YouSaid · the spoken record

Adrian Woolfson

lines on the record: 36
first: 2026-02-18
most recent: 2026-02-18
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Life is, I call it a sketch for a manifesto, and it's a sketch because I don't believe that any individual is able to or has the right even to write a manifesto for such an important thing. So, you know, it's simply a sketch and other people, including everybody who reads my book, should have a voice and be at the table helping to make those important decisions about how life will navigate its own future.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We might find ourselves in a world where an authoritarian state or regime decides that such things are undesirable. Why would you want to have a population with free will? How inconvenient? Why would you want people who challenge your ideas? And free will is only lost once. So I think eventually those types of issues will become an issue. They're far away, fortunately, but they will. Somebody watches if this interview survives another hundred years. And if you're watching this in 100 years, you will probably appreciate what I'm saying now. And I have no doubt that those conversations, if we're lucky, there will be dialogue and issues like that. If we're unlucky, there won't be. And things will be done without consent. So my manifesto for...”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that's absolutely right. And the moment we've reached in history and not just the history of humankind, but the history of all life on Earth is totally unprecedented. You know, it's a phase transition because all of a sudden, you know, rather than nature being something that is received and that we observe and that has no real agency or design or intentionality or foresight, suddenly there's a new show in town.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Perfect and paradoxical, right? That's why we're human. You know, if we weren't irrational, if we didn't upset our partners every day, if we didn't make mistakes and do things we regret almost on a daily basis and suffer that, we wouldn't be human. And so there is something beautiful in our imperfect. And I'm not sure that AI would appreciate that ultimately, you know, AI would be striving for the logically perfect system, but that isn't consistent with our view of beauty and nature, you know. So you're absolutely right to, you know, raise this issue.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“However, I'm not entirely convinced that we'll have a good enough editorial eye to spot things that AI puts into new genomes, because we simply don't have the mental capacity, most of us don't. There might be one or two savants who do. And I've met some people like that, actually, who can look at crystal structures and just immediately visualize them. And, you know, but I think even those people, when it comes to visualizing whole genomes and the impacts of small changes be very challenging. So I think it's important. I love your question, by the way, and I think that you're right, that AI isn't human, and it doesn't have our moral sensibilities, it doesn't have our aesthetic. I don't think it has, well, we'll ever have an imagination quite like ours. And remember also that, you know, I argue that one of the beautiful things about human nature is it is important.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's absolutely critical that humans maintain the upper and final hand in all decision making when it comes to design of life. I don't think there's anything more frightening than the idea that AI kind of takes the key role in determining life's future because eventually as many people several people have expressed concerns about AI's ultimate direction that AI might be heading in. And it is quite worrisome to think that AI might design types of life that could undermine us and serve its own ends, you know, and so we must ensure that all editorial ownership, if you like, remains in the domain of human.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that configures the pathway, if you like, in a way that is beneficial to society and to all society and to humankind and that respects nature and values nature for what it is. And also values human nature for what it is and doesn't try to undermine human nature as it is.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that everybody needs to participate in this debate? Everybody needs to have an opinion about this. And so I wrote my book to make this quite complex subject accessible to everybody, whoever they are, whatever their scientific background, and in particular people who have no scientific background. And as you mentioned, I've put in a lot of history and philosophy and art and all types of different facts drawn from many different areas to make the whole subject fun and interesting and lively and entertaining. But it deals with the core principles. And at the end of the day, what's most important is that we align on a manifesto for life that is sensible, safe, responsible, transparent, equitable.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He can also do the same with a bacterial bacterium. He hasn't made a new bacterial species yet, but he can design bacterial genomes. Now, clearly there's a big difference between a virus and an elephant or a virus and a penguin or even a human. But what it shows is that we're on the route to designing complex life. We're at the very beginnings of doing so, but the process has begun. So sometimes people, you know, when they read my book or hear about my book, because when they read it, they understand, right? But they say, oh, but this is all in the future, you know, what relevance does it have today? No, it's happening today. This is happening. It has happened, right? We are building new species as we speak, right? So people do need to know about this. And most importantly, and again, the reason I wrote my book.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Discern and doing that, Brian was able to design the world's first ever totally artificial species. Now it happened to be a virus and a virus isn't technically living, it's a biological entity, but it has a genome and it becomes living when it infects a bacterium. So it's kind of at the interface of a living thing, if you like. But he showed”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Models. So these are, you know, think of them as being just like ChatGPT, but they manipulate combinations of the four nucleotides that make up the DNA that forms genomes. And what he showed is that if he trained his AI on huge databases comprising the genome sequences of many different species and indeed many different humans as well, that the AI in a way that human minds are completely incapable of doing because we just can't store that much information, you know, we're just, our brains are just too simple, sadly. That's just a fact, right? AI is able to go way beyond what the paltry human mind can do and can look at all of these patterns and pull out principles that we just unable to...”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alphabet, for example. And actually, the actual alphabet of DNA is much simpler. There are only four letters, A, C, T, and G. So it's perhaps not surprising that the AI that has been developed to manipulate the 26 letters of the English alphabet and the alphabets of other languages turns out to be really effective at looking at combinations of the four chemical letters of DNA and abstracting information from them. Now my colleague Brian He, my third co-founder, and he's at the Ark Institute at Stanford, and in my view is undoubtedly the leader in this field of using AI-driven genome design. He developed two AI models, one called Evo 1, one called EVO2, and we refer to those as genome language.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Demesasebis said this really nicely actually. He basically said that mathematics was the perfect language for describing physics, you know, physical phenomena like the orbiting of planets and enable mathematics, mathematical modeling enabled us to send man to the moon and to produce these space telescopes and so on and so forth. It turns out that actually mathematics hasn't been that helpful for unpicking the grammar of life, you know, defining the grammar book of life. But it turns out that AI seems to be the perfect language to do that. Now, AI, as we know it today, these kind of language learning models that run chat GPT and Claude and so on and so forth, they manipulate text strings of letters that the 26 letters of the English”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Go all around the world but eventually, and wherever there was microplastic, it would just eat it up, right? Because we need to get rid of microplastics, right? And that sounds like a good idea, right? But actually, is it? Is it really a good idea? Because how would that bacterium, that synthetic bacterium beyond that particular role impact other ecosystems? And the chances are it would be perfectly fine, right? But every time we do that, every time we interfere with nature and try to change it by introducing a new species, particularly a totally synthetic one, one has to be aware that there is tremendous risk. So my view is that the threshold, however intuitive it might feel to do something like that, I think the threshold is really, really quite high.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually changed its genetic code, meaning the way in which particular amino acids are kind of pulled in according to the genetic information in the DNA. And so I think firewalling is essential and it will also be essential to put in fail-safe mechanisms so that if species start misbehaving, you can just delete them very, very easily, right? But I think the barrier to introducing species into natural ecosystems is very high. And for example, People are already producing some prototypes for organisms, bacterial organisms that can destroy microplastics, right? So you can imagine that engineering a bacterium that you would release into the environment, it would just...”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even very simple interventions like introducing one new species into a new environment. And of course, nature as we know it isn't natural because humans have been fiddling around with nature for centuries by reintroducing species from one place to another and so on and so forth. But what we know is that ecosystems are, A, they're incredibly fragile, B, they're incredibly complex and C it's really difficult to predict how the introduction or modification of a species will impact all the other species within the ecosystem, right? What that means is that the barrier to doing so is extremely high, right? So in my view the synthesis of new species for our benefit should for a very long time and I can't tell you how long Is but until we are able to mathematically model ecosystems.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just to be clear, that's not what I'm advocating in my book. And I do in my final chapter, I delineate sort of manifesto for life, which is actually quite cautious and conservative. And I do highlight all these issues. And you're absolutely right that the ecosystems are incredibly fragile, natural ones, right? And what we've learned, actually, from...”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“An infinite landscape, and we as humans have always liked to travel. Magellan circumnavigated the globe because we wanted to know what was out there. And you've got this biological universe out there. And I think we're getting into our canoe and we're starting to explore it.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things would all of these genomes, these species were discovered by evolution by natural selection, but had things been slightly different, we may well not have had any, we may not have, there may have been no hens. We may never have known that there was such a thing as a hen's egg, for example, or we may never have eaten roast lamb on a Sunday right now. Imagine now that within the space of all possible genomes, which is so large that one can barely imagine it, that if we were able to chart that space of all possible genomes using AI, we'd be able to say, right, over here is a species, a potential cash crop that, like a potato or light rice or light maize, which has never existed, which could transform human existence and be of immense value. So I think that's the other kind of discovery aspect. It's like there's this landscape out there.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“houses rather than build houses. So I'm looking to biology as being a technology that could really help us to preserve nature and to preserve the environment. Now there's one other example of how synthetic life could really change the way we do things. And let me tell you about that. So evolution by natural selection has created all known life, both existing and extinct. But known life represents just the most infinitesimal fraction of all possible life, right? So let's look at a few things that have lived and think about how critically important they've been in human civilization. Let's think about maize. Let's think about rice. Let's think about potatoes and tomatoes and rubber plants, right? Now, all of these”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“really challenging environmental conditions like high salinity and that can increase the yield of crops. Biomaterials, spider silk has the tensile strength of steel using AI one could imagine you could build threads of silk that had five times the tensile strength of steel because AI can do that. It can explore variants, right? So these are just some examples of ways in which we can start to embed biology into our everyday life. And as a sort of humorous example in a sense, in the book or certainly on the cover of the book, I talk about living cell phones. Why not? Why couldn't your cell phone be made of biological components? Why couldn't your cell phone naturally divide in two rather than needing to be manufactured? For example, why can't we grow houses?”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Information storage, particularly in the modern world, consumes huge amounts of energy, which, as you know, is destructive, results in the production of greenhouse gases and so on, destroys the environment. If we stored information DNA, it's a very, very sustainable way of storing information. Energy production, instead of burning fossil fuels, we could make biofuels. The population of the world, as we know, is skyrocketing by 2050, they're going to be literally tens of billions of extra people on Earth, and we need to feed them. And how are we going to do that well? I argue that we can make synthetic chromosomes. In fact, we're already doing this in general, that can reprogram, not edit the genomes of crops, but literally reprogram them to be able to withstand droughts.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Produced a process known as the Basamir process, which reduced the cost of steel production by an order of magnitude. So it became 10 times cheaper. And all of a sudden, steel could become democratized. And in fact, Carnegie, as we know, basically rolled out steel all over America. And it was used for railways, it was used to build bridges, and it was used to build buildings. It was also used to build munitions. So there are downsides. But in fact, it became a kind of geopolitical phenomenon still. And the same was true of railways and iron and oil, you know, many other such technologies. Now, biology, I believe, is going to be the steel of our century and the future, right? The difference is the applicability of biology. Is far greater than steel, and it can be made naturally because you just need to grow things.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Good question, right? And fundamentally, well, there are a number of reasons. Let's divide them into categories. One is to obviously understand how our body works and to get rid of human disease. And I think that there's a good reason to believe that disease could be completely eliminated should we wish to do so. And we could discuss that separately. But that's obviously one use. A second use is to turn biology into a an engineering material, a predictive engineering material much in the same way that steel is an engineering material. And when steel used to be an artisanal material, by that I mean it was a very niche material. It was extremely expensive to make. And therefore was only used for a very small number of things, but then a chap called Bessemir.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That are built in this way. And in fact, I do address that in my book. Fortunately, and I use the word morphora, you know, that in the future we might refer to these human and AI designed and built organisms as morphora because they don't have any reference to history. And actually I also introduced a concept, actually I don't think I did in my book, but since writing my book, I think I came up with a concept of a forest of life. So we moved from the tree of life, which is rooted in history and the last common ancestor, into this infinite forest of life, which is different biologies, which history forgot. It's the world that time forgot.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's categories. Now, what's happening now, though, is that the very concept of a species is at risk for designed life. It will always be there for naturally evolved life because hopefully that will continue, right? But actually the concept of a species becomes meaningless actually when you're dealing with life that we design from first principles using AI and then construct using technologies like the one that we've developed at Genero for kind of writing genomes at scale or printing them out. And the reason for that is that when you can design life, history becomes irrelevant. You don't need to reference history. You've got a blank piece of paper and you can just write the narrative of any genome you'd like and you can take your sources from anywhere you like. So actually we are probably going to have to come up with a new concept for organisms.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A kind of reproductive barrier that keeps gene kits or genomes separate from one another into separate categories. It's like art history is separate to popular science in a library. They don't mingle. Well, actually in my book they do actually. They do.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has its origin in the very first ancestral lost common ancestor, which is a hypothetical creature that lived roughly four billion years ago, emerged from the primordial soup and then gave rise to all life on Earth as we know it. And as far as we know, there was only one such ancestor. So all life is connected on this complex branching tree of life, right? And that's a perfectly good way to think about heredity. And a species is a kind of compartmentalization of bits of the information on that tree. So it prevents a giraffe from mating with a zebra or a beetle from mating with a crocodile. You know, it's a way of partitioning information so that you don't end up with absurdities, if you see what I mean, right? So that's a simple definition of this.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the problem we have as humans is to try and reverse engineer the missing instruction manual. And if we could do that, and I actually call that instruction manual the grammar of life, right? You know, another way of looking at the chink kit is like a language and the bits come together using a kind of grammar, if you like, right? And we don't have an instruction manual. And if we did, we'd be able to work out how to cure illnesses and how to live longer and all of those things. So that's the answer to your first question. The genome is that instruction manual, it's not quite an instruction management, but it's the minimal set of information to make an organism. The second point is really important, right? So historically, a species has been described in the kind of linear way. That's because of heredity. So we talk about a tree of life, and all life in some way or another.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the genome is essentially that. It's the kind of all the information, the basic information, it's not all the information, but it's the basic minimal set of information required to kind of describe you, basically. Now, the awkward thing for us, though, however, as humans, is that sadly when you buy a gene kit from a shop, toy shop, which toy shop doesn't really seem to exist anymore these days, but in the old days, I used to go to Toys, Toys, Toys in Swiss Cottage, and my mum would buy me a Meshmith kit or some Spitfire or something like that. And you'd open it up. And the first thing you'd do is you'd pull out the instruction manual, which you'd unfold, and there were all the instructions to assemble.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with these model aeroplanes and they came in as little plastic pieces joined together. And with an instruction manual, and you'd basically follow the instruction manual and pull off each piece and connect them up, and eventually you'd end up with a plane and you'd paint it, right? So Sidney Brenner argued that the human genome was a bit like one of those model kits. In other words, within that box, the box, if you like, is the box of the human genome were all the components you needed to build the thing that you were trying to build, right? So if you wanted to build a human, you needed a human gene kit.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really good question. So let's start with the first question. And for the first question, I'll actually reference my own book, which itself references a lecture that I went to when I was doing my PhD in Cambridge, given by probably the smartest biologist that I've ever met on Earth, which was a chap that you probably know called Sidney Brenner. And just before the Human Genome Project began, Sidney Brenner gave, he was a very brilliant biologist for those of you who don't know who was in Cambridge at the time, South African chap, very eccentric, quite controversial amongst colleagues because he didn't suffer fools lightly and his brain was sort of electricity on steroids. He had the most incredible mind that just moved at the speed of light. Anyway, he gave his lecture and he talked about the human genome as what he called a gene kit.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Kind of pocket guide, you know. I went to India in my year off before going to university and I took the Lony Planet guide with me. When I wanted to know where to stay there, I pulled it out. If I wanted to know where the best restaurants were or how much to tip or the best sites, I always had my little pocket guide with me. So I see my book. Here it is again on the futurist species as a kind of pocket guide, a friendly companion, a knowledgeable friend that one can put in one's pocket, carry around as one navigates this new landscape, which isn't a physical place on earth. It's actually the landscape of the future of life, obviously an uncharted space. And I hope that my book will serve as that guide.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's quite an extraordinary concept. And I think that what's really changed in the last couple of years and even in the last couple of months, actually, to be honest with you, is that all of a sudden this idea that we could design life and build life is becoming a reality. And I kind of discerned that some years ago that that was going to happen. And I really felt that it was important that somebody actually caught that moment and communicated that moment to the general public because, well, first of all, they need to know that this is happening because the consequences are going to be quite remarkable and life is going to be changed in ways that some of us, well, most of us can barely imagine in a good way, but they're also things that might happen that may not be so good, right? And so I think that what I wanted to do was to create”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really good question. And I think I've been kind of fascinated for a very long time with the notion of the possibility of actually building biology from first principles, you know, the idea that we could actually synthesize life.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Great pleasure to meet you, Ganesh, and just for the sake of the viewers, this is the actual final version which it's probably in the post.”
2026-02-18 · Intelligence Squared · Will AI Design New Organisms From Scratch? With Adrian Woolfson · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT