George Church

So there's all kinds of things you can do in biology where you're working at a very high programming level is a way of thinking about it.

Pushing us to a new level of intelligence is going to be very challenging and maybe not even urgent.

To some extent, actualizing the people that we currently have would be quite, you know, just getting them

all up to whatever speed they wanna be up to within the range that's been demonstrated.

So like some people are gonna wanna be like Einstein, some people won't.

Some people wanna be healthy all the time, unlikely, but some people might not.

Some people might wanna live to 150.

Some people might wanna die at 80.

But if you give them that range, that capability, what if we had 8 billion super healthy,

Don't need to worry about food and drugs.

Super healthy, Einstein level of intelligence, education level, best we can come up with.

That would be a completely different world.

I would say mostly GWAS for humans.

maybe for animals in general, followed for animals with synthetic biology, you know.

And the smaller and the cheaper and faster replicating, the more experiments you can do.

So, you know...

I don't want to overemphasize how single genes can do these amazing things, but there's also the possibility that multiple genes can be hypothesized and tested quickly.

So for example, I mentioned earlier, what's the minimum number of transcription factors it takes to turn a stem cell into a neuron?

Well, there's a bunch of recipes where you can do it with one, right?

Maybe you want a specific neuron, you might need a few more.