Friday, March 4, 2016

nice vid

reply regarding recent biosupercomputer article and future possibilities


True but one of the main applications of increasing compute resources is AI, particularly the development of general ai. The brain is said to consume a few tens of watts and replication of its computations has been estimated to require 10^18 and in some estimates even up to 10^22 operations per second on a traditional computer architecture.

With synthetic biology, which won't be easy, I admit, synthetic brains and accompanying organs could be rapidly grown from some custom designed cells. The digestive capabilities of the entire biosphere could be integrated on the biomachinery producing these by incorporating genes from all over. Combined with mechanisms to extract energy from electricity and recycle wastes as well as incorporate resources from the atmosphere if need be. The incorporation of the genetic capabilities of extremophiles that can withstand high levels of heavy metals, salinity, acidity, etc. should allow these systems to be able to digest even the raw garbage from a landfill("The U.S. has been exchanging fiat currency globally for vast amounts of diverse raw material in the form of products, which often ends up in these after consumer use"), hypothetically speaking of course.

Also eventually we don't have to limit ourselves to biological limits. What's to say synthetic biology can't overcome limits such as those of axon signal propagation speed with alternate cable materials and designs, things that might very well be unevolvable in nature might prove to allow for even superior performance through advanced synthetic biology.-source

nice article

"Biosupercomputer could be 100 times more energy efficient than regular transistor computers

 The substance that provides energy to all the cells in our bodies, Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), may also be able to power the next generation of supercomputers. 

That is what an international team of researchers led by Prof. Nicolau, the Chair of the Department of Bioengineering at McGill, believe."- source


Brief snippet from a nice article on biological computers.