Ponder these premises:
-
Earth-life emerged spontaneously and evolved itself into the mindboggling diversity we see today.
1.
-
That a purely self-emergent, resource-constrained process could generate entirely novel categories of phenomena -- including consciousness itself -- strongly suggests our universe is capable of hosting other undiscovered phenomena.
2.
-
An intelligently-guided, non-resource-constrained version of biology would result in forms and phenomena with as yet unimaginable capabilities.
3.
-
We ourselves exist on that same biological operating system. New categories of phenomena applied to our own biology will be the ultimate, revolutionary exploration of the limits of what is possible from our universe.
4.
There's a certain excitement around the recent achievements and growth of computation. No other new field of science has produced an engineering platform as productivity-boosting and lifestyle-enhancing as it. We're confident it will continue to be improved and generate new phenomena, including the exciting possibility of general artificial intelligence. However, a head-to-head comparison with the astounding capabilities of existing biological systems serves to remind us to appreciate how powerful that operating system can be.
