Self driving cars. The amount of time saved for humanity will be absolutely staggering and free up people to spend more time accomplishing more things.
Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
11–20 of 121 posts
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#12Hydrogen cars. A long way to go yet.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#13Various AI accelerator hardwares. It seems to me deep learning advance is currently limited by computing hardware resources.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#14CRISPR-CAS9 for genome editing. Briefly, it allows us to identify particular bits of DNA and modify one or more bases. It's a very new biotechnology (research essentially began within the last 10 years) which applies to essentially all species we've tested it on. It is cheap and so easy to perform that I could probably teach 99% of HN to do it in a week's training or less. It's still not as accurate as we need it to…
Agree. I think the hunt for ever-newer computing tech is misplaced (blockchain lol) but CRISPR might actually cure cancer. That's way more important than Yet Another Logistics Company at this point.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#15Brain-computer-interface, semantic web, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#16Quantum computing as it relates to chemistry and materials development.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#17OK, just an incremental improvement over lcd, oled, e-paper etc, but the characteristics enable deployment in many new situations. Plus it's a "why didn't I think of that?" technology. https://www.clearinkdisplays.com/technology
Seems offline atm. The archive.org version renders ok though:
https://web.archive.org/web/20171029180947/http://www.cleari...
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#18Can we remember to run this question every 6-12 months aka whoishiring?
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#19CRISPR-CAS9 for genome editing. Briefly, it allows us to identify particular bits of DNA and modify one or more bases. It's a very new biotechnology (research essentially began within the last 10 years) which applies to essentially all species we've tested it on. It is cheap and so easy to perform that I could probably teach 99% of HN to do it in a week's training or less. It's still not as accurate as we need it to…
I am not sure that human genome edition is something I would consider "exciting". It adds a lot of ethical questions, I am thinking about the kind of uses "I want my child to have blue eyes" in particular.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#20Note: Below are just my opinions. I don't think downvoting is justified. I'm completely right and downvoters are wrong, but anyway this thread asks for what we think.
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My opinion: (100.000000% guaranteed to be right in this case.)
It's obvious that general artificial intelligence will be a reality and surpass human cognition in every way, because our brains are a couple of pounds of meat running on less than a hundred watts, using biochemical pathways: no light-speed switching, about a six orders of magnitude slower. Meanwhile, our datacenters run in the gigahertz domain. (There are, however, about a hundred billion neurons in the human brain.)
Some people think a computer will never be able to do general cognition. They're idiots. It is like saying that nothing but a sack of meat will ever fly (i.e. that only a bird can, no human-made engine can) -- at a time when we have engines that are 1,000,000 times more powerful than birds' muscles. (I mean at the time that Lord Kelvin famously stated that heavier-than-air flight is impossible.)
Any task of human cognition that the sack of meat in a skull can do, a digital algorithm will be able to do, because the former is just slow, slow analog meat.
Granted the emotional part is a point of difficulty but higher mental functions seem pretty unrelated to emotions.
AI is like when people were saying heavier than air flight is impossible. Obviously it's possible. And it will rock and change the world. (Anyone who doesn't see it this way is stupid and wrong. They're just on the wrong side of history. They have zero vision for things that are completely obvious. It's not even debatable. It's a sack of meat in a skull doing slow analog operations 24/7 for 3 years before it can even read. The bar is not as high as people think.)