Ecologies

I was asked to give a little talk to an august group of my peeps on the future of Estonia. It was a bit daunting. So I used a framework from my daily work, comparing startup companies to startup economies… This is a frame grab from the video went online today.

Gotta pack. I’m heading down to some of my favorite places: SpaceX and then the Santa Fe Institute for a cool symposium on evolution… in the broad context. From Danny Hillis: “The greatest achievement of our technology may well be creation of tools that allow us to go beyond engineering – that allow us to create more than we can understand.” — a quote from my dead text blog, but one I still ponder. In the synthetic biology space, Genomatica has found that design for evolvability can trump intelligent design in maximizing chemical yield from genetically engineered microbes.

But the learning in evolutionary design is process learning – how to grow a solution, not how the microbe works. The intel inside is inscrutable.

Hope I can find some fine folks there to knock some sense into me.