Where'd l put my keys? I'll ask my phone

Okay, so Kurzweil’s “singularity” is hard to swallow. But even without big breakthroughs in nanotech and AI, it seems to me current technology pushed to new levels is going to change things a lot.

For example, here’s links to articles that have appeared quite recently that point toward the availability in the pretty-near future of a kind of total personal information system. Let’s see what they add up to…

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Bringing Computers Together

The internet is about to unleash the full potential of the world’s computers. Gridding computers together over the internet allows idle computers to compute problems originating from other machines. Seti@home allows your computer to decode extra terrestrial radio signals captured by space telescopes and radio scopes, while it is in screen saver mode.

This technology could soon be focused on genetic decoding projects, and the search for the intricate biological origins of diseases like cancer, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer.

Update: $1K genomes

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Scientists seek faster, cheaper tools to map DNA

Is the $1,000 genome sequence for real or hype? Here’s an update of the new techniques being tried to reach that holy grail. Toward the end is flat-out statement by one skeptical scientist who says we won’t see this for another 10 to 15 years! I’d like to pin the quote up on a bulletin board and check it every 5 years.

In silico drug development

New Zealand News – Technology – Computer modelling future of medicine

Perhaps here’s a partial answer to Mike’s earlier post. Keep in mind the guy quoted is selling life science services for Sun Micro, but it’s an interesting vision about how computing companies see lowering the cost of drug development with awesome computing power. IBM and Hewlett-Packard also are developing life sciences services.

We believe in 10 years we can eliminate the need for all animal studies, we can eliminate phase one and phase two clinical studies, so computationally we can model a drug or therapeutic agent in the computer against the genomic data.