Neal Stephenson and a Big X

5 responses to “Neal Stephenson and a Big X”

1. 

   jurvetson

   Feb 7, 2012 at 3:54 am

   my teaser post from earlier

   

   Here are some more of my notes:

   • Opening

   How is it that the best minds of our generation have turned to spam filters instead of grand challenges? We have to fear thinking too small.

   “Science has lost its constituency. In 100 – 200 years, it will be the norm to believe that we never went to the moon.”

   • Nutraculture

   Food should be decoupled from nutrition. “Breaking Bread” into its elements.

   1 billion people are chronically undernourished. Food should cost less than 20 cents/lb.

   It may taste like fat , but should curb our appetite.

   Perhaps our food was not optimally designed to feed us. A cow, or a soybean, were not evolved to ideally feed us.

   • Education

   Eliminate sports and universities would be much, much better. We also have to eliminate tenure.

   Of 1.5B children on the planet, 100M do not go to first grade. –They are learning by themselves. In primary school, it’s not what you learn; you have to learn learning itself and become passionate about it.

   In 1975 Logo programmers were better spellers. Why? They were interested in the bugs, not just getting most of it right. Celebrating the bugs is a fundamentally good way to learn.

   We need to be making programming fashionable, reinvent invetning, rediscovering discovering, minimize rote, decelebrating instructionism, and learning to read by yourself.

   So we are going to illiterate villages. No literacy in 200 miles. Can we give them eBooks that allow them to learn to read by themselves?

   Survey of audience (via a custom mobile app built for the event): Innovation in what area has the best chance of adding 10% to our useful lives? [aging, healthcare, transportation, education, workplace productivity, sleeping, other]
   52% of the audience said Education.

   And when asked what the most transformative technology will be?
   71% Synthetic Biology, 12% Chemistry, 12% Computer Science. Many other categories got negligible votes, which brings us to:

   • Syn Bio & Healthcare

   From 2007 to 2011, the cost of DNA sequencing dropped 800x versus 4x for Moore Law.

   But in the past 6- years, new medicines in market per $billion invested has dropped by a factor of 100x. It’s Moore’s law in reverse.

   Medicine’s missing measure: how many lives are lost when the FDA takes 12 years to approve a drug? There has never been a Congressional inquiry on FDA inaction.

   Half of all chronic diseases are CNS disorders., and they have the highest failure rate in late stage clinical trials.

   Retort: “we are all terminally ill”.

   • Global Warming

   Parts of the Arctic Sea are bubbling like champagne with methane from hydrates outgassing on ocean floor.

   When climate change forces the relocation of 1B people, it won’t happen easily. They will burn everything in sight.

   The IEA estimates that we have less than 5 years to address this problem.

   C4 plants have 10x the carbon capture of C3 plants. So sorghum, sugar, and switchgrass >> soybeans, trees, shrubs, flowers.

   A biochar soil amendment keeps the carbon in soil for 100s of years.

   P.S. Juan Enriquez just sent a photo he took, with me unaware

   

   Reply
2. 

   solerena

   Feb 7, 2012 at 10:16 pm

   I watched Mary Lou Jepsen’s video – yes, mind-blowing…. so instead of flickering pictures we will be exchanging freely some 3d holographic images through telepathic channels and such… sounds like fun for visual thinkers:)

   But it is true that our legal framework has to be set-up around something like this and thus it goes back to the same painful issue of our governments being backwards completely and behind the time (plus global corruption aggravated lately to X degree too) and not able to respond to problem solving efficiently and aligned with 21st century demands here… so to move forward – we need to reinvent the politics and governments first. Not sure where is the chiken and where is the egg here… not my call.

   And I enjoyed Neal Stephenson’s tak but cannot agree with him: he a bit undercut a whole revolution by just stating the fact that typewriter was replaced by the computer and internet boom and mobile and bio-nano tech and more… it looks like we are getting close to another turn in a spiral – gathering tools through all these advancements in order to come back and create a major change in space, nuclear, bio-tech and especially physics… one needs to kinda notice these tools and how amazing, large (colliders) and hyper fast (quantum computers) they become and some of them (like mobile phones) are everywhere and so connected.. a whole web- noosphere phenomenon emerged… hm, so nothing has changed? Is he serious? it is a new era… new spiral wave – back to space and other big things (like 60 years ago) through all these new tools..

   Reply
3. 

   obskura

   Feb 7, 2012 at 11:44 pm

   I don’t think I agree with "getting rid of tenure". Currently universities already are staffed with about 80% post-docs, on 1 or 2 year contracts, who are forced to change cities regularly (or mostly, continents) in their idealistic pursuit to contribute to science, chasing the elusive goal of a steady income, some day. Although most will never become professors, taking away the dream of one day being able to have academic freedom would possibly kill the university system. The push for "marketization" of universities in the last decade has done enormous damage in my view.
   I think it harms many areas of science that require a long view, thoroughness, or many years of observation – this kills careers, and people know it (it’s only the idealists who push on regardless…). Coupled with the intense publication pressure, it has led to a flood of non-substantial papers as well, instead of high quality, independence and objectiveness.
   Maybe some people would argue that maybe we don’t need universities, research should only be done by the free market, but I think that would be a big mistake – many big discoveries were made because people were allowed to follow the "odd thing", to be distracted by something they couldn’t explain, without having to worry about being able to support themselves past the next few months.

   Reply
4. 

   scleroplex

   Feb 8, 2012 at 1:02 am

   "expressing the image on the retina" once again betrays the fact that some people still think of it as a screen.

   try expressing the image on a CCD sensor and you’ll see what i mean……..

   Reply
5. 

   mgusek555

   Feb 8, 2012 at 2:57 pm

   Hmmm…I’ll have to watch the videos or attend to comment properly. One thing did pop out that I would agree with, though: Our over-reliance on Instructionism in education (and other places) is very antiquated worldview and is a throwback to 19th century command and control thinking.

   Reply