Grow your own table: Kurzweil, Venter, Brooks in an Edge Discussion

If you go back 50 years, our industrial infrastructure was coal and steel. And in the last 50 years it's been transformed into an information industrial infrastructure. This engineering, at the molecular level, at the genetic level, of cells, is going to change the way we do production of a lot of stuff over the next 50 years. Right now you grow a tree, you cut it down, and build a table. 50 years from now we should just grow the table. That's just a matter of time — and if we take Ray's point it'll only be 15 years rather than 50 — but I'm being a little conservative here. There's some stuff to work out, but it's just a matter of working through the details. We've seen broad strokes how to do that.