My mother teaches high school English, and she's an artist and a poet and a sculptor, she's published twelve poetry books. I grew up in a household in Venezuela with living, breathing art installations that were the way that she used to express herself, a highly creative environment where ideas were celebrated, where artistic expression was celebrated. Seeing her as somebody who was always able to have a creative output - if she felt sad, she wrote a poem, if she felt happy, she made a sculpture - I think for me, there was an early interest in finding outlets for my passions.

That's the case with these exponential technologies; our brains, they struggle with it. We live in a world that is global and exponential, and our brains evolved in a world that was linear and local.

It is innate in our species to be cyborgian in nature. We have been in the self amplifying feedback loop with our tools since stone tools, and since the written word, and what we are seeing now is just a deepening of that. But it has always been the case. We have always done this.

I think one of the both liberating and terrifying prospects from synthetic biology for example is that you are going to have all of these do it yourself biosynthetic labs where people are going to be playing with the software of life. We are going to have a new generation of artists that are going to be playing with genomes the way that Blake and Byron used to play with poetry. And when genomes are the new canvas for the artist, we might be able to radically upgrade the human species and the software of the biology of the human species.

Awe is the best drug in the world

We didn't stay in the caves. We haven't stayed on the planet. With biotechnology, gene sequencing, we are not going to even stay within the limitations of biology.

The idea that we are the gods now, and we are doing things that our ancestors think are god-like is not a rhetorical question. You know what I mean? We really are as gods.