It was done for the first time, we have no idea what really did the magic here, we can just assume. In any future medicine scenario I'd expect us to exactly know what we are doing and how it works. Yes medicine is improving but we really are in the dark ages still.
No, we'd be in the dark ages if we were in still the dark ages. Our current level of progress would seem like science fiction or even magic as little as a century ago.
I think I understand your point, that we have so much more to learn we're not even able to quantify what we don't know.
But this is not some kind of endless quest. We're dealing with a machine in the end with finite complexity and eventually it will be understood fundamentally.
I don't think I would be surprised if the most common diseases were eliminated in the next 100 to 200 years.
I'm guessing you don't work in the medical field (I have). First their's the emergent complexity of scale (after all the universe consists of a finite number of a small number of fundamental particles). Second, the human body (and all the pathogens etc) are object code highly optimized over billions of years. We understand almost nothing about how it all works. We can transcribe most of a human's genome but barely understand how even a tiny part of it works.
> I don't think I would be surprised if the most common diseases were eliminated in the next 100 to 200 years.
The most common causes of death have been pretty much eliminated in the wealthy world over the last 50 years. People still die, just of a wider variety of less common reasons. In the limiting case, each person will die of a unique cause.
> People still die, just of a wider variety of less common reasons. In the limiting case, each person will die of a unique cause.
Right now, human lives are still capped at ~120 years, and usually much less than 100. In the (mathematical) limit, each person will die of a unique cause at age infinite. While we won't ever reach that limit, it's worth to continue getting closer to it.
Maybe the fact I don't actually makes it easier to understand biological complexity.
You guys have to figure out how to fix a brain when it breaks.
In CS, a holy grail is to match or exceed human cognition with general AI. It's not fixing something broken, its reverse engineering or alternatively engineering from scratch the greatest known computational device in the universe which has evolved over a billion years.
It's often not appreciated that this hasn't happened yet not due to lack of computing power. It hasn't happened yet because we're still not even remotely close to knowing what code to write if we did have 10,000 times more compute. We don't know how to do it, and instead are forced to plod along in awe as every year we learn a little more about what we don't know.
I see this as agreeing with the person you're replying to. We can make certain limited interventions which are amazing, but the kind of complete understanding that you're referring to is a long, long way away. Even when we do have a treatment, we often do not fully understand how they work.
Nice side effect of solving coordination problems include: solving poverty, solving peace on Earth. :).
...which is true of most of medicine. Most indications (e.g. diseases) are named after their symptoms rather than causes, and a lot of treatment is just creating / improving the environment in which the body can do its job.
None of which should be taken as denigration of amazing achievements in the medical field!
http://www.parents.com/kids/safety/outdoor/dry-drowning/
"Any child pulled from the pool needs medical attention," says Dr. Berchelmann. "At the very least, call the pediatrician."
Our daughter was coughing after swimming in a river a few weeks ago, and my mother in law found the dry drowning stuff on the internet. I was like "dry drowning doesn't exist," but we called a nursing hotline which told us to go to the ER. The doctor checked out the kid, then asked us for the number of the nursing hotline so she could yell at them for sending parents to the ER over a condition that doesn't exist.
No shit swallowing water is not the same as aspirating [breathing] it and nobody said it was!
"And I’m pretty sure everyone understands that a child who is down in the water, gets pulled out, and requires resuscitation needs immediate medical attention, even if they seem to recover." - No, they might not!!! And that's the point!!!
The takeaway is:
If someone has a serious near-drowning episode they should seek medical attention even if they appear fine.
If someone exhibits symptoms listed after aspirating water, they should seek medical attention.
His doctor contradicted you, and the advice you gave at the end of your comment. Are you also a doctor?
We just got done doing a swimming class for our 2 year old and this was addressed in the class. I highly recommend you take a class with your children. Classes for younger than 3 years old are done with parents in the water. It'll make both your children and you much more comfortable and safe.
http://www.nhs.uk/conditions/Sudden-infant-death-syndrome/Pa...
I'm speaking a little in hyperbole here, but you get the point I'm sure.
My mom was a great parent and wonderful overall, but that was a particularly excellent decision of hers. She was still careful with my little brother and me around water - we were enrolled in Red Cross swim classes during the summers in elementary school, and always had lifejackets on at the lake. Despite being terrible at pretty much all sports (unlike my athletically-gifted brother), I was always a decent swimmer.
When my wife and I were on our honeymoon we watched a couple throw their 6 month old (10 month maybe? wasn't walking, only crawling) in the pool over and over again. Most of the pool looked on in horror, but they had taught her the "leg kick to turn over onto her back and float" skill. Definitely gave us perspective.
I know this doesn't really matter much, but if we're going to throw in hyperbole, it should at least be somewhat accurate. I think people are boo'ing anyone who brings up this point because it's such an incredible achievement. That's true, it is, and it's amazing that brain damage was reversed. But Star Trek is a useful, iconic yardstick for measuring our progress. Saying we're close to it discounts how much work we have left to do.
To that end, I'm curious how Star Trek is a useful iconic yardstick? My assertion would be that it is not. It is a common one. But there is nothing useful in it. Precisely because you have to cherry pick what parts you use and how you interpret them. For example, you interpreted it to refer to the method of curing. The comment was taking it for the level of the sickness that was cured. Both are valid places to look.
I suppose it's sentimentality. If you watch TNG (which is difficult nowadays -- it's so far out of time), the writers made some interesting observations.
We now have the capability to ask the computer for information (Google), the ability to send each other messages (email), and we can verbally ask the computer questions (Siri). Touch interface (iPhone). These are landmark achievements, and they were all predicted by a show which ended in 1994, before the advent of the internet. The technology predictions have generally been on-point, and it seems like a useful metric for how far humanity can progress.
(To those who haven't watched TNG, the whole series is on Netflix, mostly (entirely?) in the remastered edition, so no TV-like quality. A piece of caution: this is not your typical sci-fi; it's much more positive about the future, science and technology than what we get served on TV these days.)
RE the yardstick thing - there's still lots of things that in Star Trek are shown as easy, and that they feel like they should be easy with sufficiently advanced tech, and that are still hard for us today. So it's maybe less of an yardstick and more of a goal / reminder that there's lots to be done yet.
Simultaneously it postulated that the humans of the future would not be cyborgs, which appears unlikely. Furthermore, few tasks were automated in a manner we might see in our lifetime, let alone the time of the show.
I'd wager most of the things that you are quoting were less pioneered by Star Trek, and moreso popularized to an audience. In particular, using a computer to find information, talking to a computer, and sending messages electronically have long been staples in science fiction. Before science fiction, the only thing that was different was the "electronically" part. And really, I don't know as even Star Trek was treating "electronically" any different than earlier stories used "magically."
Umm. I was reading about TNG on the web in 1994. The internet had been around for a long time before the web was useful to ordinary people. Email has been around since the 70s. Search engines were certainly limited, but were already available in the early 90s.
All these predictions succeeded because they were "predicting" incremental improvement on something already known to exist.
The internet was around well before 1994.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131022102227.h...
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130910142334.h...
http://www.dailytech.com/New+Miracle+Diagnosis+Handheld+Medi...
https://www.cnet.com/news/esight-video-glasses-restores-sigh...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/03/vision-chip-...
Exaggeration is an essential part of the definition of hyperbole. Merriam-Webster literally gives the definition of the word simply as "extravagant exaggeration."[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photorefractive_keratectomy
> They can erase and alter people's memory
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14572521, plus lots of pharmacological stuff in spook-land which is well-attested but rarely peer-reviewed.
> They can scan for problems using a handheld device.
http://edition.cnn.com/2017/01/26/health/ai-system-detects-s...
> We are nowhere near any of that.
In the case of your specific examples, we are. It's early days and unevenly distributed, but actually we are getting there.
Edit: somewhat unrelated since this girl fell into an unattended pool, but it's important to know the signs of drowning, which are not what you see in movies: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-to-spot-signs-of-a-child-dro...
Edit 2: I get that people have a right to downvote whatever they want, but seriously, did I say something wrong here?