
Biology Is Eating the World - yarapavan
https://a16z.com/2019/10/28/biology-eating-world-a16z-manifesto/
======
warlog
Or: Biology is really hard, and returns to investors in the space have been
pretty tame, and taken longer than promised (expected). See commentary by
Peter Thiel in Zero to One for more on this topic. In response to this
reality, one tactic is to create a narrative that sells the vision of biotech
as a tech or engineering discipline to an investor audience that is naive
about biology and uber bullish on tech eg, this article). "Biology? It's just
engineering, we can engineer things, we'll just engineer biology (please
invest in us as if we're tech]". Never mind that engineering is a tradition
built on minimizing variation, while biology is a science founded on
understanding a built-in mechanism for generating variation. "Life finds a
way". Indeed. I've been on numerous synbio projects and one thing is certain,
evolution is always driving against the engineered design. And by driving
against, I mean undoing. Entropy might slowly undue engineering, but mutation
and selection? It's an entropic accelerant for engineered outcomes. Also,
engineering is about "parts" and synbio is constantly dreaming of building
things by putting parts (promotors, genes, etc) together from a catalogue. In
reality, biology is interactions, where the expression of almost everything is
dependent on the context of all the other parts. So outcomes aren't simply
"the sum of the parts". When they are it's for a minority of cases. Finally,
as you scale a process (say from a test tube to a 1,000,000L industrial sized
fermentation tank, biology almost never cooperates.

Biotech's dirty secret is that biology is Not engineering (it is still a
discovery science)...but the music is still playing folks, dance on! (Sorry,
it's early, I'm still pre caffeinated, and this topic always rankles me).

~~~
Gatsky
This seems a fairly narrow view. In my field (oncology), there are many drugs
saving lives that are the result of what is engineering in biological systems.
Certain immunomodulating antibodies are the most recent example, one of which
is earning it's pharma company many billions of dollars a year. Another proven
class of drug is conjugating chemotherapy to the back end of an antibody.
These drugs have undergone incremental improvement, with the latest versions
showing greatly enhanced efficacy. This to me meets the criteria for
engineering. Then there are CAR T cells. Researchers in this field actively
describe their work as 'immuno-engineering'.

Synbio has been disappointing admittedly, but then engineering an organism is
orders of magnitude more difficult than any engineering problem in existence.
It is bottlenecked by the lack of a truly useful DNA synthesis platform. One
day, when you can dial up a genome and have it into a cell in < 24 hours, and
do it in a high throughput fashion, things will be very different. This will
happen in under 10 years I think.

~~~
dkural
The top selling check-point inhibitors ie "immunotherapy", Keytruda and
Opdivo, were not found by anything remotely resembling 'engineering'. It was a
traditional lab science and drug discovery. If anything those two drugs have
expanded their lead commercially, with no other PD1 drug approaching it. None
of the top 10 selling Abs are drug-conjugated. CAR-T is struggling mightily in
the clinic - it is the opposite of "scalable" due to the personalized nature,
and has a terrible side-effect profile.

TCRs are far from 'engineered' in any real sense, highly dependent on patient
MHC and the specific neo-antigen, with no one able to rationally design from
scratch a TCR.

Synbio's challenge is not necessarily engineering a genome faster. It's that
no one knows what to make, per se. What should we print? We don't know how to
design proteins or enzymes. Designing assays to measure a good vs bad design
is often the rate-limiting step.

~~~
Gatsky
I see you have a specific idea about what ‘true bioengineering’ should look
like. But you have just made this up, based on your own ideas, which I simply
reject.

Your first paragraph glosses over all the work that goes into making a useful
antibody candidate, a process of iterative modification to meet certain
specifications. I don’t see a problem calling this engineering. Your point
about market penetration as a judge of ‘engineeringness’ is also silly. There
are antibody drug conjugates that serve a specific patient population very
well, the fact they aren’t in your ‘top 10’ is irrelevant.

So what if CAR-T cells are struggling in the clinic? It is an entirely new
treatment modality. There are people walking around who would be dead without
it. You deride it because it isn’t an instant global panacea?

Your point about Synbio is also wrong. Leaders in the field just wrote a
position piece in Science and genome writing was listed as one of the major
challenges. You’re trying to tell me that George Church ‘doesn’t know what to
build?’ Pure bunk.

~~~
dkural
Dear Gatsky, My point is not that there is no engineering or no biotech in the
world - to the contrary. There is antibody engineering, biomedical
engineering, and many other types of engineering. I am a computational
biologist. I actually worked at the George Church Lab, playing with the
Polonator (an early sequencer prototype). I started a computational biology
company (Seven Bridges Genomics), and then spun a biotech from it. So I truly
believe in engineering.

Try to think of my argument as trying to add higher resolution to the debate,
instead of being against/for your argument.

My main argument is against over-crediting what the _software and algorithmic
component_ of this is, precisely because I think it is too important. Another
wider argument is are humans rationally designing anything / do we understand
the wider design principles.

So let's go back to immunotherapy. Neither the target PD1/PDL1, nor the
therapies themselves were enabled in particular by "in-silico" methods.
Nivolumab and Pembrolizumab were not designed with much algorithmic or
software input, but discovered through good old experiments / lab
science/engineering. There is no human designer or algorithm in the world
where if I give a target, they can rationally design an antibody. What we do
is brute force + affinity selection / "directed evolution" to force nature
come up with an answer still. We have no clue how to design it like one would
design a bridge.

I think CAR-T is amazing technology - my point there remains: the therapies so
far did not at use in-silico design of the Chimeric Antigen Receptor so far
(the CAR part).. The low success in the clinic is precisely due to our
inability to actually design these things properly. Similarly, neoantigen
selection remains a big challenge due to lack of rational principles. A CAR is
not too different from a TCR or Antibody, which we don't know how to
rationally design.

I believe that genome writing is a major challenge. Again you are widely
missing my point: Suppose you had a very cheap, abundant, perfect genome
writer. What would we write? George, who was an advisor to my first company
and kicked off our Hackathon, would be the first to admit that protein design
is a major challenge.

Venter wrote an entire organism - and it was mycoplasma verbatim.

We are only able to copy nature or cajole it at the moment, because
fundamentally we don't know how to design biology. It is because we don't
really understand it very well, which makes it such an exciting time to be in
the field.

None of this means these won't be done, or that teams around the world are not
trying to do it this moment. There are amazing labs and companies working on
these. What I am saying is more specific: Immunotherapy, CAR-T, or genome
writing, in its first generation, as it exists, cannot be recruited as a
showcase for computationally led, "in-silico" driven advances in biology.

I do believe this will change shortly.

------
DrScientist
Imagine a solar-powered, self-replicating, self-repairing machine that can do
carbon capture, clean the air, and improve biodiversity in one go and it's
ridiculously cheap and easy to operate and maintain.

Yep a tree.

It always amazes me that people get excited about a new car, new phone or a
new software release from a technical angle ( not what you can do with it -
that's fine ) - but also don't see the amazing machines called life all around
us as interesting at all!

You are always the most complex type of machine in the room - by many orders
of magnitude.

Yep, the risks are higher in biotech, yep the rewards are perhaps not as good
as a Google etc, and it's way harder. On the other hand it's more interesting
and in the end these companies are creating new treatments for cancer or heart
failure etc.

Disclosure: I was part of a biotech 'unicorn'.

In terms of whether we are at the cusp of a biotech revolution - I'd say it
really kicked off 20-30 years ago and is already here - the new wave of
immuno-oncology drugs transforming cancer treatment are a good example.

I think the role of computers in the future is a little overhyped - it's
necessary, but not the fundamental driver - the drivers are the new
experimental technologies generating the data at unprecedented scale.

~~~
themacguffinman
I think the tree example is silly, trees aren't good tech because they're not
very controllable and often very difficult to modify. And like many biological
things, they're not really optimized for our convenience.

Imagine a disease/bug-prone, space inefficient, waste dropping, telemetry-
less, allergy-inducing machine that requires continuous water deliveries and a
multi-year build process. Yep a tree.

I won't try to tell you that you can't find trees and other biological
constructs more interesting, and they certainly pose harder problems, but I'd
think (and hope) that the future isn't overly complicated biotech adapted from
even more complicated and wasteful natural systems. Right now we have to deal
with heart failure and cancer because our crappy bodies are the best we've
got, but I would think that the long-term future belongs to engineered systems
that we can control, optimize, and understand.

~~~
DrScientist
I'm saying it's an amazing _machine_ rather than the perfect machine for a
particular task. Ever wondered how it works? It's much more complex that it
appears - does the energy capture use quantum phenomena? Do tree's communicate
via via fungal network intermediaries?

Do you realize that they grow out of the air - ie all that bulk comes from
captured atoms from the air, not stuff pulled in through the roots.

In terms of our crappy bodies - they are incredibly complex machines trillions
of cells, each one unbelievably complex - it's astonishing they work at all.

But you are right eventually they fail - and natures answer is to simply
reboot ( build a new body from scratch ) - the consciousness you are so keen
to protect is simply RAM state that get's blitzed on reboot, while the cycle
of life goes on....

We are made from mostly ( 99.85 % ) 11 elements - some gases, carbon, bit of
metal

Not saying we shouldn't make stuff - just that people seem to have a blind
spot on what we can learn from nature, and _technically_ how amazing it is.

> I would think that the long-term future belongs to engineered systems that
> we can control, optimize, and understand.

And if we could understand, optimize and control biology - it would be so much
more amazing - cells are nanobots - they can already sense, move, change shape
to squeeze through gaps, replicate, signal, repair, kill, and control their
environment.

In fact those trillion cells - cooperate to make you - you are a collection of
cooperating nanobots. Take a look at some forms of life that take this to an
extreme, that live as single cells and then come together to build a much more
complex structure -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyostelium_discoideum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictyostelium_discoideum)

Big Hero 6 nanobots - biology - been there - done that.

~~~
themacguffinman
Agreed that nature has plenty to teach us, where I slightly disagree is that
controlling and optimizing biology is the better path to future tech.

Yes, cells are nanobots, but they're nanobots "designed"/evolved by nature
with deeply complex goals and incentives often orthogonal to ours. Cells come
with a lot of evolutionary baggage and many constraints owing to its extensive
optimization.

From my perspective, it's like hijacking a crazy project that doesn't belong
to us. It's not clear to me that taming insanely complex cells to serve our
goals is better than building traditional engineering up to do the same thing.

I compare this tension to ARM vs x86 for mobile devices. Mobile devices
uniquely require extreme power efficiency, and ARM processors are dominant
because they satisfy that critical requirement even though they're less
capable than other processors. Intel wanted to enter the mobile market and
they already own the more capable x86 platform, but its power efficiency is a
lot worse. Can Intel retrofit ARM-level power efficiency onto its deeply
complex and desktop/server-optimized x86 processors before ARM builds up to
x86's level of capability?

Honestly, I don't confidently know the answer and you could be right. But I
think it's telling that centuries of medicine and decades of biotech have been
a slow grind producing very narrow solutions (eg. invented a chemical cocktail
to treat one type of cancer, tweaked a plant to contain more of a certain type
of nutrient and be resistant to a handful of common diseases/bugs) while
ground-up engineering is seemingly exponential, where today's tiny portable
processor is orders of magnitude more advanced than the state of the art only
a few decades before.

Yeah, nature and biology has a headstart, but we don't have to spend a
thousand years figuring out how to develop an appendix.

~~~
DrScientist
I'd agree that we can only guess at the future - I'd just saying there is
almost a fetishism for man made technology, and a blind spot for nature as it
is pervasive.

You say we have made little progress in biology technology - yes and no.

Yes - there is _so much_ more that could be done.

No - you are again ignoring the stuff in plain sight - the vast majority of
our food comes from 'engineered' animals or plans - very little from wholly
engineered chemical processes.

Breeding is low tech engineering - but it's still engineering - the
productivity of commercial wheat is vastly superior to wild grasses for
example.

Or look at the variety of dog breeds - each one developed for a particular
purpose - from sheep herding & rabbit hunting to guiding blind people.

Now it's perhaps too easy, and not intellectually completely understood - but
if you are focusing on outcomes - it's bloody effective.

The right virus - a tiny thing much smaller than a single cell - could wipe
out a huge proportion of the population - it's happened in the past.

You can imagine a future where Iron Man fights for human survival with
rockets, missiles and high tech, but you ignore biology at your peril.

------
hanuman
Biology has been eating the world for 4 billion years.

MA: "Bio today is where information technology was 50 years ago."

Bio today is still in the pre-transistor era of IT. There is no tool that
doubles our capabilities to manipulate molecular processes every 18 months.
No, genome sequencing does not count, it is "read only." No, as amazing and as
promising as it is, CRISPR does not count. For the present we continue to
merely tinker, which is invaluable and necessary to more forward. Maybe once
we figure out how to efficiently, reproducibly engineer enzymes, which truly
accelerate molecular processes, we can claim that human-directed bio is eating
the world. Until then, nature-driven bio is still on top.

------
qsymmachus
"People who excel at software design become convinced that they have a unique
ability to understand any kind of system at all, from first principles,
without prior training, thanks to their superior powers of analysis. Success
in the artificially constructed world of software design promotes a dangerous
confidence."

[http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/sase_panel.htm)

------
floki999
A VC hyping-up its own book & strategy. Biology is certainly not an
engineering discipline. This claim that it is reflects how little the authors
know about biological systems and our limited understanding of biological
diversity. Reads like lame sell-side broker research. I recall the promises of
biotech of the mid 80’s, the promises of bioinformatics etc etc. Same story,
different decade.

~~~
georgeek
Is this the hype train? Yes to a large extent. However some people at a16z do
know what they are talking about. Ex: Vijay Pande is a partner there and an
(adjunct) professor of Bioengineering at Stanford. He and the team around him
do have an educated guess how biotech today is different from 20 years ago.

~~~
floki999
I’m quite sure that a16z folks are smart, and perhaps the hyping-up does
achieve an intended purpose. What bugs me is the non-stop need to feed
narratives which dum-down and embellish reality.

~~~
boringg
Well said.

------
fabian2k
This seems horribly naive and dramatically understates just how difficult drug
development is. We simply don't understand enough of the complex interactions
that happen in a biological organism, and in the end we have to do very
expensive trial and error to determine whether any drug or intervention
actually works.

~~~
randcraw
Yes to this. At the Very Big Pharma where I work about 20 years ago we took
some baby steps toward adopting an engineering approach toward bio-based
systems engineering. Systems biology and in silico modeling of disease had
long promised to short circuit the protracted process of drug development. And
maybe one day that may yet prove true. But after 15 years of building models
of disease or therapy based on data gleaned from lab assays and preclinical/
clinical studies, we found that there were still far too many 'degrees of
freedom' in the parameter space of interest to convince the biologists that
our models could add sufficient real value to their work for our work to
continue.

Fortunately, medicinal chemists have fared better in silico, often employing
computational techniques to reduce their search space for a compound desired
behavior. But I think no one would describe their models of molecular docking
/ binding as manifestations of engineering or systems biology.

------
maerF0x0
One thing about this that scares me is looking at the negative parallels,
black mirror style, between computing and biology.

When I hear "iterative" design I think of shitty car infotainment or router
software that only works half the time and never is updated/supported...
Except its under my skin and I cannot get it out.

When I hear designer molecules + DNA I think of DRM and a lack of "right to
repair" . But now its inside your body and the business owns it.. err you...

------
tompccs
I am very bear-ish on biotech. These are not systems we humans have built from
the ground up. Computers _are_ built by humans from the ground up: literally
every aspect of a computer is deterministic and documented. And yet even
computers can throw up surprises to programmers on a pretty regular basis.

The idea that our understanding of molecular biology is as mature and stable
as our understanding of the field effect transistor was in the 1950s is
frankly laughable. I predict many many investors getting burnt by biotech, as
well as some pretty nasty externalities if regulators buy the hype.

edit: improve sentence structure

------
cdcox
I think the biology revolution will look less like the computing (1940s-2010s)
or transportation (1890s-1970s) revolutions and more like the chemistry
revolution (1800s-1950s). It will be less iterating on one process and more
years of seemingly stagnant progress while people tinker with the last big
thing until the next big thing roars out of the gates. Iteration will be brief
and seemingly unimpressive. The only real progress will be, that which was
expensive and hard will become cheap, but unlike compute that won't
necessarily be the driver of progress.

For instance early genetic testing revealed a huge number of disorders that
could be linked to single genes that changed the game for how a certain sub-
population has kids and treatment for a handful of disorders. Then it turned
out a lot of stuff was multigenic or only very partially genetic and progress
has stalled. As genetic testing has gotten cheaper we have learned more, but
actual usable insights are rare.

Or take lab grown insulin from 1980s, it was a huge deal, everyone worked on
similar technologies and knock ins and for a handful of disorders it was a
complete game changer that petered out medically speaking. It saw a weird
second life in farming and GMOs for a time that helped improve processes but
didn't really move the needle in a big way. Then as it got cheaper, and new
more efficient tools emergedm it reexploded as the field of biologicals, which
have been great drugs since the mid-2000s. And as the technology gets really
cheap we are seeing products like lab meats, Impossible leading the charge
there, emerge.

Now we are on CRISPR, RNA-sequencing, CAR-T, and tissue engineering all of
which, when they hit will have massive impact, but then slow down for a bit
until the next big thing revs up.

This parallels chemistry where the theories of thermodynamics and gas laws
emerged, sped everything forward, then petered out. Then organic chemistry
emerged using a lot of the ideas developed by the previous field, sped
everything forward for a while then slowed down. Then inorganic and solid
state chemistry etc. But there was never a 18 month doubling it was more like
a 10 year lull followed by 1000x in 5 years, if you were counting for example,
the number of compounds developed. You could smooth the curve and pretend it
was like compute but it's not. We'll just look back in 20ish years, or even
look back today at the 1950s, and say 'wow there is a lot of stuff in our life
that was based on biological research where did that come from'. Just like
someone in the 1940s would look back and be like 'wow where did all this
plastic/metal fab come from'.

~~~
DrScientist
Good points - but the thing that struck me the most with the comparison to
chemistry was how many of those new wonder materials turned out to be more
dangerous than we originally thought.

The risks with poorly conceived GMO's are _so much_ higher... but fortunately
the technology to do it has been out of the reach of all but a few large
companies or institutes who have by and large been very careful.

But now the technology is becoming accessible even to individual
enthusiasts.....

It's like nuclear technology becoming in reach of the ordinary citizen.

------
DrAwdeOccarim
I've been wondering how long it would be until a16z said something along these
lines. I agree completely and am blown away by the progress we have made on
informational medicines in the past decade. I would highly recommend to you,
if you're a tech-focused person, to get into the field now. I feel like the
internet era has matured significantly to the point where the frontier aspect
of it has been tamed. Now it's time to move into biology. Look for
foundational companies that power the biological information revolution.

~~~
kharak
I wanted to do this for years now. It´s clear to me, that biotech will become
a complete game changer. But what can you do, if you know only the computer
science part? It seems like you can contribute only peanuts, if you don´t know
one of the natural sciences.

~~~
DrAwdeOccarim
We hire data scientists constantly. We also hire along the full-stack because
we make all our software in house. There is tons of low-hanging fruit right
now in biotech for CS problem solvers.

~~~
kharak
I currently live in Switzerland and had no problems getting several job offers
for consulting, traditional software engineering companies, insurance
companies, Fintech companies and so on.

I also applied to some companies that work in biotech related ares, zero
response (full-stack job offers). Well, I think I send one application and two
inquiries, still no response. That was very irritating, as it did not happen
before anywhere else. But all of them wrote that they want a bit of a bio
background, so I attributed it to that.

~~~
DrAwdeOccarim
Eh, the bio requirement is weak but I get it. Without the bio background, best
would be to know someone who can refer you to the hiring manager (LinkedIn,
etc.) or to be super persistent and asking good questions.

------
skywhopper
Ugh. We've heard all of this before for decades. Yes, progress is being
rapidly made on understanding biological processes, but with as many steps
back as forward, as we realize there are entirely new _categories_ of things
that we didn't even know we don't know.

The hubris on display here is typical of tech VCs, who eventually believe
their own hype. If it's hard for humans to comprehend, just rub some machine
learning on it... ignore that we're finally realizing that machine learning's
limitations are significant, but that we can only discover how wrong they can
be on results that humans can double-check.

And the naive application of software engineering buzzwords like "modular" and
"iterative" to drug development and biological processes is seriously
dangerous. You don't want to move fast and break things when we're talking
about human health and genetics.

This article is full of misleading claims and overstatements of reality. It's
easy to make things sound great when you entirely ignore the _reality_ of
existing and potential technology, but of course I don't expect anything
different from these folks.

------
trevyn
> _The bio companies of the future will take learnings from predecessors in
> other spaces: consumer, enterprise, fintech, and beyond._

The horrors have just begun.

------
nscalf
Let's say you're a tech expert, how do you get involved with the biotech
revolution. Is there any resources to learn what is currently available, how
you can contribute, etc? I think this field will likely yield some of the most
impactful tools and innovations we've ever seen.

~~~
madhadron
This is something I have dealt with a few times. There really isn't a good
resource to point someone from a math, informatics, physics, etc. to so they
can get an understanding of how the field works. People end up recommending
books like Alberts or other things that provide lots of pictures and names in
a particular, small area of biology but don't give any idea of what the field
covers or what thought processes work in it.

The closest thing I have is twenty-ish pages of notes I braindumped for a
colleague who had just entered bioinformatics from computer science, but those
already assumed lots of conversations and information already in place.

It's made even weirder because biology is three fields inextricably
intertwined (genetics, physiology, natural history). For each one you can
start at the beginning, but how do you provide some kind of linear path
through all three at once?

~~~
haihaibye
With age and humility has your view of the field tempered with time from "Fuck
you, bioinformatics. Eat shit and die."[1]?

I totally get your point, and it maddens me daily but I take the interesting +
meaningful work/money tradeoff and enjoy being one of the best coders in a
building (much harder in pure tech)

[1] [http://madhadron.com/posts/2012-03-26-a-farewell-to-
bioinfor...](http://madhadron.com/posts/2012-03-26-a-farewell-to-
bioinformatics.html)

~~~
madhadron
Oh boy, that rant. Doubtless the most far reaching and influential thing I
have ever written. It gets assigned in bioinformatics classes around the
world, which puzzles me in the extreme, and I get emails every couple of
months from new readers of it asking my position.

My usual response these days is that if it's raising red flags for them, they
should explore what troubles them until they have satisfied themselves rather
than taking the word of some random guy on the Internet.

From here inside my head, I think my criticisms are still accurate, nor have I
seen any actual refutation of them. Lots of ad hominems. Many people not
understanding that terms like "computationally difficult" are precise terms of
art, and have nothing to do with intellectual or conceptual difficulty.

With age and humility and, more importantly, absence, my attitude is probably
better described as "meh."

------
breck
If anyone is interested in a revolutionary new type of medical records system
where you can copy/paste your entire medical records in a safe way, we are
working on a system here called Pau
([https://github.com/treenotation/pau](https://github.com/treenotation/pau)).

Imagine if you could just copy/paste your medical records in an email to
change doctors. Or participate in a new medical study via a simple copy/paste.
Or if you were in an acute care setting and your healthcare providers could
instantly call up all your relevant medical history. We are going to enable
those sort of things.

------
babesh
Shouldn't we (at least in the US) be more concerned with getting health care
costs under control and universal? This manifesto is mostly about making money
rather than about general human welfare. The issues are not due to
technological limitations.

~~~
pcwalton
I mean, yes, we should do that, but we also need medical advances. Right now,
if you get Alzheimer's disease, it doesn't matter how much money you have: you
will suffer a long cognitive decline until you are no longer recognizable, at
which point you will die. The entire process places an enormous social and
financial burden on society. We need to fix that.

------
tiborsaas
The world is eating itself

------
Razengan
If the last time was an indication I fear we might be in for an spate of "X is
eating the world" posts again.

------
6gvONxR4sf7o
>We are at the beginning of a new era, where biology has shifted from
empirical science to an engineering discipline.

What the hell do they think doctors and other healthcare providers have done
for all of history? What do they think surgery is? This is such fluffy hype, I
feel insulted.

------
m3kw9
Immune related diseases won’t really be solved unless we really understand how
the immune system works. Because of the complexity there seem to be little
incentive to fix root causes rather than just inhibit the immunes response
I.e. patching

------
Udo
_> Bio today is where information technology was 50 years ago: on the
precipice of touching all of our lives._

Bio has been touching all of our lives for a long time now, from vaccines to
food to basic research yielding large advancements in medical understanding.

What we are on the precipice of _may_ be personalized or customized
biochemistry, which is something we _desperately_ need if we ever want to
attack diseases like cancer, enable radical regenerative intervention, or
tackle the effects of aging.

On a side note, I feel that we should put a moratorium on the phrase "X is
eating the world". Right now we're using it whenever something needs to be
hyped and it's becoming quite cringy.

------
tito
A16Z has only published "Eating the World" articles two other times, to great
success:

Mobile is eating the world (2016)

Software is eating the world (2011)

------
zxcb1
Engineering is the opposite of evolution. No?

~~~
anonu
Engineering is evolution.

When a chimp uses a tool, like a long twig, to pull ants out of the ground, it
has used basic engineering (tools) to solve a problem. The species advances
because of this.

~~~
agumonkey
I think people here are discussing the notion of sharing proven models rather
explicitly rather than only trying at random.

------
Merrill
Interesting summary of biomedical progress, but the extrapolation at the end
is a leap too far.

------
ljw1001
Hype and cliches are eating the world. You heard it here first.

------
angel_j
For context, simply click all 37 links in this article.

------
carapace
Biology _is_ the world.

The single most important aspect of all of this is the _metaphysics_.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou)

> Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:

> 1\. The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is
> separate in itself, which we either use or experience.

> 2\. The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the
> other is not separated by discrete bounds.

Biology is Thou.

\- - - -

When Prof. Michael Levin talks about "What Bodies Think About: Bioelectric
Computation Outside the Nervous System" (youtube.com)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698)
he keeps saying, "What if our technology could do this?"

The answer is, our technology already does "this". We are 4By-old
_nanotechnology._ You've heard of Grey Goo? It turns out that the oceans are
already "Blue" Goo.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo)

> Gray goo (also spelled grey goo) is a hypothetical global catastrophic
> scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-
> replicating machines consume all biomass on Earth while building more of
> themselves,[1][2] a scenario that has been called ecophagy ("eating the
> environment", more literally "eating the habitation").[3] The original idea
> assumed machines were designed to have this capability, while
> popularizations have assumed that machines might somehow gain this
> capability by accident.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_bacteriophage)

> Marine viruses, although microscopic and essentially unnoticed by scientists
> until recently, are the most abundant and diverse biological entities in the
> ocean. Viruses have an estimated abundance of 10^30 in the ocean, or between
> [10^6 and 10^11] per millilitre.

> Although marine viruses have only recently been studied extensively, they
> are already known to hold critical roles in many ecosystem functions and
> cycles.

We keep making discoveries (like the bacteriophages) that show us that we have
no real idea what's going on in the biosphere, which includes our bodies. I
think it behooves us to wait a few centuries before we go hog wild on the only
known ecosystem in the entire Universe, eh?

------
hardmaru
Literally.

------
euroPoor
It’s called ‘millenium’ non-plural.

------
te_chris
Welcome to MaddAddam

------
Nokinside
#1 Supercomputer today is Summit - IBM Power System AC922, IBM POWER9 22C
3.07GHz, NVIDIA Volta GV100, Dual-rail Mellanox EDR Infiniband

#1 Brain today (unknown but someone like Terence Tao, Edward Witten, Magnus
Carlsen, or Donald Trump) [https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-
flops/](https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/)

    
    
        #1 Supercomputer
        performance: 148,600 TFlop/s
        power:        10,096 kW 
    
        1# Brain
        performance:   9,000 - 337,000 TFlop/s 
        power:         20 W.
    

Biology (=organic chemistry) has has huge computational power/watt advantage.

~~~
AllegedAlec
> 1# Brain > performance: 9,000 - 337,000 TFlop/s > power: 20 W.

Yeah, not really.

These measurements mostly rely on the entire brain firing all at once, while a
real brain does not do that.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I wouldn't even call them "measurements"; last time I checked, the brain
didn't run on IEEE 754.

~~~
adrianN
I did my own measurements, I got about 0.01 floating point multiplications per
second out of my brain.

~~~
thatcat
It's almost like your brain doesn't even have an FPU

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
It does! But it's only good for counting up to 3 or 4.

