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It's kind of sad how slow some technology progresses. 10 years ago, I thought that by now we'd have self-powered machines which can manufacture insulin inside t

It's kind of sad how slow some technology progresses. 10 years ago, I thought that by now we'd have self-powered machines which can manufacture insulin inside the body or replace essentially any organ. It's crazy that we still can't replicate biological processes. Literally a peace of meat can do this stuff but we can't replicate it. As a software dev, I feel like the industry has slowed to a crawl. Most of the jobs are about building gimmicky software as part of some weird corporate acquisition scheme. There are very few jobs available to build real useful stuff. Those jobs involve taking risks... But private equity firms don't see the point of taking on risks when they can just as easily get risk-free profits. I find the risk-aversion of private equity firms very weird because at their scale, with their finances, you'd think they could make a large number of risky bets and get relatively predictable results but that's not what they're doing. The alternative approach I'm suggesting clearly works; just look at what happened when companies started investing in AI. The level of risk in that case was off the charts, yet clearly, even that bet paid off. The productivity gains of recent AI innovation are broad and obvious. Why isn't this approach the standard? If incentives are the issue, we need to reform the socio-economic system to align incentives to prioritize useful innovation. Remove perverse incentives which reward useless schemes. Encourage broad bets, prioritize technical skill. Funding should be easily accessible to skilled tech people and shouldn't be based on social connections or arbitrary metrics of past financial success. Technical success and financial success rarely align these days because technological alignment with financial schemes is the main determinant of financial success in the tech industry. A lot of innovation is brushed under the rug. Useful innovations which could have provided a solid foundation to build upon are completely deprived of funding. Almost every useful innovation becomes a dead end.

schoen 2y ago
The cell organelles are a bit smaller than microelectronics that we can make with photolithography, aren't they? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)#10_nanometres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)#1... Even though that chart lists semiconductor process nodes as down in the single-digit nanometers, the articles about the semiconductor fabrication say that these are marketing terms and don't refer to the size of actual features produced by the fabrication process, which are apparently an order of magnitude larger or so. So you could say cells are still doing some incredibly small-scale (yet voluminous) manufacturing, in a wet environment, such that we couldn't directly manufacture devices like that even if we understood all the details of how they work!

schoen 2y ago

The cell organelles are a bit smaller than microelectronics that we can make with photolithography, aren't they? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)#10_nanometres https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(length)#1... Even though that chart lists semiconductor process nodes as down in the single-digit nanometers, the articles about the semiconductor fabrication say that these are marketing terms and don't refer to the size of actual features produced by the fabrication process, which are apparently an order of magnitude larger or so. So you could say cells are still doing some incredibly small-scale (yet voluminous) manufacturing, in a wet environment, such that we couldn't directly manufacture devices like that even if we understood all the details of how they work!