this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
118 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59092 readers
6622 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
... am I getting old or is the world getting noticeably more sci fi? Or both?
You're definitely not getting young.
Well...not yet. They are still working on perfecting that one.
Not yet, anyways
In the bio-tech space specifically, most of these recent advancements (e.g. protein folding) are a direct result of advancements in Deep Neural Networks. This is because things that are impossible to model explicitly without a working understanding of the system are easily understood by a neural network. The reasons for this are precisely the same reasons why we ourselves are so good at the task. For a real world example of humans being applied to a similar task, look up the Japanese educational industry around chick sexing.
Around what?!
Lol from Wikipedia, "Chick sexing is the method of distinguishing the sex of chickens and other hatchlings." For further context, this is done by a highly trained individual who is able to briefly look at the cloaca of a chick and immediately recognize their sex. They are even known to be able to perform this on two chicks at the same time (one in each hand). Joshua Foer briefly talks about it in his book Moonwalking with Einstein where he attributes the skill to the incredible ability of humans to perform rote memorization. I think it is better understood as an example of the incredible abilities of these sorts of neural networks (digital and biological) for pattern identification.
There is absolutely no possible way this was a coincidence, and I applaud it.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/A939QRRSNV4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Technological progress is a helluva drug.