It's interesting that artificial life and artificial intelligence are expected to be developed in similar time frames, yet they are independent projects. They are approached with entirely different methods--chemical reactions vs logical, computational connections.His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.
"We aren't smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard work and then we figure out what happened," Szostak said.
And yet there is obvious interplay between these two fundamentally distinct levels of organization. There is information "controlling" the chemical reactions (encoded in DNA), and there are necessary electrical underpinnings to the computations of Turing machines.
The fact that these are so deeply intertwined, and yet can be engineered in totally different existential levels, makes it plain that we are engineering our way toward a technological solution of the mind body problem. We're almost there. Creating physical and mental life (though I think AI is a lot farther off than we realize). Now if we can build conscious, sentient beings from biological organisms we create ourselves, does this finally put creationism to rest? Or does it mean that we've simply discovered God's secret formula? If we build these sentient biological organisms in the manner described above (using evolution), what does it mean that God's secret formula involves the very thing that contradicts creationism?
