Technology Will Save The World

[Parsad]

I'm a firm believer that much of what pains humanity and the Earth, will be solved over time by technology...as long as we don't blow ourselves up and set us back 100 years!

Here's an article that discusses how science is slowly resurrecting organisms that have been long gone.  Cheers!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-20/32-000-year-old-plant-reborn-from-ancient-fruit-found-in-siberian-ice.html

[ValueCarl]

I think we're at the cusp or edge of another GREAT BULL MARKET, and yes, it is being led by TECHNOLOGY not unlike the early nineties. This being said, I expect to see some damn WINNING tech stocks in your portfolio at the NEXT TURN!  Now you're talking Parsad!   

[Arden]

Technology is a bit too broad to choose winners. Don't forget - 100 years ago airplanes were high tech.
These days, everything that's "computery" is considered advanced, but do you think that 15 years from now we will still be impressed by software is? maybe, maybe not.
Maybe we will have nanochips that cure diseases, and the ones that make tons of money will be biologists and bio companies or something.

I do hope technology will live up to what we hope, But I doubt there will ever be a "singularity"  (for those of you who don't know- it's the theory that says that one day we will make a computer smarter than any human, and use it to build even better computers which will build better ones, so at that point technology and advancement will rise infinitely very very fast)

[Ben Graham]

I'm a firm believer that much of what pains humanity and the Earth, will be solved over time by technology...as long as we don't blow ourselves up and set us back 100 years!

Here's an article that discusses how science is slowly resurrecting organisms that have been long gone.  Cheers!

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-20/32-000-year-old-plant-reborn-from-ancient-fruit-found-in-siberian-ice.html

We can never be sure what will happen – and certainly not when – but it’s important to be prepared for what’s likely to lie ahead. And understanding the inevitable pendulum swing in the way investments are viewed – from weeds to flowers and back – is an essential ingredient in being able to do so.

Warren Buffett “I’ve commented about junk bonds that last year’s weeds have become this year’s flowers. I liked them better when they were weeds.”


Thank you Parsad, for planting a new crop of seeds for all of us to think ahead about.     

Invest in companies that are helping to stimulate the biggest change in communications technology in 100 years, like IBM, Intel, DirecTV, Fairfax & Berkshire Hathaway.

[Liberty]

I'm definitely among the ranks of the techno-optimists. We get used to it all so quickly, but if we were transported back just a few decades ago - or if we took someone from that time and brought them to the present - we'd see pretty quickly just how wonderful progress has been.

Anything that can be done according to the laws of physics will eventually be done, but we do have to be careful about catastrophic risks (nuclear war, supervolcanos, asteroids, super-plagues, etc). We really don't spend enough resources to prevent these, considering just how big their impact would be.

There's a great book about this compiled by an Oxford University polymath (Nick Bostrom):

http://www.global-catastrophic-risks.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Global-Catastrophic-Risks-Nick-Bostrom/dp/0199606501/

[Uccmal]

I always have mixed feelings about tech. development.  Sometimes,  it brings to mind the ST orginal episode "miri" where the society develops an anti-aging virus that runs amok killing all the adults but giving the unsupervised children extremely long lives.  Seems to me we need social development to occur at the same time. 

It always helps to keep things in context.  Computers are calculators, nothing more.  The only reason one could pass the Turing test is by being programmed with all the right answers.  Data speed or storage reaching a certain point does not spontaneously combust to become a "living being", so far.  It just becomes a better, faster calculator. 

As to the above, what if resurrecting a plant from the distant past unleashes a dormant plant virus as well, that kills the world's wheat crops.  Time to go wallow in a corner somewhere....

[Arden]

Uccman, I feel similarly about computers. Most of my engineer friends tend to overestimate computers and technology IMO.

About the wheat crops- We don't grow as much wheat as one might think, the plant we are most dependent on is... corn. it's practically everywhere, and we're so dependent on it that a virus could really do some serious damage ,I don't think it will come from a lab though- as smart as we think we are, evolution is way, way better than us at designing things - we can't even cure AIDS because the mutations keep beating our best attempts, and that's when we know the enemy.

The real bummer is that the faster we advance in medicine- the more we need it. a century ago it would be rare to meet someone with glasses, now that bad eyesight doesn't get you killed- it's almost 50% in some countries. fertility treatments mean more genetically infertile people. as we advance, we will become a more dependent animal.

[jb85]

Anyone have any thoughts on Ray Kurzweil predictions?  Bill Gates says he agrees with a lot of his predictions, some of which are here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzweil

[bargainman]

It always helps to keep things in context.  Computers are calculators, nothing more.  The only reason one could pass the Turing test is by being programmed with all the right answers.  Data speed or storage reaching a certain point does not spontaneously combust to become a "living being", so far.  It just becomes a better, faster calculator. 

A better faster calculator that can be used for massively more interesting and useful purposes, in a much cheaper fashion than before.  For an example take a look at this TED talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_resnick_welcome_to_the_genomic_revolution.html

Moores law for genetics.  Soon we'll be able to sequence our genomes for a pittance.  And by soon I mean within the decade or sooner.

With regards to combusting to become a living being?  That's a tough one.  There are several theories on that.  I think Ray Kurzweil thinks that it's all about the number of connections, and theorizes that computers will have the same number of connections as the brain sometime around 2035 if i remember correctly.  Also worth reading is this:
http://singinst.org/overview/whatisthesingularity/

But there's someone else who thinks Kurzeil radically underestimates the number of connections needed.

I'm really not sure whether there will be a singularity or not.  The reality is that today 'greater than human intelligence' already exists IMO.  Think about how smart someone with a computer is vs without.  Think about how smart someone who has access to the latest technology of any sort is vs someone like this:

http://thecnnfreedomproject.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/13/hope-for-vietnams-children-of-the-dump/?hpt=hp_c1

Today we've already seen years of exponentially growing intelligence.  Computers are designed with computers. Then those new computers are used to design the next breed, which leads to exponential advancement. 

So there are two forces that pull on eachother I think.  The people who have access to technology get smarter and design better technology and pull away from the 'have nots'.  But then there's the other effect where things keep getting cheaper and more accessible to everyone, preventing the 'have's' from pulling away too far.  Think of how cheap it is today for someone to have a smart phone which has more tech in it than mainframes did maybe 50 years ago!  But the pace keeps increasing.  There are things like this:

http://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney.html

basically 3d printing is becoming more and more accessible, even for biological tissue. 

There's also talk that some company has figured out how to take your cells and convert them back to the precursor to stem cells  (pluripotent stem cells) with full telomeres in place (resetting the time clock basically)
http://www.investorsinsight.com/blogs/john_mauldins_outside_the_box/archive/2011/02/28/want-a-new-cardiovascular-system.aspx

So people may not need stem cell donors they may be able to reuse their own cells.

Lots of stuff to be both excited about and fearful of as well!

But as someone else pointed out the food vs growing population part is a bit scary.   It sounds like yields are no long increasing at the same rate as before, and top soil continues to be depleted..  Not sure how much further technology can help there..

[link01]

A Conversation with Peter Thiel

http://www.the-american-interest.com/article.cfm?piece=1187

"...We have different kinds of challenges on the government side. One is a little more philosophical in nature: We tend to think the future is indeterminate. But it used to be seen as a much more determinate thing and subject to rational planning. If it’s fundamentally unknowable, it doesn’t make sense to say anything about it. To put it in mathematical terms, we’ve had a shift from thinking of the world in terms of calculus to statistics. So, where we once tracked the motions of the heavenly bodies and could send Voyager to Jupiter over a multiyear trajectory, now we tend to think nature is fundamentally driven by the random movements of atoms or the Black-Scholes mathematical model of financial markets—the random walk down Wall Street. You can’t know where things are going; you only know they’re going to be random. I think some things are true about this statistical view of the future, but it’s extremely toxic for any kind of rational planning. It’s probably linked in part to the failure of state communist central planning, though I would argue that there is something to be said for some planning over no planning. We should debate whether it should be decentralized or centralized, but what the United States has today is an extremely big government, a quasi-socialist government, but without a five-year plan, with no plan whatsoever..."