“It’s not just collecting what is basically the object code of life that is expanding exponentially. Our ability to understand it, to reverse-engineer it, to simulate it, and most importantly to reprogram this outdated software is also expanding exponentially. Genes are software programs. It’s not a metaphor. They are sequences of data. But they evolved many years ago, many tens of thousands of years ago, when conditions were different.”
Ray Kurzweil: The world isn’t getting worse — our information is getting better
Here is a snippet from my new ‘Technology vs humanity’ book that I’d like present as a bit of a counter-argument to Ray’s pretty far-reaching statement that ‘human genes are outdated software’:
As much as I am enthralled by STEM breakthroughs, as well, I think that we urgently need to create a counterbalance, one that amplifies the importance of truly human factors. In contrast to the STEM acronym, I have recently started calling this CORE: creativity and compassion, originality, reciprocity and responsibility, and empathy.
