Shawn Douglas - Nanoscale Instruments for Visualizing Small Proteins & Bret Victor - Dynamicland

This is the latest thing I know of from him and was recorded at the 2022 Foresight Designing Molecular Machines Workshop talk called "Nanoscale Instruments for Visualizing Small Proteins" & Bret Victor comes in about 14:14 [1] It shows just how far the Dynamicland concept can be pushed into a hyperspecific feature set customized to fit a single domain -- because they can deconstruct the user experience to that level of detail. Extending a Tangible UI out to the actual OS itself has been the thing at Dynamicland from the get go but here we see it finally as physical 3d objects participating with realtime digital feedback in the built environment !! [1] ▶ this video

We are still quite far from being able to implement these kinds of things at scale. For the literature review piece the key problem is that LLMs are exquisitely bad at working with even the simplest kind of scientific evidence: citations [1, 2]. They will get better, but it is not clear that LLMs can deal effectively with the very sparse kind of evidence that appears in the literature. Also, generating hypotheses isn't exactly the rate limiting step, the bigger issue tends to be when you get people with pet projects/hypotheses in positions of power that dictate funding priorities (e.g. the decades long Alzheimer's Aβ disaster). For automation and instrumentation of labs the vision is on point and there is interest, and active work, if not large amounts of funding, to bring that vision to reality [3, 4, 5]. However, we simply don't have the tooling needed to be able to express the full complexity of experimental protocols in a way that can be verified. Sure you can write a python script to control a robot, but it is exceptionally difficult to extract the scientific meaning from that. My PhD work was to develop a formal language for scientific protocols, and I'll be continuing to develop it, but there is still a long way to go. 1. link 2. link 3. ▶ this video 4. link 5. link

A bit wishy-washy, but the general point holds. Since the 90s, I’ve been somewhat surprised to see the PC technology fail to really learn from how well humans have leveraged printed information that is embedded in our environment. I figure screens and projectors are simply harder and more expensive than what would be required for the digital to get paper like. But still, it’s disappointing. Incidentally, just watched a recent Bret Victor talk about his latest application of his RealTalk/Dynamicland system: ▶ this video