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Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

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Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#71

Post by pilom »

gooslol wrote: post #42
WhompingWindows wrote: post #8

CRISPR-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…

Just out of curiosity – how much does CRISPR allow us to modify adult humans? I've read a lot about designer babies and such, but what can the current population expect to get out of it?

We've modified adult cells of Huntingtons patients [0] but I can't find any reports outside of hackerspaces of performing it on full human adults.

[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/researchers-use-crispr-to-edi...

Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#72

Post by logicallee »

mtmail wrote: post #50
logicallee wrote: post #20

Note: 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…

You're describing a long term view (singularity?) rather than the up-and-coming technology in the question. Claiming to be 100% right and calling people with different opinion idiots might have added a downvote or two (Personally I upvoted).

I don't think it's a long-term view due to the numbers involved. For example, everyday developers might have access to 64-bit laptop computer with 4 cores @ 4 ghz and 16 GB of RAM (literally millions of people use such a machine, zero exaggeration).

When working on their own desktops, AI researches might use an 6-core or 8-core desktop with 64 GB of RAM or, rarely, 128 GB of RAM.

Access to 2-32 terabytes of RAM are not in the realm of what most AI researchers get to run their algorithms on on a daily basis.

Google's AlphaGo ran on[1] 1202 CPU's, 176 GPU's, and I didn't immediately find the amount of memory but on the order of magnitude you would think it is from 1 terabyte (if it's 1 GB of RAM per CPU) up to (reasonably) about 128 terabytes, with my guess being 4 TB-16 TB. However I didn't find this figure.

This is hardware that exists today, but AI researchers would have to wait a few years to have normal everyday access to this kind of thing in their normal everyday devices. Right now only datacenters match the processing ability of the human mind. Although they certainly exist in one cluster, they're far from the type of thing that is in everyone's hands yet.

On the other hand, once it is set up these clusters can be far faster than the human brain, which runs at really slow analog speeds. (Look up the propagation speed of neural signals.) The human brain is just slightly ahead of the curve right now without any specialized hardware.

There are 7 billion extant examples of intelligent human brains. There are probably less than 10,000 clusters AI researchers can play around with for months, which have 16-128 TB of RAM and aren't used for anything more important, just whatever they feel like running on it. (Versus easily more than 15 million computers with just 16 GB of RAM, though that may not be enough.)

I don't think this is very far-off.

[1] http://uk.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-computing-power...

Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#73

Post by [deleted] »

icebraining wrote: post #57
logicallee wrote: post #20

Note: 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…

You're missing another alternative: what if AI is totally possible, but our sacks of meat in skulls are not able to achieve it? I don't have to disbelieve the possibility of the existence of humans to doubt that flies could create a human.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#74

Post by ropeadopepope »

k__ wrote: post #33
JBReefer wrote: post #9

I think we're at a standstill for most PC/mobile/the sort of tech most of us work with. Electric cars and the explosion of renewables are going to change _everything_, faster than people think. Doing a quarter mile in a Model S is fucking AWESOME.

I think they will continue to pump PC tech into mobile devices until both converge, still a few years to go for this.

The reason PC and Mobile hasn't converged is because of the lack of good inputs that aren't mouse and keyboard. As long as there's no good way to input text on mobile, there will never be a convergence of those two verticals.

Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#75

Post by ropeadopepope »

JBReefer wrote: post #62
mtmail wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hellsca…

> 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.

I'm actually looking forward to that. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "dying in your sleep."

Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#76

Post by eddieschod »

zwieback wrote: post #51

Same thing as when I was a teenager in the 80's: clean energy. Solar cells are now mainstream and maybe I'll live to see some advance with fusion reactors.

Net-positive fusion reactors still don't solve everything sadly; they're likely to be really costly and because of those economics will only serve really populous energy grids.

One thing I learned from someone wise is to not down-select technologies for a solution (i.e., this is most dangerous when the government down-selects technologies). Something might arise other than solar cells specifically that accomplishes their goal.

Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#78

Post by charlchi »

sanxiyn wrote: post #25
WhompingWindows wrote: post #8

CRISPR-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? We will. Quoting from https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/typos/ "What would a spelling-checked person, one with no genetic typos, be like? Since no such person has ever existed, we have to speculate. I figure that kind of guy would win the decathlon, steal your shirt and your girl -- and y…

This is all optimistic speculation. Being able to remove diseases from our genome is not equivalent to being able to create mega-geniuses with blonde hair. The "spelling-checked" persons DNA is just that, their DNA. It says nothing about how they're going to be raised, environmental factors etc. Before we can even start to think about "engineering" ourselves we still need to figure out how we're engineered to begin with and how that engineering changes throughout the span of our lives.

Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#79

Post by logicallee »

icebraining wrote: post #57
logicallee wrote: post #20

Note: 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…

You're missing another alternative: what if AI is totally possible, but our sacks of meat in skulls are not able to achieve it? I don't have to disbelieve the possibility of the existence of humans to doubt that flies could create a human.

You raise a good and apt point.

I would say firstly, we don't have to know how to achieve it exactly, since once we have the hardware we can just experiment. The human source code is about seven hundred megabytes (fairly precisely, DNA is almost precisely 2 bits per base pair) so somewhere in that is the encoding for human intelligence, since humans inherit it. So we know that there is some Secondly I would point to many of the specific advances reached using machine learning as excellent indications that we are quite near the kind of algorithmic breakthroughs that are necessary. Since the topology of these algorithms is in many cases closely inspired by human neural topology, and many algorithms achieve many similar results, it seems quite likely that we would be able to reproduce some of these effects experimentally.

More than "likely", in many domains the computers have done just that.

Re: Ask HN: What up and coming technology has you most excited?

#80

Post by crote »

sanxiyn wrote: post #25
WhompingWindows wrote: post #8

CRISPR-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? We will. Quoting from https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/02/27/typos/ "What would a spelling-checked person, one with no genetic typos, be like? Since no such person has ever existed, we have to speculate. I figure that kind of guy would win the decathlon, steal your shirt and your girl -- and y…

How would that work in practice? Of course, you could eliminate all hereditary diseases, make people smarter, remove certain genetic predispositions; but I'm not convinced that the "perfection" thing is possible.

The most obvious being, what exactly is perfection? If you ask 100 people to describe their perfect partner, you'd get 100 completely different answers. If our species would converge to any one of those descriptions, those who have a different idea of perfection would find themselves in a objectively worse world. Converging to some kind of average wouldn't be any better either.

Just take a look at the standards of beauty even over the last, say, 40 years. There's no constant, purely objective measurement of beauty, so to me it seems impossible to create perfection.

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