Comment by tacon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tacon | Hacker News Reader

This piece is of amazingly low quality. Almost all the "discoveries and innovations" are echoes of work performed before the golden quarter. For example, Alexander Fleming noticed the effect of penicillin in 1928. The engineering of a useful drug didn't happen until 1942. Sulfanomides were in regular use in the 1930s. But, hey, let's assign "antibiotics" to the Golden Quarter.

But the laugh out loud quote is this:

"if you were a biologist, physicist or materials scientist, there was no better time to be working"

Physics is slower now because the energy levels to probe new phenonmena is getting awfully big, but biology? That is simply ludicrous. The golden age of biology is right now, and for the next fifty years. Today's material scientists are building things atom by atom, with undreamed of properties, and nanotechnology wasn't even a dream back then.

I'd summarize the Golden Quarter as that time when the low hanging fruit dropped into the exponential growth of scientific and engineering advances. But the idea that we aren't innovating at a blistering pace today - so far off the mark.

Where is my "built atom-by-atom" computer? Where is the nanotechnology? Are you talking about the water-repelling coating on my pants which died away after several washes? Where are my 3D-printed organs? That's exactly the point of the article! We see thousands of amazing things in labs every year. When I will be able to buy any of them in a regular shop? The pace at which things get from labs to end consumers is baffling! We saw DNA-made nano-robots that could deliver drugs to tumors four years ago (in a TED talk). So why all the governments didn't rush to pour billions into that project? We could've seen first results in hospitals by now.

And as I understand the article, that's what would happen had we lived in the Golden Quarter. And now we are too doubtful because we're conservative about financial risks and unfocused because we have so many advancements and we cannot fund them all.

The author is right. Only amazing (indeed spectacular, jaw-dropping!) things that I've seen in my hands or on the streets in past 20 years are miniaturized electronics (including cameras) and ubiquitous communication (internet). And GPS is cool, by the way.

Radius of a Silicon atom is about 0.11 nanometers; Intel produces CPUs that have 22 nanometers technology. Not exactly "atom-by-atom", but pretty close (only two orders of magnitude).

Thank you, you are right. But do you get my idea? That the number of qualitatively new things (that give us entirely new capabilities like "not dying from smallpox" or "flying over Atlantic") is suspiciously low in past 20 years. Yes, miniaturization. Yes, GPS. Yes, communication/information access anytime anywhere. Yes, low-clost airlines. Anything else? My computer today can not do many things which Pentium-166 couldn't do. Navigation on iPhone 3G was as good as one on iPhone 5S (New versions of the apps are only getting slower so we're forced to buy new phone every year. But my old one was fast two years ago!)

Bitcoin. Ubiquitous news reporting (death of newspapers). Privatized space industry. Twitter. Netflix. Gene sequencing for pennies. Working from home. 3D printing.

Its easy to list whole categories of innovation, and say "Anything else?" Aren't those enough?

> Bitcoin. Ubiquitous news reporting (death of newspapers). Privatized space industry. Twitter. Netflix. Gene sequencing for pennies. Working from home. 3D printing. Its easy to list whole categories of innovation, and say "Anything else?" Aren't those enough?

What qualitatively new capability Bitcoin gives me? What's Twitter? Online movies? Well, yes! It does not improve our lives radically but still.

> Privatized space industry.

You get the point here. Nice!

> Gene sequencing for pennies.

We need faster/wider adoption of it. Article mentions it. Right now I cannot benefit from it in everyday hospital.

> Working from home.

Was possible before. Only quantitative improvement. Although awesome.

> 3D printing

Is a good counter-example. It's been around for years. And still I didn't hear about someone who uses it on a daily basis to improve their lives. Amazing applications in medicine is the only exclusion so far. Expensive industrial 3D-printers for prototyping etc. are well expensive and not wide-spread.

> Right now I cannot benefit from [cheap gene sequencing] in everyday hospital.

I work in a lab with people who are working on developing diagnostics for transplant rejection based on sequencing the RNA from a small sample of your blood and using a trained machine learning classifier to diagnose rejection (I'm tangentially involved in this project). It's still a ways away from clinical application, but if successful, it could replace the current gold standard for diagnosis, which is an invasive biopsy of the graft that is then manually inspected under a microscope by a trained histologist.

That's a pretty big step up, from a biopsy and a histologist to a few drops of blood and a computer classifier to diagnose transplant rejection with the same accuracy. It would mean that you could monitor for signs of rejection much more often because drawing blood is much less invasive. This, in turn, would allow you to detect rejection events much earlier and take action to control the inflammation and prevent loss of the graft before it's too late. There's huge potential for quality-of-life improvements here. And I can assure you many other labs are applying the same methods to all sorts of diagnostic problems, not just transplant rejection. I could imagine a future where we have hundreds of trained classifiers for all sorts of diseases based on blood gene expression, and as a routine part of a doctor's visit, your blood will be drawn, sequenced in a matter of minutes, and run through all of these classifiers to identify any diseases you might possibly have, which can then be tested for by more accurate conventional tests now that the doctor knows what to test for.

Here's the paper I was involved in: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24725967

Here's a similar earlier paper that will also give you the idea of what we're up to and that I think is public access: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2041877/

Thanks!

Would you settle for not dying from AIDS? Landing on a comet? Airbags in cars? The world-wide web? (Don't laugh - that amount of information available at your desk is a qualitative change.)

Then there's the smaller stuff that adds up. In the "golden era", you had to tune up your car every 3,000 miles or so. My 2004 and 2005 cars needed tune-ups after 100,000 miles. In the "golden era", we took an un-air-conditioned car to visit my grandparents in Arizona. We did it in the summer, because that's when my brother and I were off of school. Yeah, that was fun... not. Now, you would have a very hard time buying a car without air conditioning.

Can you recommend any other articles that share your view? The perspective of the present time is strange. I share the authors view that progress happened much more rapidly in the past, and that the future always seems 10 years out. Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it?

> Is that simply my brain playing tricks on me or is there any validity to it?

Just look at whatever device is currently in your pants pocket.

Really? I feel like I can do mostly the same - and possibly a little less - with my pocket device than I used to do with my PC in the 90s. (For context I grew up in the 90s as a child programmer.)

I feel like the devices do mostly the same stuff, just more of it, and more portably. With new caveats.

Obviously the hardware improvements have been incredible. The software capabilities? I'm less inclined. (Software is probably more stable - I'll give it that.)

It may be just a "distortion" of perception of the past: several decades in the past are much more "succinct" to our present view than a month half a year ago; we look at all the achievements in several decades before us at once, whereas it's an entire half of our own lifespan.

Or another way to view it, WW2 had diverted innovation towards the war effort and the non-war items were stalled until long after the war when the opportunity to commercialise many decades of work arrived within a couple of decades.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com