Taking on Death

Google recently announced that they're starting a new company to extend the human life span, and I applaud them for their efforts.  Medicine seems to be one area where technology has failed to make the same impact as it has in other fields.  Machine learning is used everywhere from advertising to predicting stocks, weather and enzyme functions.  Medicine, with all of the personal data collected on millions patients, is severely lagging behind.  The human genome project was completed over twelve years ago, with personalized being hailed since the 90's as the future of health care.  Relatively few people have since seen the benefits of personalized medicine. With our technology today, with all of the data we have, we might not be able to prevent death, but we can certainly do better than we are doing now.

The Digital Age

When teaching a machine to learn we simulate intelligence and experience by feeding a computer a large set of data.  If there is noise in this data it disrupts the learning and can teach the machine to believe false concepts.  In the digital age we are surrounded by information.  That's a good thing, I'm never lost when I go out, and I have easy solutions to my simple problems.  But then there's also the noise, information that doesn't help anything but is easy to consume.  It can fill our lives, distracting and disconnecting us from the world we live in.  We need to filter out some information, to avoid consuming noise.  If we don't we'll become like a poorly taught machine, only communicating in memes and pictures of cats.