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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?

#101

Post by WhompingWindows »

KeitIG wrote: post #19
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…

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.

You don't think ridding ourselves of genetic diseases is an extremely large good? Millions of humans have incurable genetic diseases which vastly limit their quality of life and even lifespan itself. To me, this ALONE would be exciting. But when you add on the benefits to editing crops, livestock, microbes, and human traits not tied to disease, the ramifications become downright mind-boggling. I don't think it's exciting in a purely positive way, I honestly don't know if it's going to be good or bad on the whole. I'd wager that it starts off very good and slowly becomes less good, since the best use cases will all be targeted first.

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

#102

Post by admyral »

dsr_ wrote: post #96
admyral wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially I think due to disruption to banking and government monopolies. Outrageous fees, pitiful interest rates, and financial services only accessible Monday through Friday 9-5 and sometimes on Saturday seem pretty archaic today. People who never had access to a bank can send money to anyone peer-to-peer like cash. Millenials largely prefer to invest their money into cryptocurrencies over traditional assets, which…

Outrageous fees: are you sure we're talking about BitCoin, here? Financial services M-F 9-5: while you generally need to go into a bank to set up an account, that's not always the case. Afterwards, most banking can be via direct deposit, mobile cameras for check deposits, ATMs, and web services. People who don't have access to banks -- Kenya appears to have solved this without blockchains. "Millenials largely prefer…

I'd personally much rather pay higher fees when there is a high network volume than constantly paying fees for the privilege of using an ATM, or servicing my online account, or processing a wire transfer, or reissuing me a debit card or checkbook, etc. For merchants, fees are outrageous indefinitely.

Here are a few recent articles on millenial interest in crypto [1] [2].

[1] https://www.finder.com/why-people-arent-buying-cryptocurrenc... [2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/millennials-are-afraid-sto...

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

#105

Post by stillsut »

Jagat wrote: post #47

Self-driving RVs. Imagine traveling throughout the country, sleeping in one national park campsite and waking up in another.

Love this idea. On the subject, does anyone know the potential fuel (delta % mpg's) savings of an optimally coordinated self-driving fleet that utilizes drafting?

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

#106

Post by logicallee »

babygoat wrote: post #100
logicallee wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exceedingly slow. Neurons fire at not 4 gigahertz, 400 megahertz, 40 megahertz, 4 megahertz, 400 kilohertz, 40 kilohertz, 4 kilohertz, or 0.4 kilohertz (400 hertz.) They fire at That is literally 8 orders of magnitude slower than processers. 8 orders of magnitude is the size of difference between a grain of sand and 1.2 short tons. In the time that your neuron moves 1 grain of sand, a computer can move 1.2 short…

Are brains working on the bit level? All that aside, how does general cognition emerge from speed? Why hasn't anyone made a "slow" version yet?

No, brains work on the neuron level. We know how many neurons there are (about 100b).

The reason I mention the bit level is because if we knew for a fact that the "code" that ran the structure of the brain fit in, say, 64 KB (if we knew this because the whole human genome fit in 64 KB) we would have long-since tried to emulate it.

Instead it is "guaranteed" (in a sense) to be a subset of about 700 MB of bits. That's the human source code.

It just gives you a sense of the scale of complexity that might be involved there. (700 MB is quite a lot of source code, don't get me wrong.)

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

#107

Post by logicallee »

Semirhage wrote: post #65
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…

Your humility is as inspiring as your many arguments by analogy.

my sibling post lists some of the numbers involved, but you should especially look the number of neurons, their connectedness, firing speed, and above all realize how incredibly slow this analog biochemical signal propagation is. You can look at how many parts make it up. (About a hundred billion.) Finally you can know for sure that the algorithm can be encoded in well under 700 MB, since that is literally the entire blue print of the human genome (bit-perfect, at 2 bits per base pair), which (obviously) encodes human intelligence as just a small part of it. (Since it includes everything else too, such as your entire rest-of-your-body.)

Look at the number of "mechanical" (biochemical) parts making up the human brain, their blueprint, the size they're contained in.

Finally look at the results that analogous machine learning algorithms are making with (albeit much simpler) neural net topology models.

The idea that nobody will ever match it is like looking at a mechanical watch and saying no digital model of it could ever come up with similar emulated results. What.

When you look at the size of the datasets involved you will see that it is exactly the sort of thing we can expect to be emulating now.

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

#108

Post by logicallee »

crote wrote: post #91
logicallee wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm very sceptical about it. First of all, the current state of AI and machine learning seems to be abysmal. The major breakthroughs (such as backpropagation) were made decades ago. The only reason that AI seems to be improving, is that a couple of companies are throwing an immense amount of money, data, and computing power into it. Even then, the results are relatively poor at best: systems like Google Now and Siri…

I understand your frustration with the results. But please bear in mind that until the wright brothers flew, the results were frustrating.

What you need to look at is the raw power of internal combustion engines, and the weight they add. Versus the raw power of muscles of birds.

You need to look at the raw number of neurons firing in a human brain. This is the analog device that is our benchmark.

You need to look at the speed each neuron, of which there are a hundred billion, fires at: 200 hertz maximum, and more like 0.1 hertz on average.

you need to look at the speed of propagation: 8 orders of magnitude slower than the interconnects in data centers.

You are looking at a bird in flight, and you are looking at an internal combustion engine that outputs 1,000,000 times more power than its wings, and you are saying, "But our results are abysmal."

We will, and very soon, match that output. And far, far exceed that output. For sure we will. Because it's just analog meat. And our computers are faster and wider.

The poor state of algorithmic research is due to researchers having small access to the algorithms in question.

We have all of the machinery for "flight" (intelligence).

Personally I also think that researchers are impatient. Humans takes years to bootstrap to where they can understand the world as well as a 3-year-old. Specifically, humans take three years to understand or communicate as well as a 3-year-old. 36 months.

Parity with human brains isn't the goal. The goal is achieving 144 months (12 years) of brain development closely assisted and supervised by parents and teachers, especially within the first few years, within 9 hours of unsupervised learning.

But it will be done. You have the facts there in black and white.

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

#109

Post by davidivadavid »

candiodari wrote: post #97
crote wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow your reasoning. It might work for some genes, but a very large part has no meaningful significance at all. If we were to simply take the majority allele, that would eliminate all blonde people, all redheads, everyone who has any form of biological talent for anything whatsoever; you'd even get rid of white people altogether: after all, they are the minority. Taking the majority would mean getting rid o…

Plus there's going to be interaction between the genes. After all, that's exactly what evolution is trying to evaluate. If it was possible to simply know the answer, don't you think it would have found that in 3 billion years runtime ? Duplicate some hollywood star's genes ? Maybe even a scientist's ? Some combination ? Perhaps (have fun being the first one to try it though). "Perfect" genes/humans ? No way. It'll ta…

Speaking as a marketer, I think people will be more interested in differentiation than in perfection (provided the basics are covered).

I.e. get the "secret" formula for a unique hair color or body proportions, or whatever.

If everybody's "perfect" in the same way, there's no advantage to being perfect, and people will look for ways to differentiate.

(Of course all of this is Hollywood-level speculation, but still).

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

#110

Post by Balgair »

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…

Wait until it's coupled with the optogenetics for control of neural bundles. New senses are just the beginning.
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