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The future of yogurt – smart yogurt

Ian Pearson, BT Futurologist, Nov 04

Most people enjoy an occasional yogurt. Personally, I like the peach ones best, but strawberry flavour comes a close second. Some people prefer live natural yogurt, without added flavours, usually health fanatics who go for a run beforehand to work up an appetite. Live yogurt contains billions of bacteria, though these are benign varieties, and the health fanatics probably spend all day thinking about little miniaturised wars between the nice bacteria from their natural yogurt and all the nasty ones from elsewhere that want to give us food poisoning. But pleasant food or bacterial army, what yogurt isn’t renowned for yet is its intelligence. But like everything else, this is going to change.

Scientists in biotech labs routinely modify the DNA in cells for a wide variety of purposes. Other scientists in IT labs are experimenting with organic circuits that use synthetic organic molecules to act as switches, logic gates, even display components. Others are developing mechanisms based on nature to enable circuits to self-organise. Other scientists are working hard on figuring out how consciousness works in nature, or could be made to work in a machine, or how we can make true artificial intelligence. And still others have been using actual DNA molecules to assist in the assembly of simple inorganic circuits, for example by attaching gold contacts onto the ends of carbon nanotubes. All of these research areas are progressing quickly, and they are cross fertilising more and more. We call this convergence, where technology ideas in one field increasingly overlap with those in another, gradually eroding the boundaries between the fields. Convergence in the areas above will eventually make our yogurt smart.

DNA is a useful molecule, that contains not just the information about how to make an organism and how to keep it alive, but is also a key part of an elaborate molecular factory inside the cell. Ongoing research in proteomics is gradually figuring out the various mechanism involved in the construction and maintenance of the myriads of proteins used in the many life processes in a cell. With the ability to routinely modify DNA, knowledge of how to make up complex circuits out of organic molecules, and a half decent library of DNA coding sequences to enable us to fabricate these particular molecular structures, we will one day have a basic toolkit to assemble organic molecular circuits within the cell itself. This day could be as early as 2020. That basic toolkit will gradually get better, until, maybe by 2025, we could make a bacterium that contains synthetic neurons. And if this bacterium is designed properly, it should be perfectly capable of behaving just like it would have done before, but now with some extra circuits within it that have no biological significance, but which are immensely useful to people.

The first such bacterium will cost a lot to make. Millions, probably billions of dollars of R&D to get to the first one. But given access to some food, that bacterium will split into two, then four and so on, until we have our very first yogurt populated with bacteria that each contain synthetic neurons. Or maybe we’ll use a few varieties with different types of circuits in each kind. At the same time, researchers in self organisation will be pretty skilled at making such circuit components self organise in to useful complex circuits, and also have a good command of synthetic evolution so that the system can mess about itself with different configurations until it finds the best ones. So soon after we have our pot of yogurt containing bacteria that contain circuit components, we will have a smart yogurt. This will hold billions of bacteria, and in those there will be even more billions of synthetic neurons. The human brain contains about 20 billion neurons, communicating using a mixture of electrical impulses and chemicals. Our bacterial neurons might use radio, electrical, optical and chemical communication, either controlled entirely from within, or as part of an external system. Human neurons fire at about 100 times a second. The bacterial neurons might fire a billion times faster. Signals travel by electro-chemical processes along human neural fibres and across synapses. In the yogurt they might travel at light speed, a million times faster. And the human brain’s main purpose in life is to keep the human alive, so it uses up a lot of the neurons for tasks such as maintaining our metabolism and basic life processes, interpreting the visual world around us to help us find food, shelter, security and sex. Only a fraction of the neurons at any time are doing what we really think of as thinking, but we can make all the neurons in our yogurt act as part of a thinking system. And finally, the neurons in the yogurt will probably be packed much closer together so signals have to travel less distance. When we look at all these performance improvement factors, it is reasonable to expect that we could fabricate a smart yogurt that is millions or even billions of times more powerful than the human brain. And in those timeframes, given the amount of research already in the field, we might expect that it will be fully conscious and be able to think in much the same way as we do. Except that its IQ will be several digits longer.

I’ve been a great fan of the Terminator movies. I’ve always thought they were fun, but not very feasible. Apart from time travel, which probably isn’t feasible, the people win at the end of the film, and that is even less likely. Winning against machines that are slightly smarter than people requires a bit of luck, but is achievable. Winning against machines that are billions of times smarter would be like expecting humans to be conquered by earthworms. Generally, we can design much better weapon systems.

When the threat is smart bacteria, the problem is orders of magnitude more difficult. They will be collectively much smarter than us. They will be able to design other forms of smart bacteria. They will enter our computers via air vents, enter our bodies through our food, water or even the air. They could tap into our nervous systems and control our thoughts, our emotions, our behaviour directly. If we ever fight a war against smart bacteria, the chances are that we wouldn’t even know it had happened, but would simply become their unwitting slaves

So, strawberry or peach? I wonder if the yogurt will let us decide.

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