The goldrush for “AI” is, of course, sickening. It really does seem that vast amounts of money are being ploughed into a schoolboy fantasy about robot servants. There’s various explanations: many initiatives are just grift, some are techniques for evading copyright protection, others are attempts to undermine workers rights. And of course there are legitimate uses, in particular empowering people to express themselves in their non-native language. But none of that could produce the combination of messianic language and absurd quantities of money that represent the current AI wave.
But what that leaves me wondering is, why didn’t that money flow into the other, far more plausibly revolutionary technology of the last few years? Namely, mRNA.
Culture
“The Culture” series of science fiction novels by Iain M. Banks depict a future utopian space-based society with technology far in advance of our own, including artificial general intelligence. He explores the implications of artificial intelligence at quite some length. Less thoroughly explored though, while still regularly mentioned, is the “gland”. It’s usually described as an instant way to experience any recreational drug. Different cocktails produced by the gland have the equivalent of street names, such as “snap” or “softnow”, with effects described like narcotics. “Charge” produces “love of action, movement and the blessed need to be doing something”.
What’s never described is medical uses of the gland. And surely that’s obviously how you’d use such a thing? Viral infections, minor injuries, chronic conditions, cancers. All the things we treat with drugs presumably could be treated with the gland as well.
I assume these things are never described because they’re not relevant to the story. The story is about the choices made by the characters and their consequences, including their choice of drugs. Medical uses would be so important that they would be automatic and unquestioned. So they don’t appear in the stories, any more than a present-day story includes the characters’ bowel movements. The Culture, as well as being post-scarcity, is post-medicine, at least in the form we are used to.
DNA Synthesis
For many years I’ve been very excited about DNA synthesis. It’s one of those perpetually 20-years-away technologies, so it belongs firmly in the fantasy section of my brain. But if billionaires and presidents are allowed to get excited by AGI and bitcoin, I’m allowed to get excited about DNA synthesis.
While the field is quite developed, and we all know about gene splicing with CRISPR, we’re very far away from being able to print out an arbitrary sequence of nucleotides. It’s a fantasy.
Still, it’s a pretty amazing fantasy. If it was simple and quick and routine and cheap to print out custom DNA molecules, it truly would revolutionise medicine. And probably every other industry as well, once we print out microbes to perform a wide variety of chemical processes.
But it’s medicine that really matters here. As industrial processes become more efficient, we are approaching a point that no-one in the world needs to go without food or shelter. But the demand for medical care is truly infinite, as science develops new treatments and the population ages. In particular, the demand for nursing can never be met with anything except professional humans paid a lot of money to do a very difficult job.
Health care is going to be an ever-increasing share of the economy for the foreseeable future. Something like routine DNA synthesis is the only plausible short-cut to that trend. So while machine learning coult conceivably justify astronomical investment based on its potential to replace a large chunk of our economy, really the potential of DNA synthesis is even bigger.
Embedded
But that’s large-scale industrial DNA synthesis. My dream would be a device you could implant in your own body, under your own conscious control, powered by the bloodstream itself, and able to synthesise any protein you wish. It wouldn’t need a tank of base material, it would use the proteins already available in your metabolism. It would behave just like a ribosome, but instead of consuming mRNA and amino acids to produce proteins, it would consume information from outside the cell and free nucleotides to produce mRNA. And since the whole thing is under software control, it could be open-sourced, free of corporate control, like an open source insulin pump.
How would you build such a thing? I don’t know. It’s obviously hard. A moonshot project. But as Drew Berry’s animations show, we’re well along the way to a detailed simulation of exactly how RNA polymerase does its job. What’s needed is a very large amount of work on manipulating molecular machines.
Covid 19
So when BioNTech rode to the rescue with their mRNA vaccine against Covid 19, to me that sounded like a starting gun. There are never any breakthroughs in science. But the Covid 19 vaccine was the first time custom-built DNA sequences had been used to mass-produce mRNA and inject the results into vast numbers of healthy people – making a butt-ton of money in the process.
That’s far away from the “gland”, of course. But the legends of the founding of Silicon Valley tell us that this is one of the few areas where capitalism is supposed to shine. The first product leads to money. Money leads to investment. Investment leads to more products. And this is how we get Moore’s Law. The end product of this particular Moore’s Law is ever more precise control of the protein machinery of life.
Why didn’t this happen? Or at least, if it is happening, why am I not seeing headlines about massive investment deals? Why am I instead reading about big tech buying nuclear power plants?
Capitalism
The major reason the history of the electronics industry isn’t a good historical example, is that the legends are wrong. The electronics industry was mostly funded by the US government. Capitalist involvement was the final stage, and it took decades to get there. Of course, the US government wanted the electronics to help them kill people. And while mRNA certainly has the potential to kill lots of people, and America is as bloodthirsty as ever, the US government is just not in a fit state to conduct any large-scale initiatives. Not any more.
The truth is, capitalism is only capable of investing in sure bets. It has no time for anything that requires real research, medium timescales, or tangible risk. And messing with DNA is full of risk.
Fraud
The other reason this kind of fundamental biomedical research loses out to bitcoin and “AI”, is that mRNA has a reasonable chance of succeeding and being profitable.
The reality of our economy is that as technology slows down and becomes more feudal in nature, a gap opens up between the profits of outright fraud and useful investment. Fraud always has big returns, it’s just that our long industrial revolution managed to produce comparable rates of returns from real industry, continuously for centuries. Once the industrial revolution settles down, competing with fraud becomes untenable.
At some point, being useful becomes a class marker. Tans used to be considered ugly and disreputable, because it showed you had been working in the sunshine. Similarly, having a plausible timeline for making the world a better place is investment poison. It just signals that you’re not making any effort to commit fraud.
Keep Dreaming
So, mRNA therapy seems like just one of those boring grinding stories of slow progress and adoption.
Still, there is one ray of hope. It could be a practical therapy for hair loss. This is the cheat-code to capitalism – make something of personal value to aging men. And it has plenty of scope for outright fraud. So drop a dose of diffuse, friends. We still may be glanding for real any century now.