Saturday, September 29, 2007

Dyson on biotechnology.

Q: You view [biotechnology] as a creative enterprise?

A: Yes. Film technology became one of the major art forms of the 20th century. I would say that writing genomes will probably be an art form for the 21st century in the same kind of way. We will have all these creative people designing creatures and trying out beautiful arrangements. It's a new form of landscape design where you can design the plants as well as the landscape. With that will probably go biotech games for children, where you give the child some eggs and seeds and a kit for writing the genomes and seeing what comes out. That will certainly be a very messy and sometimes dangerous business, but I think it's on the whole likely to be very good for education. People get a better understanding of the natural world when they can manipulate it themselves. For them it will seem natural, which of course is the way it is with computers. My grandchildren are much more at home with computers than I am. So I think it'll be the same with biotech.

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Same interview as previous post; see link below. Dyson's idea makes sense in a Sim, Second Life kind of way. Perhaps simulation games are our way of preparing ourselves for this kind of future.

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