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In the past decade, genetic engineering has caught up with computer science with regard
to how new scientific initiatives are shaping our lives. Genetic engineer George
Church, a pioneer of the revolution in reading and writing biology, is central to this new
landscape of ideas. He thinks of the body as an operating system, with engineers taking
the place of traditional biologists in retooling stripped-down components of organisms
(from atoms to organs) in much the same vein as in the late 1970s, when electrical
engineers were working their way to the first personal computer by assembling circuit
boards, hard drives, monitors, etc. George created and is director of the Personal
Genome Project, which provides the world’s only open-access information on human
genomic, environmental, and trait data (GET) and sparked the growing DNA ancestry
industry.
He was instrumental in laying the groundwork for President Obama’s 2013
BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative—in
aid of improving the brains of human beings to the point where, for much of what
sustains us, we might not need the help of (potentially dicey) AIs. “It could be that some
of the BRAIN Initiative projects allow us to build human brains that are more consistent
with our ethics and capable of doing advanced tasks like artificial intelligence,” George
has said. “The safest path by far is getting humans to do all the tasks that they would like
to delegate to machines, but we’re not yet firmly on that super-safe path.”
More recently, his crucially important pioneering use of the enzyme CRISPR (as
well as methods better than CRISPR) to edit the genes of human cells is sometimes
missed by the media in the telling of the CRISPR origins story.
George’s attitude toward future forms of artificial general intelligence is friendly,
as evinced in the essay that follows. At the same time, he never loses sight of the AI-
safety issue. On that subject, he recently remarked: “The main risk in AI, to my mind, is
not so much whether we can mathematically understand what they’re thinking; it’s
whether we’re capable of teaching them ethical behavior. We’re barely capable of
teaching each other ethical behavior.”

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