"
Team:Edinburgh/newinformatics(conclusions)
From 2009.igem.org
Personal Entry
In may 2009 Edinburgh University iGEM Team started to look for a project which will be presented in Boston after 5 months. 8 people gathered in a room on the 8th floor of the 8-floored building. 8 people represented 4 different backgrounds and 7 different nationalities. Every single one came to iGEM team with his own goals and ideas. Next 4-5 months will make a team out of those 8 and they will result in one single project. Project, which appears as the whole to the outside world, but at the same time comprises 8 different worlds, 8 different outlooks.
My name is Jan and below is the small extract from my personal blog which I was keeping during the whole project and tiny part of which I decided to publish in the very end of our team WIKI. This text won’t tell you about technical details, it won’t tell you about scientific researches and achievements, but it will tell you how we came to the idea of our project, what global goals are hidden under the numbers and scientific reports. Which personal goals had members of our team in the beginning of the project and to what conclusions they came after 5 months of work. I will try to show you the things which are always hidden behind the numbers, graphs, results and scientific achievements.
!ATTENTION, ONLY HIGHLY UNTECHNICAL TEXT BELOW ALL VIEWS REPRESNTED HEAR ARE PERSONLA VIEWS OF THE AUTHOR AND MIGHT NOT REPRESENT VIEWS OF THE WHOLE TEAM!
Middle of July 2009
Long time ago I read about imaginary world. In this world human beings were the 5th generation of human like creatures living on Earth. Main adjective given to our generation was “highly technocratic”. Long before human beings evolved from monkeys there existed another generation of human like creatures. And even before those strange creatures another generations of even stranger creatures existed. This happened exactly 5 times and now you and me are representatives of the 5th generation of strange creatures.
There was one very important difference between us and them. They had very “creative” way of solving problems. For example, if they needed to move huge stone as big as my house from one place to another, they were just closing their eyes and using their mental power to move this huge stone from one place to another. They were able to do lots of others cool things. Well, from my point of view, this was definitely creative ways of solving problems. Unfortunately, this creative way of solving problems is unavailable for us. We just lost this ability. Of course, moving things is not so important. Those creatures were spiritually rich and they had greater Wisdom then we do have now. That is all the difference between us and them. They could do it in “creative way” but we can’t.
According to this description creatures mental abilities and power was becoming weaker and weaker from generation to generation. More precisely, mental energy and power was transforming into power of physical knowledge what we call now science. Further and further away each generation moved towards physical knowledge, to the knowledge someone might call technocratic. Computational power became main power of our generation opposed to spiritual power of the very first generations. Well, we also can move huge stones as big as our houses, but only if our mental ability will be transformed into huge hoisting crane. Directly our mental power can hardly move ourselves from one place to another especially if things are about fighting with laziness. MATH science became our kingdom. Kingdom of our generation.
Personally, I don’t believe that we lost all of our mental energy. We still can create amazing art pieces and we still feel something, like anger or happiness. But you know what… we are so close to lose even those abilities. Robots are going to become 6th generation of human like living creatures. They will finish transformation of mental energy and mental power into fully computational energy and power. Gap between emotions, emotional experience, and feelings from one side and pure physical knowledge and rational decision making will become infinite. It will happen simply because there will be no place for first 3 things listed.
Robots will be as far from emotions as I am from teleportation. Moreover, they might totally loose our creative abilities. Last achievements in the field of robotics show that vision, orientation, decision making problems are solvable in the nearest future but we still are as far away from giving to the robot creative power as we were 50 years ago. Just imagine, that we will create living robot creature with very basic abilities and suddenly meteorite hits our planet and human beings will disappear. Only our robots will stay alive as they will be the only one capable living in environment with average temperature equal to 200 degrees C. Due to evolution laws we programmed into our robots they will evolve into something which is more capable to live under extreme conditions. Obviously art pieces creation is something absolutely unnecessary under extreme conditions. It means, that journey of mental energy will come to the end, totally substituted by computational power.
Those were the thoughts I came with into iGEM room located in a huge building at the very first time in the end of May. Through iGEM I wanted to prove to myself that scenario described above is just imagination of sick mind. Usually such type of global thoughts is totally lost during project time, because mind is captured by everyday problems solving. But those thoughts are hugely important. They are important because they are the basis for people to create great things. Those were mine thoughts which pushed me to join iGEM to see the cutting edge applicable researches from the very inside. I am sure every single one from 8 had his own global reasons to join iGEM. Those 8 global reasons ended in the project and results you have just seen on our WIKI.
Oh, I also had local reasons… My mom didn’t want me to join iGEM because she needed me to work in her garden. Well, she calls it “family garden” but then I am definitely not part of the family. So, I thought that is much better to solve world scientific problems rather then working in my mom’s “family garden” : )
Long time ago I read about imaginary world. In this world human beings were the 5th generation of human like creatures living on Earth. Main adjective given to our generation was “highly technocratic”. Long before human beings evolved from monkeys there existed another generation of human like creatures. And even before those strange creatures another generations of even stranger creatures existed. This happened exactly 5 times and now you and me are representatives of the 5th generation of strange creatures.
There was one very important difference between us and them. They had very “creative” way of solving problems. For example, if they needed to move huge stone as big as my house from one place to another, they were just closing their eyes and using their mental power to move this huge stone from one place to another. They were able to do lots of others cool things. Well, from my point of view, this was definitely creative ways of solving problems. Unfortunately, this creative way of solving problems is unavailable for us. We just lost this ability. Of course, moving things is not so important. Those creatures were spiritually rich and they had greater Wisdom then we do have now. That is all the difference between us and them. They could do it in “creative way” but we can’t.
According to this description creatures mental abilities and power was becoming weaker and weaker from generation to generation. More precisely, mental energy and power was transforming into power of physical knowledge what we call now science. Further and further away each generation moved towards physical knowledge, to the knowledge someone might call technocratic. Computational power became main power of our generation opposed to spiritual power of the very first generations. Well, we also can move huge stones as big as our houses, but only if our mental ability will be transformed into huge hoisting crane. Directly our mental power can hardly move ourselves from one place to another especially if things are about fighting with laziness. MATH science became our kingdom. Kingdom of our generation.
Personally, I don’t believe that we lost all of our mental energy. We still can create amazing art pieces and we still feel something, like anger or happiness. But you know what… we are so close to lose even those abilities. Robots are going to become 6th generation of human like living creatures. They will finish transformation of mental energy and mental power into fully computational energy and power. Gap between emotions, emotional experience, and feelings from one side and pure physical knowledge and rational decision making will become infinite. It will happen simply because there will be no place for first 3 things listed.
Robots will be as far from emotions as I am from teleportation. Moreover, they might totally loose our creative abilities. Last achievements in the field of robotics show that vision, orientation, decision making problems are solvable in the nearest future but we still are as far away from giving to the robot creative power as we were 50 years ago. Just imagine, that we will create living robot creature with very basic abilities and suddenly meteorite hits our planet and human beings will disappear. Only our robots will stay alive as they will be the only one capable living in environment with average temperature equal to 200 degrees C. Due to evolution laws we programmed into our robots they will evolve into something which is more capable to live under extreme conditions. Obviously art pieces creation is something absolutely unnecessary under extreme conditions. It means, that journey of mental energy will come to the end, totally substituted by computational power.
Those were the thoughts I came with into iGEM room located in a huge building at the very first time in the end of May. Through iGEM I wanted to prove to myself that scenario described above is just imagination of sick mind. Usually such type of global thoughts is totally lost during project time, because mind is captured by everyday problems solving. But those thoughts are hugely important. They are important because they are the basis for people to create great things. Those were mine thoughts which pushed me to join iGEM to see the cutting edge applicable researches from the very inside. I am sure every single one from 8 had his own global reasons to join iGEM. Those 8 global reasons ended in the project and results you have just seen on our WIKI.
Oh, I also had local reasons… My mom didn’t want me to join iGEM because she needed me to work in her garden. Well, she calls it “family garden” but then I am definitely not part of the family. So, I thought that is much better to solve world scientific problems rather then working in my mom’s “family garden” : )
Edinburgh University iGEM Team 2009
