Point of interest: The co-founder of Ginkgo is Tom Knight--the same Tom Knight who designed the Symbolics lisp machine, the Knight keyboard, and transactional memory (which later became software transactional memory). A few years before he started Ginkgo he had a lab at MIT where he was building NAND gates out of bacterial DNA. I expect Ginkgo will do just fine bringing AI to the lab.
Ginkgo Bioworks is really cool. I was interviewing with them a few weeks ago but ultimately took another job instead (one that didn't require me to move) but I was pretty impressed with the conversations I had with their team. I definitely expect this company to do amazing things.
“Recently there has been an explosion in AI and machine learning, and that’s a discipline where you don’t have to have a first principles model — you learn the model,” said Maheshri. “The technology in both disciplines is at the point where it’s time to combine them and see what happens.”
I disagree. If you don’t have a good model for basic sciences you should go and look for one. You can’t get to the moon by fitting models from moving objects.
Congratulations to both Ginkgo & Transcriptic! The newly-forming intimate relationship between bio and advanced digital and automation processes is very fun to watch.
You can rapidly screen (using robotics) the phenotypic space of a wide range of (genetically engineered) mutant organisms (yeast or bacteria) and feed that data into deep neural networks to ultimately predict from input DNA sequences, conditions --> phenotype. You will probably even be able to apply a reinforcement learning algorithm to optimize a particular phenotype/outcome. Ultimately, the AI will be able to do this in a self contained system.
And that is the simplistic answer. At some point you will probably figure out how a micro biome works in concert and either engineer a super organism or populations of organisms to do some specific task(s).
Do you mean the smallest possible leap, IE, Planck distance, or a leap by quantum tunneling into a state the barrier into which we have insufficient energy to cross?
Quantum leaps in the sense of physics have nothing to do with the Planck length, or “smallest” units in any sense. Quantization isn’t about small (although in practice it is), but about discrete changes with no values “in between” transition. What makes a quantum leap a quantum leap, is that the energy levels an electron may occupy are not continuous.
Incidentally, while it’s true that no current theory describes physics below the Planck length, it’s not true that said distance scale is somehow a limit on scale. It may be true that the Planck scale is the scale at which spacetime becomes “foamy” although it’s just a conjecture. It’s also possible that scales far below the Planck scale exist. We don’t know.
