Artificial Intelligence
In his book “Outlive”, Peter Atia outlines the history of medicine. According to him, we’re currently in medicine 2.0, which is concerned with addressing many of the diseases that put children and adults in an early grave. Typically, these are infectious diseases such as polio and smallpox and
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After more than three weeks of amazing vacation, I am now gearing up to get back to work again. And that, of course, means returning to posting on my blog as well. This summer was really good for me in that I completely disconnected from work, email, paper reviews, writing,
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As the summer vacation is approaching or has started for most of us, also this blog will take a summer vacation. We will be back in mid August, but I thought I’d share a final post before the summer with five ideas, concepts and reflections that I hope provide
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The last weeks, I traveled quite a bit (even ran a marathon!) and visited several of companies as well as talked to a lot of people in both industry and academia. Having had a few days to reflect on my experiences, I can’t shake an overall feeling that many
Digital you
There is a saying often used by people of more advanced ages that the days go slow and the years go fast. Although I am not of retirement age yet, I must say that I feel this year has gone by really fast. Normally, this is because little of significance
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Human intelligence is amazing and has led to everything that we experience in our day to day lives. Every thing we use, every idea we communicate around with our peers, every abstraction we use to deal with a complex problem has been created by a human. Nothing exists until it
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There’s an interesting pattern at universities where a full professor typically is the only one who’s an expert in a particular field. Because of this, over time, professors tend to become quite confident in their expertise. The consequence is that they start to view their research field and
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There’s a story from World War II where perfectly normal German men were sent to the eastern front to act as police officers. In three or four years, these sons, brothers, husbands and parents went from ordinary people to absolutely atrocious monsters murdering innocent men, women and children and
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Whenever I talk to people that are (even) older than me and ask them about how they spend their time, there often is a reflection along the lines of “The days go slow, but the years go fast.” Especially in retirement, it seems that the number of things people spend
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In science, there’s an interesting pattern few people talk about. It turns out that inventions often occur at the same time or almost the same time in multiple research groups. These inventions aren’t struck-by-lightning insights by a single scientist; they tend to be ideas that evolved and emerged
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In many ways, I view myself as a philosophical modernist in that I believe the world we live in is getting better all the time. In virtually any metric of human quality of life, from the number of people living in abject poverty to life expectancy, things are generally improving
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Especially during my time in industry, a common saying among my a-type, hard-driving colleagues was “I can sleep when I’m dead.” The idea communicated was that the things you’re now spending time on are so important that you’re willing to give up everything else. Especially young, ambitious