A common belief of technocentrism is that if we have the ability, why not use it? The rapid advancements in genetic testing requires ongoing public awareness. Direct-to-consumer companies like 23andMe and Ancestry.com get access to users’ DNA, which is used...
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MOST PEOPLE USE Google's search-by-image featureto either look for copyright infringement, or for shopping. See some shoes you like on a frenemy's Instagram? Search will pull up all the matching images on the web, including from sites that will sell you the same pair. In order to do that, Google’s computer vision algorithms had to be trained to extract identifying features like colors, textures, and shapes from a vast catalogue of images. Luis Ceze, a computer scientist at the University of Washington, wants to encode that same process directly in DNA, making the molecules themselves carry out that computer vision work. And he wants to do it using your photos.
On Wednesday, Ceze’s team at UW launched a social media campaign to collect 10,000 images from around the world and preserve their pixels in the As, Ts, Cs and Gs that make up the building blocks of life. They’ve done this sort of thing before; in 2016 they encoded an entire OK Go music video—setting the record for most amount of data stored in DNA. But this time...