What if biology stopped being something we study and started becoming something we design? That’s the premise of Adrian Woolfson’s new book, On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Biological Intelligence, which published on 28 April from MIT Press. He argues that advances in AI and DNA synthesis are pushing biology toward an engineering paradigm—one in which scientists can generate new genetic sequences and eventually build organisms to order. He calls this emerging capability artificial biological intelligence, or ABI, a catchall term for systems that can design, construct, and ultimately “boot up” living things.

That vision runs into a basic problem: Evolution didn’t produce clean, modular systems. It produced genomes shaped by billions of years of incremental change, with overlapping functions and little of the tidy structure that engineers rely on. Some synthetic biology researchers have tried to “refactor” genetic code (the same way engineers restructure computer code) by reorganizing genomes to make them easier to understand and manipulate. But how far can that approach go? And what would it take to make biology predictable enough to engineer? In a…