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Pretty much what they said about reusable rockets and electric cars.
by aerovistae 10y ago
Pretty much what they said about reusable rockets and electric cars.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoTrue. But not every idea that is labeled as "too hard" is in fact useful (or even doable) idea.
- aerovistae 10y agoYou don't think being able to communicate with a computer by thought is useful?
- AnimalMuppet 10y agoIf it's not doable, no. It's just a nice dream. If it's doable but the computer can't tell the difference between my attempts to command it and my daydreams, maybe still no.
- aerovistae 10y agoClearly you think this is an impossible task. I strongly disagree, given the fullness of time.....tens and hundreds and thousands of years lie ahead of us, eons for engineers and scientists to fill with research and experimentation. Your perspective on this seems very shortsighted to me.
- tormeh 10y agoThey said that about electric cars? They had electric buses before they had petrol ones. In most ways electric is actually simpler. We've just been waiting for the batteries, and Tesla didn't do anything revolutionary there. Tesla saw the batteries were finally there and found a way to hype, market and sell electric cars successfully. That's praiseworthy. The self-driving stuff and over-the-air software updates are also cool. Lots of innovation there. But making electric cars has never been that hard per se.
- Balgair 10y agoAnd anti-gravity and teleportation and warp-speed and finding a date in LA.
- minkzilla 10y agoThat last one being especially out of mankind's reach
- JabavuAdams 10y agoEh, it's worth understanding the scale and scope of the problem. I've been thinking about this a lot, recently. The human brain has on the order of 1e11 neurons. The galaxy has on the order of 1e11 stars. Now, would we confidently predict that we could "solve" the galaxy in less than 100 to 500 years, say? And yet we make very, very aggressive estimates of how quickly we might unravel the secrets of the brain. Biology is just monstrously, monstrously complex! The hope is that it may actually be easier to build a useful thinking machine than to fully reverse-engineer the brain. If we can really build a neural lace in the sense that Iain Banks originated the term, then we've probably also solved cancer and the rest of biology. Imagine the fine-grained control you'd need to manufacture a molecular-scale structure in-situ.
- throwaway91111 10y agoWell, the issue with the galaxy has more to do with general relativity than the number of stars. The issue right now isn't bottlenecked in any single place like that.
- JabavuAdams 10y agoCan you elaborate? I don't think I got your point. I'm intrigued by the difference between "understanding" a population, in aggregate, and having a fine-grained view of each individual while also knowing how each individual relates to the whole. So, what might we learn about the galaxy if we knew what / where / when every single bright spot of star-ish size is, that we would not learn from an aggregated simulation? Rhetorical question, obviously. I don't even know how many people live within 5km of me. How many are human-trafficked, held against their will? etc. We can make approximations, but there's a lot of interesting information at the margins.
- throwaway91111 10y agoWell, most of what you get is verification. When the problem is entirely local, you can verify separately calculated measurements with other measurements. This is why I think we'll be able to move much faster to work on problems of similar magnitudes locally than on relativistic scales. While you don't know how many humans are within 5km of you, that's certainly easier to verify with confidence N than it is to verify how many humans within 5 light years.