Living Technology Today/Artificial Life Tomorrow

The field of artificial life emerged in the 1980s as an avant-garde alternative to artificial intelligence. For many years it was ahead of the science to support it, but recently it has developed an applied side with an advancement in technology that derives its usefulness from properties usually associated with living systems: growth, self-reproduction, self-assembly, self-organization, self-healing and evolvability. Examples range from biotechnology – such as artificial cells and synthetic biology – to information technology – such as the World Wide Web and the rise of social networks. This living technology is typically not built from the top down like traditional technologies, with a blueprint specifying every detail, but rather relies on emergent properties for its structure and function. 

ProtoLife CEO Packard will discuss the history and future of living technology, including the rise of wet artificial life. He will describe how new generations of artificial life will result from the current convergence of biotechnology and information technology. In studying these new forms of life, we may learn a thing or two about life itself.

Speaker: Norman Packard, Ph.D., Founder and CEO, ProtoLife; Former CEO and Founder, The Prediction Company.