Robb Smith, CEO of Integral Life, is currently attending the T.E.D. Conference in Aspen, CO, and is blogging while he is there. The following has been crossposted from his personal blog.

TED 2008: Warning, scary shit ahead.

Craig Venter, who decoded the human genome, is digitizing biology by designing (on a computer program) and synthesizing new life. The process designs the new life on an auto-CAD like program and gets added to existing genetic material to knock out certain pieces of the old life's DNA in order to create new forms of life with more parsimonious DNA. As he describes it, by inputting new DNA (software) into existing life forms (hardware), "the software builds it own hardware." The life form literally changes in the lab in front of their eyes. This is bad Hollywood sci-fi writ large. Venter wants to create synthetic life to solve many of humanity's pressing problems (carbon explosion, health crises, etc.) He did go through a bio-ethics review at MIT prior to doing this new work and now receives $100 million annually from public and private sources for his Venter Institute.

Paul Rothemund is a Caltech scientist who folds DNA to demonstrate that humans are "computer-generated artifacts," by which he means that the primary definition of life is the computational process required to assemble life. So he sees a world where we can "design life at a computer like you would a cell phone."

At this point in the conference I was so depressed I thought of committing sepuku. We should assemble a credo on integral bioethics. Many of the problems that these scientists are trying to rectify derive from a sole reliance on artifact development (i.e., technology) to solve previous problems, a reiterative process that doesn't solve itself. Our technology development since the Enlightenment has far outstripped our ethical development. Most of the presenters at TED and the TED staff are continuing to look in the wrong places for comprehensive solutions to the questions they are posing, which is why the answers are partial, not integral, and in the most dangerous sense of the world: more purely right-hand empirical development will not change the game, only perpetuate it.

Instead, increasing complexity calls for more modesty. As TED presenter and scholar of randomness Nassim Nicholas Taleb argued on Thursday, black swan events are catastrophic and completely unpredictable events whose only predictability is that we will have them in the future. (Think 9/11, Black Friday, World War I, etc.) Because heightened systemic complexity is far greater than humans can currently comprehend, he argues that we should just stop messing with complex systems as if we walk God-like over reality. Another way to put it, in integral terms, is that ontological complexity in all 4 quadrants is far greater than that describable by Teal or Turquoise levels of development, and with our leadership tending to Green ethics (this is my judgment after having worked with world leaders from every sphere), we are still under-equipped to make the right ethical judgments. My own solution, when I realized this 3 years ago was to embark on building a global community devoted to vertical development so that we could bring the interior development up to par with the ontological complexity and the technological compulsion. Integral Life is the result of that impulse.

MEMEs: An addition/revision of the integral model?
The third presenter was researcher and author Susan Blackmore. She argued very persuasively that MEMEs, despite being much maligned, are misunderstood, are real, and have profound implications for our future development. She cautions that in order for MEMEs to work we stick to a strict definition: "information which is imitated." She summarized Darwin's 3 main points from Origin of Species: 1. variation in biological traits occurs, 2. selection for survival-promulgating traits occurs, and 3. heredity occurs. These three basic features, which I'll call VSH, are the only three dynamical aspects required for design/evolution to occur (presumably variation also accounts for mutation). These hold true for information MEMEs and are the basis of culture.

Take a simple example: earrings. We didn't invent earrings, rather they were among a variation of cultural adornments that each successive generation selected as having some positive effect on life condition. And so on with all cultural refinements since the dawn of man, with each successive mutation or adaptation having a four-quadrant instantiation at a given level of our development: socially, culturally, behaviorally, or phenomenologically. We like the iPod because it is a better adaptation than what came before, especially as we operate in a techno-economic that is information-based, we are mobile, we like the state-experience of new music, new music is easily accessed with the device, etc. And now everyone's wearing one, with a several billion dollar market having been generated and a redistribution of the resources in the music business. A rampant, unruly MEME on the loose.

Now here's where Susan really opened my eyes: The first level of dynamical systems to obey Darwin's VSH rules were genes, as we all know. The result got us through 4 million years of evolution roughly up to the dawn of language. But roughly with the dawn of language, MEMEs took over genes as the primary influences on development. With the birth of language and the development of culture, representing an inter-subjective space for the early hominids, MEMEs (working together with genes) impelled brain growth to accommodate memetic evolution. So MEMEs put genes in their service in order to advance their own parasitic role on humankind (and eventually evolving to enjoy religion, art, etc.). A gene machine became a MEME machine.

Susan argues we are now at the cusp of a third epoch of VSH-compliant dynamical-system emergence: Temes, or technological memes. Temes obey all the VSH rules. The argument that technological development is self-generative (driven by cultural memetics), that we select those adaptations best suited for our collective version of the good life, and that those are passed on, seems self-evident to me. Importantly, each stage of VSH emergence implies immense danger to the host system (that would be us). Because each emergence sucks up resources blind to their own sustainability, emergents can very easily kill off the host. What she argues is that, especially in light of presentations like Craig Venter's, temes will soon get to the point that they either self-replicate (yes, self-generative artifacts) or they survive on like parasites on their human hosts. When paired with Chris Jordan's talk on unconscious collective behavior and Nassim Taleb's talk on black swan complexity, Blackmore's argument is fully plausible to me. It's all around us, all you have to do is look at how cell phones and iPods emerged and look at emerging genetic therapy and it's not hard to project where this could go. Scary shit, indeed ...