81–90 of 121 posts
I can't wait for the e-ink patent to expire. We'll see an explosion of research on color screens that don't need a backlight.
There's a lot of exciting things going on in DSP, OCR and automated transcription these days. Being able to convert various sources of information to text without having to do it manually is exciting.
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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.
We already play god. People are just having sex without thinking twice. I'm married and in the appropriate age and i have thought about having kids a ton. I'm not sure if i'm even allowed to create a new thinking human being only for the motivation of having a kid. The crispr thing takes all our medical advantages just an additional level up. You see people argue about if you should do a gen test for down syndrome (d…
There is nothing wrong with this - as you said, everyone wants the best for their child. The big question is, what exactly _is_ the best? From my point of view, it seems that if designer babies were to become easily available, the average parent would just look on Facebook as to what the latest "influencers" fancy this week - and that would make the world an awful lot worse.
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…
> 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.
In the time that your neuron moves 1 grain of sand, a computer can move 1.2 short tons worth of sand 1 grain at a time (talking about just cache here) - because it's switching at 4 GHz instead of 10 hertz.
That is enough to make a lot of back and forth trips. Now, you have to make a lot of these back and forth trips because the brain is extremely parallel. But the difference between these extremely slow biochemical firing speeds and gigahertz light speed enables this.
The speed of propagation in the brain is about 100 meters/second [2]. The speed of propagation between two fiber optic end-points is about 299 792 458 meters/second. That gives you 7 orders of magnitude to play with. Or, in other words, it can let you take seven orders of magnitude more trips across a data center (or go that much farther) before you miss a real-time deadline for when you need to address a neuron by.
In the future it's pretty clear that computers are not going to think as fast as the human brain when doing similar calculations using a similar topology, but, for example, 10,000 times faster than real-time.
This really shouldn't surprise anyone growing up in technology. Brains are slow, mechanical devices. They're not digital and they don't do signal processing at the speed of light.
It's taken us some time to catch up because a hundred billion neurons is still a lot of neurons, and algorithm development using similar topologies has been slow.
[1] https://aiimpacts.org/rate-of-neuron-firing/#Estimates_of_ra...
Unpopular opinion around here, but Bitcoin. The idea that we have technology now which can help address global wealth inequality just makes me happy.
Genuinely curious... how can Bitcoin help address global wealth inequality?
3d printed houses and vertical farms. If these technologies get cheap enough, they will cover two of people's basic needs.
According to State Farm, completely rebuilding my apartment is would be 1/7th of what I paid for it, and that's with NYC union labor. There's a reason that crackhouses in Vancouver cost $1 million, and it's not because they're made of gold. You need to build density to reduce the share of land cost per dwelling, anything else is a gimmick.
Or (meaningfully) make proximity less important.
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> 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 desc…
Yes, this will lose some new beneficial mutations, but since most mutations are deleterious, taking majority allele is guaranteed to be an improvement in whole. Huge improvement.
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.
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.
Now a bit on the uptake by (still few) scientists. Its a no-no subject because of the vested interests in uranium/plutonium fission and (overly) prestigious fusion projects.
Was not a fan of fission, but this is much safer, more maintainable (liquid salt/thorium mix, runs through pipes), and much less waste ('only' 500yr radioactively dangerous).
And the best thing: Thorium is everywhere. All countries have it, so it would democratize nuclear technologies, be a big help in solving the energy crisis!
I'm at a point in life where technology doesn't concern me so much as human behavior and where we're collectively headed as a unique species in the cosmos. Regarding convenience, comfort and entertainment, we are good enough — A person can get all sorts of luxury and services without ever leaving one's home — but technology that encourages us to treat each other better, feel better about ourselves, and removes barrie…
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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 n…
On the example of AlphaGo.. in 1997 a scientist and Go fan stated that it would take at least 100 yrs or longer for a computer to beat humans at Go. 20 yrs later the champion was beaten..