But something useful can be done. Instead of straight heating elements, I suggest a server farm. Maybe box it up like an electric heater, sell the CPU cycles back while still getting the same heat out.

Our synthetic genomic approach stands in sharp contrast to a variety of other approaches to genome engineering that modify natural genomes by introducing multiple insertions, substitutions, or deletions (18–22). This work provides a proof of principle for producing cells based upon genome sequences designed in the computer. DNA sequencing of a cellular genome allows storage of the genetic instructions for life as a digital file.

This seems significant, equivalent to booting up the first stored-program computer.

Scientists who were not involved in the study are cautioning that the new species is not a truly synthetic life form because its genome was put into an existing cell.

That’s sour grapes, because the original cell cytoplasm decays to zero exponentially fast in the number of replications, a point well made in the paper. It’s only needed for booting. What’s more useful to know is how much of the 1.08Mbp genome consists of existing genes. The paper says it’s a close copy of M. mycoides:

The synthetic genome described in this paper has only limited modifications from the naturally occurring M. mycoides genome. However, the approach we have developed should be applicable to the synthesis and transplantation of more.

The next step will be a basic cell with a minimal genome, a barebones cell OS, if you will. Then, on to synthetic functions. Pretty soon we’ll have cell API’s, fancy-pants programming frameworks, and bugs and viruses. I mean real ones.

Why is this? Let’s reason about it in a crude way.

It depends on why there is unemployment. It is said that economic policy dictates some buffer stock of unemployed people be maintained to anchor inflation, which is to say that unemployment can be eliminated by inflating. Indeed, at a low enough real interest rate (including negative rate), all work that spans non-zero time becomes “profitable” at wage above zero and there can be no unemployment. So there will be some unstable equilibrium, where there is full employment at just above zero wage and only “unprofitable” work left on the table. For a margin of safety (so as not to overshoot and still leave profitable work at above the lowest wage, which will unanchor the targeted inflation), there will be some unemployment, and therefore always payable yet unprofitable work. If the government offers some delta positive wage, then this excess labor can be used to do the unprofitable work, and we can do away with the technical requirement of excess labor margin and yet get equilibrium without the possibility of overshooting. Effectively, the government inflates the last little bit as needed to pay wages directly … rather than dumping it into the banking system where it will be promptly lent back to the government due to the real interest rate being slightly too high.

Theoretically, this also solves one of the greatest libertarian complaints that the minimum wage causes more unemployment. The theory of minimum wage is that everybody should be able to self-sustain on their wage (which now includes wage from the government as the employer of last resort). Now, by policy, the government can set some minimum wage (but it must be set so low that, it is guaranteed that everybody will definitely spend at least at that wage rate) and pay its own wage at delta below that. Since all of labor now spends at the minimum wage rate, there will be support on the demand side to assure that the full-employment equilibrium is set where the minimum wage cannot be unprofitable. All in all, the government does not compete with the private sector.

Of course there are still practical issues with this. For example, what do you do with lazy workers. So employer of last resort should only be in the sense of employment opportunity of last resort. You should still be fired for substandard work and go without pay at all. Now that’s an incentive to be productive. Another practical issue is churn. Since the government only intervenes at the lower extremum of the wage scale, unemployment higher in wage scale would need to filter down through displacement. I don’t really see a good solution to this. Perhaps there are clever and ethical ways to increase job market liquidity.

A lot of work these days goes into novel human-computer interfaces (think coffee table displays, networked whiteboards, etc.) and gestures (think various touch responses like multi-touch zooming), but in my opinion (and metaphor), these work are like lightly scratching the skin when there is a deep deep itch.

The deep itch is a totally multi-input environment. I don’t mean multiple non-interacting or minimally interacting users on the same machine. I don’t even mean multiple users who interact only when it is obvious to do so, like during conferencing, or when the game players are in one area of the map. These are all fundamentally still single input environments, because each user owns a static token, be it the single identity in a conference, the single drawing pen on the virtual whiteboard, or the same virtual character in a game!

Why not be bolder? Suppose two people are working on a desktop, whether locally or via a network connection. Why not have two mouse cursors and two possible focuses? It works like this: any place that cursor X clicks receives focus for all of cursor X’s associated inputs (perhaps keyboard X). Each user gets a set of inputs, then they can be working on separate windows, or even separate parts of the same window. They can both see what is going on with the both of them so they can really collaborate. Change two users to some other number and the same applies. None of this VNC-like fighting cursor crap. Let each user have multiple sets of inputs and still the same applies. See, now you can really multitask with two hands and feet if you want rather than glorified time sharing — lots more possibilities here than boring gestures! It’s how the real world works anyway. Besides, if processes can share a processor, users can certainly share a virtual interface and all of its objects and resources.

It seems like all — and I do mean all — interfaces existing and under development suffer from some kind of designer brain freeze where each user is assumed tied to a single and static virtual token in the interface, simply due to the coincidence that the user is tied to a single and static physical input set. That’s stupid. If you could have 10 hands rather than 2, wouldn’t you rather have 10 hands? Well, in the virtual interface, you can and should. And if your 10 hands can all work, and your friend’s 10 hands can work, you should be able to work together so you have 20 hands in total. Swap hands, too.

This is so obvious, I don’t even understand why it hasn’t been done 10 or 15 years ago…

But guess what, this is an actual industry. Here is an article that shows, to my great amazement, that people have not only taken this concept to heart to solve the real problem (for spammers and hackers) of automated CAPTCHA decoding by low-wage humans, but they’ve even managed to load-balance the whole thing to reduce latency! What … the hell!

We have several big teams and hundreds of active agents solving captchas, all at one time, especially during daytime in India. The backend of this project involves over 45 powerful, expensive servers communicating with the MySpace site to pull the captchas and then queue them up on this site, and then process the results to push back to MySpace all within 20 seconds per captcha.
…
Sometimes 100 or more agents are waiting at the same time.

Now I’m going to be open-minded here… That’s some entrepreneurial spirit. The reason why 10 years ago I thought this would be a joke was because I didn’t think anybody would put up with this kind of work. Not only was I wrong but now that I think about it, I can’t see how it’s worse than factory work or other kinds of manual labor. In fact, isn’t it better?

Let’s generalize this a little in the way I’ve mentioned in the opening and see if it can’t be applied innovatively on a large scale to other projects. This world needs more jobs.

No, the reason this was an interesting article was the biographical part, and of the biographical part was a nugget of a quote by Simonyi:

Simonyi was born in Budapest in 1948. The son of a physics professor, he fell in love at 15 with his first computer–a mammoth Russian Ural II in Hungary’s Central Statistical Office. By the 1960s, the Ural, which received its instructions through cash-register-style keys and had a roomful of vacuum tubes to perform calculations, would already have been a relic anywhere else in the world. But Hungary’s Communist leaders were trying to use the Soviet castoff to optimize rail and trucking schedules. The Ural wasn’t up to the task: there was no way to input real-time data on shipments. “It was completely hopeless,” Simonyi recalls. “It could have been done very easily by supply and demand. Unfortunately, that was politically incorrect.”

An apt observation that the free market is but a machine of humans running an optimization algorithm.