One of the top biologists in biocomputing--Leonard Adelman-- said something critical way back in 2002: we have gone from the age of the electron to the age of the megamolecule. The electron has been our focus and our power source since the days of Faraday in the early 19th Century. Biopower--the ability to harness bio-engines, bio-manipulators, and sophisticated biofactories like DNA, plus the ability to harness macrolecules that sense and respond to a target, macromolecules that work together as massively parallel processed learning machines, macromolecular railroad tracks and engines like the molecular conveyer-cars that travel along microtubules in the cell, and macrolecular propellors like flagella-- spinning whips and their drivers, nano-sockets--this is a vast new frontier, one almost indistinguishable from and interlaced with Eric Drexler's nanotechnology.

I wonder about Jim Gray's paper. There's a high value to universal cross-accessing--to my being able to reach into your data with intelligent agents that know what I'm looking for and that see your data differently than you and your intelligent agents do. There's an enormous and as-yet-unleashed potential value in your being able to send your intelligent agents to look into my data and sort it in ways I've never conceived, too. If my computer is close to me and predigests the stuff I'm curious about so you can't look at it in your own way, we lose enormous creative and even scientific possibilities.

I've seen this happen in science. Researchers studying rats back in the 1940s and 1950s put seven rats on a hotplate then turned the juice on to see if the rats would respond with hostility. They did, and the researchers wrote up the success of their hypothesis. Something I was looking for and they were not almost got lost in the shuffle.

As soon as the rats' feet began to sizzle, they didn't turn randomly aggressive. The six strongest rats reached an almost instant consensus about which was the weakest rat among them and all proceded to beat the shit our of him.

The researchers were looking for the relationship between pain and hositility. I was looking for scapegoating behavior. The critical thing to me in their paper showed up in just one stray sentence. If an editor or a colleague had told them to get rid of the sentence, one of the most important aspects of their experiment would have been lost forever.

Why? Because those who wrote up the paper were local processors working on local data, then keeping many, many aspects of the data itself hidden or unreported. If I had intelligent agents combing the web, if the actual films of the experiment were online, if those films showed all sorts of things the scientists had overlooked--the personality characteristics of the rats, for example--and if my intelligent agents were able to search graphics and film as well as words, you'd not only increase my productivity ten times over, you'd increase the productivity of tens of millions of human beings like me.

You'd literally change the collective nature of human intelligence, you'd upgrade it enormously, by upgrading the powers of the mass mind's neurons--you and me.

Leonard Adelman has hinted at a brilliant new challenge for the 21st century technology. We've mastered the gift of physics, the electron in the late 19th and early 20th century, he says. Now it's time to master the macromolecules presented to us by biology.

I'm still waiting for the single-cell sized dna implant that gives me instant access to all the library material in the world and an instant storage system for all those terrific thoughts that disappear before we have time to type them up. We shall see. I strongly suspect I will not live to see the birth of this gizmo, but just think, if handled properly, it could change the way we do psychological and social science.

Imagine the dna-implant that plugs us into the world wide web of the future and gives us facts the instant we realize we need them, stores our important thoughts, has intelligent agents that learn our tastes, remind us of bright ideas we've had in the past that relate to what we're pondering right now, bring us facts they anticipate we'll find interesting, and have strict privacy controls. If we manage to keep big brother out of our brains, psychological research might change dramatically. In exchange for access to the final data or some other perk, I make my brain available for a psychological research project. Ten thousand other volunteers and I can be studied in our natural environment. Our passions can be measured and weighed in crisis, in play, and in events of the everyday. It's ethology and mass psychology combined-finally really entering, measuring, and getting a new feel for the human mind. --Howard Bloom

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