Well, OK, I was talking to Demis Hassabis, and he was quite interested in this idea. Not just novels that would pass some sort of Turing test, but novels that would really move people or make people cry. I remember raising the question with a very leading AI expert about whether there could be a program that could write novels. It’s not under the traditional government or university auspices, so oversight is going to be difficult. And I can see that a lot of the energy behind Crispr is in the private sector. The possibilities, in terms of medicines and also in terms of producing food, are enormous.īut by the very fact that it’s relatively cheap and relatively easy to do, it’s going to be very hard to regulate. This means that its benefits can be with us very, very quickly.Īlready, I understand, there are people who have been cured of sickle cell and other blood related illnesses. I was lucky enough to meet Doudna, in 2017, at a conference in London, and I got very interested in the whole thing.Ĭrispr is an absolute breakthrough because it's so accurate, it's relatively cheap, and it's relatively easy to do. When I heard about this, I thought, well, actually, it's going to make a meritocracy something quite savage.īut I was excited by it as well. If you’re of my generation-I'm 66-a lot of what's happened in the world has, in one way or the other, been to do with struggles against unjust hierarchies, class systems, colonial systems, castes according to skin color.

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro