Top Breakthroughs for 2019 Curated by Bill Gates | Hacker News Reader

Top Breakthroughs for 2019 Curated by Bill Gates

technologyreview.com

72 pointssytelus37 comments

A small comment on one of these technologies: cell-free DNA. A big problem in innovating there is that THE big backbone technology player Illumina (for DNA sequencing) has its own big research initiative (named grail) in the field. I know from at least one start up that got into trouble regarding some new tech with them as Illumina obviously does not want competitors to succeed and has far too much knowledge about those to let them go freely. So being a big "breakthrough" area can have disadvantages as it also attract monopoly players.

Bill Gates seems to have upped his media presence this year. I am seeing a Gates article in some stream or the other almost on a daily basis.

Political run soon?

I'm fairly certain he doesn't want to be involved in politics. He at least mentioned he will not run for president.

I have two hypotheses as to why that is.

Bill Gates is financially involved in a large number of startups mentioned in the article. Good PR = more sales = Gates' portfolio is better off.

The other reason is a little more conspiratorial. There is a growing trend of financial populism where politicians are clamoring for higher taxes on the rich (70% on $10+ mil). I think Gates is trying to mitigate this movement by showcasing how he uses his wealth for the greater good.

He's for higher taxes on the super-rich isn't he?

He disagreed with AOC's recent proposal (70% marginal income tax rate above $10m/year) https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/12/bill-gates-supports-wealth-t... but he has recently advocated for higher capital gains taxes and higher estate taxes. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/19/bill-gates-taxes-on-rich-sho... So maybe he's trying to direct the discussion away from quite such a high number.

He also advocated for taxing wealth in general instead of income and supported a 150% debt to GDP target (which..is basically what most MMT supporters want).

He is right that a 70% top bracket won’t increase revenues by much.

Considering that Gates has publicly said that he wants the government to tax him more(He said it most recently during the AMA not to long ago) I would disagree.

yeah, sort of. He isn't clamoring to be taxed quite yet. https://twitter.com/anandwrites/status/1087749307380523008?l...

None of this makes sense when you factor in that Bill Gates plans to give away all his money when he passes away.

Many people in his position would be looking to try and make the world a better place for his children. Bill Gates however is simply technically strong and wealthy enough to do this through more direct means.

I think the best argument against 70% on 10+mil income is the basic fact that it'll increase the tax take by only 0.3%, best case scenario (no tax dodging, no damage to the economy). This idea is almost not worth discussing.

> One estimate puts extra annual revenue from Ms Ocasio-Cortez’s idea, which applies only to incomes above $10m, at perhaps $12bn, or 0.3% of the tax take.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/02/02/how-to-tax-the-...

Why, though? There's almost nothing anybody could do to put any sort of dent that Gates would ever feel into his wealth.

He's so astronomically rich he's barely human. What could anybody do to affect him in a way that changes the things he could do with the money he has?

He makes media appearances every year around this time to publicize his annual letter etc.

I wrote the story about ECGs on your wrist! https://www.technologyreview.com/s/612929/wristwatch-heart-m...

I'm hoping the ECG thing catches up to where you don't need an iPhone for it to work - the first step, in my mind, in making it widely available. Last I checked, 80% of owned smartphones were running Android.

Buy a Kardia Mobile - only $99. Works with Android and iOS.

>> In China, consumers are getting used to Alibaba’s AliMe, which coordinates package deliveries over the phone and haggles about the price of goods over chat.

I'm surprised by this. Seems like there is a lot going on in real brains when negotiating, much less a computer running some probabilistic algorithm. I'd be interested to see the specifics of how "consumers are getting used to" having a computer talk the price down with a real human seller.

Interesting that blockchain is not mentioned at all. Is it past its hype cycle?

Blockchain isn't new at this point.

Blockchain is a net negative for the world.

The emissions it enables through the reckless waste of power does not outweigh the currently limited benefits.

Very much like ITER's fusion reactor, not worth it, right?

What a bizarre comment.

If ITER is successful then it will be the saving grace of humanity. Being able to have a limitless, emission free source of power will bring hundreds of millions out of poverty and help prevent climate change.

What humanity sized problem is Blockchain solving ? It's maybe a better payment system, maybe a better data storage approach, maybe a better contract mechanism. That's all. Not guaranteed. Just maybe.

I have to admit I was never a fan of Bill Gates when he was heading Microsoft.

But he's turning out to be an ideal billionaire. I think he's really making a difference.

Tech breakthroughs these days don't seem on the level of things like airplanes, the computer, the internet, nuclear power, space flight, satellites, etc. I wonder what is different now.

It seems the difference is that developing a new toilet doesn't require the manpower that developing nuclear power or spaceflight does. This is just the list for 2019, not the 20th century.

It's representative of recent breakthroughs.

For example if we looked back in time to the invents I mentioned, the year's breakthroughs would have surrounded these much bigger breakthroughs.

The theme of current breakthroughs seems much smaller scope. For some reason our vision is smaller. I don't know why. We are either focused on very large things that appear unlikely to happen, like AGI, or on very small, speculative or trivial things like social networking or blockchain. None of the middle ground which are large, clearly important and have traction.

I guess a lot of the big tech I mentioned was generated by the necessities of fighting a global war.

Yes, the drive to kill something before it kills you is a very strong driver of innovation. All of these breakthroughs cater to precisely the opposite target: promoting human health either directly, or by improving our environment. This makes sense since this is the primary focus of the Gates Foundation, in 2019. That's a small scope if you ask me. You'd better believe that humans returning to space would be on this list if Gates had a horse in that race. I personally admire Gates' commitment to humans rather than stuff 'n things.

Also, I don't think its fair to call blockchain or social networking trivial. But thats neither here nor there given this listicle.

Gates is a billionaire thanks to a lot of wartime technology.

By 1938 radioactivity, nuclear fission, nuclear fusion, and quantum phenomena had been observed in the laboratory. Quantum mechanics and theories of special and general relativity were already well-developed. I think that the 20th century would have seen technologies mushroom from these new scientific observations even without WW II.

Of course scientific discovery continued after 1950. The difference is that newly discovered physical [1] phenomena -- though very impressive in their own ways -- don't have the same obvious technological applications as ionizing radiation, nuclear phenomena, and quantum mechanical phenomena. The discovery of gamma ray bursts, continental drift, the cosmic microwave background, and exoplanets were all very scientifically exciting. But they don't have obvious technological applications the way that nuclear fission or the photoelectric effect did. It may be possible that we ran low on interesting physical phenomena amenable to incorporation in new inventions much sooner than we ran low of interesting physical phenomena in general.

[1] I almost forgot biology. I would say that the progress of biological knowledge and applied biotechnology has been impressive in recent decades, even if it hasn't matched the hype around the time of the original Human Genome Project. I also think that biotechnology has yet to reach its peak rate of development.

You're cherry picking some of the biggest inventions of the 20th century. Wait until 2099 and look back, I bet you could come up with a similar list.

Mobile phones? Radically transformed the word in <10 years.

Those and smart phones do seem pretty disruptive, but are more a medium of distributing the computer than an inherent technical innovation. The computer is still the fundamental technology here.

I'd agree there is still a fair amount of disruptive innovations happening. However, I don't see the same kind of fundamentally new technologies appearing as they did a generation or two ago.

Some thoughts:

- custom cancer vaccines - the idea being that the vaccine, which triggers a person’s immune system to identify a tumor by its unique mutations, could effectively shut down many types of cancers, but this could also easily be retargeted and used to shut down the whole body (or just a vitally important part). It's still a question of delivery, the toxin would need to be delivered to the body in an undetectable way to be really dangerous... This is explored in an episode of The Expanse [0].

- carbon dioxide catcher - I wondered before to what extent does production of [...] synthetic fuels, using the captured carbon dioxide as a key ingredient even make sense - more energy is spent (likely from carbon) to produce the fuel than is released by burning the fuel, so this really only makes sense if we have enough clean energy to power the whole world (e.g. solar), but not enough batteries to run the economy (cars don't just need energy, they need energy in a convenient portable form). The CO2 -> fuel processes could enable us to go to zero-net-CO2 energy cycle, while keeping current infrastructure (fuel-burning cars, planes, ships).

- an ECG on your wrist - how about an ECG in your wrist - a chip implanted into your body that would be able to not just measure the heartbeat, but also continuously monitor various blood markers - glucose, cholesterol, stress hormones, ... Is anyone aware of any company working on this? Are such sensors even possible from a medical-technology perspective (disregarding energy, data transfer and privacy issues)?

- sanitation without sewers - a similar technology (full dirty feces -> clean carbon & water process) will need to be developed for space habitats...

- smooth-talking AI assistants - this almost seems like a solution in search of a problem. Do we actually want to haggle with an AI (hyperoptimised and hyperexperiences and almost certain to beat us while giving us the impression that we're getting a great deal!), don't we just want to get a fair price (in the free market sense, i.e. with most profit competed away)? I wonder what are some problems that can/should be automated at scale, but that cannot be automated via other means (e.g. buying plane tickets online)... I'm guessing Google's application of an AI booking appointments (with people) is one of the best applications, as it treats speech as a kind of a universal interface (originally developed for humans)...

[0] https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/The_Monster_and_the_Rocket

All these seem like more or less products that are variations and extensions of things already existing. Indeed, a lot of them are solutions in search of a problem. Robot dexterity has indeed been increasing for a long time but has been held back back by computational complexity of interacting with the world. Cancer treatments relying on the immune system have been tried over and over again and have failed for a similarly period, undone by the complexity of cancers. Carbon sequestering in various forms is often talked about but none of them make much sense compared simply stopping profligate carbon release (sure, once that stops and things are still bad, then this maybe but stopping release is always going to be the most cost effective until we some serious reduction).

So either the complexity of modern society means world-change innovation has become vanishingly small or Gates is pushing products of some pals rather than taking a serious look at possibilities.

Behind paywall apparently

That confused me as well - there's the line

> But what exactly is the purpose of a plow?

After a paragraph about it, but then the article just jumps right into the "Top Breakthrough Techs" no big deal? I couldn't tell what was going on, I'm not even sure I read the "actual" article.

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