22 ms·

So back in the 60's, people looked back at the progress over the previous decades, imagined the future, and thought about space. We'd have commercial space flig

So back in the 60's, people looked back at the progress over the previous decades, imagined the future, and thought about space. We'd have commercial space flight any day now. The most poignant scene I can think of: in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the character flies on a Pan-Am spaceship to the moon, and then goes into a phone booth to make a phone call. Fast forward and it turns out that we had been near the top of an s-curve when it came to space tech, but near the bottom of the s-curve of computers, and few people back then were imagining (could imagine?) how different the world would be 50 years later with everyone carrying around internet-connected supercomputers in their pocket. I think we may be in the same situation today, where people imagine the future and think AI revolution and computational everything, but are mostly missing that we're at the bottom of a biotech s-curve that is going to blow "computer" progress out of the water over the next 50-60 years. My guess is that in 60 years our computer technology will be largely similar to today, just faster and nicer. But in the same way that the mature industrial revolution made high-precision manufacturing possible which made incredible computers possible, our mature computer technology is now enabling incredible progress in biotech. And the explosion of biotech will lead to mind-blowing changes that are difficult to even imagine. From this article: no more keyboards / mice? No typing, you can "think" to write. What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later? How much further can that tech go? And there is so much more beyond BCI, we are just understanding the basic building blocks in many areas, but making amazing progress. I'm excited about it.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
I agree. Your comment made me think of Natalie Woods' last movie: "Brainstorm." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)
derefr 6y ago
> we had been near the top of an s-curve when it came to space tech Near the top of an s-curve in getting-to-space (“heavy lift”) tech, more like. I’d say the field of actual in-space tech (i.e. technology that takes advantage of low-gravity / low-pressure / low-oxygen environments) is still pretty nascent. We still treat space as “Earth, minus some guarantees” (i.e. something we have to harden for) rather than doing much with the unique benefits of space. It’ll probably take having a long-term industrial base operating from space to see much change there, though. Imagine, for example, living on a space station, and having your food cooked using cooking techniques that assume cheaply-available vacuum and/or anoxic environments. :)
- burlesona 6y ago
  Yeah I agree, there are "generations" of technology, and I think that people in the 60's looked at the progress of transportation tech from 1910 to 1960 and thought "at this pace we'll all be zipping around the solar system like it's nothing by the 2000s." It was not easy to form an intuition of why the first generation of space tech was going to hit physics-imposed limits that would "slow that progress." To be fair we still made lots of progress with space tech after the 60's, and I think via SpaceX and others we are hopefully now starting a new S-curve unlocked by cheaper access to LEO.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    60s space tech also hit a lot of limitations of computers of the time. SpaceX's Super Heavy is in some ways a reimagining of N1's first stage, but with control software that makes it viable to deal with engine failures in flight. But a big problem is also that the progress in space tech wasn't organic. There was no economic incentive, it was driven purely by propaganda, national pride and political goals. Once that fell away it took half a century for economic usecases catch up to a point where private investment was viable.
  - akhilpotla 6y ago
    An interesting thing to think about was people used to think of getting somewhere. Now we think of things coming to us. In a way, we did achieve the "zipping around", it's just that we did it via the internet and wireless communication. Of course, it is not the same, but it is similar.
- blisterpeanuts 6y ago
  Space tech might be considerably further along today, had we in the U.S. not limited our R&D after 1969. A reusable shuttle that cost over $1B per flight was interesting innovation in 1981, but it actually represented a dead end for the U.S. rather than the beginning of a new era of exploration.
  - musingsole 6y ago
hhs 6y ago
There’s a startup called MindPortal (YC W21) that seems focused on using tech to review thoughts and control things: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindportal https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindportal
d_silin 6y ago
That's actually a good prediction. Biotech is untapped field for moonshot-scale breakthroughs, even the current mRNA vaccines is only a small part of what will be possible in 10-15 years.
- jszymborski 6y ago
  I think this is why the grand-parent is perhaps making an error in thinking that e.g. space travel or computing are silos unto their own. Having worked in wet labs and deep learning labs, I think we've a lot to gain from increasing our ability to simulate experiments in silico and automate biological processes. A lot of the room for improvement has been carved out by improvements in machine learning.
  - burlesona 6y ago
    I agree with you :) > But in the same way that the mature industrial revolution made high-precision manufacturing possible which made incredible computers possible, our mature computer technology is now enabling incredible progress in biotech.
    - jszymborski 6y ago
      True, I missed that!
PartiallyTyped 6y ago
I agree with you, and I'd say that we are perhaps in the bottom, or the middle of the S curve in software. Despite all the technological progress in hardware, our software is very slow and buggy. We end up increasing complexity in the name of 'productivity' and going up in abstractions, but we end up lacking fine-grained control and performance in modern systems. I hope that we see a paradigm shift back towards writing robust and performant systems instead of stacking abstractions. Sure, Monads and Transformers are all fun to use, make code coincise and are very satisfying when they compose well, but, what's the hidden cost, and is it worth it? As a user that encounters bugs at a disproportionally high rate, I'd say no. The trade-off in increasing abstractions is not worth the trade-off.
- jolux 6y ago
  Your experience of using Haskell is that it causes more bugs than less abstract languages?
  - PartiallyTyped 6y ago
    No, on the contrary, my experience with Haskell is that my code is mostly bug free, but ends up less performant because you can accidentally create huge trunks in the heap and it consumes too much mental stamina. However, there exists an intermediate plane of abstraction over C and under Haskell that is absolutely horrendous and results in all sorts of weird bugs and unpredictable situations.
    - tachyonbeam 6y ago
      I've heard people say that Haskell would be better with eager rather than lazy evaluation, because of the mental burden that it causes. IMO that doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve. We can design pure functional languages with eager evaluation.
      - zozbot234 6y ago
        Haskell would be better if it used polarity and focusing to make both strict and lazy evaluation first-class citizens in the language. A stricrly-evaluated counterpart to Haskell is just ML, which we've had since the 1970s.
IgorPartola 6y ago
Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy. Now imagine if your need for speech goes away: why bother using it when you can just “text” from your brain directly to mine and I instantly know what you said without me having to “read” anything. Instant communication. Instant connection to anyone. Instant ads beamed directly into your brain by Google and Facebook. Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network. The boundary of where “you” exist and where the rest of the world exists is erased. You can feel what other people feel. You can see through the eyes of an Oscar winner, a surgeon, a head of state, a porn star. Police body cams become police mind cams: what was the cop thinking when they took any given action? What we currently have as YouTube celebrities and Instagram influencers become Mindgram stars. You can see and perceive as them. Now take it a step further. Death isn’t death. Like the paradox of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time, your mind stops existing in your body and occupies a collection of other bodies. Artificial intelligence mixed in with real intelligence mixed in with remnant intelligence. We can’t imagine what this feels like but we are marching towards it getting ever closer every year. Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this hive mind concept. They disconnect. They play games. They make games where all NPCs are now simulated to the point where they believe they are real. They are here for the benefit of the players but even the players can’t tell the difference when they are in the game. Now take it a step further. Inside the simulation someone introduces Hard Seltzer. The in game year is 2021 and a player just read that some NPC somewhere had just created a brain/computer interface. He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  > Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this hive mind concept. Why would they? All the preceding paragraphs sound like Borg collective, but hey, if it's voluntary, it actually doesn't sound bad. As long as we can keep adtech away.
  - 6y ago
fnord77 6y ago
we have something today that's 3-4x faster than pecking on a smartphone keyboard: voice to text.
- ungamed 6y ago
  But only 90% accurate, thats 10% not accurate enough.
  - fnord77 6y ago
    but it is improving, and will be good enough long before there's a viable brain-computer interface.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I extremely doubt that, I type faster with predictive text than I speak.
  - throwawayboise 6y ago
    Entirely depends on the individual. With a virtual on-screen keyboard, I can rarely type even one word without error. It's like my fingertips are just too big to hit the keys accurately. Swipe-keying is somewhat better/faster but I'm much better with real physical keys. Speech-to-text used to be pretty bad but with my current phone it's better than typing, for me. The downside is I hate talking to computers.
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Have you used SwiftKey? I find it corrects 99% of my errors, to the point where I just press keys in the vicinity of what I want to type and it comes out correct.
- drbojingle 6y ago
  I've used talon voice for software development as a replacement for typing a while back due to an arm injury. It ain't faster than typing.
bopbeepboop 6y ago
I see it the other way: We’ve had a revolutionary S-curve with computing/artificial reasoning in inventing transistors — but we know we’re still at the bottom of two related S-curves, quantum computing (an exponential increase in many problems of interest) and IOT/smart systems where our automated reasoning is embodied in something. We know somewhere up those curves lies the ability to make new kinds of minds. I think both of those will prove to be bigger than bio-science... and more over, bio-science will require them to a) do the experiments and b) find uses for the technologies. I think human augmentation will turn out to be like spaceflight: humans are near the top of their S-curve already. Instead, I think biology research won’t come into its own until AGI research does and we have an idea of how to make new biological systems. Of course, that might kill us all. Horribly.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
We were also at the bottom of the s-curve of social malware and adtech, which turned out to the real outcome of commoditised computing. The rhetoric of personal creativity and freedom was flattened by something far less interesting and more toxic. I wouldn't be so keen to rush headlong into a bioware-connected world until that problem is solved.
- frashelaw 6y ago
  This indeed is also my main fear. All the nefarious, intrusive, methods of advertising will get a hundred times worse, but now be directly beamed into our brains. Our hypercapitalist economy will only accelerate and exacerbate this.
BiteCode_dev 6y ago
With the track records we have of power and technological abuses, I'm not sure I'm excited about having a direct interface to my head. In fact, I would be more excited about IRL laws tuning down what some are doing with the current indirect interfaces to my head, such as fake news, propaganda, advertising and manipulations of all sorts.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Pretty much. I'm less excited. Because I was super excited 50 years ago when we were at the bottom of the S-curve on computers and I had no idea they would eventually be commandeered to rip off my parents. I think of it as a "wider" view of the impacts vs a "narrow" view of the benefits. For me, the nagging question is what happens when biotech has figured out biological systems to the point that everyone stops aging/dying[1]. Does that 10 billion people, give or take, become "the humans" for the rest of time? [1] Lots of evidence that there is no "reason" for cell senescence, it's just an evolutionary afterthought (you succeeded in reproducing, now go die) and like other things can be "fixed."
- pmichaud 6y ago
  I wish I could find the source, but when I've looked into this in the past I was reasonably convinced that the population would go up a bit, but not catastrophically, with the basic idea being that people die all the time for lots of reasons, only one of which is "aging" (aging is multiple things, blah blah). So people's lifespans would be much longer on average, but not infinitely long. Something more like 300 or 400 years, with a pretty big standard deviation.
- astrange 6y ago
  Is not dying even a good idea? It might be the best way to create a stable system at society level - crash-only computing works pretty well in practice compared to never-crashing systems like Lisps. Main problem is we take too long to build a replacement person.
oceanghost 6y ago
> but near the bottom of the s-curve of computers I think the most interesting exemplar of this is Star Trek. As everyone knows, Star Trek is based on 19th century naval warfare. The battle scenes are hilarious-- a captain calling out orders at human speeds to his crew that executes them. It's been obvious for 40 years that computers would do the fighting, but in 1966 it wasn't obvious, so the paradigm was Horatio Hornblower.
- ddalex 6y ago
  star trek is not heavy on fighting anyhow, so these battles are plot devices... how would a computer executing and finishing a battle even before humans figure ouut that somethin is happening help with the plot.... in the same vein, why would strikes on a ship result in sparkles on the bridge....
noir_lord 6y ago
I think the big revolutions are going to be in biology - fast super computers allows us to make advances we couldn't have made any other way. Computers are an enabling technology for basically every other advancement - in fact it's hard to imagine breakthroughs at this point that don't involve computers in some way - even 'just' as a tool for collaboration.
- emayljames 6y ago
  Also, taking economics to a new level, once we have got past the scarce-resource/pollution based short term thinking and it no longer is viable to have a volatile structured economy, where there is no longer a need for the profit motive. Super computing could easily take this task up of organising and fairly structuring the economy.
- hypertele-Xii 6y ago
  'Computers' are more like, industrial consciousness, though. What happens when we can grow brain cells on demand? (and support their function). Imagine upgrading yourself like you upgrade your computer. More brain. Less sleep. More hands. Armored skin. Photosynthesis. Imagine you're a shapeshifter. You can copy any aspect of any living organism on Earth, integrate tech directly into your body, and the smartest people are coming up with new useful things to add.
  - bserge 6y ago
    Aaaand it's all banned. Enhancing your performance? Heresy! That's assuming such research is allowed in the first place. Humans are innately repulsed by biology, by organisms. Imagine an arm with its skin ripped open to the bone, gushing blood everywhere. Imagine your guts hanging out from your belly. And the ethical/moral rules we built over thousands of years will not allow the majority to sit by and watch some atrocious (from their POV) experiments.
  - ByteJockey 6y ago
    So, humanity becomes the borg?
meremortals 6y ago
The Mood Organ from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep
ben_w 6y ago
While I agree that we will have mind blowing biotech improvements in the next 50 to 60 years, I don’t believe it’s physically possible for biotech progress to be as mind-blowing as what happened in computer tech. In the last 60 years, computers have gone from $160 billion/GFLOP to $0.03/GFLOP; transistors are now smaller and faster than synapses by the same factors that wolves are smaller and faster than hills, and the sort of computing tech that was literally SciFi in the 60s — self-teaching universal translators, voice interfaces, facial recognition — is now fairly standard. 60 years of biotech? If the next time I wake is after 60 years in a cryonics chamber[0] and was told every disease was now cured, that every organ could be printed on demand, that adult genetic modification was fine and furries could get whatever gene-modded body they wanted up to and including elephant-mass fire-breathing flying dragon, and that full brain uploading and/or neural laces a-la The Culture were standard, I would believe it. But if they told me biological immortality was solved (as opposed to mind upload followed by download into a freshly bioprinted body with a blank brain) I’d doubt the year was really only 2081 — not all research can be done in silicon, some has to be done in-vivo, and immorality would be one of them. [0] this would be very surprising as I’ve not signed up for it, but for the sake of example
- KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
  > But if they told me biological immortality was solved (as opposed to mind upload followed by download into a freshly bioprinted body with a blank brain) I’d doubt the year was really only 2081 — not all research can be done in silicon, some has to be done in-vivo, and immorality would be one of them. But why, biological immortality is already here for many animals like jellyfish. Honestly seems closer to me than uploading.
  - ben_w 6y ago
    Because 60 years isn’t enough time to tell if you were completely correct, or if there was something you missed.
    - ByteJockey 6y ago
      Depends on if the tech is something you do to an embryo and have to wait for, or if it's something you can do to someone who is already alive. If you apply the process to someone who is already 100 and they hit 160 with no further degradation, it would be, at the very least, a pretty good indicator your process had worked.
frashelaw 6y ago
> From this article: no more keyboards / mice? No typing, you can "think" to write. What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later? How much further can that tech go? And there is so much more beyond BCI, we are just understanding the basic building blocks in many areas, but making amazing progress. While this itself is certainly an interesting concept, I'm worried at its consequences when implemented in our hypercapitalist economy: We'll almost certainly, along with this incredible interaction technology, have advertising beamed directly into our consciousness or something similarly intrusive. It's honestly terrifying how much worse intrusive tracking and advertising would get with this technology.
oliv__ 6y ago
"What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later?" Oh hell nah, it's enough craziness in real time, I sure as hell don't need to replay that.
hyko 6y ago
I guess I don’t see what is supposed to drive the S curve in biotechnology over the next 60 years. Advanced information technology is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for biotech mastery, and the other conditions are just not in place.
- burlesona 6y ago
  Just to name one thing, I think CRISPR is likely to be seen as fundamental a technological building block as the transistor.
  - hyko 6y ago
    Yeah CRISPR-Cas9 is an incredible breakthrough. I’m just not sure the regulatory environment is geared up for exponential growth, and my assertion is that reverse engineering biology will be a much steeper climb than the history of transistors or rocketry. I guess my question to you would be, if we were to take a bet on it, what metrics would we use to know who was right? Biotech patents? In the case of rockets and chips we had thrust and transistor density respectively. I’m not sure how easy it would be to quantify progress, though I have a sense of what some of the tangible applications will be when they show up. Maybe mortality rate would be a good measure? Or human population size (a proxy for mortality + food production)?
vkou 6y ago
> So back in the 60's, people looked back at the progress over the previous decades, imagined the future, and thought about space. We'd have commercial space flight any day now. We do have commercial space flight. Commercial space flight has exploded over the past few decades. The sky is full of communication satellites, imaging satellites, sensor satellites, even the occasional vanity satellites. Everything worth doing in space, we're doing. What we don't have is things that aren't worth doing in space, like Pan-am flights to the moon.
varispeed 6y ago
> What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later? More realistic is that your thoughts will be listened by police in real-time plus you could transmit them to other people through instagram. Amazon will be doing food delivery from app to mouth, and people largely will not be moving much, as food will be wholly automated end to end and any hobbies people will be doing via VR goggles. There will also be contraceptives controlled by ministry of reproduction and will be working or not based on couple's social score. edit: I forgot - exposure is going to be a real currency.
AussieWog93 6y ago
I thought so too, until I started my PhD back in 2017. The topic was the application of machine learning to neurosignal decoding. We are absolutely at the top of the s curve in this field. There has been no real progress in two decades. The AI boom has just made things worse by redirecting all of the grant money away from better sensors (which could get results in certain niche applications) and towards new algorithms, which have hit an accuracy ceiling because the data their human operators feed into them is complete shit. The field is so beyond saving that an algorithm that achieves slightly better performance on a single old dataset due to sheer chance is presented as a breakthrough. Data rates would be in the tens of bits per minute with error rates of 20% on a good day and no feasible plan to improve either of these woeful specs. I'll be dead before we have a BCI with enough bandwidth that anyone but a dying MND patient would want to get one installed.
mr_toad 6y ago
> Fast forward and it turns out that we had been near the top of an s-curve when it came to space tech It’s true that the types of rocket engines we have today are not that much more advanced than the ones we made 50 years ago. But rocket motors have never been mass produced, and we haven’t poured billions of dollars into research (let alone commercial production). We haven’t had the decades of improvement that came with integrated circuits, but we haven’t done the decades worth of R&D either.
ganafagol 6y ago
> What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later? Wet dream of surveillance tech. 50 years ago, if you had suggested that someday all your social connections would be instantly available to all serious secret services as well as big corps, people would laugh at you. You'd be the negative guy, against progress. 1984 fans were the paranoid tinfoil hat guys. Today it's reality. And only few actually care. You don't want tech to automatically transcribe your thoughts. That's the only domain today where real privacy still exists. There is a nice Black Mirror episode about this.

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

I agree. Your comment made me think of Natalie Woods' last movie: "Brainstorm." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainstorm_(1983_film)

derefr 6y ago

> we had been near the top of an s-curve when it came to space tech Near the top of an s-curve in getting-to-space (“heavy lift”) tech, more like. I’d say the field of actual in-space tech (i.e. technology that takes advantage of low-gravity / low-pressure / low-oxygen environments) is still pretty nascent. We still treat space as “Earth, minus some guarantees” (i.e. something we have to harden for) rather than doing much with the unique benefits of space. It’ll probably take having a long-term industrial base operating from space to see much change there, though. Imagine, for example, living on a space station, and having your food cooked using cooking techniques that assume cheaply-available vacuum and/or anoxic environments. :)

burlesona 6y ago
Yeah I agree, there are "generations" of technology, and I think that people in the 60's looked at the progress of transportation tech from 1910 to 1960 and thought "at this pace we'll all be zipping around the solar system like it's nothing by the 2000s." It was not easy to form an intuition of why the first generation of space tech was going to hit physics-imposed limits that would "slow that progress." To be fair we still made lots of progress with space tech after the 60's, and I think via SpaceX and others we are hopefully now starting a new S-curve unlocked by cheaper access to LEO.
- wongarsu 6y ago
  60s space tech also hit a lot of limitations of computers of the time. SpaceX's Super Heavy is in some ways a reimagining of N1's first stage, but with control software that makes it viable to deal with engine failures in flight. But a big problem is also that the progress in space tech wasn't organic. There was no economic incentive, it was driven purely by propaganda, national pride and political goals. Once that fell away it took half a century for economic usecases catch up to a point where private investment was viable.
- akhilpotla 6y ago
  An interesting thing to think about was people used to think of getting somewhere. Now we think of things coming to us. In a way, we did achieve the "zipping around", it's just that we did it via the internet and wireless communication. Of course, it is not the same, but it is similar.
blisterpeanuts 6y ago
Space tech might be considerably further along today, had we in the U.S. not limited our R&D after 1969. A reusable shuttle that cost over $1B per flight was interesting innovation in 1981, but it actually represented a dead end for the U.S. rather than the beginning of a new era of exploration.
- musingsole 6y ago

hhs 6y ago

There’s a startup called MindPortal (YC W21) that seems focused on using tech to review thoughts and control things: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindportal https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/mindportal

d_silin 6y ago

That's actually a good prediction. Biotech is untapped field for moonshot-scale breakthroughs, even the current mRNA vaccines is only a small part of what will be possible in 10-15 years.

jszymborski 6y ago
I think this is why the grand-parent is perhaps making an error in thinking that e.g. space travel or computing are silos unto their own. Having worked in wet labs and deep learning labs, I think we've a lot to gain from increasing our ability to simulate experiments in silico and automate biological processes. A lot of the room for improvement has been carved out by improvements in machine learning.
- burlesona 6y ago
  I agree with you :) > But in the same way that the mature industrial revolution made high-precision manufacturing possible which made incredible computers possible, our mature computer technology is now enabling incredible progress in biotech.
  - jszymborski 6y ago
    True, I missed that!

PartiallyTyped 6y ago

I agree with you, and I'd say that we are perhaps in the bottom, or the middle of the S curve in software. Despite all the technological progress in hardware, our software is very slow and buggy. We end up increasing complexity in the name of 'productivity' and going up in abstractions, but we end up lacking fine-grained control and performance in modern systems. I hope that we see a paradigm shift back towards writing robust and performant systems instead of stacking abstractions. Sure, Monads and Transformers are all fun to use, make code coincise and are very satisfying when they compose well, but, what's the hidden cost, and is it worth it? As a user that encounters bugs at a disproportionally high rate, I'd say no. The trade-off in increasing abstractions is not worth the trade-off.

jolux 6y ago
Your experience of using Haskell is that it causes more bugs than less abstract languages?
- PartiallyTyped 6y ago
  No, on the contrary, my experience with Haskell is that my code is mostly bug free, but ends up less performant because you can accidentally create huge trunks in the heap and it consumes too much mental stamina. However, there exists an intermediate plane of abstraction over C and under Haskell that is absolutely horrendous and results in all sorts of weird bugs and unpredictable situations.
  - tachyonbeam 6y ago
    I've heard people say that Haskell would be better with eager rather than lazy evaluation, because of the mental burden that it causes. IMO that doesn't seem like a hard problem to solve. We can design pure functional languages with eager evaluation.
    - zozbot234 6y ago
      Haskell would be better if it used polarity and focusing to make both strict and lazy evaluation first-class citizens in the language. A stricrly-evaluated counterpart to Haskell is just ML, which we've had since the 1970s.

IgorPartola 6y ago

Imagine if we could connect your brain directly to a computer. Imagine if you could do things like instantly and precisely recall any Wikipedia article, any news story, any mathematical formula. Imagine if arithmetic goes from a skill you learn to a thing your brain does with 100% accuracy. Now imagine if your need for speech goes away: why bother using it when you can just “text” from your brain directly to mine and I instantly know what you said without me having to “read” anything. Instant communication. Instant connection to anyone. Instant ads beamed directly into your brain by Google and Facebook. Now take it a step further: your mind is now a part of a collective globally connected network. The boundary of where “you” exist and where the rest of the world exists is erased. You can feel what other people feel. You can see through the eyes of an Oscar winner, a surgeon, a head of state, a porn star. Police body cams become police mind cams: what was the cop thinking when they took any given action? What we currently have as YouTube celebrities and Instagram influencers become Mindgram stars. You can see and perceive as them. Now take it a step further. Death isn’t death. Like the paradox of rebuilding a ship one plank at a time, your mind stops existing in your body and occupies a collection of other bodies. Artificial intelligence mixed in with real intelligence mixed in with remnant intelligence. We can’t imagine what this feels like but we are marching towards it getting ever closer every year. Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this hive mind concept. They disconnect. They play games. They make games where all NPCs are now simulated to the point where they believe they are real. They are here for the benefit of the players but even the players can’t tell the difference when they are in the game. Now take it a step further. Inside the simulation someone introduces Hard Seltzer. The in game year is 2021 and a player just read that some NPC somewhere had just created a brain/computer interface. He rips off his headset and goes to unplug the computer because fuck this game, all the DLC clearly ruined it.

TeMPOraL 6y ago
> Now take it a step further. People want to get away from this hive mind concept. Why would they? All the preceding paragraphs sound like Borg collective, but hey, if it's voluntary, it actually doesn't sound bad. As long as we can keep adtech away.
- 6y ago

fnord77 6y ago

we have something today that's 3-4x faster than pecking on a smartphone keyboard: voice to text.

ungamed 6y ago
But only 90% accurate, thats 10% not accurate enough.
- fnord77 6y ago
  but it is improving, and will be good enough long before there's a viable brain-computer interface.
StavrosK 6y ago
I extremely doubt that, I type faster with predictive text than I speak.
- throwawayboise 6y ago
  Entirely depends on the individual. With a virtual on-screen keyboard, I can rarely type even one word without error. It's like my fingertips are just too big to hit the keys accurately. Swipe-keying is somewhat better/faster but I'm much better with real physical keys. Speech-to-text used to be pretty bad but with my current phone it's better than typing, for me. The downside is I hate talking to computers.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Have you used SwiftKey? I find it corrects 99% of my errors, to the point where I just press keys in the vicinity of what I want to type and it comes out correct.
drbojingle 6y ago
I've used talon voice for software development as a replacement for typing a while back due to an arm injury. It ain't faster than typing.

bopbeepboop 6y ago

I see it the other way: We’ve had a revolutionary S-curve with computing/artificial reasoning in inventing transistors — but we know we’re still at the bottom of two related S-curves, quantum computing (an exponential increase in many problems of interest) and IOT/smart systems where our automated reasoning is embodied in something. We know somewhere up those curves lies the ability to make new kinds of minds. I think both of those will prove to be bigger than bio-science... and more over, bio-science will require them to a) do the experiments and b) find uses for the technologies. I think human augmentation will turn out to be like spaceflight: humans are near the top of their S-curve already. Instead, I think biology research won’t come into its own until AGI research does and we have an idea of how to make new biological systems. Of course, that might kill us all. Horribly.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

We were also at the bottom of the s-curve of social malware and adtech, which turned out to the real outcome of commoditised computing. The rhetoric of personal creativity and freedom was flattened by something far less interesting and more toxic. I wouldn't be so keen to rush headlong into a bioware-connected world until that problem is solved.

frashelaw 6y ago
This indeed is also my main fear. All the nefarious, intrusive, methods of advertising will get a hundred times worse, but now be directly beamed into our brains. Our hypercapitalist economy will only accelerate and exacerbate this.

BiteCode_dev 6y ago

With the track records we have of power and technological abuses, I'm not sure I'm excited about having a direct interface to my head. In fact, I would be more excited about IRL laws tuning down what some are doing with the current indirect interfaces to my head, such as fake news, propaganda, advertising and manipulations of all sorts.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Pretty much. I'm less excited. Because I was super excited 50 years ago when we were at the bottom of the S-curve on computers and I had no idea they would eventually be commandeered to rip off my parents. I think of it as a "wider" view of the impacts vs a "narrow" view of the benefits. For me, the nagging question is what happens when biotech has figured out biological systems to the point that everyone stops aging/dying[1]. Does that 10 billion people, give or take, become "the humans" for the rest of time? [1] Lots of evidence that there is no "reason" for cell senescence, it's just an evolutionary afterthought (you succeeded in reproducing, now go die) and like other things can be "fixed."

pmichaud 6y ago
I wish I could find the source, but when I've looked into this in the past I was reasonably convinced that the population would go up a bit, but not catastrophically, with the basic idea being that people die all the time for lots of reasons, only one of which is "aging" (aging is multiple things, blah blah). So people's lifespans would be much longer on average, but not infinitely long. Something more like 300 or 400 years, with a pretty big standard deviation.
astrange 6y ago
Is not dying even a good idea? It might be the best way to create a stable system at society level - crash-only computing works pretty well in practice compared to never-crashing systems like Lisps. Main problem is we take too long to build a replacement person.

oceanghost 6y ago

> but near the bottom of the s-curve of computers I think the most interesting exemplar of this is Star Trek. As everyone knows, Star Trek is based on 19th century naval warfare. The battle scenes are hilarious-- a captain calling out orders at human speeds to his crew that executes them. It's been obvious for 40 years that computers would do the fighting, but in 1966 it wasn't obvious, so the paradigm was Horatio Hornblower.

ddalex 6y ago
star trek is not heavy on fighting anyhow, so these battles are plot devices... how would a computer executing and finishing a battle even before humans figure ouut that somethin is happening help with the plot.... in the same vein, why would strikes on a ship result in sparkles on the bridge....

noir_lord 6y ago

I think the big revolutions are going to be in biology - fast super computers allows us to make advances we couldn't have made any other way. Computers are an enabling technology for basically every other advancement - in fact it's hard to imagine breakthroughs at this point that don't involve computers in some way - even 'just' as a tool for collaboration.

emayljames 6y ago
Also, taking economics to a new level, once we have got past the scarce-resource/pollution based short term thinking and it no longer is viable to have a volatile structured economy, where there is no longer a need for the profit motive. Super computing could easily take this task up of organising and fairly structuring the economy.
hypertele-Xii 6y ago
'Computers' are more like, industrial consciousness, though. What happens when we can grow brain cells on demand? (and support their function). Imagine upgrading yourself like you upgrade your computer. More brain. Less sleep. More hands. Armored skin. Photosynthesis. Imagine you're a shapeshifter. You can copy any aspect of any living organism on Earth, integrate tech directly into your body, and the smartest people are coming up with new useful things to add.
- bserge 6y ago
  Aaaand it's all banned. Enhancing your performance? Heresy! That's assuming such research is allowed in the first place. Humans are innately repulsed by biology, by organisms. Imagine an arm with its skin ripped open to the bone, gushing blood everywhere. Imagine your guts hanging out from your belly. And the ethical/moral rules we built over thousands of years will not allow the majority to sit by and watch some atrocious (from their POV) experiments.
- ByteJockey 6y ago
  So, humanity becomes the borg?

meremortals 6y ago

The Mood Organ from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

ben_w 6y ago

While I agree that we will have mind blowing biotech improvements in the next 50 to 60 years, I don’t believe it’s physically possible for biotech progress to be as mind-blowing as what happened in computer tech. In the last 60 years, computers have gone from $160 billion/GFLOP to $0.03/GFLOP; transistors are now smaller and faster than synapses by the same factors that wolves are smaller and faster than hills, and the sort of computing tech that was literally SciFi in the 60s — self-teaching universal translators, voice interfaces, facial recognition — is now fairly standard. 60 years of biotech? If the next time I wake is after 60 years in a cryonics chamber[0] and was told every disease was now cured, that every organ could be printed on demand, that adult genetic modification was fine and furries could get whatever gene-modded body they wanted up to and including elephant-mass fire-breathing flying dragon, and that full brain uploading and/or neural laces a-la The Culture were standard, I would believe it. But if they told me biological immortality was solved (as opposed to mind upload followed by download into a freshly bioprinted body with a blank brain) I’d doubt the year was really only 2081 — not all research can be done in silicon, some has to be done in-vivo, and immorality would be one of them. [0] this would be very surprising as I’ve not signed up for it, but for the sake of example

KaoruAoiShiho 6y ago
> But if they told me biological immortality was solved (as opposed to mind upload followed by download into a freshly bioprinted body with a blank brain) I’d doubt the year was really only 2081 — not all research can be done in silicon, some has to be done in-vivo, and immorality would be one of them. But why, biological immortality is already here for many animals like jellyfish. Honestly seems closer to me than uploading.
- ben_w 6y ago
  Because 60 years isn’t enough time to tell if you were completely correct, or if there was something you missed.
  - ByteJockey 6y ago
    Depends on if the tech is something you do to an embryo and have to wait for, or if it's something you can do to someone who is already alive. If you apply the process to someone who is already 100 and they hit 160 with no further degradation, it would be, at the very least, a pretty good indicator your process had worked.

frashelaw 6y ago

> From this article: no more keyboards / mice? No typing, you can "think" to write. What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later? How much further can that tech go? And there is so much more beyond BCI, we are just understanding the basic building blocks in many areas, but making amazing progress. While this itself is certainly an interesting concept, I'm worried at its consequences when implemented in our hypercapitalist economy: We'll almost certainly, along with this incredible interaction technology, have advertising beamed directly into our consciousness or something similarly intrusive. It's honestly terrifying how much worse intrusive tracking and advertising would get with this technology.

oliv__ 6y ago

"What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later?" Oh hell nah, it's enough craziness in real time, I sure as hell don't need to replay that.

hyko 6y ago

I guess I don’t see what is supposed to drive the S curve in biotechnology over the next 60 years. Advanced information technology is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for biotech mastery, and the other conditions are just not in place.

burlesona 6y ago
Just to name one thing, I think CRISPR is likely to be seen as fundamental a technological building block as the transistor.
- hyko 6y ago
  Yeah CRISPR-Cas9 is an incredible breakthrough. I’m just not sure the regulatory environment is geared up for exponential growth, and my assertion is that reverse engineering biology will be a much steeper climb than the history of transistors or rocketry. I guess my question to you would be, if we were to take a bet on it, what metrics would we use to know who was right? Biotech patents? In the case of rockets and chips we had thrust and transistor density respectively. I’m not sure how easy it would be to quantify progress, though I have a sense of what some of the tangible applications will be when they show up. Maybe mortality rate would be a good measure? Or human population size (a proxy for mortality + food production)?

vkou 6y ago

> So back in the 60's, people looked back at the progress over the previous decades, imagined the future, and thought about space. We'd have commercial space flight any day now. We do have commercial space flight. Commercial space flight has exploded over the past few decades. The sky is full of communication satellites, imaging satellites, sensor satellites, even the occasional vanity satellites. Everything worth doing in space, we're doing. What we don't have is things that aren't worth doing in space, like Pan-am flights to the moon.

varispeed 6y ago

> What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later? More realistic is that your thoughts will be listened by police in real-time plus you could transmit them to other people through instagram. Amazon will be doing food delivery from app to mouth, and people largely will not be moving much, as food will be wholly automated end to end and any hobbies people will be doing via VR goggles. There will also be contraceptives controlled by ministry of reproduction and will be working or not based on couple's social score. edit: I forgot - exposure is going to be a real currency.

AussieWog93 6y ago

I thought so too, until I started my PhD back in 2017. The topic was the application of machine learning to neurosignal decoding. We are absolutely at the top of the s curve in this field. There has been no real progress in two decades. The AI boom has just made things worse by redirecting all of the grant money away from better sensors (which could get results in certain niche applications) and towards new algorithms, which have hit an accuracy ceiling because the data their human operators feed into them is complete shit. The field is so beyond saving that an algorithm that achieves slightly better performance on a single old dataset due to sheer chance is presented as a breakthrough. Data rates would be in the tens of bits per minute with error rates of 20% on a good day and no feasible plan to improve either of these woeful specs. I'll be dead before we have a BCI with enough bandwidth that anyone but a dying MND patient would want to get one installed.

mr_toad 6y ago

> Fast forward and it turns out that we had been near the top of an s-curve when it came to space tech It’s true that the types of rocket engines we have today are not that much more advanced than the ones we made 50 years ago. But rocket motors have never been mass produced, and we haven’t poured billions of dollars into research (let alone commercial production). We haven’t had the decades of improvement that came with integrated circuits, but we haven’t done the decades worth of R&D either.

ganafagol 6y ago

> What about recording your own thoughts and then playing them back to yourself later? Wet dream of surveillance tech. 50 years ago, if you had suggested that someday all your social connections would be instantly available to all serious secret services as well as big corps, people would laugh at you. You'd be the negative guy, against progress. 1984 fans were the paranoid tinfoil hat guys. Today it's reality. And only few actually care. You don't want tech to automatically transcribe your thoughts. That's the only domain today where real privacy still exists. There is a nice Black Mirror episode about this.