverging methods for building complex systems.

But this trend is not just a niche topic for the bio-geeks. The really powerful applications are in IT, but over a longer term. I think it is a broad and important long-term trend, with some near-term niche applications. In the long term, the evolutionary approaches are more likely to tackle the big hairy “super-human” problems, where pure purposeful design will likely fail.

Can we transcend human intelligence with an evolutionary algorithm yet maintain an element of control, or even a bias toward friendliness? The next step in the evolutionary hierarchy of abstractions will accelerate the evolution of evolvability itself.

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• biotech
• churchill+club
• design
• evolution
• top+ten+tech+trends

[AlwaysOnVideos]

You sir, may be the only person harder to comprehend than Jurvetson himself.

[cinndave]

What's REALLY neat is that because you are emulating nature's way of designing things, you often get designs that look like living things.

An antenna that looks like a piece of sea corral.

Turbine blades that look like bird feathers.

A mirror array designed to collect light and bounce it into a solar thermal power unit ended up looking like chrome flower petals.

NASA supercomputers made a vibration-damping boom truss for the space station that looked like human leg bone.

[EntropyHaptens]

Hmmm Hmmm, yes sir what are we doing, what are these algorithms, I've read some science papers recently. The short of it, my consciousness is now dissolved between green jello and a ham sandwich. Energy is supplied by my bacterial slaves, from the sandwich, and said jello, replenished, sterile, daily. I plan on placing key electrodes at specific buoys in the pacific ocean, after which the fish energy slave will do my bidding, my ocean consciousness. Dissolve not in this tube alone good sir.