OpenWorm and differential technological development

Thanks for pledging and encouraging others to pledge! Full disclosure: I'm the coordinator for the project. I've been having a look through the discussions on your references and I'd offer the following thoughts:

I think Hanson's three part break down (Computing power, brain scanning, cell modeling) is useful and I agree that cell modeling is an important research investment that has not had enough focus, either academically or industrially. Better cell models is one of the technological advances that OpenWorm helps to address due to its approach to model a complete organism with such few cells.

I would add that none of these discussions seem to pick up on the additional benefits of cell modeling outside of the context of brain emulation, which include advances in complexity science in general, increased potential for tissue regeneration and repair, and better diagnostics and therapies for diseases. Remember, all living things have cells, so advanced cell modeling could give us a debugger and an editor for biology unlike anything we've ever seen.

In terms of funding open science via crowd funding as a differential technological development strategy, I would also point out that the results are held in a public commons (GitHub in our case) and this transparency and open access may be an important factor. Work like this is likely going to be done at some point, but if it isn't publicly funded then it is likely to be privately funded and also privately held, and may add to asymmetrical control over these technologies. Personally, I prefer power to be distributed as a bulwark against tyranny. The more of these technological advances are out in the open, I think, the less likely the power of them will be concentrated in the hands of the few and used improperly.

Re: Tyler's comment on "philosophical work" on x-risk reduction being largely a waste of time.

I'm not sure what he means by "philosophical work" here, but if he means "broad strategic work of the type sometimes done at FHI and MIRI," well, the whole point of that work is to help answer questions exactly like the one you're conflicted about here: whether OpenWorm is good or bad differential technological development. It's precisely because of such work at FHI and MIRI that we have the concept of "differential technological development" in the first place, and that we have a collection of arguments for and against different kinds of differential technological development, even if the answers aren't yet clear.

Before one country invades another, or cuts or supplies $1B in funding for some project, it would be nice to know whether doing so would be good or bad. That's why Teller et al. studied the question of whether an atom bomb could ignite the atmosphere, and it's why FHI and MIRI are doing much of the research we do.

The latest edition of The Economist (May 24th, 2014) includes a story on OpenWorm. Some excerpts:

OpenWorm [is] an informal collaboration of biologists and computer scientists from America, Britain, Russia and elsewhere. On May 19th this group managed to raise $121,076 on Kickstarter, a crowd-funding website. The money will be put towards the creation of the world’s most detailed virtual life form—an accurate, open-source, digital clone of a critter called Caenorhabditis elegans, a 1mm-long nematode that lives in the soils of the world’s temperate regions. C. elegans is a scientific stalwart. It is simple, transparent, easy to feed and easy to breed. As a result it is one of the best-understood organisms in biology. Hermaphrodite individuals (which is most of them) have exactly 959 cells, of which 302 are neurons. The location and the function of every one of these cells is known. Thanks to work begun in the 1970s, scientists even have a complete map—a “connectome”—of how the neurons link up with each other to form the worm’s nervous system. Despite 40 years of technological progress, C. elegans remains the only animal for which such a diagram is available.

Building a complete electronic organism in this way, one that aims to be functionally indistinguishable from its fleshy counterpart, would be quite an achievement. It would also be useful. The human brain, for instance, differs from the worm’s tiny nervous system only in the number and interconnectedness of its neurons. But although plenty of cash and brow-sweat have been thrown at the problem over the years, nobody really knows how the brain works. Having a detailed, proddable model of a far simpler nervous system would be a good first step. And C. elegans is already used to probe everything from basic biochemistry to the actions of drugs in laboratories. The ability to run those tests electronically, with no need for actual worms, and to be reasonably sure that the results will nonetheless be the same as in the real world, would be a boon to biological and medical research.

For now, no one is quite clear what a faithful simulation would look like. The point of a model is to remove unnecessary, cluttering details, while preserving the essence of whatever it is the model-maker wants to study. But even for an organism as well-researched as C. elegans, no one is sure which details are crucial and which extraneous. A living cell is a complicated mess of enzymes, ion channels, messenger molecules and voltages. Attempting to simulate everything faithfully would bring even a supercomputer to its knees.

For the moment, the team is planning systems that will simulate how the worm’s muscle cells work, how its neurons behave and how electrical impulses move from one to the other. There will be physics algorithms that give the worm a realistic simulation of a Petri dish to move through. They will also make sure its virtual muscles can deform its virtual body by the correct amount when they receive a virtual jolt from a virtual neuron.

OpenWorm is available to anyone to play with. And its success on Kickstarter may help raise interest—and cash—from elsewhere. “We’ve thought about applying for traditional grants,” says Dr Larson. “And the success of this crowd-funding proves that there’s public interest in this, which ought to help our case.” If he and his collaborators succeed in their ambitions, then doing biological research may one day become a simple matter of downloading some animals onto your computer, and getting started.