Future life will be synthetic: About the emergence of engineered life, its promises, prophecies and the formal causalities needed to make sense of them
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article proposes to reflect on the promises of synthetic biology through fieldwork carried out in 2014–15 with a group of bioartists in Helsinki, Finland. It narrates the author’s experience of three one-week gatherings leading to the production of a piece titled Your Synthetic Future, an ironic apparatus appearing as an oracular machine. This reflection leads us to understand that the true originality of synthetic biology resides in its ability to breach the once clear and impenetrable frontier that has kept apart the analogue and digital modes of existence. In turn, this renewed understanding of what is at stake with the current state of the field of synthetic biology leads us to focus on the unfolding of new forms of presence across the analogue/digital divide. It argues for a renewed perspective on causality that was first intuited by Marshall McLuhan as an original insight on the question of the medium.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it