Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes biology is the next frontier in computing
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes biology is the next
frontier in computing
KEY POINTS
- Former
CEO Eric Schmidt said biology is in a “golden period,” making it perfect
for tech.
- Schmidt said data
from human eyes will generate new algorithms.
- He
also said computing and biology need each other now more than ever.
Jennifer Elias@JENN_ELIAS October
2, 2019
“Biology will undoubtedly
fuel computing” in coming years, former Google CEO and current technical advisor
Eric Schmidt said at a conference called SynBioBeta in San Francisco Monday.
“Taking biology, which I’d always viewed as squishy and analog, and turning it
into something that can be digitally manipulated, is an enormous accelerator.”
Schmidt’s comments come as
Silicon Valley’s seeming obsession with biology attempts to move beyond
fascinating projects and into more serious investments that could help
modernize tech processes.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg this year
announced he and his wife Priscilla Chan would donate $68 million to
support the mapping of all the cells in the human body. Facebook also recently acquired a company called CTRL Labs that
lets you control computers with your mind. And Neuralink, a start-up once
backed by Elon Musk, announced its
brain-computer will start trials on humans next year.
“I’m always interested in
the question: What is changing the fastest right now? Because whatever that is
determining the history of next year,” Schmidt told the crowd. “There’s lot of
evidence that biology is in that golden period right now.”
He gave examples of vision
data aiding computing advances and smart assistants bolstering biological
research and medical cure advances. “The way the eye and the vision works and
so forth, will undoubtedly generate algorithms that are very powerful that we
don’t fully understand right now,” Schmidt said.
Under Schmidt, Google’s made
several early vision-related investments and most faced snags. Alphabet’s life
sciences company Verily tried creating smart contact lenses,
which aimed to measure blood sugar levels in tears. It has also filed patents
for eye-tracking and, of course, who can forget the infamously defunct Google
Glass.
“It’s easy to come up with
movie recommendations or YouTube recommendations, because we have millions of
data points of people like you,” Schmidt said. “We don’t have an analogous
amount of data in biology yet.”
Schmidt said he’d like to
marry the two worlds as quickly as possible. At one point, he asked the crowd
to “build bacteria that absorbs CO2,” adding “We need it at scale and we need
it in the next 10 to 15 years.”
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