Medicine Is from the Stone Age

When I was in grade school, I went on a field trip to a pharmaceutical company. We toured the plant and learned how new drugs are discovered.

To me, the process was very surprising. They basically just try random chemical compounds and see what they do. Seriously. They find a new compound, check if it will kill you, and if not, see if it has any useful function.

This reminds me of watching movies about cavemen. They would stumble upon something in their environment and see if it could be useful for some task. For example, when hunting a wildebeest, maybe they would find a rock on the ground and use it to attack their prey.

One might say that a turning point in human history was the transition from stumbling upon tools to crafting them.

It probably started with hammers and knives. Then there were farming tools. Then engines. Now we can access the world's information from a $30 tool in our pocket.

So here's what I'm getting at: our current state of drug discovery is from the stone age. Finding a new medicine is like finding a - well, stone - that happens to be helpful.

Now compare a rock to your smartphone. What kind of chasm exists between the two? That's the kind of leap we can expect when drug discovery moves out if the stone age.

But can that happen? Can we actually design drugs the way we design tools?

We can craft tools because we understand the relevant laws of physics and have the manufacturing processes to fabricate the tools. Given the exponential rate of technology growth (discussed last time) we will soon have both the biological understanding and fabrication methods to actually craft medicine.

Then what we will be capable of crafting will make penicillin and ibuprofen look like rocks by comparison.

Compounding Technology

If you invested one cent in the year 1 AD, earning two percent interest annually, how much money would you have today?

Millions? Billions?

Nope.

You would have over 1.5 quadrillion dollars. That's 1.5 million billions.

What if you received ten percent interest? Well, then you would have more dollars than there are atoms in the known universe.

The math is straightforward. But I was shocked when I first heard it.

Why the disconnect between the math and our mental estimate? Our natural inclination is to think linearly. Most physical things that we have interacted with over the ages behave linearly. If I turn the faucet in my sink, I expect a linearly corresponding amount of water to come out. If I want my cookies to be a little more well-done, I will leave them in the oven a linearly corresponding amount of time.

But compounding interest does not behave linearly. The reason makes sense: each year's compounding means that next year you have more to fuel the process. It's something of a positive feedback loop. Compounding interest thus behave exponentially - and the math shows that.

Technology exhibits this same compounding effect.* Think about the latest darling in technology: the smartphone. That was built upon technologies that came before: cellular transmission and the internet. Those technologies were, in turn, built on prior tech: radio/tv broadcast and computers. We could trace further back to semiconductors, then to metal refineries, and so forth.

Each new innovation doesn't just move us forward, it accelerates us forward. Moore's Law seeks to quantify this effect. It states that computational processing power doubles every 18 months. If that were your bank account, that would mean that you would earn about 60% annual interest.

So what does that mean for us, right now? Well, think about all of the technological progress we have made in the past 30 years. In the next 30 years, we can expect an increase of about one hundred million percent. What does one hundred million percent of our current technology look like?

I certainly don't know. But it sure will be fun to watch it unfold.



*If you read my blog often, you'll notice that I often write about what I'm currently reading. This post was inspired by Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near. It will likely inspire several more posts.

Chasing the Latest Trends

I'm an engineer.  I love playing with the newest toys.  But acquiring those toys has a cost - and not just in terms of money.  More important is the time invested to learn the new system and transition from the old.

But hey, for me, the benefit (fun) usually outweighs the cost (money/time).

A problem can arise, though, in domains where the technology is changing rapidly.  In such a domain, the technology could potentially change so rapidly that if you keep up with everything, you are constantly in a learning mode and never get to a productive mode.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that is what is currently happening with HTML and JavaScript libraries.

One large-scale web application I worked on started with the Prototype library (heh, yea).  In mid-project we switched to OpenRico (remember that guy?).  Then we said, "Oh hey, the newest thing is MooTools."  Then there was the big one, jQuery.  Backbone?  Oh, Angular is so hot right now.  But what about Google's new Polymer?

Granted, it's exciting to see the evolution of the web platform.  But if you spend all of your time moving your project to the latest, hottest library so that you can trash talk all of the old fogies who still use the passé crap, you'll never be able to get any real work done.

But, come on, we can't still be coding in Cobol, right?  Nobody wants to spend their whole career working on old technologies.  Definitely!  So how do we decide if we should stick with something old or jump to the new kid on the block?

Nassim Taleb (author of The Black Swan) gives the answer:

The longer a certain idea or technology has been around, the longer we can expect it to survive.

He uses the example of a chair.  We may imagine the future with chairs made of exotic materials that fly.  But the simple wooden chair has been around for thousands of years.  Chances are, in 50 years, we will still be sitting on simple wooden chairs.  Why?  They have proven their effectiveness.

In terms of software, "future-proofing" is very very hard to do.  But applying Taleb's principle can help us.  For example, raw HTML has been around for a long time and so will likely stick around a long time into the future.  So maybe we pick a library/framework that is as close to raw HTML as possible.

Another example: Relative to other JavaScript frameworks, jQuery has proven its effectiveness over a good span of time.  Sure, there will be a new king someday.  But it's prudent to wait and see who can prove more effective over time.

How long is that time?  I don't know the answer to that; but I'm sure it varies by domain.

Again, as an engineer, this 'waiting' is against my natural inclination.  I want to get the new toy asap.  But if I'm responsible for a piece of software that my company will be maintaining years from now, I must force myself to make prudent decisions.