This is very impressive work and I'm glad people are doing it. For any billionaire, funding it would be a no-brainer.
That said, it makes more salient for me the dichotomy between demos and reality. This demo looks very much like molecular biology does in the movies.
But what is it to look like something "in the movies"? I don't know exactly... All tools have overhead, no matter how cleverly designed. Maybe "the movies" is what you get when you ignore this overhead.
There's a clear phenomenon in looking back on old demos and concluding we must have taken a wrong turn because our systems are still not as good. This is true of Victor's own demos from a decade ago, and many well-known demos from decades earlier.
But rewatching a Victor demo earlier this year, which had blown my mind when I saw it live, it seemed full of a kind of naivety (and a bit of sleight of hand). Of course, he made clear it was only a demo. It was meant to inspire. But now I feel that's an easy excuse for not investigating what really advances our use of tools – and what holds it back.
That said, it makes more salient for me the dichotomy between demos and reality. This demo looks very much like molecular biology does in the movies.
But what is it to look like something "in the movies"? I don't know exactly... All tools have overhead, no matter how cleverly designed. Maybe "the movies" is what you get when you ignore this overhead.
There's a clear phenomenon in looking back on old demos and concluding we must have taken a wrong turn because our systems are still not as good. This is true of Victor's own demos from a decade ago, and many well-known demos from decades earlier.
But rewatching a Victor demo earlier this year, which had blown my mind when I saw it live, it seemed full of a kind of naivety (and a bit of sleight of hand). Of course, he made clear it was only a demo. It was meant to inspire. But now I feel that's an easy excuse for not investigating what really advances our use of tools – and what holds it back.