Neri Oxman: preference

Transcript context

…How well is it understood how to do this dance of controlling these different variables in order for various kinds of growth to happen? It’s not. It’s never been done before and these capsules have never been designed before. So when we first decided these are going to be environmental capsules, people thought we were crazy. “What are you building? What are you making?” So the answer is that we don’t know. But we know that there has never been a space like this where you have basically a wet lab and a grow room at that resolution, at that granularity of control over organisms. There is a reason why there is this incredible evolution of products in the software space. The hardware space, that’s a more limiting space because of the physical infrastructure that we have to test and experiment with things. So we really wanted to push on creating a wet lab that is novel in every possible way. What could you create in it? You could create the future. You could create an environment of plants talking to each other with a robotic referee. And you could set an objective function. And let’s say for the transaction-driven individuals in the world, let’s say their objective function is carbon sequestration. And all of those plants are implemented with a gaming engine and they have these reward system and they’re constantly needing to optimize the way in which they carbon sequest. We weed out the bad guys, we leave the good guys, and we end up with this ideal ecology of carbon sequestering heroes that connect and communicate with each other. And once we have that model, this biodiversity chamber, we send it out into the field and we see what happens in nature. And that’s sort of what I’m talking about, augmenting plants with that extra dimension of bandwidth that they do not have. Just last week I came across a paper that discusses the in vivo neurons that are augmented with a pong game. And in a dish they basically present sentience and the beginning of awareness. Which is wonderful that you could actually take these neurons from a mouse brain, and you have the electrical circuits and the physiological circuits that enable these cells to connect and communicate, and together arrive at swarm situation that allows them to act as a system that is not only perceived to be sentient, but is actually sentient. Michael Levine calls this gentle material, material that has agency. This is of interest to us because, again, this is emergence post-templating. You template until you don’t need to template anymore because the system has its own rules. What we don’t want to happen with AGI, we want to happen with synthetic biology. What we don’t want to happen online and software with language, we want for it to happen with bio-based materials. Because that will get us closer to growing things as opposed to assembly and mechanically putting them together with toxic materials and compounds. If I can ask a pothead question for a second, you mentioned just like the silkworms, the individualist silkworms got to actually learn how to collaborate or actually to collaborate in a swarm like way. You’re talking about getting plants to communicate in some interesting way based on an objective function. Is it possible to have some kind of interface between another kind of organisms, humans, and nature? So like a human to have a conversation with a plant?…

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