What We Believe: Sequence, Preserve and Protect All Life
Where genetic company Traitwell is going over time
We have a lot of ideas that might well be considered zany at Traitwell but all interesting ideas start out as day dreams or nutty ideas, don’t they?
We’ve begun the process of collecting DNA from the public through our Educational Attainment app. We sincerely thank you for the efforts you’ve made in sharing your precious genetic data with us. Please continue to share our work on social media and with family and friends. This Educational Attainment app, and others like it, will get better in time as we gather still more genetic data and the cost of sequencing goes down.
You might well ask: What’s this all going toward?
We believe in sequencing every carbon based life form, starting with humans and working our way down the animal and plant kingdom.
We take on this obligation because we believe in stewardship, not exploitation, and because we celebrate the diversity of all of life.
And yes, that includes the deceased, whose genetic sequence combined with their cause of death, may well prolong the lives of the living. Longevity does seem to be heritable, after all.
And yes, that includes other sentient beings. We’re encouraged by the increasing empathy human beings show animals. To behave humanely is perhaps the closest we will get to behaving divinely.
We’re encouraged by such films as My Octopus Teacher, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary, and which breeds a sort of empathy.
And the foxes experiment continues to capture our imagination by raising the stakes about what sort of species we might well have in the future.
We recommend the book, How To Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog): Visionary Scientists and a Siberian Tale of Jump-Started Evolution (2017). [Note: As an Amazon Associate, Traitwell earns from qualifying purchases and receives commissions for purchases made through links in this post.]
Are we humans just self-domesticating apes, after all? That’s the contention of Richard Wrangham’s The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution (2019)
We think it not totally crazy that we might build a world like David Brin’s Uplift series, where human beings bring along our animal brethren to the cosmos.
Who wants to live in a universe if we have to Man’s best friends at home?
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There’s a lot of discussion about artificial intelligence and yet curiously little about human or animal intelligence.
We’re skeptical of all of this claims. Machines can only do what came before. We agree with Lord John Browne of Giant.VC and author of Make, Think, Imagine: Engineering the Future of Civilisation (2019).
Although an increasing amount of their output appears to be the product of some sort of genuine intelligence, we must remember that these systems can still only provide insights based on deductions from past events. And anyone who worries about the arrival of supremely powerful artificially intelligent machines should consider the challenges of maintaining machines even today — the unpredictable behaviour of an office printer is a good example. Computers already outperforms human intellect in many specific tasks, and engineers will continue to build and program computers that support us in many ingenious ways, but silicon-based intelligence with the same qualities as human intelligence has yet to arrive.
Indeed.
But animal intelligence? Well, such a process may take hundreds of years. Let’s get started.
Crossposted with Traitwell and Charles Johnson’s Thoughts and Adventures. If you’d like to support Traitwell’s work, please consider donating your DNA and buying a book through our Amazon affiliate links.
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