#substrateindependence

The cost of manipulating life’s building blocks, he says, is falling at a much more rapid clip right now than Moore’s Law predicts for silicon. “If you think that diminishing cost is what drives innovation to startups and to dorm rooms, I think bioengineering is coming really fast and is going to catch up,” Ito says. “It’s neat to think about not just computational biology but computation in biology.” joi.ito.com

It's not too late to see Operabots, with some temporary humans running around as a sideshow ;-) "Death and the Powers is a new opera by composer Tod Machover and developed at the MIT Media Lab. It is a one-act, full-evening work that tells the story of Simon Powers, a successful and powerful businessman and inventor, reaching the end of his life and facing the question of his legacy. He is now conducting his final experiment, passing from one form of existence to another in an effort to project himself into the future. Simon Powers is himself now a System. His family, friends, and associates must decide what this means, whether or not he is actually alive, how it affects them, and whether to follow."