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Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
61–70 of 121 posts
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#62Self driving cars. The amount of time saved for humanity will be absolutely staggering and free up people to spend more time accomplishing more things.
Combined with cars that reside in remote places to pick you up on demand. Then our cities will have more spaces that is currently occupied by parking.
I think this is the biggest part, and less the "sleep in your car while you commute for 5 hours each way!" which sounds fucking terrible.
Imagine the amount of space and time saved by having 1 enormous lot on the outskirt of town, like an airport. You walk around your dense urban area, call your car, 10 minutes it's there, it drops you off, and parks itself. No circling the block, no terrible big box concrete hellscapes, just Park Slope without the frustration.
Cheap, too. Building parking in NYC costs ~$100k a spot https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/12/us/12parking.html
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#63Note: 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. ---------- 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 tha…
> 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.
It's not slow at all. And you are obsessed with meat.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#64CRISPR-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…
> Do we allow a bunch of 6'5" mega-geniuses with blonde hair, blue eyes, and all the right genotypes to take over society?
Better than a 6'2" idiot with a ginger toupee thats already taken over a society.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#65Note: 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. ---------- 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 tha…
Your humility is as inspiring as your many arguments by analogy.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#66Note: 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. ---------- 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 tha…
> 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. It's not slow at all. And you are obsessed with meat.
All this talk of meat is making me hungry...stupid auto correct.... :<
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#67CRISPR-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…
Blonde hair and blue eyes? It seems to me that traits not currently found in nature would be most difficult to produce, ergo most rare and expensive, therefore most prestigious among a certain crowd.
How about purple hair and orange eyes? Natural skin pigmentation that mimics tribal tattoos? A tapidum lucidum? Ears with elf-points? Sharp vampire-style canine teeth? People are going to be designing their babies, which means certain traits will go in and out of fashion, just to keep people paying more money for "better" babies.
It is likely that certain traits will be subsidized as a matter of national security and/or pride, like those identified for intelligence, athletic ability, or resembling the current dictator-for-life. The rest will be a la carte, and maybe paid in cash under the table.
Forward-looking countries will subsidize packages to meet national goals, such as uniform body size, lower total mass, higher bone density retention, and lack of freefall-sickness for a space program, or strength and endurance for soldiers, or fine motor control and analytic ability for surgeons. Frivolous cosmetic traits would be add-ons for the rich and/or powerful. As they trickle down to the lower classes, they become less fashionable, and rich people pay to have them removed. Star-bellied Sneetches pay to be unstarred, and Plain-bellied Sneetches pay to get stars upon thars. Sylvester McMonkey McBean takes all the cash and gets away clean.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#68CRISPR-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…
Blonde hair and blue eyes? It seems to me that traits not currently found in nature would be most difficult to produce, ergo most rare and expensive, therefore most prestigious among a certain crowd. How about purple hair and orange eyes? Natural skin pigmentation that mimics tribal tattoos? A tapidum lucidum? Ears with elf-points? Sharp vampire-style canine teeth? People are going to be designing their babies, which…
Sadly I imagine appearance will be the fashionable choices. Fitness be damned.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#69Smarter conversational AI. More applications just being plugins connected to your cloud AI instance. It's a revolution on user interfaces whose scope we're not even close to understanding. The biggest part: it'll make people better at asking sophisticated questions and understanding how important that is. I think it'll be as big a shift change as the Internet was.
I doubt this. People don't even bother asking sophisticated query to search engines.
Only because no search engines understand them.
I would love to ask specific questions instead of translating everything into multiple queries of "search engine speak".
Every time we find an edge case (or a noob question) that lands us on stack exchange, we could just ask an AI directly to look up the relevant documentation or scour through thousands of bug reports and workarounds.
Stage two describing the solution you want generated code for, or stage three stating the problem, or stage 4 finding problems and solving them.
Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?
#70Self driving cars. The amount of time saved for humanity will be absolutely staggering and free up people to spend more time accomplishing more things.
Agreed that a lot of time will be freed up, but I don't think the majority of people will use this time productively. Most people will just end up watching Netflix in their cars instead of focusing on the road.
I highly recommend this Benedict Evans post on the second-order consequences of electric & autonomous vehicles: https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2017/3/20/cars-and-s...