Anytime we get practical implementations of ideas of the past by scientists and engineers working on it despite cutbacks in funding, I wonder where humanity would be if we at least halved the money spent on state-funded violence and similar counterproductive activities. Flying cars, deep sea habitats, space habitats, clean energy, hair style robots, fully coordinated jam-free personal traffic.
And this future would be even less evenly distributed than the one which exists now, which would lead to even more unrest which the state might try to quell with even more violence. So let's spend a quarter of the money spent on state-violence on future tech, and another quarter on health, education, liberty and peace in the developing world. I think on some level the Bill Gates philanthropist types are doing their charity because they realize that if the future moves too far and too fast then the bottom half just might rise up and destroy it.
Can't upvote this enough. I was recently at a talk by Kenneth Cukier from the Economist and he discussed how our economic climate is similar to the early days of the industrial revolution - inequality is increasing as jobs are being eroded by technology. In the short term, this actually causes problems as a whole generation are essentially displaced by technology and are not able to reskill, but in the long term the next generation inherit the right skill base to benefit from the new trajectory of civilization and mass prosperity is achieved.
The problem is that individuals often cannot see the bigger picture. It also does not necessarily follow that individuals benefit from aggregate wealth creation. If you are unemployed (by technology) and can no longer feed yourself or your dependents why do you really care that goods are now available cheaper and can be delivered 247: you still can't afford them. If in your lifetime technology only brought starvation upon you, why should you care that future generations will benefit. Last I checked, we are not indoctrinated from young to be altruistic martyrs for humanity nor do I recall that being a basic human instinct either.
So displacement is a somewhat inevitable outcome from mass technological disruption. It's very easy to champion progress when you're on the winning side, and ultimately progress is important. It falls to the powerful (the wealthy like Gates and Zuckerberg) and nation States to protect the interest of all citizens to make sure everyone's basic rights are still preserved. Especially over trasitory eras such as the current one.
>but in the long term the next generation inherit the right skill base to benefit from the new trajectory of civilization and mass prosperity is achieved.
I don't think we have enough examples from history to make this in some kind of universal law. Mass prosperity might just as well NOT be achieved.
This is the talk [0]. It was interesting, although in the talk he only addressed the issue of erosion of jobs quite briefly. He spent more time how AI was augmenting/disrupting a variety of industries. It was more of a penny drop moment for me than an in-depth discussion on that particular topic.
The talks were filmed so they may be accessible somewhere, though I know the speaker writes on the subject so his writing may be more readily accessible.
As a free tip/shameless preach a book which has impacted me greatly recently is Ill Fares the Land by Tony Judt[1]. The more people that read this book, the better.
It's why I think capital should be given the old Georgism treatment. Basically, an land-value-like tax which either funds/bolsters welfare or a direct check to all people below the poverty line. Either way, something needs to be done about the inequalities of concentrated capital.
> this future would be even less evenly distributed than the one which exists now
I see a pattern:
- Windows desktop monopoly -> MS makes billions while other software companies get crumbs
- FB social networking monopoly -> ad money collects to FB while regular businesses struggle to make advertising pay
- Apple store -> millions of app devs lose money while Apple becomes the most valuable company on back of their apps
- Recording labels have huge market share -> artists are poor and lose the rights to their own creations by signing unfair contracts
- Middle east oil money in the hands of a few arabs -> massive unrest in the region, state sponsored religion indoctrination, culminating in wars and terrorism
It so happens that accumulating massive wealth and power in the hands of a few leaves the rest of the population high an dry, frustrated and with lots of issues.
Don't forget Apple's app stores giving billions to devs, the billions made by software vendors making windows software, Facebook's platforms generated lots of revenue for other businesses, etc, etc.
I mostly agree, though I'm not sure if Gates and friends are scared of an uprising.
With better and fact-based education we can solve a lot. I don't mean training for jobs, I mean education as a means to, say, reduce killing each other or making more efficient use of earth's resources.
For instance, the best way to fix the problem of people flocking to extremist leaders is more education on all sides. The unknown is scary enough for many people that it's used for them to be led to believe simplified but factually wrong explanations for issues they face.
The sentiment that education can solve a lot of societal problems is a popular one, especially on HN, but it presumes that people's outlook and worldview are primarily or at least substantially influenced by "facts" and introduction to a sufficient number of such facts will result in the adoption of a better worldview for whatever definition of "better" you prefer. In reality, people are much more influenced by those with whom they associate whether those links be tribal, familial, political, etc. Each of those groups has a narrative for how the world works and facts that challenge that narrative are downplayed or ignored while facts that support that narrative are promoted. There are those whose associations change dramatically as a result of confronting facts that challenged the narrative of their group, often combined with some sort of personal crisis, but they are among the minority. Most of us go through our lives without seriously challenging the basic narrative of our associates and increasing our exposure to facts isn't going to change that.
That's because part of education is learning to think critically, which specifically means learning to overcome those biases you mention. You say "in reality" as if those supporting education are't aware of human nature, but it's precisely because they are aware that they want people to be better educated, it helps overcome the petty tribalism inherent to the uneducated.
You're incorrect about what it presumes; valuing facts is something most people need to be taught. That's why there's always a push for education, otherwise you end up with Trumpism.
The "petty tribalism inherent to the uneducated"? As if the salary class – highly-educated left-learning professionals – doesn't have it's own tribal affiliations, it's own status markers, its own inconvenient facts that it excludes for the sake of a higher narrative?
Are we now disputing that ignorance is a bad thing, really? Do you think society is better off with more uneducated people? Racism, bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, etc are all symptoms of ignorance; those are petty tribalisms. Ignorance isn't something to defend, but to strive to eliminate.
When did I dispute ignorance is a bad thing? I'm just saying that the first stop in fighting ignorance is looking at yourself? What inconvenient facts do you refuse to accept? Where do you apply standards unevenly? Where are you showing confirmation bias?
Telling people from another tribe that they are ignorant has never changed anything.
You're have a point, though if we can reduce the amount of people that are clueless about important facts, that will also reduce the pool of new recruits into their ideologies. This is not a cure for vocal minorities spreading dangerous lies, but the more people know and understand the truth, the less there will be who are, for lack of a better word, gullible in certain topics.
I think societal unrest doesn't necessarily come from lack of education, but from the perceived feeling that parts of society are disenfranchised, a feeling of powerlessness, of being against a "corrupt system" that does not have their best interest at heart. It's the lack of social mobility, or perceived lack of social mobility that causes unrest.
I was talking about extremist leaders recruiting people, and your point is true. With better education those who are oppressed are actually more likely to take notice and "rebel". I wrote in a sibling comment that everyone should be better educated, including oppressors, thereby ideally making them realize that it's a short-term game they're playing, for example.
Remember, Gates' and Zuckerberg's wealth is the product of society itself -- the reason they are so "wealthy" is because we believe in and partake in a system that reinforces their wealth and high value.
The biggest threat to their wealth would be a collapse of the current society -- the status quo -- and so, although they may have SOME material goods (okay, more than most others), the vast majority of the value of what that they have is merely on paper or "stock," whose value is determined entirely socially.
Of course, their value could vanish in an instant if society no longer believes in their wealth or the system that proliferated it.
Granted, it would take a "total collapse" (and resultant lack of faith in our economic system) for this to happen, but historically, societies don't fail gradually or softly, they implode.
A real life example of such a loss of "faith" in a massive quantity of wealth that isn't civilization-scale such as the fall of the Roman Empire (as recent in history as it is) on an individual-scale would be Theranos and the instantaneous deflation of Holmes' net worth from a socially propped-up "cool billion" to zilch.
People en masse generally don't take too well to mass corruption. Over history, the average lifespan of a social empire has been 300 years, and the western-dominated global sociopolitical landscape est. 1776 (largely a product of American military superiority and foreign interventionalism) is now getting a little long in the tooth.
It's in their best interest to keep giving the masses their opiate.
I'm not sure I understand the point you are making. Are you saying if there are too many technological advances, the 'bottom' population will uprise? And you mention industrial revolution as a case in point? Please clatify if I'm mistaken...
The industrial revolution did not seek the advancement of mankind, but mostly the financial advancement of a few fortunate wealthy 'barons'. I think the your comment`s Parent is meant to signify that if we stop focusing on fear and the spread of violence and instead focus on solutions which are all inclusive, we would be better off (this I agree with).
He's not saying if there are too many, he's saying if it happens too fast. If all of our cars became self-driving tomorrow, and the American Trucker Association's estimates are correct [1], then 3 million truck drivers will suddenly be out of of jobs.
We live in the real world so change doesn't happen overnight, but if truck driving becomes out-moded significantly faster than a truck driver could learn a new skill, then the displaced population will riot because they worked hard and did nothing wrong their whole lives and machines replaced them anyway.
And this is true for nearly all blue-collar and some white-collar workers, whose jobs would be threatened by advancements and automation made in their sector
Yep, it's not about technology, more about concentration of power and its effects on society. Technological advancements are massive opportunities for power grabs.
>another quarter on health, education, liberty and peace in the developing world.
At least for part of it, in the US, almost half of spending is spent on welfare: social security and healthcare[0].
The problem is more nuanced than just "cutting defense" to make it 29% instead of 25%. I'm a pretty liberal guy, and I think a public option would eventually be cheaper in the long run than obamacare or what we had before, but I am under no delusion that simply throwing more money at the problem will fix it.
Academia requires more money, I agree. But what accounts for a quarter of spending already requires new ideas, not more money.
Obviously those that do have do not want to distribute what they feel belongs to them, but this has been the case for forever. It's just a question of 'how much is too much'.
IMHO, Einstein had a great idea. While he's not known for his political beliefs, he did have them, and theorized a societal structure where the richest person could be up to, but not more than 10 times richer than the poorest person.
While it's obviously difficult to impossible to easily implement, I do believe that having a more evenly distributed society would solve most of humanity's violence problems, and maintaining some level of hierarchy based on merit/effort allows for healthy growth and positive incentives.
We've already had that experiment - it was called "the 60s" - obscene amounts of money (basically a blank check) was given scientist to reach the sky and we went from barely touching the atmosphere to sending humans to the moon, sending robots everywhere else, inventing robots for that matter. And from the investments from that era came the american semiconductor breackthroughs aka - Silicon Valley. So yeah we've seen it happen, it's amazing and I hope I could witness such a magical period in my lifetime. Sigh...
I have seen people argue that we wasted a lot of money on the space effort, and if we had not allocated so many resources there we could have had smart phones 10 years sooner. Of course you can never know, but it is something to consider. Those semiconductor breakthroughs probably would have happened sooner - the moon mission was happy with vacuum tubes on the ground and the transistors of the day: their big problems of engineering were not in the electronics area.
Or to put it a different way, if we put similar effort into genetic engineering we could have fire breathing dragons instead. Nobody has been to the moon in my lifetime (and I'm getting old!), and I have no hope of going (though probably someone will go in the next 10 years it won't be me). At least the circus could show me a dragon.
"the moon mission was happy with vacuum tubes on the ground and the transistors of the day"
That is not actually the case. The Apollo Guidance Computer was one of the first (possibly the first) computers to use integrated circuits (RTL).
One of my professors in undergrad worked on it. They built the whole thing out of NOR gates, figuring that it would be better to have one component and test the crap out of it than have several different components. It's possible to think up arguments either way, but in any case, it worked. :-)
Of course, as long as you have either NAND or NOR (or either AND or OR and an inverter), it's possible to build any Boolean logic function.
In the hypothetical scenario where we didn't have a "space race" with Russia doesn't mean humans would not have figured out how to send a few satellites to space. Or learned how to triangulate signals to make GPS work.
The OP said "lots of money was wasted". Sending rockets into space was very valuable. I don't think anyone questions that. But that was hardly the only part of the space race.
People need to be more self sustained. We need technologies that will empower people and communities to rely on themselves and not depend on systems that are outside their control as much. I think that efficient agriculture in the hands of small communities, solar, 3d-printing, open sourced robotics and AI, open source and creative commons in general would help ease a lot of this tension. Violence comes from disenfranchisement and being socially marginalized, but if each community could stand on its own feet, this would be much less the case.
We need to reduce the gap between the super powerful and ordinary people to have a less polarized society, and I fear this will not happen through politics, but rather from technological empowerment. People are living today at a much higher standard than a century ago, and we have all seen the benefits of putting an internet enabled mobile phone in the hands of everyone - the things we could do today that we wouldn't have dreamed of 40 years ago... We just need to spread the benefits more evenly.
He's not even talking about an end, just a reduction in spending. When you look at how much mayhem is going in in Syria, it's hard to believe that you need to spend trillions just to massacre people.
Yeah, many people has wondered this sometime in their life. Unfortunately, it's not going to happen for the foreseeable future.
Rather than dream about the ideal world and not changing anything, we'd be much better off figuring out clever ways of financing more R&D, moonshots, etc. More X-Prizes, for example?
I totally agree. The only problem is that when we innovate, sometimes parts of society fall behind. The real turning point to bring about what you speak of is how to enable all of society to reap the benefits of innovation. If you have a way to do that, and gain buy-in from the entirety of the third rock, then we can make some real progress :).
What one does with innovations is up to us. We can use it to wreak havoc or widen the poverty gap by benefiting just 1%, but we can also use it to solve critical issues and reap positive effects.
I think they're saying the state-funded violence and whatnot often leads to advancements that spill out into the broader scientific world, e.g., many DARPA projects.
If you spend 50% of your money through the military it is inevitable that much of your useful work will end up being funded that way. This in no way means we need to spend through the military; the same useful work could be funded regardless.
If. US is currently at 12%. Education, health care and pensions currently amount to > 60%. So its easy to cry wolf. We're really in a much better place than chicken little would have us all think.
Uh, why? That's the portion of the budget that Congress actually has control over. Furthermore the mandatory portion (entitlements) are fundamentally different - you pay into the system through payroll taxes and pay out later during retirement. Vastly different from taking money from income taxes and using it to buy guns and planes.
> That's the portion of the budget that Congress actually has control over.
Congress has control over the whole budget. Unlike, e.g., the California Legislature and voter-mandated Constitutional spending in the state budget, there are no "mandates" in the "mandatory" part of the federal budget from some authority that transcends Congress, and it is well established that past acts of Congress do not bind future Congresses, or even future acts of the same Congress.
> Furthermore the mandatory portion (entitlements) are fundamentally different - you pay into the system through payroll taxes and pay out later during retirement.
That's not entirely true. While mandatory spending does include the payroll-tax-funded Social Security and Medicare programs, it also includes programs that are funded from general revenues like Medicaid, SNAP, EITC and the Child tax credit, etc.
Assuming the percentage you cited is right, I do think the relative numbers are less important in my assertion than the absolute because with the current tools at hand it's hard to reduce that > 60% part. Only by finding better tools through more research can we, for example, reduce the need to spend that much on health care and pensions. If you consider the absolute amount spent on the battling part of the forces, I would like for battles, if they have to be fought, to shift into cyber space. Just getting rid of money spent on munitions alone would be huge. And more cyber wars means stronger need to build and use more secure IT infrastructure which will benefit everybody.
Right, and I'm saying that if the funding changes, then hopefully more of it will be on topics that are useful for civilians' problems too. That means, more research on, say, cyber warfare would inevitably trickle down to the civilian world as technological improvements. Also, if more of the battles are in the cyber realm, then even if the same amount is spent, at least the chances of collateral damage will likely be lower.
So, let's fund things that make people live longer and save their lives but not things to help solve problems related to increased and older population? Seems asinine.
I don't know where you think I wrote the above to be a full list of things I consider in need of more research, but I can assure you that it was a sample of stuff I find is not getting enough focus. So, I certainly would include issues of the increasing unbalanced population too.
The department of defensive funds a lot of science. Don't forget that progress in most of the fields you mentioned came directly from military tagged expendature.
Exactly, and I'm saying if their focus would shift a little and, if absolutely necessary, take wars into the cyber realm, then more progress would come out of that which is applicable in civilian life. We just need the right goals for the desired side products to emerge. The race to get someone on the moon and back was one such overarching goal.
>We show that when MC-1 cells bearing covalently bound drug-containing nanoliposomes were injected near the tumour in severe combined immunodeficient beige mice and magnetically guided, up to 55% of MC-1 cells penetrated into hypoxic regions of HCT116 colorectal xenografts. Approximately 70 drug-loaded nanoliposomes were attached to each MC-1 cell. Our results suggest that harnessing swarms of microorganisms exhibiting magneto-aerotactic behaviour can significantly improve the therapeutic index of various nanocarriers in tumour hypoxic regions.
So they load these little guys up with drug and use magnets to guide them into the tumor, which kind of works in SCID mice, although you'll note they make no claims about ability to actually kill or shrink tumors.
This news piece is awful, incidentally, but what else is new.
Good question: (1) open access so people can read the original research, (2) better writing therein so people will actually understand what they read, will surely help.
This is pretty cool research, from what I can recall hypoxic tissue is hard to treat for three reasons:
1. It is hard to detect
2. Hypoxic tissue is hard to access as there is little blood supply
3. Hypoxic tissue is hard and physically robust
So according to this release, the work done here should help to address the issues of hypoxic tissue.
Is anyone with deeper subject knowledge able to discuss the viability of this research: how much is hype? Are there any risks or weaknesses to this method? How commercially viable is it to mass produce this?
Not an expert, but #2 you bring up is pretty valid. Aside from directly administering a drug or agent, there is a reliance on the circulatory system to carry drugs to their targets. As for risks, any time you introduce a bunch of little things into the blood, that are likely (or possibly might) gather together, you have a potential risk of a stroke.
I wish these articles wouldn't turn up here. Although this sounds cool, the chance of having an impact on actual patient care is miniscule. This is a very complcated delivery system at the end of the day. We have enough trouble giving one drug and managing toxicity successfully, let alone this controlled nano infection cocktail. Also hypoxia isn't as tumour specific as you think, off target toxicity is a problem.
I don't think anyone will be cured by this and it will no doubt cost an absolute fortune.
That was exactly my first thought as well. It was a movie that definitely carved itself to my memory (though I saw it only on TV some time in early 1970's, no movie theatres around my place)
It has nothing to do with that. It's still a mass-release into the blood stream, just like you would do with the molecules in a drug. It gets distributed everywhere. It can't go to a specific target, there are not road signs in arteries and capillaries and there is no active propulsion. What makes it "targeted" is that only those nano-containers release the drug that happen to find specific conditions of the targeted tissue. Normal targeting with small molecules (of drugs) is done by "3D pattern matching" - the molecules of the drug fit into or onto target molecules. Doesn't work if you don't have specific target molecules. So in this case instead of targeting molecules they target something else, which you can't do with a normal drug since then the only targeting you have is the 3D shape of the drug molecule.
Here is a visualization of a small molecule binding to a protein (also a small one here, they often are much larger and incredibly complex - but predictablly so, since their chemical structure detemines how they fold): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2Zj23pipuY
It's not a drug molecule but the exact same principle.
The problem of normal drugs is that their shape and structure cannot be solely determined by the function they have to perform at the target. As a drug designer you have to design them that
a) They are delivered at all, which includes a lot of difficulties on its own, like oral drugs having to pass through the very active liver, or that it has to be hydrophilic to be transported in blood but hydrophobic to get through cell membranes into cells.
b) Since you cannot control where they end up they get everywhere, and they meet a zillion molecules on their way. If they bind anywhere else but in their target site, which is likely given that drugs are small molecules and the number of potential binding sites is huge, it's what you get to hear about as "side effects" of the drug.
So by putting the drug molecule into a container you now have the advantage that you separate transport and target selection from the drug action, and the drug designer can concentrate on the effect on the target without having to worry about how it gets there and undesirable interactions everywhere else.
The nano containers are still distributed throughout the whole body though, they just won't open at non-target sites.
Haven't we already had this for a long time? Targeted drug delivery using Nano technology? A lesser complicated version and less of the sci fi but the technology has been here and proven for a long time with some FDA approved drugs already. Most of the drugs are still in trial but targeted drug delivery looks promising.
Anybody know when/if this type of treatment could be used? Any idea of the increase in the effectiveness of cancer treatments using this technology? I read the article and skimmed the paper but didn't get an idea of whether or not this technology is on a clear path to being a medical option for cancer patients.
Anybody know when/if this type of treatment could be used?
At the earliest a decade. Effectiveness of the treatment wasn't evaluated. Just the delivery mechanism. This things are kind of a toss up, because this isn't a drug per say, but a delivery method.
It's pretty cutting edge tech. But if the right $$$ is behind it potentially see us in 5-10 years. But this would cost a load, and require a lot more researches be involved. This is before we even get to human trials.
Generally a drug/therapy isn't going to make it to market until the research teams spins off, or joins a bio-med startup. Then its 3-5 years away. Bio-med startups normally front the huge testing costs, then simply sell the patent+FDA approved drug to a large phrama firm for a HUGE pay off.
I remember reading Prey by Michael Crichton as a teenager and wondering if the nanobots he described there could be used to "eat" a tumor, like leaf-cutter ants gradually moving bits of material in a pipeline from one place to another. Glad to see that kind of idea realized in my lifetime.
