Against Waldenponding: "small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events, great minds discuss ideas" by @vgr

The evolutionary leap & radical improvement of human cognition will start as a need to address pressing challenges. The ecosystem is developing. Interesting to imagine if technologies like these could be paired with @mit_ili's Skillscape to help people build skills @danielas_bot

"Good thing breakthroughs in the human condition happen outside of politics. History is the record of political failure. Progress is the march of science and technology." I have a few quibbles on the details, but @rossetto is on the money here

There are ~5x10^37 base pairs in extant DNA on Earth right now - representing 4 billion years of a catalytic chemical computation on the planet. What will we learn from this dataset?

6/ Two quotes come to mind: "Talent hits a target no one else can hit; Genius hits a target no one else can see." & "If you want to build a boat, teach others to yearn for the sea."

5/We have Moore's Law for computers, yielding staggering algorithmic gains, what laws and consequences will emerge for radical human improvement? Can we even identify them now?

4/Since we can’t see it, we can’t JFK it (going to the moon), MLK it (I have a dream) or Babe Ruth it (calling the home run). Instead the great explorers of our age will succeed when they close their eyes set sail inwards.

3/Just like that last leap, this next evolutionary chapter will be sufficiently large that Earth's minds don't yet have words or concepts to explain it. It simply sits beyond our imagination.

2/My take on where we're heading: an evolutionary transition on a scale like the planet experienced from early hominids 2 million years ago to us today.

1/Fun conversation with @eboyden3 and @janemetcalfe at #SynBioBeta2018 on the neuro-biological revolution. I'm consumed inquiring what our cognitive existence could be in 20, 50 and 100 years from now.