Tech Tree by Kai Micah Mills

View Mode
Edit Mode
Submission
Pull Request
Changes
Intelligent Cooperation Community Tree

Inspiration

After spending the last 10 years in tech I was finally in a position to build a company in the life extension field, but didn't know where in the space my skills would be best utilized. To figure this out, I built a tech tree (inspired by Balaji's tweet about Civ 6) which laid out the core milestones we need to hit in the field, and it helped me decide what to build.

Shortly after this I found Aaron King from the Foresight Institute on Twitter who was building a much better tree with a lot of incredible data, so I reached out to team up. It became very obvious that this is necessary not only for the life extension field, but for all fields!

The tech tree has already been forked/generated for 5 of the Foresight fields (Biotech/Health Extension, Neurotech, Nanotech, Intelligent Cooperation, Space) and the teams for these categories are actively experimenting and collaborating with this. (these can be found here: https://github.com/Foresight-Institute)

What it does

This tech tree mapping software, including the node connections, was developed entirely from scratch.

Features:

Open source public template Github repo (https://github.com/KaiMicahMills/tech-tree)
Ability to add, edit, and remove nodes
Self-organizing nodes, allowing import from massive data sources to generate a tree without any manual work
Multi-user collaboration with automated source control hooked into Github via a bot
Configuration file for new projects to easily modify the tree to work for their community
Automatic saving & resetting progress
Lightweight setup, no backend or database required
Hooked into Vercel to live preview in-progress tree pull requests from collaborators
Simple JSON structure for data allowing importing and exporting of data to/from other sources
Ability to highlight milestones
Responsive, works on all devices down to mobile
Futuristic design

+ some in progress features > 50% completed, including...

X/Y axis to go from just a graph to a true map (prototype at https://longevity-tech-tree.vercel.app/)
Sub-trees to expand nodes into inner trees with more data
Free-placing draggable nodes
Node details with list of projects tackling the issue and ways to crowdfund and get involved

How we built it

Stack:

React/JS/HTML/SCSS
Vercel for hosting and previews
Github for source control (via custom Github bot)

The core file is under 1000 lines of code, heavily commented, and clean. https://github.com/KaiMicahMills/tech-tree/blob/master/src/Tree.js

Although this was developed for a hackathon, it's scalable and makes a great base to continue building on.

Challenges we ran into & Accomplishments that we're proud of

Originally I was searching for node software that we might be able to incorporate or work off of, but they all had their own restrictions and issues. I was able to develop one completely from scratch that will give us a lot of freedom moving forward in development.

What we learned

This is a huge project - and there is so much work to do moving forward. It's incredibly important software and I've already seen users collaborate with it. We've seen scientists discover connections that they didn't know existed before. Been a pleasure to work on and I have no doubt that tech trees will become a standard across industries and unlock a lot of new knowledge.

What's next for Tech Tree by Kai Micah Mills

I'm continuing to add features and fix bugs. I'd like to finish the in-progress features on the list and continue to work with the Foresight groups to build software that works for real collaborators. We can see how the trees, once built out, connect across industries and all of this complicated data will force me to make it extremely flexible.

Thanks for reading, Kai Micah Mills