260919: Garfield On Digital Imagination
When [Industrial Light & Magic] did the first screening, a test shot of a T-Rex walking through a field on a sunny day... Everyone in the room had a religious experience, because they realized this was the moment where the single cell of celluloid film was no longer something constrained by our ability to manufacture objects in physical space, but had become a canvas of pixels for the instantiation of the imagination in digital space. And this is precisely what happened with Jurassic Park itself... [Genetics marks the same] crossing of the digital-analogue divide... When I read [Jurassic Park], one of the primary things [I see Michael Crichton saying] is that computation—the spike that we're standing on right now, of accelerating computational power—is affording a collapse of the boundaries of space and time, and a collapse of the boundaries between the real and the virtual, or the imagination and the physical... It won't be long before you can prompt ChatGPT to write genetic sequences and have those pushed out in a bio fab-lab somewhere...
Michael Garfield, on Jurassic Park
Garfield goes on to quote Crichton directly:
A bare decade after the bomb, we began to have genetic power. And it will be in everyone's hands: it will be in kits for backyard gardeners, experiments for school children, cheap labs for terrorists and dictators. And it will force everyone to ask the same question: What should I do with my power? Which is the very question science says it cannot answer.
And to reference Ian Malcolm's morphine rant:
