What would quantum technology actually deliver?

Other than collapsing the internet when every pre-quantum algorithm is broken (nice jobs for the engineers who need to scramble to fix everything, I guess) and even more uncrackable comms for the military. Drug and chemistry discovery could improve a lot?

And to be quite honest, the prospect of a massive biotech revolution is downright scary rather than exciting to me because AI might be able to convince a teenager to shoot up a school now and then, but, say, generally-available protein synthesis capability means nutters could print their own prions.

Better healthcare technology in particular would be nice, but rather like food, the problem is that we already can provide it at a high standard to most people and choose not to.

> And to be quite honest, the prospect of a massive biotech revolution is downright scary rather than exciting to me because AI might be able to convince a teenager to shoot up a school now and then, but, say, generally-available protein synthesis capability means nutters could print their own prions.

Yep this type of pandora's box is scary. Our culture demonstrably has no good mechanism for dealing with these kinds of existential risks.

Humans are fortunate that nuclear weapons turned out to be very difficult and expensive to build even with the theory widely known. If they were something anyone with an internet connection could create we would probably be extinct by now. There is absolutely no guarantee that future developments will have similar restrictions.

If bio-engineering gets accessible enough that any random motivated individual can create a new super bug we're pretty much doomed. Seems like something to worry about!

Healthcare costs are a real issue especially for gerontocracies like France, and driving them down would be a massive benefit to society

Previous biotech breakthroughs have made good progress in treating many illnesses, but making healthcare cheaper overall is not one of them, even if it makes a specific therapy cheaper.

It would be unsurprising to me if a biotech gold-rush resulted in healthcare becoming a larger proportion of GDP, even if it produced miraculous results. We'd just have to scrimp and save and take out a reverse mortgage for generic re-transcription therapy or whatever instead of chemo and nursing homes.

> What would quantum technology actually deliver?

We might be able to finally determine the factors of 21

Quantum had already peaked in the hype. It doesn't scale, like at all. It can't be used for abstract problems. We don't even know the optimal foundation base on which to start developing. It is now in the fusion territory. Fusion is also objectively useful with immense depth or research potential. It's just humans are too dumb for it, for now and so we will do it at scale centuries later.

Crispr would clash with the religious fundamentalists slowly coming back to power in all western countries. Potentially it will be even banned, like abortions.

I like this, because I hate the idea that we should either be rooting for AI to implode and cause a crash, or for it to succeed and cause a crash (or take us into some neo-feudal society).

seriously, LLMs are cool but if this level of investment was happening around crispr, longevity and other health tech I would be 1000X more excited.

Want a product idea? You know the paper bags that you get at the grocery store? Why don't they have coupons/advertising printed on them? Take your groceries home and then cut up the bag for coupons for the next time you shop. I don't think I've ever seen this, and I can't find anything similar in a quick google search. Maybe you could create a business out of that?

I don't think so. I'm pretty sure it was considered an 'act of G-d', not an act of China :)

I think you could also have specific pandemic insurance, and that paid out, but those were rare before Covid.

Yes, maybe what people create with it will be more basic. But is 'good enough' good enough? Will people pay for apps they can create on their own time for free using AI? There will be a huge disruption to the app marketplace unless apps are so much better than an AI could create it's worth the money. So short Apple? :) On the other hand, many, many more people will be creating apps and charging very little for them (because if it's not free or less than the value of my time, I'm building it on my own). This makes things better for everyone, and there'll still be a market for apps. So buy Apple? :)

You're missing the forest for the trees. It speeds up people who don't know how to program 100%. We could see a flourishing of ideas and programs coming out of 'regular' people. The kind of people that approach programmers with the 'I have an idea' and get ignored. Maybe the programs will be basic, but they'll be a template for something better, which then a programmer might say 'I see the value in that idea' and help develop it.

It'll increase incremental developments manyfold. A non-programmer spending a few hours on AI to make their workflow better and easier and faster. This is what everyone here keeps missing. It's not the programmers that should be using AI; it's 'regular' people.

Great point, one that I think gets missed when you write code for a living and are comfortable with the ecosystem. But I remember when I was getting started making projects - even figuring out what I needed to google to get unblocked could feel impossible. I think AI will help bring a lot of people who are “on the border” between building something with code or giving up on the idea the boost over that line.

I think that was the point they made.

If AI enables regular folks to make programs, even if the worst quality shovelware, there should’ve been an explosion in quantity. All the programs that people couldn’t made, they would start making them in the past two years.

> It speeds up people who don't know how to program 100%.

I'm not sure how that challenges the point of the article, which is that metrics of the total volume of code being publicly released is not increasing. If LLMs are opening the door to software development for many people whose existing skills aren't yet sufficient to publish working code, then we'd expect to see a vast expansion in the code output by such people. If that's not happening, why not?

There goes the dream of ai allowing normal people to develop cool stuff. Talk about 'big company' stifles the little man.

Has anyone bothered to read section 2? It explicitly states that anyone the government deems a threat to themselves or others can be put away.

This is neat! I always wondered if there would be a way to 'containerize' tables like this. IE a regular table is like a bulk carrier ship, with everything stuffed into it. If you could better organize it like a container ship, you could carry much more stuff more efficiently (and offload it faster too!)

Easy stuff.

Convert table row to a string, json to whatever

Apply base16 to the that variable

You've now got a base16 string of that data.

Create a hash table, setup a key value for that base16 string.

You now have a container holding the data.

All you need to do is decode the hex string and you've got base32 data.

What you just described is magnitudes slower than even conventional hash tables

I'd like to see your solution.

My solution would be a conventional hash table. Now, I will consider using the solution defined in the paper.

Yeah? Not for me. I prefer my way of things. More fun and learning.

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