[ExI] This is one amazing robot!

[Kelly Anderson]

On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 3:28 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 22, 2013 at 09:12:36AM +0100, BillK wrote:
>


> It is touching that the kids think a few decades are going
> to make a difference.


Eugen, your pessimism is showing again. Would you like an optimism
transfusion? I think I have enough for both of us.

It was only in the 1990s that we sequenced the entire human genome. And now
look what it costs:
http://bit.ly/18PrQUD
That is a truly shocking curve.

We are only just now bringing anything based on that huge breakthrough to
the marketplace. Understanding the human genome will take time, but we are
parsing it with increasingly powerful computers. Get the protein folding
algorithm down, and we'll see some real breakthroughs real fast. Yes it is
a hard problem. Can it be solved? Maybe with special hardware or something.

Maybe with online games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foldit

Start parsing the genome of various plants and animals, and we'll figure
out even more stuff.

Medicine is making a radical jump towards being more predictably scientific
and less trial and error prone. This really does make a difference. If you
can predict what a compound might do without animal trials, the things you
can do with the same amount of research money start to go up a Moore's Law
kind of curve. That's a game changer, don't you think?

Said another way, when medicine becomes engineering, won't that change the
rules of the game?

And can't you see that medicine is evolving towards engineering?

There is no limit on the resource of human ingenuity over time in such
matters. This isn't a limited resource like sweet crude. Just walk into the
light Eugen!

-Kelly
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