4 ms·
This is one of my favorite little videos to illustrate the dichotomy - https://i.imgur.com/o7lI08Y.gifv https://i.imgur.com/o7lI08Y.gifv For all of our mastery
by jcims 5y ago
This is one of my favorite little videos to illustrate the dichotomy - https://i.imgur.com/o7lI08Y.gifv https://i.imgur.com/o7lI08Y.gifv
For all of our mastery of information processing, our ability to fabricate and motivate fine differentiated structures is really quite incredibly poor relative to biology. The little beetle is basically alien technology relative to the toy. But add in the fact that it can feed itself, repair itself and reproduce itself with a system that can scale 3-5 orders of magnitude up and down based on need is pretty mindblowing.
The mRNA vaccines might be one of the first times where we've leveraged biology to directly fabricate a discrete part with desired properties. Certainly in raw tonnage of output I can't think of anything that comes close. I feel like this is only going to advance with time, to the point where we may be growing robots instead of milling and printing them.
- jtbayly 5y agoWhy doesn't that play in Safari?
- jonplackett 5y agoI find the comparison with AI and insects really interesting to illustrate just how far off the mark we still are. You have a room sized super computer that trains for zillions of hours and can’t even pick out pedestrians with especially good precision. Then you have a bee with a minuscule brain that can do complex pattern recognition to find flowers, complex manipulation to get nectar and pollen out of them, object avoidance, swarming behaviour, and fancy communicative dances (both performing and interpreting), plus all the other stuff bees do to get by in the world. Something is up there for sure.