Programming animals

This is a prediction of the future for bio tech.

I have recently made a plat where I grow strawberries and some other vegetables. But after 2 months or so, it look like this:

Not sure if you can spot the strawberry plants in there, but I promise there are some. Of course there should not be so much weed. But who has the time to clean it out?

So this is what I want: A programmable chicken.

Chickens are great! They eat everything:

But that is not what I want. I want them to eat everything but my strawberry plants!

Today I think it is a challenging task to do that, but what about in the future? My prediction is that in (quite many, say 20-40) years I will be able to buy, together with my strawberry plants, a tailored chicken that will eat everything but strawberry plants.

This will be great. But how will that be done? Not sure, but perhaps one could engineer taste receptors to bind to DNA or RNA so the check do not like the taste of strawberry DNA. Or there might be some gene modification of both the chicken and the strawberries to make the chicken stay away from the strawberries.

The idea here is quite general and is based on the fact that animals are amazing machines! I am quite convinced that humans will not for an extremely long time be able to build a machine with all the nice properties of a chicken. But we will be able to re-program the chicken to do exactly what we want it to.

So, there will probably be VHDL for chickens. This is what programmers will work on in the future. It has to be efficient to design the chicken for a particular task. Hence we will need some general blocks in a language that can be used when programming the animals.

No more weed in our plants. We could probably get rid of all the pesticides and get eggs and great strawberries at the same time. A brilliant future lie ahead!