So many of the technology blogs and news articles we read these days are devoted to personal technology. That’s reasonable, of course. After all, we’ve got to read about whether the Droid or iPhone or BlackBerry is the best, because we’ve just got to have the best, dontcha know.
Consequently, we don’t hear much about other technology, even though some of it may impact us far more than our personal tech gadgets. Some of that technology fascinates me, and I want to share a little of it with you, because many of you enjoy learning new things.
The first item I share with you today is the following extract from an interview between James Turner and David Dooley, regarding Sequencing a Genome a Week:
David Dooling: … I work at the Genome Center at Washington University in St. Louis. We are one of the handful or so of large scale genome sequencing centers around the world. What that means is essentially we participate in large genome sequencing projects that some people may have heard of, like the Human Genome Project, Thousand Genomes Project, things like that. And involved in that is a lot of data processing, laboratory processing, tracking and all sorts of things, so it’s a rather large enterprise.
We have somewhere around three petabytes of storage online, and somewhere north of 3,000 cores in our computational cluster. And we’re generating terabytes, tens of terabytes of data, per day with our current sequencing instruments. The sorts of things that we’re doing now as we transition from more fundamental evolutionary types of projects, such as the Human Genome Project and subsequent projects like the Mouse Genome Project, we’ve done things like corn and things of that nature, now we’re doing more and more sequencing projects related to medicine and medical sequencing.
Last year, we published the full cancer genome sequence.
I referenced this article several months ago, but decided to mention it again with more detail, because what we learn from genome sequencing can make enormous changes for the better in our world. To me, that is fascinating enough. But, being the geek that I am, it also fascinates me how much data is being generated and stored. Tens of terabytes generated per day is staggering, when you consider that a terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes. Given that a typical home computer has (say) 200GB of storage, then the data generated everyday in this project can fill the hard drives of over 50 home computers. (BTW, a petabyte is 1,000,000 gigabytes).
It is also interesting that I am writing this article from the same desk that 25 years ago had a computer with a 20 megabyte hard drive. So, the one on my desk today beats that one by 12,500 times. The difference in RAM storage between the two is about 20,000. (Both computers were standard options with no extra memory.) Those are huge differences.
That sort of leads into the presentation shown below, which is the keynote presentation given by Ray Kurzwell at the recent Singularity University Executive Program. Kurzwell is a futurist who emphasizes that many technologies advance at an exponential rate. Moore’s Law is perhaps the best known of these: the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. So, after two years, the number would be 2x, then after two more it would be 4x, then 8x, then 16x, then 32x, then 64x, then 132x, and so on. After 20 years, there would be a 1,000-fold increase.
Kurzwell puts together several of these “laws” and suggests that we will reach a point in the not-too-distant future at which artificial intelligence will exceed that of human intelligence. Specifically, it could get to the point that we do not even understand how it works, as it develops itself. He has several other fascinating predictions, too, some dealing with bioengineering developments (making use of nanotechnology). He notes that these sort of predictions are hard for many people to understand because we typically think in linear terms.
If you have 40 minutes, and enjoy predictions of the future and what will drive the future, his talk is a good one. When I viewed it, I broke it into 4 10-minute chunks because my attention span doesn’t last 40 minutes.
By the way, back to the David Dooling interview I mentioned above, you may want to do as I have done with it: sign up for InstaPaper, use its “Read Later” bookmarklet for the interview, and then read the interview on your iPhone or Touch using the InstaPaper iPhone app.
