30 yrs ago, in a different part of the world. My father had to catch a bus from a village to the city, then catch a plane to a major city to make international phone call to the US to his business partners. Today, people in that same village can sign on to HN and reply to this very post. Or tweet and facebook real time.
Maybe they won't be the one to solve it, maybe it would take a bit longer, who knows? Gotta give it a shot. Maybe we won't cure all the disease. Perhaps we eliminate 85%. That would be great too. Stay optimistic my friend.
If we're talking about the same time frame, 84 years ago, I don't think most people would doubt that it could happen. This is a period where there was an enormous growth in telecommunications, and I don't think most people thought it was obviously going to suddenly stop and stagnate for 84 years.
My guess is the idea wouldn't have seemed implausible even earlier. Once the telegraph came along, it probably seemed like at least a possibility.
However, if a wealthy individual 84 years ago who hadn't been involved in telecommunications decided to throw some money at it and said they were going to connect everyone 84 years in the future, people would probably be skeptical - and rightly so. Especially if the amount of money was less than many of the smaller players in the industry.
As the article points out (about the Zuckerberg effort), "One British charity - Cancer Research UK - is likely to spend more in that time on just one disease."
And "connect the world" is vague enough that it's easier to claim success with low hanging fruit. This is more like "I want to be able to instantly transfer anything anywhere in 84 years."
85% looks wildly optimistic too. And "giving it a shot" is not exactly new idea somebody needs to be convinced in - people are giving it a shot since the idea of medicine was born, which was probably before recorded history started. If the money they use for research bring fruit - excellent, but I'm not sure money is what limits us (and that 3bn is going to fix that if it were the problem), and certainly arbitrary date and bombastic goals is not what was missing from medical research field before.
I'd suspect that most innovations would have had plenty of experts and other people saying why they weren't possible.
But I think it needs stressing that being skeptical is not the same as being dismissive or ridiculing or having a hostile attitude towards things.
I think that the reason people tend to reject new ideas tends to be more on emotional terms rather than for truly skeptical reasons.
Take connecting the entire world. Even after the technology existed and had been deployed (the very early system that gave rise to the internet as we know it), people didn't look at that early version connecting a handful of places and think, "Wow, this could connect EVERYONE!" They didn't stand there, looking at the terminals of two connected computers, and imagine a connected world like the one we live in today. They didn't talk about ecommerce and social media global events being reported on in near real time. No one had to roll their eyes, because no one was making these grand claims.
I can't find the link now, but I read somewhere that it took YEARS after the Wright brothers had achieved first flight to get the attention of the world. People didn't see how transformative that thing could become, yet the proof of concept was there.
When you look at all the big tech moments in (recent-ish) history, the car, modern computation, the PC, aviation, you don't see people coming out with these grand declarations before the fact. And it's not for lack of intelligent, visionary people.
So it makes me wonder, whenever a person makes such grandiose plans, and they're not fiction writers, what's so different about them that they'd be able to see so far ahead?
Maybe they're different. How would I know? But history makes me skeptical.
The truth is the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12433966
Wrights were actually very secretive and they were reluctant to publish anything before they got the patent. They were so adamant about the patent that they didn't do any public demonstration of flight for years until they were literally forced by competing claims. In those times people making claims for "heavier than air" flights were numerous and it was hard to take anyone seriously unless they do demonstration. They not only chose not to do so until they got patent but also did almost nothing to enhance their technology meanwhile. Their contribution except for first flight is very marginal and their rest of the lives are dominated by nothing but patent worries, bringing massive lawsuits on others and getting royalties. They also made a very generic patent claim essentially asserting that any system that produces lift is covered by it. This produced a lot of friction in bringing new innovations to market leaving USA significantly behind of Europe.
In addition to this, there were flight enthusiasts all over the world, and particularly in France. They were hang-glider enthusiasts at the time, as that was the cutting-edge flight technology. One of the famous hang-glider pilots died due to his belief that a hang-glider ought to be controlled by shifting one's body weight, which led to a fatal stall. This further convinced the Wright brothers that "the control problem" was the most important problem to focus on.
A lot of people wanted to fly.
This is all tangential to your point, though, and wasn't meant to take anything away from it.
"Some day there will be, say, six great wireless telephone stations in a world system connecting all the inhabitants on this earth to one another, not only by voice, but by sight. It's surely coming."
Virtual and digital switching, or better, packet-based networks, remove that problem. At the heart of most messaging systems now is the directory -- either of individual addresses, or of systems on which those addresses reside. Hence: DNS, MXs, and the like, for email.
(This makes me realise that one way around the Global Directory of Everyone problem of current messaging systems is to split up the address space again.)
There is a line that can be crossed if I make a prediction and say that by 2100 humanity will become as powerful as Gods. That statement is ludicrous when judged by common sense. It is not unrealistic to the say the same of having ALL diseases cured by 2100.
I'm basically "rolling my eyes" at your comment.
It might also not, but I'm very glad if someone tries.
He quotes Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Parapsychologists are constantly protesting that they are playing by all the standard scientific rules, and yet their results are being ignored – that they are unfairly being held to higher standards than everyone else. I’m willing to believe that. It just means that the standard statistical methods of science are so weak and flawed as to permit a field of study to sustain itself in the complete absence of any subject matter.
This general topic sometimes comes up on HN (most recently, yesterday†). Here's a good starting point:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=http:%2F%2Fwww.phdcomics.com%2...
[1] http://www.biospace.com/News/down-syndromes-extra-chromosome...
But first, we need to understand the cell. For this we believe we need not only statistical learning, but also formal methods. See e.g. a slightly dated but brilliant paper from Luca Cardelli:
http://lucacardelli.name/Papers/Abstract%20Machines%20of%20S...
Zuckerberg should give you all his money.
Constant blood surveillance is already a fact--that is, perhaps we don't need more blood. Instead, we just do the immune sequencing on the stream that's already available. Spread out over the whole population, that's a lot of information. Firmware updates, if necessary, could be handled on an as-needed basis, or more generally like flu vaccines.
I'm not sure how the giant cube-shaped space ships will be handled--that's definitely a hurdle to consider.
Fixing the existing body is nice, but you're forever limited by what nature intended, and what it intended is just not very good.
The history of technology is filled with cross pollinations of that kind - ex: GPUs invented for high quality 3D amusement being used for AI and protein folding research.
But just ending cancer would essentially be a project for externally ameliorating, not even fixing, the bugs of 4 billion years of (genetic) code, code that "just happened" with "bugs" that survived because they weren't selected against.
You probably cannot defeat cancer merely by genetic engineering every new birth
Sometimes the right solution doesn't deal with existing problems but tries to go somewhere else entirely.
We're still really dumb about a lot of things related to natural mortality, but exponentially smarter and more capable than we were 50 and then 200 years ago.
Relevant PHD Comics about how "there will never be a cure for cancer":
http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php/archive_print.ph...
Summary
1. Lack of rigidity, excessive stickiness of molecules (Van der Waals force), constant random interactions (Brownian motion) at the microscale of cells means mechanistic intuitions from the macroscale don't apply.
2. High surface area (combined with VdW force) causes problems related to friction and energy dissipation.
What a boring criticism! All of the things he mentions are easily approachable engineering challenges. His conclusion seems to be "mechanical engineering as with gears and pulleys won't work with nanobots". Duh! No one claimed otherwise.
> mechanistic intuitions about the microscale don't apply.
Obviously. Why would you or the author think nanotechnology optimists don't know this? Half the reason we don't have nanobots is because we don't yet have the engineering expertise and practical tools for these scales. The other half is that we're still working out efficient 3D nanofabrication. They are related problems. These are not physically insurmountable issues (as demonstrated thoroughly by organic life). There are a hundred different fields of study that are slowly eating away at the edges of the general purpose nanofabrication problem.
If they are so "easily approachable," feel free to solve them any time. I think you'll find that solving problems in living systems (let alone in the clinic) is much more challenging than it might appear from a CS/physics perspective (https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-Andy-Grove-fallacy?share=1).
I'm not saying it's not worth trying (it's certainly a more worthwhile endeavor than getting people to click on more ads), but that it's important to be realistic (for example, that all disease is unlikely to be cured by 2100).
In fact, I am currently working in a nanotech lab, so I am hopefully helping a bit ;)
None of the problems you linked to are things that need to take a hundred years to solve. It's probably more accurate to measure development barriers in R&D costs than years. At the very least, we could just reverse engineer biology.
Doing experiments on animals (and especially humans or other vertebrates) is the exact opposite of something you can just go ahead and do. The best way to see that is to give it a go yourself.
> At the very least, we could just reverse engineer biology.
Many people in the past with a CS/physics mindset have made similar claims. If you try to work with living systems, I'm sure you'll see why these problems aren't just a matter of spending R&D dollars.
Perhaps you can explain it to me, so I can skip becoming a bio researcher.
I know optimism in and around computer tech is through the roof, but the levels of delusion on tech disruption topics in our community never ceases to amaze me.
Not even the Gates foundation is trying to cure all diseases, and Bill Gates is smart and gets stuff done. This sounds like feel-good charity to me, but we'll see what the results are in 100 years, I guess.
You never know if we will need that arsenal against asteroids.
And everyone knows lasers are the solution to errant asteroids. Perhaps attached to evil sharks :)
There may be a 'relativity' level discovery in biology/aging/cancer that will change the historic perspective. We can't know until after the fact.
That fundamental advancement in biology hasn't happened yet. That's the difference between rational optimism and irrational and mindless optimism.
The fundamental discoveries necessary for the nuclear bomb weren't discover until after Leo Szilard [0] proposed the weapon. Given that none of us were alive between 1906 and 1945 it's hard to fully grasp how the scientific understanding evolved over those 39 years.
Einstein's work paved the way for Leo Szilard's vision but that vision was in no way a given. If it weren't for WWII, and Einstein's support, Leo would not have been able to garner the $2 Billion (1940's money) in support that was necessary to build the bomb.
Even then, there was a coin-toss level certainty that it would do anything.
Similar to Einstein's work preceding the discovery of Fission and the Atomic bomb. We have a great deal of work in biology around aging, telomere's, transcription errors, and more that hasn't been leveraged by the medical industry for varying reasons.
I'm not ready to be a naysayer on this topic, historically as a species we've had remarkable success in accomplishing things that were considered impossible before we did them.
That's totally different than the current situation with say cancer. In the world of physics and engineering, a "coin-toss" shot at working is actually a pretty well-developed idea. There is no ready-to-go idea you can point to and say "if we spent $20 billion building this it's have a coin-toss's chance of curing cancer."
> By the time someone wrote a check, the basic mechanism of the runaway fission reaction was understood.
I find that to be a gross simplification. I would challenge that the basic mechanisms of the fission reaction were as well understood then as we understand the basic mechanisms behind cancerous mutations now.
> There is no ready-to-go idea you can point to and say "if we spent $20 billion building this it's have a coin-toss's chance of curing cancer."
Over what time-horizon? We've achieved a great deal in the last 100 years that would have received less than a coin-toss probability if one were to be having this same argument in the early 1900s. The Haber Process [0] is a great example of something that we had no way of expecting we could accomplish (the energy efficiency aspect) before it happened.
What would you prefer Zuckerberg does with his money? I mean, he could build a massive yacht like Jobs before he died... As a species we have consistently accomplished feats that were as unlikely as the mitochondrial symbiosis that allowed us to exist in the first place, is there a reason to discount our abilities to continue this trend?
The relevant time is right now. If the U.S. government had said "yes, we can do it!" and invested $20 billion in building an atom bomb in 1915, they would've pissed that money away. It would've been mindless optimism. Doing it after fission had been discovered was a calculated investment.
The issue is that we're quite a few "Nobel-worthy" inventions away from curing Cancer.
I mean, biologically we're not in the equivalence of 1950's physics. We're holding in 1300's physics.
I saw that someone once compared curing Cancer to landing on a moon without knowing basic Newtonian physics.
I expect that before we cure cancer, we'd have found ways to cure all "normal" diseases, have "designer babies" without side-effects, have "instant, proof-perfect medicines", etc.
I'd want his to work on those issues.
Right now it'll probably end up like Google X. A great lab, makes great prototypes, but practically get left behind by incremental technology.
The question if Nagasaki would work, which is why they did Trinity.
The theory was there when the Manhattan project started - it was an engineering hurdle, not a scientific one.
Manhattan Project : Curing Cancer :: Apollo : Warp Drives
Nagasaki was the second practical test of the plutonium implosion method.
A population of cells is more complex than an atom as it requires more parameters to be fully specified. It is also harder to predict because there are several levels of non-linear feedback interactions within an environment that can never be fully given ahead of time. A population of cancerous cells is more complex than a population of cells because their dynamics are not stationary in time. Unlike a typical population of healthy cells, cancerous ones are able to, in effect learn and more effectively than even the immune system. Extend this to the full class of cancers to see why a simple mathematical theory of the kind we find in atomic physics is highly implausible.
As such, we have an object of higher descriptive and predictive complexity than atomic physics. Searching for this theory will take longer and is much, much more difficult in a formal sense.
Could you elaborate as to why you believe that?
Having worked on both biological and physical simulations the limits from a ground-up perspective are quite similar. While there are no well-understood analytic forms to describe biological systems, unlike in quantum systems, the fundamentals of the problem are the same: we can't predict things because there are too many interactions to easily model.
There is a whole world of non-traditional techniques opening up with increases in computational capacity.
We also don't know to what extent quantum computation would aid predictive modeling of protein interactions. It's possible that there are no leaks at the classical level of abstraction as to hurt predictability. But the problem still remains that experiments to fix parameters are hurt by the fact that the system is changing under you and interacts in a complex way with its environment which can't be known ahead of time. So the computational complexity is not necessarily easier (in a practical sense) even if we assume that there is no utility in modeling quantum effects.
One very theoretical idea of solving cancer (per cancer) would involve searching for a 'problem', an insult, outside of the learnability class of evolution which also does not harm healthy cells. This is computationally likely harder than BQP. Anything less, even if equipped with a quantum computer, would be evolved out of and with any survivors less attackable. Any way you look at it, it is a far harder problem than working out fission.
My entire point was that the bomb wasn't a given in it's day (in spite of what the retrospective belief seems to be), just because something is out of our grasp now doesn't mean we won't reach it if we try.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Usa/Med/Discfiss.html
Edit: Reflecting on this, without quantum mechanics (which stemmed from Einstein's relativity work), Oppenheimer would not have had the mathematical tools that were heavily leveraged building the bomb. The bomb is more than throwing together two sub-critical pieces of material, knowledge from quantum mechanics was critical in the prediction of which fissile materials could yield a functional weapon (of which there are very few).
That's not 2 billion dollars, that's 2 TRILLION dollars.
So, basically, redirecting the US military budget. I approve.
[0] https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/RL34645.pdf
[1] http://mitchellhowe.blogspot.com/2006/02/want-manhattan-proj...
The point being that atomic bomb development required a gigantic commitment.
The Manhattan project cost about $2B in 1940s money; equivalent to around $26B today.
The Manhattan project cost was "about $26 billion in 2016 dollars" according to the Wikipedia article. They are short $23B.
That's where this part comes in:
"The more people believe we can cure all disease in our children's lifetimes, the more likely the government is to invest in it"
Further reading from Vinod Khosla: http://fortune.com/2012/12/04/technology-will-replace-80-of-...
It's kinda like efforts to modernize (read: give Western lifestyles to) a lot of South Asia and Africa...a lot of pollution and ecological destruction that is probably not a good thing.
Mark was reacting to this:
If we have a hypothetical scheme to find out all drugs that can be found, and see that the cure for those is not there, that is as a conclusive contribution into finding cure to those ailments as finding a cure. Most biggest discoveries are not about going on a beeline to a solution as a race. Rather, one is charting an unknown territory. As the unknown part shrinks, one does not need to spend energy in stumbling there and concentrate on other areas, finally reaching a solution (if a solution can be found).
TLDR:
"Andy later discovers that he has pelvic cancer, and has approximately one year to live if the hip and leg are not removed. In desperation he sneaks into Stephen's lab and injects himself with the nanobots" ... "The nanobots continue making "improvements" to Andy, including giving him eyes in the back of his head, bones above his stomach, keen hearing, and jellyfish-like stinging tentacles on his skin."
But as much as I'm rolling my eyes at their blanket statement, the spirit of "yes we can!" does way more for science and progress than naysay of critics.