On Human Plasticity, DNA Data Storage and the Singularity

Imagine an individual, says Nietzsche, who could embody the entire history of mankind; assimilating all that was once strange and alien and accessing knowledge and experience long forgotten. Such plastic power would make him a god, would it not?

Well, thanks to the possibilities opened up by new techniques and technologies, including DNA data storage, perhaps we might all one day have the opportunity to carry around within us every book, every image, every piece of music, every memory, every possibility ...    

Scientists at the European Bioinformatics Institute have already converted digital data into the four nucleobases found in DNA and then successfully stored and retrieved the text and audio files - which included Shakespeare's sonnets - with between 99.99 and 100% accuracy (i.e. with an extremely low rate of data loss).

Obviously, there's still some way to go before we might use a little finger as a flash drive, but the future is fast approaching at an ever-accelerated rate and rather than fear it, perhaps we should go with the flow and ensure that artificial superintelligence also belongs to us and not just our machines in a posthuman world ...

Note: Just to provide some idea of how pressing the problem of data storage is and why DNA is such a potentially fantastic solution ... In 2020, it's estimated that we'll need to store 40 trillion gigabytes of data. That requires 2.6 billion hard drives, or 42 billion USB sticks. However, just a single gram of DNA can also do the job.