Eroom's law
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
Both of these statements are mere observations of trends (short term ones in the grand scheme of things). Nothing about the trends observed in "eroom's law" must hold true in the future and, similarly, nothing about the trends observed in "moore's law" must remain true in the future.
There are no causal links behind either of these "laws", nothing to make them universally applicable throughout time. Indeed, both are stated as functions of time with an implied start date. These qualities make both mere observations of trends rather than proper scientific laws.
In the case of Moore's "law" the implied outcome seems optimistic and I think that is why we have so far given a pass on calling it a "law". In the case of Eroom's "law" the implied outcome is much more pessimistic so I am betting that we'll be unlikely to want to recognize it. However, if we accept Moore's observation as a "law", we'll have a hard time pointing to a distinction that prevents Eroom's observation from being a "law".
In my opinion, the right answer is to stop implying that either of these observations are inevitable or representative of a truth about the universe. Then we can properly recognize that both trends are easily subject to disruption through hard work and breakthroughs in related fields, or the lack thereof.
There's a lot in science that's mere observation.
The law of gravity is one example, since nobody knows where gravity actually comes from.
With gravity we see a principle which, when mathematically described in sufficient detail, is consistent throughout space and time. What we know of it, we know only due to the observations we can make locally and in our timeline thus far; however, even with such a limited view, we can already see that gravity very likely is as it has always been and is the same throughout the universe. This is certainly not true of neither Moore's law nor Eroom's law.
Please stop this. While I agree with your overall point, we know what causes gravity (the uneven curvature of space due to the distribution of mass). You can find this out by googling "what causes gravity". It's not a mystery anymore.
Moore's law does not pick up on any causal pattern that connects transistor size to time.
The universal law of gravitation does capture a causal pattern that connects masses to other masses.
Whether we "know" what causes gravity or otherwise is irrelevant.
Scientific laws typically do support a tendency or trend in effect but the accurate description of a present trend is not sufficient to call the observation a "law". To consider that upgrade we need universality and persistence.
The fact that we know Moore's "law" and Eroom's "law" must both stop working at some point in the relatively near future means that they both fail this test.
Anyone know if this applies to antibiotics? I think a lot of people, myself included, are hoping that new drugs will buy us enough time to solve the sociatal problems (e.g. heavy use in ag) causing antibiotic resistance.
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14098
Note that the paper isn't only about a new antibiotic but also about a promising method for making additional discoveries via uncultured bacteria.
In engineering or any scientific field, incremental progress is clearly still progress. For most other kinds of drugs, time doesn't work against their effectiveness. Texts describe the use of aspirin precursors, such as willow teas, dates back over four thousand years to ancient Sumer. Salicylates haven't stopped being effective since then.
The trouble with antibiotics is that resistance inevitably develops over time even if we manage to curb their misuse. It isn't enough to enough to develop new antibiotics, novel or otherwise; to keep the "miracle of antibiotics" alive, we need to continually to develop novel ones.
That hits pretty close to what I think I am seeing here.
There are a few assumptions built in to Eroom's "law" which I think we have learned to avoid when looking at Moore's "law".
One is that we will not come up with an alternate or more effective way to address the problems drugs are currently addressing. Another is that we will not come up with a drastically cheaper or more effective way to invent new novel drugs. Still another is that we will not invent a drastically cheaper or more effective way to verify a drug's usefulness and safety.
With Moore's observation, I think people have learned to assume that any observable slow down will be corrected by the invention of some previously unimaginable technique or other machine that will keep things on track. (nothing really makes this have to be true, but we seem to think of it that way)
Similarly, any number of future inventions could completely reverse Eroom's observation.
As we get better at editing genomes, making nanomachines, and increasing the resolution of 3d printers, previously impossible techniques may suddenly make it easy to invent novel drugs, address the same issues without drugs, or change the game in any number of other hard-to-predict ways.
Given these increasingly plausible possibilities, I am inclined to see Eroom's "law" as the mere observation of a relatively short lived trend in human history.
Also at the moment one issue is that the market for anti-resistant drugs is very small, and current antibiotics are rather cheap. So the spreadsheets show no business case, when this grows to millions of doses a year then at $1k a dose so $10k a course and over 20 years of patent life a $2bn investment starts to look ok.
State intervention should be used to shorten and cheapen that path so that we get less of the actual death without real need business up front. I read with dismay the FP9 preparation reports which stress cohesion as an objective of research funding and I look forward (grimly) to watching the waste of funds that could lead to life saving treatment that this policy will precipitate.
There is an emerging wave of new therapeutic modalities (cell therapy, gene therapy, microbiome therapy, bioelecrronic medicine, etc) but it isn't clear if these will be as significant as antibodies were in the 1980s
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/11/28/a-g...
Going to space was never cheap, and I doubt it has ever been cheaper than it is today
With increasingly more data available on the drugs released by FDA, EMA, etc, combined with cheap genetic sequencing and other measurements, part of me wonders if the statistical approaches with some sub fields of chemistry combined with bioinformatics could move things from the era where certain drugs are produced in mass to one where getting certain interactions with compounds to take place based on and individuals state.
Razib Kahn talks[0] about this recently:
"There’s a debate that periodically crops up online about the utility, viability, and morality of returning results from genetic tests to consumers. Consumers here means people like you or me. Pretty much everyone.
If you want to caricature two stylized camps, there are information maximalists who proclaim a utopia now, where people can find out so much about themselves through their genome. And then there are information elitists, who emphasize that the public can’t handle the truth. Or, more accurately, that throwing information without context and interpretation from someone who knows better is not just useless, it’s dangerous.
Of course, most people will stake out more nuanced complex positions. That’s not the point. Here is my bottom-line, which I’ve probably held since about ~2010:
- The value for most people in actionable information in direct-to-consumer genetics is probably not there yet when set against the cost.
- With the reduction in the cost of genotyping and sequencing, there’s no way that we have enough trained professionals to handle the surfeit of information. And there will really be no way in 10 years when a large proportion of the American population will be sequenced.[0]https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/04/10/notes-from-the-per...
The paragraph that dismisses the 'low hanging fruit' explanation of Eroom's law looks rather weak to me - it says there are still many potential targets, but does not consider their technical feasibility, cost or potential ROI.
I think the underlying assumption is that more money is being spent for drugs that are equivalent. Is that reasonable or provable assumption?