Candleblog

I just spent an hour and 15 minutes listening to two geniuses discuss science fiction and futurism.

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman sat down to have a conversation with Hugo Award winning author Charles Stross at Worldcon in Montreal last week. This stuff is chicken soup for the nerdy soul. Listen to an mp3 of the talk here and read a transcript of the conversation here.

Krugman starts from the position of the “where’s my jetpack” set, explaining why he thinks technological progress has slowed in the last 50 years, but Stross points out how Krugman is judging current technological advances in the context of what futurists were predicting in the mid twentieth century. Things have progressed very rapidly, just not in the ways that people were predicting they would. The discussions about AI and genome mapping are particularly worth your time. The Q&A is really smart too. I guess Worldcon audiences are full of some pretty bright people.

Charles Stross: …Now, if I remember correctly, the original price prediction of the Human Genome Project when they got started around 1990 was about 20 years and 100 million pounds or thereabouts of that order. They finished it several years early under budget and they did 90% of the work in the last six months… Gets better. At that point, sequencing an individual human genome could be done for about ten million pounds. A while later it got cheaper and now we’re seeing gene sequencers coming on the market over the next year or so where its basically on an integrated circuit that should be able to do personalized genome scans to the same level of detail for about $5,000 in three hours. And it’s still getting cheaper. They have sequenced quite a few mammalian and other genomes since then it is getting cheaper all the time. Craig Venter came up with an interesting project a couple of years ago to sequence the Pacific Ocean. If you have a bucket of seawater, it contains probably on the order of a billion organisms most of which are viruses, probably single virus particles in that bucket from a number of species. It turns out when they did shotgun sequencing on a bucket of seawater 98% of the genes they discovered were hitherto unknown. There’s a lot of stuff out there that we do not have a clue about. About 90% of those unknown genes were from viruses and we have no idea what the host organisms of them were … basically, viral soup. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know about how the genome works. It’s not, as was widely thought in the 50’s and 60’s, a blueprint. It’s more like a very very messy snapshot of a running computer program. In fact, the bits we’ve been looking at and referring to as genes, the exons are, if anything, just the static data strings encoded in the program while it’s running. Things such as the actual text in a variable containing the copyright date and the name, stuff that doesn’t change. A lot of the interesting work seems to be epigenetic as various enzymes tag methyl groups onto genes to activate and inactivate them. And we’re not quite sure what we’re looking at except … pointing a debugger at the running program and saying let’s change the value in this variable and see what it produces.