Key points that stuck out to me (the Youtube description does not do it justice - would highly recommend actually watching it):
- Intelligence is the way something solves a problem, and is multi-dimensional, and things that we usually wouldn't think of as "intelligent" like frog skin (xenobots) or bacteria are in their own way
- It's much harder to reverse engineer genes than electrical patterns and what are we but those charges ... so what happens when we manipulate them (with some comp neuro) without changing the genes? We can cause the desired changes! The example given was giving a worm 2 heads instead of 1 by just changing its voltage map.
- There are *so many* opportunities for this technology - we can make a huge variety of "intelligences" by combining electrical impulses and base cells. We can use it to cure cancer and regenerate limbs (research is currently being done on both and looks promising!)
- This tech is in its fledgling stages - the ultimate goal is to wholly reverse engineer the communication patterns of organisms and abstract away manual manipulation to something as simple as "give me a newt with 3 heads". A wonderful analogy was made to manually soldering whenever you want to switch from Word to Photoshop - that's what we're trying to do with genes at the moment. *my own personal analogy here is reversing the code of something vs reversing the API. One gets you somewhere faster and offers a much more convenient way to change behavior.
- The entire human body functions similarly to the brain with electrical channels and inter-cell communication. And if communication is all that matters, you can add an eye to the tail of a newt, for example, by just changing the message the initial cells communicate between each other, not the underlying gene causing that message. (and quirk of neuroscience, the brain interprets that visual data in the same way as if it were on the head as it was "evolutionarily evolved" to be - see https://www.ted.com/talks/david_eagleman_can_we_create_new_senses_for_humans?language=en)