Technology & Social Media Robots.

One of the reasons I am interested in investing, is that I feel the medical profession (like many others) is on it's last legs as we know it. Looking at the advances in other areas, how we treat certain diseases will no doubt be looked upon with the same disdain we know consider blood-letting and leaches.

I went to a thought-provoking, exciting but terrifying lecture tonight by a man involved in robotic design, who regaled us with Moore's law, of doubling computer power every 2 years, and how we are at a crux of technological advances across many fields coming to a meeting point. And if progress at our stage doubles at this rate (which it is, and will), then we have little comprehension of what is coming.

We have operations now that can be done better, faster and more reliably by robot.

A robot cloud will capture, integrate and allow deep learning such that we will be made obsolete (if we aren't already).

Check out IBM Watson: IBM Watson Health: Welcome to the New Era of Cognitive Healthcare . Can read 40 million journal articles on cancer in 15 seconds. Imagine when we (it) can then incorporate genetic information, drug information, design information and formulate solutions.

I've thought that reading x-rays should be done by computer programs - apparently this is a cinch, and already exists. Histopathology. Decision making can be done by a multitude of patients telling their stories to a robot, whose knowledge persists forever in a cumulative fashion.

And this is one tiny corner of our lives, that really is lagging behind many, many other industries.

My mind was blown seeing what is ALREADY happening, let alone what is coming. I cannot see any other time in history where our compounding knowledge and it's sequelae has been poised to take off.

 

[QUOTE="Bran, post: 234078, member: 496"
Check out IBM Watson: IBM Watson Health: Welcome to the New Era of Cognitive Healthcare [/QUOTE]
You should check out the cutting edge stuff Cyberdyne Systems are developing.

 

On what is coming, I'd highly recommend this long, but engaging read for anyone interested in advancements of AI:

Part 1: The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1 - Wait But Why
Part 2: The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 2 - Wait But Why

 

Quantum computing will accelerate Moore's Law in a few years.

Off topic: I was teaching my 8 year old about gravitational waves and Einsteins theory of relativity tonight. He was loving it!

 

Nanobots will in my view be the biggest thing to hit the health industry.

Imagine a world where your blood is replaced by microscopic robots, they move around your veins just like blood, they carry the perfect amount of oxygen. You never get sick because before it's even a problem these little dudes take care of it and expel it from your body.

No cancer, no disease and no death.

What's that? Population will go mental? Not if the nanobots don't allow you to get pregnant .

Obviously there will still be cases of death where a trauma is too much for them to fix ie getting hit by a fast moving train but in general it could be a solution to mankind's worse illness.... Death.

 

Histopathology - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
That's seems to be a real game changer within itself,maybe all those books by Arthur C Clarke were a bit ahead of their time..
Sir Arthur C. Clarke

 

Exciting and interesting times ahead. IMO people have been terrible at predicting when and which problems will be solved by technology. I wouldn't be at all surprised if problems we think will be solved aren't and if things we haven't even considered get solved.

Potentially, I doubt consumer products will be accelerated ahead of the law however. It is much more profitable introducing new products at the rate of Moore's Law.

I remember (ok I read) a similar thing been said when penicillin was first introduced, now we are running out of antibiotics.

 

It's an interesting point, will there simply be a shift from a virus being biological to being technical?

Will these nanobots be able to be hacked?

No matter what we make, someone somewhere will be able to understand it and unmake it.

Will someone create a virus which allows us to remote control people against their will through the nanobots?

Will we ultimately end up being the terminators as opposed to actual machines?

Will we be the demise of man!!!!

OK so I got a little carried away at the end but it does bring some really interesting discussion points to the table .

 

Your industry is going to be enormously disrupted @Bran, no doubt. As are many others. Deep learning coupled with the exponential growth of tech is already staggering the mind...a few more doublings and the world will be a very different place.

Glad you had a chance to see what's on the way.

I believe it won't be long before medical professionals will find their roles skewed towards almost entirely to the human interaction side of things with diagnosis and "hands on" stuff like surgery increasingly shifting towards our new overlords

 

I don't think so. The medical profession has a very powerful union.

 

A step further than that, once vaccines are found for everything - hepatitis, cancer, MND, parksinsons, dementia, etc etc etc, will medicine only involve injury patching?

 

I would suspect that as we push out our life expectancy there will be wonderful new ailments we discover that will require treatment.

 

I love the advances and growth. People have a much better quality of life now than 100 years ago as a result of technology.

 

..... and I thought going to the moon was pretty amazing

 

It still is amazing, when you consider that most people carry around a device with more computing power than the entire first manned flight had .

 

Absolutely, I hope I did not come across as treating thread as trivia, I meant quite the opposite? that's why forums can be a pain sometimes cos its easy to misconstrue, its in my head but sometimes the delivery is wrong

For me I had a laugh, because I recall people saying some years later..... mankind could not achieve anything greater than going to the moon, now how silly is that

 

All good mate, I knew what you meant .

I love how man achieves something, then the first question they ask is "How do we do it better"

 

I used said device to order and pay for a coffee from my local bakery! Just ran in and collected! Cray cray

 

Maybe not replacing blood cells, but we do have technology that can enter blood vessels, negate the colour and enable the camera to see through the vessel walls. This came from japanese deep ocean drilling that stirs up dirt and obscures views that they have developed algorithms to see through it

 

It's all pattern recognition. A histopathologist reaches his/her peak knowledge and dies, knowledge going with it. You can replace them with an iphone.

Smartphone App Diagnoses Malaria From Drop Of Blood