George Church: evaluation

Transcript context

…You've worked on brain organoids and brain connectome and so forth. How has that work shifted your view on fundamentally how complex intelligence is? Are you more bullish on AI because you realized the organoids are not that complicated, or rather very little information is required to describe how to grow them. Or are you like, “No, this is actually much more gnarly than I realized.” I always felt it was very gnarly. I also felt that it was something that we could engineer. Certainly we have made a lot of progress at the broken end of the spectrum where the brain is severely challenged relative to average. There are a huge fraction of genetic diseases that have as one of their consequences the child being developmentally delayed to such an extent that it's lethal or causes a lifetime deficit. We know the genes involved and we know how to do genetic counseling in some cases, gene therapy and other therapies to deal with it. At the other end, we have reduction of cognitive decline by cognitive enhancement, which is showing some promise. But again, that's kind of like this early stage severe impediment to cognition having a late stage component. But what about, how much information does it take to encode a brain? I'm not sure that much less genome is required than if you just wanted to just make a brain, because the brain is totally entangled with the body. You have 10^11 neurons, 10^14 synapses. If you wanted to reproduce a particular brain, it's speculative as to whether it would be easier to do that by making a copy of it in silico, in some kind of inorganic matrix, or making a copy of it. Both of those are going to be hard. I would say that if you wanted to make a copy of a complicated book, it would be easier to take photographs of each of the pages than to completely translate it into another language—trying to get all the nuances of the poetry and so forth—if your goal is just to replicate it. The same thing might be true of the brain. But replicating a brain probably involves a lot more information than synthesizing it. Just to define this, 10^14 synapses is going to take a lot more bytes than the genome, which is billions rather than 10^14. But there might be reasons that you want to replicate a particular brain configuration rather than just make another animal that starts from scratch as an infant. Going back to the engineering stuff, often people will argue, “Look, you have this existence proof that E. coli can duplicate every 30 minutes. Insects can duplicate really fast as well. But then with our ability to manufacture stuff with human engineering, we can do things that nothing in biology can do, like radio communication or fission power or jet engines.” How plausible to you is the idea that we could have biobots which can duplicate at the speed of insects—there could be trillions of them running around—but they also can have access to jet engines and radio communication and so forth? Are those two things compatible?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.