I think the tree example is silly, trees aren't good tech because they're not very controllable and often very difficult to modify. And like many biological things, they're not really optimized for our convenience.

Imagine a disease/bug-prone, space inefficient, waste dropping, telemetry-less, allergy-inducing machine that requires continuous water deliveries and a multi-year build process. Yep a tree.

I won't try to tell you that you can't find trees and other biological constructs more interesting, and they certainly pose harder problems, but I'd think (and hope) that the future isn't overly complicated biotech adapted from even more complicated and wasteful natural systems. Right now we have to deal with heart failure and cancer because our crappy bodies are the best we've got, but I would think that the long-term future belongs to engineered systems that we can control, optimize, and understand.

I'm saying it's an amazing machine rather than the perfect machine for a particular task. Ever wondered how it works? It's much more complex that it appears - does the energy capture use quantum phenomena? Do tree's communicate via via fungal network intermediaries?

Do you realize that they grow out of the air - ie all that bulk comes from captured atoms from the air, not stuff pulled in through the roots.

In terms of our crappy bodies - they are incredibly complex machines trillions of cells, each one unbelievably complex - it's astonishing they work at all.

But you are right eventually they fail - and natures answer is to simply reboot ( build a new body from scratch ) - the consciousness you are so keen to protect is simply RAM state that get's blitzed on reboot, while the cycle of life goes on....

We are made from mostly ( 99.85 % ) 11 elements - some gases, carbon, bit of metal

Not saying we shouldn't make stuff - just that people seem to have a blind spot on what we can learn from nature, and technically how amazing it is.

> I would think that the long-term future belongs to engineered systems that we can control, optimize, and understand.

And if we could understand, optimize and control biology - it would be so much more amazing - cells are nanobots - they can already sense, move, change shape to squeeze through gaps, replicate, signal, repair, kill, and control their environment.

In fact those trillion cells - cooperate to make you - you are a collection of cooperating nanobots. Take a look at some forms of life that take this to an extreme, that live as single cells and then come together to build a much more complex structure - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyostelium_discoideum

Big Hero 6 nanobots - biology - been there - done that.

Agreed that nature has plenty to teach us, where I slightly disagree is that controlling and optimizing biology is the better path to future tech.

Yes, cells are nanobots, but they're nanobots "designed"/evolved by nature with deeply complex goals and incentives often orthogonal to ours. Cells come with a lot of evolutionary baggage and many constraints owing to its extensive optimization.

From my perspective, it's like hijacking a crazy project that doesn't belong to us. It's not clear to me that taming insanely complex cells to serve our goals is better than building traditional engineering up to do the same thing.

I compare this tension to ARM vs x86 for mobile devices. Mobile devices uniquely require extreme power efficiency, and ARM processors are dominant because they satisfy that critical requirement even though they're less capable than other processors. Intel wanted to enter the mobile market and they already own the more capable x86 platform, but its power efficiency is a lot worse. Can Intel retrofit ARM-level power efficiency onto its deeply complex and desktop/server-optimized x86 processors before ARM builds up to x86's level of capability?

Honestly, I don't confidently know the answer and you could be right. But I think it's telling that centuries of medicine and decades of biotech have been a slow grind producing very narrow solutions (eg. invented a chemical cocktail to treat one type of cancer, tweaked a plant to contain more of a certain type of nutrient and be resistant to a handful of common diseases/bugs) while ground-up engineering is seemingly exponential, where today's tiny portable processor is orders of magnitude more advanced than the state of the art only a few decades before.

Yeah, nature and biology has a headstart, but we don't have to spend a thousand years figuring out how to develop an appendix.

I'd agree that we can only guess at the future - I'd just saying there is almost a fetishism for man made technology, and a blind spot for nature as it is pervasive.

You say we have made little progress in biology technology - yes and no.

Yes - there is so much more that could be done.

No - you are again ignoring the stuff in plain sight - the vast majority of our food comes from 'engineered' animals or plans - very little from wholly engineered chemical processes.

Breeding is low tech engineering - but it's still engineering - the productivity of commercial wheat is vastly superior to wild grasses for example.

Or look at the variety of dog breeds - each one developed for a particular purpose - from sheep herding & rabbit hunting to guiding blind people.

Now it's perhaps too easy, and not intellectually completely understood - but if you are focusing on outcomes - it's bloody effective.

The right virus - a tiny thing much smaller than a single cell - could wipe out a huge proportion of the population - it's happened in the past.

You can imagine a future where Iron Man fights for human survival with rockets, missiles and high tech, but you ignore biology at your peril.

Good tech isn't just stuff that's subject to control and modification. Look how many species you can choose from. Look at all the stuff around you made out of wood.

Trees create habitat, buffer wind, provide shade, retain soil, and on and on. They're good at what they do.

And every species I can choose from has a seemingly random selection of benefits and problems (and all of them have several issues I listed above) with no clear optimization for any particular human use. Wood isn't a bad material on its own, but trees are a bad tech to produce this kind of material (again due to several issues I listed above).

Being good at what it does is somewhat negated by the other problems it creates, and the fact that some problems it solves are only needed for other suboptimal biological constructs in the first place. There are better ways to provide shade. There are better ways buffer wind. It's good at retaining soil and habitat...only for other biological constructs that suffer from similar problems. I'd be disappointed if our vision of the future is akin to really good soil retainers. Future tech shouldn't need soil at all.

I suspect this sort of nature-fawning is some kind of evolutionary bias; we find beauty in natural biology because we evolved to rely on it. Nature can certainly teach us a thing or two in a way that only millions of years of natural selection can, but tech that we control, optimize, and understand (ie. tech we can actually engineer) should eventually beat it in value.

Uh - premise that we control "tech"? Have you looked at how tech is being used in the wild?

Our natural systems on this planet blow our "tech" systems out of the water by orders of magnitude by their order of complexity and their capabilities. To try and trivialize a tree to the listed attributes without looking how it fits into our entire living ecosystem is so incredibly diminutive and a classic simple narrative of humanity thinking we control this planet and that it was built for our benefit. We are merely here at this moment in time, we might not exist in a thousand more years, a million years? Who knows.

I don't really care that natural systems have incredible complexity and capabilities if they aren't understood, optimized, and controlled for our benefit. If we only have a thousand years left, I want to spend those thousand years engineering things for our benefit, not nature's. Perhaps dealing with advanced soil retainers and other natural systems in the next hundred years is a necessary stepping stone, so be it, but I won't pretend like I think it's an ideal vision of the future.

Appreciate your honesty. I think it is important to note that nature's benefit and our benefit overlap significantly. We do damage to nature and in turn do more damage to ourselves and our own future capability. Probably best to work within the complex model that is keeping us alive then ripping apart only to realize we've destroyed our only form of sustenance. Just my cents.

IMO this is easy to explain by people's infatuation with novelty. Say you took that tree, engineered it to grow to 2 feet tall with bio-luminescent leaves and people would be fascinated by it... until that became old-hat, then it'd be ignored again.