I remember listening to a AI researcher talk about how his quest to develop an advanced intelligence led him to realize he could do that by having a child.
I always thought that the limit of cyber/ai if eco-friendly survival, self-repair to an extent and reproduction was factored in would be homosapiens.exe
Actually I think it was in April. I was headed to a U2 concert in San Jose when I heard it, and it looks like that was in April. Depeche Mode was in August :)
I bought some houseplants a bit back and it's been fascinating to see how quickly they grow. The vast majority of that new mass literally comes from thin air.
Then think about the internals, the subtleties of cellular matrices. It's as beautiful as processor manufacturing, if not more, and right before your eyes all around.
I laugh yellow~ when people dream of robotics.. when I see an annoying mosquito, I look at how thin all this is and yet it lives, flies, perceive the world quite a bit ...
To an extent I think the future will just be the same old past except we'll now understand nature a bit more. I hope so.
Dragonflies is where its at. These guys supposedly have one of the best eye vision of all species. Now compare that thing with flying camera drones. Anything we can build is so much inferior to what a Dragonfly can do.
Yeah, it's neat how roots mostly just bring in phosphates, nitrates, and water. Incidentally, carnivorous plants only get their phosphates and nitrates from whatever they trap. All of the actual carbon in all plants come from the air or from dissolved CO2 in the water.
There's a certain fetish for technology that blinds us to the obvious power of biological systems. We end up chasing pipe dreams of self-assembling materials while ignoring the already-existing self-assembling materials right in front of us.
It’s called a god complex? But the pragmatic reasoning is that what we build we can control more so than what nature has evolved. If for example, I can build a robot to pick up my trash can and walk it down to the street once a week and it’ll self heal all the wear and tear that is pretty nice.