GENOMICON

So much will have been written about this in the time that it takes to write this sentence it’s hardly worth bothering – to dog-paddle amid the tsunamis of hype…

… but in case you hadn’t heard, and because the purpose of this here web-address is to keep track of things, Google started talking about Wave today.

(complete guide here)

It’s one of those things that deals with such basic interactions, that the full effects of it aren’t that predictable – the real-time collaboration on the same page for example.

In a nutshell though, it makes any conversation (be it via email, blog comments, etc) into an embeddable object. The ramifications of that are huge. Conversation on the web at the moment is a mess. Everything’s everywhere – if this takes off – and I suspect it will, because the viral aspects of it are Skype-like, then it will not only create and destroy whole rafts of businesses overnight, it could well wind up changing the way we interact with each other.

If it does link your email identity to your comments-on-blogs identity… then every comment you leave on every participating service will be traceable back to you – all your comments will become a single body of work. It may well lessen the anonymous arsehole factor – which is a shame, because I rather enjoy being an arsehole sometimes, still, there you go.

Google (and in fact the entire internet) is, as far as I can gather, not a million miles-away from being a giant artificial intelligence machine. Possibly the greatest ramifications of this are in this area – if so, what does it mean? Far, far smarter linking between conversations I think. The Universal Mind may be about to have an IQ leap.

If it catches on, and I think it will. I think this will be a bit of a game-changer.

“‘Eureka machine’ puts scientists in the shade by working out laws of nature

The machine, which took only two hours to come up with Newton’s laws of motion, marks a turning point in the way science is done”

So we may have come a long way from when I was at school and we used slide-rules then.

[edit] It also seems that a genetic robo-scientist in Wales has performed the entire loop of the scientific methodology on its own… and made a discovery.

” As reported in the latest issue of the journal Science, Adam autonomously hypothesized that certain genes in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae code for enzymes that catalyze some of the microorganism’s biochemical reactions. The yeast is noteworthy, as scientists use it to model more complex life systems.

Adam then devised experiments to test its prediction, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results, and used those findings to revise its original hypothesis and test it out further. The researchers used their own separate experiments to confirm that Adam’s hypotheses were both novel and correct–all the while probably wondering how soon they’d become obsolete. ”

The singularity approacheth.

T’would be cool to link something like these to the WorldChanging.com’s thing about the universal panopticon