Geek Power

Crossposted from the HPRgument

Here’s Bill Gates from a Wired magazine interview about the state of computer hacking:

If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, he says, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy to control. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naivete that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.”

And apparently Gates isn’t kidding around. From the New York Times:

Now Dr. Venter is turning from reading the genetic code to an even more audacious goal: writing it. At Synthetic Genomics, he wants to create living creatures — bacteria, algae or even plants — that are designed from the DNA up to carry out industrial tasks and displace the fuels and chemicals that are now made from fossil fuels.

“Designing and building synthetic cells will be the basis of a new industrial revolution,” Dr. Venter says. “The goal is to replace the entire petrochemical industry.”

On an only-slightly-related note, I have this whole rant about how internet technology production has become sufficiently easy, so that new test of ambitious product development is not whether your technology performs a neat function — or even, whether it turns a profit — but rather, whether it helps do something materially important for the world. That that the new standard is “meaningful stuff that matters.” Websites are easy. Changing the world is hard. And sorry, but Foursquare and Farmville don’t cut it.

Silicon valley (so the rant goes) is rapidly becoming the pre-burst financial sector of the tech world: an industry predicated on the production of profitable, socially destructive crap. Thousands of the smartest people spend their time producing web gadgets designed to aggregate digital ephemera, while the world around them spins. Zuckerberg has spoken eloquently about a “more open world“; but what about a more meaningful one? Where it’s not openness for its own sake — open to learn about status updates and see old hook-ups’ photos — but openness in service of empowerment and progress.

The really ambitious web developers are the ones going out there and trying to fix American democracy or global warming or world poverty. It’s a brave new world we live in, where you have Bill Gates saying that if he were a kid he’d be “hacking biology,” not creating websites, and now he’s off setting up malaria nets in Africa.

Such the rant goes. But I’ll spare you that rant. Let’s all just revel in the awesomeness of these articles. And then get to work being the ambitious Harvard students or HPRgument readers that we are.