While flying into Indianapolis for a sales meeting this week I was looking down at the trees below. As usuala flying afforded some time to comtemplate solving the world's problems in impractical ways. The area I was focused on was energy. Given that carbon dioxide is a problem as an energy by product it is amazing how trees absorb solar energy and consume carbon dioxide as they go. So it would be nice if genetic engineering could take what we know of various genes and create a tree that could convert sunlight into electrical power that could be added into the overall grid of power. The great thing about it is that a forest of these trees would be a power plant so planting and nurturing the forest would be beneficial to the needs of humans for consumable power. Now this somewhat happens today but we burn the trees instead of maintaining them since it is the current most efficient way to extract energy from them.

I figured we could investigate one of two routes to accomplish this. The first would be to engineer battery fruit. The fruit portion of the trees would output high power batteries that could be connected into devices. This didn't appeal to me very much because it required harvesting the battery and seems like it could lead to problems like explosions in the forest when fruit became over ripe. The second would be for the tree to convert energy from sap/sugars flowed from the top to an organ near the roots that consumed the sap to output voltage and current. This organ would have a plus and minus node for DC current that could be wired into the grid through cables designed to look like vines run along the forest floor that would consolidate into a central station to pump the power outwards. The electric eel is the obvious place to look for genes that might provide a way to convert chemical energy into electricity.

I also was considering my body vs. my total genome regarding how much of my genome encodes information useful to intelligence. I figure that most of what my body does is very mechanical in nature. The heart is just a pump and connects to a big sewage and transport system, digestion is a process for obtaining energy but it is largely low value add when it comes to intelligence, locomotion is helpful but not fundamental since a quadraplegic can still be intelligent, and all of the parts to run individual cells of different types and just the basic cell functions is mostly unnecessary doing the same sorts of maintenance. So without putting any science behind it I figure about .05% of my genome is focused on intelligence and thought. It is probably a lot of information but not that many instructions? So I figure eventually we should get computers over the hump on some of the areas of intelligence by understanding the algorithms that result from the expression of these genes. Among them, my favorite, is the operant conditioning system. It's the functionality behind why clicker training dogs works so well and people will stand in front of slot machines for days on end. So I would find it interesting to create an AI prototype that focused just on implementing operant conditioning as a model in software to train a computer.

Unfortunately I have no time to play with genes, people, power, and computers.