Tech biologists

Dyson: We have created this expanding computational universe, and it’s open to the evolution of all kinds of things. It’s cycling faster and faster, and it’s way, way, way more than doubling in scale every year. Even with the help of Google and YouTube and Facebook, we can’t consume it all. And we aren’t really aware what this vast space is filling up with. From the human perspective, computers are idle 99 percent of the time, just waiting for the next instruction. While they’re waiting for us to come up with instructions, more and more computation is happening without us, as computers write instructions for each other. And as Turing showed mathematically, this space can’t be supervised. As the digital universe expands, so does this wild, undomesticated side.

Wired: If this is true, what’s the takeaway?

Dyson: Hire biologists! It doesn’t make sense for a high tech company to have 3,000 software engineers but no biologists.

From a Q&A between George Dyson and Wired’s Kevin Kelly.