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Technoprogressive? BioConservative? Huh?
Quick overview of biopolitical points of view
Leah Carr on ' Technoprogressive Declaration - Transvision 2014' (Nov 23, 2014)
David Wood on ' Technoprogressive Declaration - Transvision 2014' (Nov 23, 2014)
Rick Searle on ' Summa Technologiae, Or Why The Trouble With Science Is Religion' (Nov 23, 2014)
Omar Immortalist Gatti on ' Technoprogressive Declaration - Transvision 2014' (Nov 23, 2014)
CygnusX1 on ' Summa Technologiae, Or Why The Trouble With Science Is Religion' (Nov 23, 2014)
hume on ' Technoprogressive Declaration - Transvision 2014' (Nov 23, 2014)
jhughes on ' Technoprogressive Declaration - Transvision 2014' (Nov 23, 2014)
Should DIY biohackers be subject to the same safety regulations and oversight as corporate biological research labs?
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By Melanie Swan
Broader Perspective
Posted: Nov 24, 2014
Security > Rights > Economic > Life > Access > Innovation > Vision > Affiliate Scholar > Melanie Swan
What is the role (if any) of Bitcoin and blockchain technology with regard to the natural world and traditional science? One obvious link is using the blockchain as a means of improving distributed community computing projects with tracking and remuneration. BOINC, whose software runs SETI@home, has introduced Gridcoin, and [Protein]Folding@home has introduced Foldingcoin.
In addition, these distributed community computing models could be extended using blockchain technology as a way to coordinate and offer supercomputing time to DIYscientists; opening up access to a scarce resource which was previously only available to professional researchers (Zennet). Other projects are investigating a way to harness otherwise wasted crypto-mining cycles (where the computing problem (computing a nonce) must be deliberately intensive, wasteful, and one-way), like Primecoin's system (http://primecoin.io/, of requiring miners to find long chains of prime numbers instead of otherwise unusable hashes.
There is a more fundamental link between the blockchain and science in the grand scope of our human models for making sense of the world: religion, science, political-economy, and now information. Information is an interesting paradigm by which we are starting to see the structure of the world and make sense of it, both in physical and digital reality. The blockchain is an information technology, and the Internet and the blockchain provide a heightened information climate; a means of improving and modulating the resolution of information through faster more-expedient transfer, discovery, deployment, and use.
Information as a Sense-making Paradigm Reconfigures Science
The reach of information as a sense-making paradigm can be seen in how this idea is reconfiguring approaches to science. One way is in the growth and pervasiveness of big data and data-intensive science. Nearly every field of traditional study now has a computational complement (computational biology, computational astronomy, computational philosophy, computational law, etc.). The scientific method is transformed from a narrow hypothesis-experimentation loop to dynamic hypothesis formation per large-data results, vastly scaling the degree of experimental activity.
DNA: The Original Decentralized System
Even more profoundly, information is changing how we think about problems in science. For example, the old thinking was that chemistry and molecular biology are the conditions for life, and this is true in the sense that they are the substrate, the hardware for life. But now life is being seen as an information problem. Biology is a software system that runs on the substrate of chemistry and molecular biology. Wetware biology is the language of information, a software system to signal, transcribe, transmit information, encode and decode information, and send secure messages; a lot like a blockchain system. Biology is perhaps the original decentralized system; every cell has the full instruction set, the organism's entire DNA, like Bitcoind nodes have the full ledger of every transaction.
Melanie Swan, MBA, is an Affiliate Scholar of the IEET. Ms. Swan, principal of the MS Futures Group, is a philosopher, science and technology futurist, and options trader.
She has an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a BA from Georgetown University, and is currently a Contemporary Philosophy graduate student at Kingston University London and Université Paris 8. She is a faculty member at Singularity University and the University of the Commons, an Advisor to the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi), and an invited contributor to the Edge's Annual Essay Question. Ms. Swan founded the citizen science organization DIYgenomics, which pioneered the crowdsourced health research study, and a future-economics startup company, GroupPurchase, which aggregated small business buying groups.
She was Director of Research at telecommunication consultancy RHK/Ovum, and previously held management and finance positions at iPass in Silicon Valley, J.P. Morgan in New York, Fidelity in Boston, and Arthur Andersen in Los Angeles. Ms. Swan speaks French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Recent publications and research interests include an ethics of perception of nanocognition, the philosophy of big data, the ideology of the biocitizen and the quantified self, the future of personal identity, and the case for cognitive enhancement.
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Previous entry: Summa Technologiae, Or Why The Trouble With Science Is Religion
Entities 0 Name: Swan Count: 3 1 Name: IEET Count: 2 2 Name: Melanie Swan Count: 2 3 Name: BA Count: 1 4 Name: Political-Economy Count: 1 5 Name: Leah Carr Count: 1 6 Name: iPass Count: 1 7 Name: Futures Group Count: 1 8 Name: Primecoin Count: 1 9 Name: Georgetown University Count: 1 10 Name: Gridcoin Count: 1 11 Name: MBA Count: 1 12 Name: BOINC Count: 1 13 Name: Rick Searle Count: 1 14 Name: Singularity University Count: 1 15 Name: Connecticut Count: 1 16 Name: Los Angeles Count: 1 17 Name: University of the Commons Count: 1 18 Name: Director of Research Count: 1 19 Name: Summa Technologiae Count: 1 20 Name: Gatti Count: 1 21 Name: J.P. Morgan Count: 1 22 Name: Bitcoin Count: 1 23 Name: United States Count: 1 24 Name: Silicon Valley Count: 1 25 Name: Foundational Questions Institute Count: 1 26 Name: Melanie Swan Broader Perspective Count: 1 27 Name: Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania Count: 1 28 Name: Arthur Andersen Count: 1 29 Name: Kingston University London and Université Paris Count: 1 30 Name: Boston Count: 1 31 Name: David Wood Count: 1 32 Name: Bitcoind Count: 1 33 Name: New York Count: 1 34 Name: Spanish Count: 1 35 Name: Fidelity Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1t894DJ Title: When Women Stopped Coding Description: Modern computer science is dominated by men. But it hasn't always been this way. A lot of computing pioneers - the people who programmed the first digital computers - were women. And for decades, the number of women studying computer science was growing faster than the number of men.
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