You are in charge here . . .

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Game money and gpu money is currently in the driving seat . . .

This longer post below is the first in what will likely be a two-part essay on how the worlds of artificial life (Synthetic Biology) and artificial Intelligence are rapidly merging. Its a topic I’ve been trying to puzzle out as a member of the UN’s Multidisciplinary Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group (mAHTEG) on Synthetic Biology. I’ll explain a bit about both Syn Bio and AI below but I’ve come to see that there are broadly 3 ways in which developments in these fields are converging - into what my friend Pat Mooney snappily calls “DNAI” - and I think the significances of that convergence are huge.

Firstly, There’s the way that Artificial Intelligence tools (such as generative AI) are being used to design synthetic organisms  or synthetic biological  ‘parts’ such as DNA and proteins including so-called ‘alt-proteins’. I call this ‘When AI bots do genetic engineering’ - and thats the ‘part 1’  essay shared below.

Secondly , Synthetic Biology is being increasingly used to design organisms as a component of bigger cyber-physical systems driven by AI and algorithmic decision-making. The example I will write about from digital agriculture is what I call ‘robot-ready crops’ . These are crops genetically engineered to emit different signals that can be interpreted by AI systems  to direct autonomous agricultural machinery.

Thirdly, We are also seeing synthetically engineered biological organisms and parts become the substrate for AI computation itself - so called ‘biocomputing’.  Instead of using silicon chips to compute, DNA or other cellular processes can carry out computation which is promised as a ‘low energy’ computing option. One arresting example from the past year is the emergence of organoid computing where lab-grown brain cells are now being cultured as AI computers.

I’ll deal with the second and third areas in a post yet to come.

The big questions of course cross all three areas: eg. what does this mean for nature?, for our economies and peoples livelihoods?, for safety?, governance? for who we are in the world and how we relate to each other? etc etc.

Devuan is a great derivatve of Debian w/o systemd, and nothing more, it won't save the world. The Devuan team is small and just capable of doing a great job of supplying replacements for some packages that need alternatives. But they can't save the FOSS world from changing. And changes not related to systemd that drip down from Debian may simply need to be accepted (e.g. this su - issue, usrmerge ... )

<LeePen> golinux: the solution for end users is to install usrmerge.