MASTER vs MACHINE: Human DNA is the Ultimate Prize.

The Machine Masters are feeding your DNA to the Vast Machine. But what happens when the machine goes MAD? Who will own you then--Master or Machine?

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Where did this baseless fear that robots would attack humans come from? Why were there so many stories about robots and humans fighting? Did they only exist because that was how mankind had always lived? Did we simply see ourselves in these humanoid machines? Were we not simply afraid of our own reflections? — Hiroshi Yamamoto

Companies that don’t invest in AI products risk becoming obsolete. And humans who don’t allow AI into the most intimate corners of their lives risk becoming obsolete, too. GETTY IMAGES

Human DNA is everywhere. In a footprint, in the air, in water. It’s called environmental DNA or eDNA and scientists are collecting it. The human DNA found in sand by scientists studying endangered sea turtles was “of such high quality that they could identify mutations associated with disease and determine the genetic ancestry of populations living nearby”.

“All this very personal, ancestral and health related data is freely available in the environment and is simply floating around in the air right now,” said David Duffy, a professor of wildlife disease genomics at the University of Florida.

DNA can be used to solve crimes and monitor health risks, which might sound positive, but it can be done without our knowledge or consent. It can also be used for location tracking, privacy breaches, data harvesting, and genetic surveillance of individuals or groups.

Everyone, from governments and the military to Google and OpenAI to the World Health Organization and United Nations, is in a race to capture the most DNA. Why? Because DNA holds the key to shaping the future of humanity and our planet. Essentially, it holds the key to ultimate power.

In order to surveille and interpret all that DNA, it must be fed to the Vast Machine, whose appetite has become insatiable. Flawed humans, even those with good intentions, are feeding the machines. Plenty of the most powerful Machine Masters are downright selfish, greedy, power-hungry megalomaniacs. Doesn’t it therefore follow that the machines are learning to be the same?

What happens when the machines grow more powerful than the humans that are feeding them?

A few days ago, I had to rent a U-Haul truck. The entire transaction was done on my phone.

I had to take a photo of the front and back of my Driver’s License, a photo of myself and sign a couple of forms. The man did pretty much nothing except sit there looking bored while occasionally glancing at a computer screen to verify that the information I sent had been fed into it.

“What happens if a person doesn’t have a smart phone?” I asked.

“They can’t rent a truck,” said the man with complete disinterest in the subject.

“Really, there’s no other way?” I said, feeling the walls closing in.

“Nope.”

Anyone who wants to live in society, work at a regular job, travel, communicate, join a club like a gym, even rent a U-Haul truck, must have a smart phone and submit to the Vast Machine.

Before I go any further, I often refer to AI as the Vast Machine, a term I’ve taken from Jonathan Twelve Hawks and his The Fourth Realm Trilogy, in which the Vast Machine is an international system of surveillance, an all-seeing eye not unlike the Eye of Sauron in Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, that pretends to watch over humanity when it really wants to suck every bit of life out of us. The more it eats, the hungrier it gets.

Increasingly, we find ourselves having to submit to the Vast Machine. Airplane travel often means submitting to facial recognition technology. Eye-scans are becoming commonplace, as I recently wrote about in WORLDCOIN: AI Requires Proof That You Are Human.

Worldcoin is a perfect example of the two sides of the AI coin. Its creators believe the orbs will usher in a new era of global humanity and financial stability. Its detractors see them as invasive, dystopian and exploitative. 

Machine Master Sam Altman

Many people shrugged off Worldcoin when I wrote about it. Such a thing will never take off. But Worldcoin’s Machine Master, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, is now AI’s latest wunderkind. As a result, Worldcoin is back in the news, seeking $50 million to fulfill its vision to create a global identity and financial network. More than 2.6 million people have already signed up to have their irises scanned by Worldcoin's "orb" devices in exchange for a digital ID and free cryptocurrency, most of them in the developing world.

Why would anyone do that? For convenience. For money. Worldcoin created its own crypto token, called WLD, and has offered 25 units (currently worth about $60) to anyone who scanned their eyes into an orb.

It was only, like, yesterday that Sam Altman was kicked out as CEO of OpenAI. Some said it was because of a hush-hush super scary AI advancement. Maybe so, maybe not, but mostly they now say it was due to a power struggle within the company over where its focus should be.

OpenAI’s original vision was to prioritize “principles over profit”, developing tools to "benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return."

But as NPR describes:

OpenAI's leaders grew increasingly aware that developing and maintaining advanced artificial intelligence models required an immense amount of computing power, which was incredibly expensive.

Tensions grew between Altman and the board about what was perceived as his hasty commercialization of OpenAI products, without proper oversight.

In the end, “profit” won over “principles” as it usually does. OpenAI’s biggest investor, Microsoft, exerted pressure to bring Altman back and the board dynamic shifted away from those advocating for principles to those demanding profits.

With Altman restored as CEO, OpenAI is back in the race to see which company can build the most powerful generative AI “products” within the shortest space of time.

The smarter AI gets, the better our lives will be, or so we are told.

Oh yes, there are a few worries, like what happens when AI gets smarter than its Masters. That will never happen, lots of people say. Maybe not. But if that day comes, we probably won’t know it anyway, since Machines will have manipulated our thoughts into total delusion.

Whether man or machine ends up in control, the fundamental problem remains that the creation is being taught by corrupt creators; by people who sacrifice principles for money and power. Despite this basic flaw, we are still told by the media (the lying voice of the Vast Machine and its lying Masters) that AI will usher in a utopia for everyone.

When asked about ChatGPT’s impact, Jeff Clune, professor at the University of British Columbia and a former research manager at OpenAI, told CNN:

…ChatGPT has already made millions of peoples’ lives easier in small and unique ways — such as by helping a non-native English speaker write a cover letter for a job application or aiding a person with specific dietary restrictions in creating a meal plan — but he adds that the tool’s underlying technology’s full effect on society hasn’t even begun to peak.

“Many people incorrectly focus on the current, seemingly magical capabilities of AI, without properly looking at the rate of improvement over time. Things continue to get better exponentially,” Clune told CNN. “The stuff that AI can do now is just the beginning.”

It all sounds exciting. What, though, is the price for all this improvement? It is a price that we, the billions of ordinary human beings, must pay in order for the Vast Machine to grow and thrive and, ultimately, outpace us.

We must give up our bodies and our minds to the insatiable appetite of the Vast Machine. Machines need food, or they start eating themselves. If that happens, they risk literally going MAD.

GETTY IMAGES

Models trained on synthetic data, or data that isn’t pure, first generation (directly from humans like you and me), are likely to go mad after just five training cycles.

"Our primary conclusion across all scenarios is that without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease," say scientists at Rice and Stanford University who performed the study. "We term this condition Model Autophagy Disorder (MAD).”

The more powerful these machines become, the hungrier they will be, and this could present a problem. Real humans must keep supplying the machines with data. But the more humans meld with machines, the messier it gets to distinguish between the two.

What’s really interesting about this is that the Machine Masters realize that if their Machines consume synthetic food, they become sick. At the same time, they insist that humans can get healthier by consuming synthetic food, drugs, vaccines, etc. Perhaps we are the ones going mad and we just don’t know it.

How can we expect our machines to be sane if we are not?

Of course, this is not explained to the ordinary human. We are told we must prove our identity for our own protection, not for the hunger of the Vast Machine.

After all, we are told, you don’t want a bot, or a person behind the bot, stealing your identity, do you? Because that would mean you no longer exist. It won’t matter that you are made of flesh and blood and walk around in the real world. If you cannot prove your existence in the land of the Machines, you are nothing. A ghost.

You need something like Worldcoin to protect you!

According to Time:

It is a way to definitively distinguish between humans and AIs. If all humans online could prove that they were, in fact, humans, then scams and imposters would dramatically decrease, and the digital landscapes would become more accurate representations of us as a society. 

So in order to prove that humans are humans, Worldcoin scans irises, which are unique to their owners. This technique is not unlike the biometric scans conducted by CLEAR or Apple’s Face ID. 

Just think of all the ways you now have to prove you are human. The obsession is out of hand. It will never be enough.

But don’t worry, just give up your data and the government will protect you while your information is being fed to machines to be stored, analyzed and used as a kind of energy comparable to the way humans eat and digest food. In exchange for feeding the machines, AI will approve your ability to buy necessities, to be entertained, to communicate, to travel, to join clubs and generally to participate in society. All of this will depend on your carbon footprint of course. If it is too big, you will lose privileges. Freedom will no longer be a right. We can already see how with Covid, we were taught that freedom is not a right, it is a privilege. We are all “in this together” and we all must submit, or it won’t work.

None of this is really for your good or for the good of the planet, nor will there ever be a utopia for humans. That is reserved for those who have risen above humanity. Or that’s what the Machine Masters believe in their own “MAD” state. Why do you think the Machine Masters and their government and media agents now insist that you reduce your carbon footprint? Because the Vast Machine’s enormous appetite requires ever increasing amounts of energy.

You are the food. But so is the planet.

None of this is about stopping Climate Change—which used to be called Global Warming, remember? But they can’t call it that anymore. Why? Because the maniacs are playing with the weather just like they are playing with everything else, and who knows what the outcome will be over time. They certainly don’t.

One thing they do know for sure: all of their tinkering requires a ton of energy.

Scientific America states:

Around the globe, data centers currently account for about 1 to 1.5 percent of global electricity use, according to the International Energy Agency. And the world’s still-exploding boom in artificial intelligence could drive that number up a lot—and fast.

A continuation of the current trends in AI capacity and adoption are set to lead to NVIDIA shipping 1.5 million AI server units per year by 2027. These 1.5 million servers, running at full capacity, would consume at least 85.4 terawatt-hours of electricity annually—more than what many small countries use in a year, according to the new assessment.

We are also told that bitcoin mining uses as much energy as a small country, and that based on energy consumption, crypto mining would be in the top 30 energy-consuming countries. 

Once again, humans must sacrifice themselves for the insatiable appetite of machines.

Rather than finding yourself in a utopia after all that sacrifice, it’s far more likely you will then be told that AI is too advanced, too dangerous for you as a mere human to be able to access it without a lot of restrictions.

As a recent Forbes article, The AI Revolution Will Be Powered By Energy, suggests:

Like a machine gun or a plane, you won’t be allowed to have your own unless you get licensed, a bit like your meds there will be experts in the way doling out AI if you want some or perhaps you will need training, testing and permission to pilot AI like you do a car or a plane.

But who knows, perhaps by that point we will all be so MAD, we won’t realize we gave up everything for a pot of stew.

Remember the story of Esau and Jacob?

They were twins born to Isaac. Esau was born first, and Jacob was described as coming out of the womb holding onto the heel of his older brother’s foot. One day, when they were adults, Esau came in hungry from the fields and saw the stew his brother had made. It smelled so good, it looked so good, and Esau sure was hungry. To satisfy his immediate hunger, Esau sold his birthright to his brother. All for a pot of stew.

To say he regretted it later is an understatement. But it was too late. The deal had been done.

We call Esau a fool. We tell the story as a cautionary tale. We would never do that! But we are doing it. We are giving up our birthright for convenience in the moment instead of long-term control over our own lives. We will soon find out the consequences if we try to renege on our contract with AI. Those who are not willing to give up all to the Vast Machine, will end up as outcasts, like the lepers of old.

If humans search for the most nutritious foods to eat to keep healthy, machines are doing the same. To have optimal health, they must eat the most nutritious foods.

No longer is it enough to consume our names, birthdates, or our photos posted on social media sites. If machines are to reach their ultimate goal of surpassing humans, they must feed off of our DNA.

Why? Because DNA is what Francis Collins, leader of the Human Genome Project (HGP) and former director of the US National Institutes of Health (who hastily got out after Covid and avoided the scrutiny that Anthony Fauci suffered) called the Language of God. In fact, he wrote an excellent book by that title, which I have read.

According to the National Human Genome Research Institute:

The finished sequence produced by the Human Genome Project covers about 99 percent of the human genome's gene-containing regions, and it has been sequenced to an accuracy of 99.99 percent.

Impressive, right? Not really. Saying we have mapped the human genome is like saying we have mapped the universe. How much DNA is in just one body?

To work out how much DNA is in the whole body, we’ll need to know how many cells a body has. This is the most difficult aspect of this question, as it’s as yet impossible to count. Estimates have ranged from 5 billion to 200 million trillion. However, a very thorough paper in 2013 attempted to measure the cell density of each tissue type (fat tissue, muscle tissue, etc.) and, knowing how much of each tissue type there is, extrapolate the number of cells from that. Their final answer was 37.2 trillion cells in an average adult male. Each of these will contain a full genome, with the exception of red blood cells.

If the Machine Masters see themselves as some sort of gods creating a new species, then surely, they see DNA as unlocking the secrets of life in order to make that happen.

But how absurd is it for them to think they can actually accomplish this goal? Instead, they are jumping willy-nilly into giving machines powers that they cannot even begin to understand themselves. They think AI will figure it all out and then explain these mysteries to them. On what basis are they so sure AI will do that? How will they even know AI is telling the truth when the very people teaching AI are liars. They are lying to us, their fellow-humans. They are not telling us the truth about why they are feeding us to the Vast Machine.

How have they managed to get humans to give up their DNA, the very essence of themselves to machines, all for nothing in return? By convincing us that it’s for our health and safety, with promises of ending disease and giving everyone in the world access to the benefits of the Vast Machine.

Let’s look at a few of the ways our DNA is being collected from governments in collaboration with the World Health Organization and the United Nations to some hot companies, like Gingko Bioworks.

We can start with the Traveler-based Genomic Surveillance program (TGS)

The TGS is led by CDC’s Travelers’ Health Branch and is a public-private partnership that plays an important role in U.S. national biosecurity.

It is the Nation’s second-largest contributor to SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences, enrolling 300,000 travelers per year from over 135 countries from all World Health Organization (WHO) regions. International travelers arriving at participating airports volunteer to self-collect nasal swab samples.

In November it expanded its surveillance to include flu, RSV, and select other respiratory viruses, in addition to SARS-CoV-2.  The pilot is being implemented by Ginkgo Bioworks and XpresCheck. Samples that test positive for these viruses will be sequenced and uploaded to public databases to provide valuable information to public health officials and policy makers.

What about Ginkgo?

Ginkgo’s reach is long, partnering with everyone from the CDC, WHO, vaccine companies, food companies, the list goes on and on. It is on the cutting edge of melding man with machine.

The interesting thing to program in the 21st century isn’t going to be computers—it’s biology. ~ Ginkgo founder, Tom Knight

Gingko summarizes its strategy with three words: “Data is Queen.” Data is the essential and scarce resource that powers machine learning applications. And as we’ve said, if data is queen, then DNA is the king of it all.

Gingko wants to reprogram the DNA of everything from food, medicine, cosmetics, agriculture, materials, or any other market. You know, it’s that synthetic food and other stuff that they keep saying will make us healthier when it obviously will not. Investors include Bill Gates and AI’s newest wunderkind, Sam Altman.

“Synthetic biology is one of the fastest growing areas of tech right now, and Gingko is leading the category,” said Altman.

Gingko is also partnering with Google Cloud to Build the Next Generation AI Platform for Biological Engineering and Biosecurity. But not only that.

Besides partnering with customers such as Bayer, Biogen, Merck, Novo Nordisk, Sumitomo Chemical, Gingko has partnered with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) on a number of national security priorities including sustainable manufacturing. Its biosecurity business unit, Concentric by Ginkgo, … is working with the CDC and a growing list of international governments to develop biosecurity infrastructure, including pathogen detection and response.

Next, let’s take a look at the 50-in-5 campaign, officially launched last month by global leaders and high-level representatives from 11 ‘First-Mover’ countries.

The United Nations, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and partners of the Rockefeller Foundation are launching a campaign to accelerate digital ID, digital payments, and data-sharing rollouts in 50 countries under the umbrella of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) by 2028

“This ambitious, country-led campaign heralds a new chapter in the global momentum around digital public infrastructure (DPI).”

Three underlying components are critical to the acceleration of the [United Nations’] 50-in-5 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”.

• Digital ID

• Digital payments like Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)

• Data sharing.

None of these three goals can be attained without every human on the planet giving up their DNA to the Vast Machine.

Kenya is ground zero for this project, where at birth every Kenyan citizen will be assigned a Unique Personal Identifier (UPI).

Goal 16.9 of Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development states as its goal to Create a legal identity for all, including birth registration, by 2030. According to the website of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP):

Article 6 of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights states that everybody has the right to a legal identity…. However, hundreds of millions of people still lack proper identification, and about half of the world’s countries do not have a universal system for registering births and deaths.

The United Nations Legal Identity Agenda Task Force, co-chaired by UNDP, UNDESA, and UNICEF, is working with Member States to ensure that more than 300 million people acquire a legal identity by 2025.  UNDP is strengthening the capacity of Member States to develop holistic, country-owned, sustainable and interoperable civil registration, vital statistics and identity management systems. UNDP is working to increase the number of countries that address legal identity issues as a foundational pillar of national development plans and strategies and ensure that everyone, without exception, has access to essential public goods and services.

Sounds like a noble goal—making sure everyone on the planet has access to public goods and services.

To understand how important this is, we must first look at the transformation of public goods into digital public goods:

A public good is a good that is both non-excludable (no one can be prevented from consuming this good) and non-rivalrous (the consumption of this good by anyone does not reduce the quantity available to others). Extending this definition to global public goods, they become goods with benefits that extend to all countries, people, and generations and are available across national borders everywhere. Knowledge and information goods embody global public goods when provided for free (otherwise the trait of non-excludability could not be met on the basis of excluding those who cannot pay for those goods). The online world provides a great medium for the provision of global public goods, where they become global digital public goods. Once produced in their digital form, global public goods are essentially costless to replicate and make available to all, under the assumption that users have Internet connectivity to access these goods.

Here are some examples given:

• Wikipedia itself.

• DHIS2, an open-source health management system.

• Free and open-source software (FOSS)

• Open educational resources, which by their copyright are allowed to be freely re-used, revised and shared.

How wonderful it will be when everyone in the entire world has access to these “free” resources.

Except that they are anything but free. As I experienced when renting the U-Haul truck, everyone will be forced to use these global “free” resources. In exchange, we must pay for the devices on which we use them. Most importantly, we must allow those devices that we pay for to “eat” all of our data. It means billions of people giving up their data; everything from who and what they love and hate, their biometrics, even their most secret thoughts, to the Vast Machine—for free.

What are a few of the ways newborn babies’ DNA is being collected, stored and owned, even without your knowledge?

Back in 2010, CNN published The Government has your baby's DNA.

Newborn babies in the United States are routinely screened for a panel of genetic diseases. Since the testing is mandated by the government, it's often done without the parents' consent.

In many states, babies’ DNA is stored indefinitely. The state of Minnesota's Web site explains this is so “tests can be repeated, if necessary, and in case the DNA is ever needed to help parents identify a missing or deceased child. The samples are also used for medical research”.

This means that your child’s DNA could be used for medical research without your knowledge or approval. What kind of medical research? That’s something they don’t tell us, but researchers call such DNA samples a “gold mine”.

When did genetic testing of babies start? According to a 2014 Newsweek article:

Genetic testing for newborns started in the 1960s, in Massachusetts, with testing for phenylketonuria, or PKU, where the body cannot properly break down protein. It’s a rare disease but if caught early enough, it’s treatable and can mean the difference between a normal life or a life of mental retardation. The benefits were so great that other states began adopting the screening.

Over the years the list of conditions a newborn is tested for has increased. By 2014, all 50 states and the District of Columbia routinely screen newborns for at least 30 genetic conditions, with some states testing for nearly twice that number.

"These newborn screening DNA databases make a complete mockery of informed consent," Jeremy Gruber, president of the Council for Responsible Genetics, tells Newsweek. "What people also don't know…is that this is the one test that is not done by the hospital or a third party on behalf of the hospital.… It is done by the state department of public health."

In 2010, a civil rights group sued Texas health officials over the sale and distribution of about 8,800 samples of baby blood to pharmaceutical companies and the military.

And just this year, a group of New Jersey parents filed a federal lawsuit challenging the state’s practice of keeping newborn babies’ blood samples for 23 years without their parents’ knowledge.

“And, once the state has the blood, it can use it however it wishes, including selling it to third parties, giving it to police without a warrant, or even selling it to the Pentagon to create a registry—as previously happened in Texas.”

Similar lawsuits have been brought against Minnesota and Michigan. California is also collecting and storing the DNA of infants without parental consent.

How about the FBI’s ever-growing Combined DNA Index System (CODIS), one of the largest in the world, with over 20 million DNA profiles.

Since China is doing it, hadn’t we better do it, too?

“The Chinese Government is building the world’s largest police-run DNA database in close cooperation with key industry partners across the globe. Yet, unlike the managers of other forensic databases, Chinese authorities are deliberately enrolling tens of millions of people who have no history of serious criminal activity. Those individuals (including preschool-age children) have no control over how their samples are collected, stored and used. Nor do they have a clear understanding of the potential implications of DNA collection for them and their extended families.” ~ EMILE DIRKS & DR. JAMES LEIBOLD, “GENOMIC SURVEILLANCE” ATASPI(JUNE 17, 2020)

Stored DNA can be used to target specific groups, such as minorities:

• Chinese authorities collecting DNA samples to teach an algorithm to predict a person’s face based on their genetics. The samples were specifically used to identify members of minority groups. In the past year, several media articles have highlighted the details of the massive surveillance operation that has been going on in Xinjiang. Among those was an article in The Intercept reporting on leaked data from a police database that revealed that the so-called “Physicals for All” program was a front for collecting biometric data from Uyghurs and other minorities.

We can shake our heads in disapproval, but as is clearly stated, China does this in “close cooperation with key industry partners across the globe”.

But that’s not all. It isn’t a government or a megacompany like Google that has the most DNA.

AncestryDNA, a commercial company where people willingly pay to hand over their DNA to the Vast Machine in exchange for information about their ancestry has the largest database in the world.

Since 2013, AncestryDNA has tested the DNA of more than 25 million people worldwide, with over 40 billion records online and over 1 billion in revenue. Every person who has submitted to this test has had to agree for their DNA data to be kept by the company and used to “improve the system”, whatever that means.

Well, here you go. Here’s the ‘fine print’:

By submitting DNA to AncestryDNA, you grant AncestryDNA and the Ancestry Group Companies a royalty-free, worldwide, sublicensable, transferable license to host, transfer, process, analyze, distribute, and communicate your Genetic Information for the purposes of providing you products and services, conducting Ancestry’s research and product development, enhancing Ancestry’s user experience, and making and offering personalized products and services.

And here’s what it means:

• AncestryDNA can use your Genetic Information to provide products and services to you and improve their products and services for all their users.

• By providing any DNA, you acquire no rights in any research or commercial products that may be developed by AncestryDNA using your Genetic Information.

Who do they sell your DNA too? Well, one example of shared genetic data has been with Calico Labs, a venture of Google’s parent company Alphabet, to study the science of aging. Machine Master and Google co-founder Larry Page helped fund Calico.

23andMe, a “health and ancestry service”, is another massive DNA collector.

In December of 2023, hackers accessed the personal information of about 5.5 million people who opted-in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature, which allows customers to automatically share some of their data with others. The stolen data included the person’s name, birth year, relationship labels, the percentage of DNA shared with relatives, ancestry reports and self-reported location.

And TechCrunch reports:

In early October, a hacker claimed to have stolen the DNA information of 23andMe users in a post on a well-known hacking forum. As proof of the breach, the hacker published the alleged data of one million users of Jewish Ashkenazi descent and 100,000 Chinese users, asking would-be buyers for $1 to $10 for the data per individual account. Two weeks later, the same hacker advertised the alleged records of another four million people on the same hacking forum.

I dread to think what someone would do with all that DNA of a million Ashkenazi Jews. Or 100,000 Chinese users.

And yet, people still keep on giving over their DNA.

In the case of a company like Calico, your DNA is being used to fuel the elite’s desire to live forever at your expense. Back in 2016, MIT’s Antonio Regalado had this to say about Calico:

Among Calico’s first hires was Cynthia Kenyon, now its vice president of aging research, who 20 years ago showed that altering a single DNA letter in a laboratory roundworm made it live six weeks instead of three. There is something hair-raising about Kenyon’s videos of old, should-be-dead worms wriggling vigorously across a petri dish.

So Google’s founders created an academic-­biotech hybrid they call an R&D company to follow up on such clues, providing nearly unlimited funding to a group of top researchers…. Calico has remained a riddle, a super-­secretive company that three years in hasn’t published anything of note, rebuffs journalists, and asks visiting scientists to sign nondisclosure agreements.

David Sinclair, author of “Lifespan,” who heads up labs at Harvard Medical School and University of New South Wales in Australian predicts that in the not-too-distant future, “age-reversing injections, laced with a small number of ‘reprogramming genes,’ will be administered to people who turn 30 and be made to kick in 15 years later: ‘Gray hair would disappear. Wounds would heal faster. Wrinkles would fade’…”

And we’re back to utopia again. Blah, blah, blah. It’s all a lot of hype that people are being sold. A pot of stew in exchange for everything that you are as a human being. Companies like Gingko Bioworks raise billions of dollars on the promise that synthetic biology will transform our world into a utopia.

Once again, here’s one of my favorite sources, Antonio Regalado of MIT Technology Review:

…it is surprising that 13 years after it was founded, Ginkgo can’t name a single significant product that is manufactured and sold using its organisms. To the company’s fans, that’s no problem. They say Ginkgo embodies the biggest trends in DNA science and surely will become the Intel, Microsoft, or Amazon of biology…. To skeptics, however, Ginkgo’s … greatest talents lie in winning glowing press coverage and raising money.

Tell a good story, raise a ton of money and who cares if it doesn’t work.

Here’s a perfect example of the insatiable appetite of a human for money and fame (also power) partnering with the insatiable appetite of the Vast Machine to make us think this is success when it’s really slavery.

Madonna’s commercial for ITAU Bank tells us with lips struggling to move because they’ve been altered so much (sort of like that old worm still wriggling around in the petri dish):

“I am always reinventing myself so I can keep being myself. It’s not about who I am, it’s about how many I am.”

Sorry, but no matter how much help you get from AI, you are still a human being with an expiration date. Or, maybe, Madonna has a few clones in the closet.

Meanwhile, the Vast Machine’s appetite is out of control and its co-dependent, man, doesn’t seem able to stop feeding it. This unhealthy relationship is making everyone MAD.