Arrivederci/ Deep Tech Exist/ 2024 Predictions/ Brain Implants Show Promise/ Digital Art Trends for 2024

Arrivederci. When I started the Antidisciplinarian here on LinkedIn, in January 2020, it was a way to capitalize on something I had initiated at BCG back in 2015. Through my work and the collaboration with the MIT Media Lab, I was exposed to the idea of “antidisciplinariety”, something that Joi Ito, back then head of the Media Lab, was extremely good at articulating.

I was, and still am, extremely fascinated by the notion of “antidisciplinariety”, and I felt the need to create a BCG internal vehicle to instill some more of it within BCG. I therefore launched a weekly newsletter, ideated, and designed by myself and my team (thanks Amy Rule !), but executed by Ranjan Roy and his team at The Edge Group . It was an immediate success, with incredible open rates, always more and more people subscribing, and many sharing it with their clients.

At the beginning of 2020, shortly before the pandemic exploded, I felt the need to make this precious tool available outside of BCG (also thanks to the support of Anne-Douce Coulin Kuhlmey and Antoine Gourevitch ) and initiated publishing it here on LinkedIn, with the addition of a personal brief intro, turning the “naked” newsletter into a sort of blog. This is what you have gotten to know as The Antidisciplinarian.

When I started, I basically had three goals:

1. I sincerely wanted to make the Antidisciplinarian available outside of BCG
2. I wanted to have a tool to force me to write on a weekly basis, because, to quote Flannery O’Connor "...?I don't know what I think until I read what I say."?
3. I also wanted to prove myself that I have the constancy and the stamina to write and publish something EVERY week.?

When I look back, I think I can say that I have fully achieved all three goals. On average 1.000-1.500 people engaged every week with the content, and I had during the years surprisingly many interactions with people thanking me for the weekly newsletter. The distribution could have been much bigger, but I never pushed for it, and, quite frankly, LinkedIn is not the best context for something like the Antidisciplinarian. That said, I am quite pleased with the reach I managed to get, and the feedback I received.

Writing every single week, even if at times very difficult, has proven an incredible instrument to clarify and sharpen my thinking. When you read about people stating that you need a very strong routine to be able to write consistently, trust them. I can only confirm that. And I am really glad I did it. In the end, in total, I have written more than 120.000 words, which is basically a book…

Last, but not least, I wanted to prove to myself that I have the will strength needed to write every week. Of the three, this was the one goal I knew from the beginning I would have achieved. I knew myself well enough to know I would have done it. Nevertheless, it has been an excellent exercise to strengthen my will even further. 195 issues published every SINGLE week since January 2020 without missing a single beat, apart from Christmas. Not bad…

By now, if you made it so far, you have probably realized that the above is not just the usual year-end retrospective, but rather something different… it is a way to stage what is coming next.

The newsletter and media landscape has changed massively since January 2020, and even more so if compared with 2015, when all of this got started… There are many very good newsletters and blogs out there, that are worth reading, and, in addition to that, while the reach of LinkedIn has increased, the quality of content on it has dramatically decreased and the level of noise and “professional narcissism” here on LinkedIn has achieved an unbearable level, for me at least.

Also, my personal situation has changed a lot. Going from being a Partner at BCG to becoming a full-hearted entrepreneur, working to put into practice what I theorized while at BCG . This means that, right now, I don’t have the bandwidth to allocate (a significant) part of my weekends to writing a weekly newsletter.

All of this is to say that this is the last issue of the Antidisciplinarian, in its current form at least.

I have been unhappy with the current format of the Antidisciplinarian already for a while. I felt that while the overall level and quality of the content online was increasing elsewhere (particularly on Substack), the Antidisciplinarian was stagnating, also because I didn’t have the time and the resources to put into it. Now, the time has come to pause and reflect on what the future of the Antidisciplinarian should be.

This is the reason why the title of this edition is “Arrivederci” and not “Addio” (i.e. Farwell). Arrivederci means, in Italian, “See you again”, which in this context means that the Antidisciplinarian is not “dead”, rather I am taking a pause of reflection to have it re-emerge in a new form sometime (hopefully) during 2024.

To reassure you that the above is not just an “empty promise”, it is already very clear to me the direction I want it to take. I just need the time and the resources to be able to focus on it, which will be possible only once Arsenale is fully up and running…?

The new Antidisciplinarian will focus more on the intersection of science, technology, humanities, art, and philosophy, the same way the Romantics explored it with Schelling, Goethe, and Alexander von Humboldt (I am really going to double down on the idea of Industrial Romanticism). It will become a collective effort, so as not to rely solely on my shoulders, but also to make it more anti-disciplinary (the inspiration here is The Atheneum of the Schlegel brothers, so another Romantic influence). And it will not be hosted here on LinkedIn, which has become a “professional Instagram” but on Substack, the best place for content and content discussions right now.

?Enough of an “Arrivederci”… before I close with my “thank you”, I was very pleased to feature, in the closing edition of the Antidisciplinarian, an article stating “Deep Tech Exists”, something unthinkable in 2020, when we had to explain what it is, and even more unthinkable in 2015, when all of this started… as a matter of fact I have been thinking for a while about what comes after “Deep Tech”, and this is exactly what I am working on with Arsenale, it is “neo-industrials”. But you’ll hear more about it as soon as The Antidisciplinarian re-emerges from its hibernation…

Time now to adequately recognize and thank the people who made 195 editions of The Antidisciplinarian possible. A sincere thank you to Anne-Douce Coulin Kuhlmey and Antoine Gourevitch at BCG, who have allowed me to continue to publish the newsletter after leaving BCG. Another sincere and heartfelt thank you goes to Ranjan Roy at The Edge Group , who has been my invaluable sparring partner in all of this since the very first issue and with whom I look forward to building the new “Antidisciplinarians Collective”.

The biggest and warmest thank you goes to my family, who has tolerated this “extravaganza” for four years, very often at the cost of our weekends (or New Year’s Eve as in this case..)

You will receive a few more “throwback” pieces in the next weeks, in the form of The Antidisciplinarian (ultimately, I want to get to issue 199... ), but consider this as the last issue of the Antidisciplinarian as you know it.

It has been a pleasure and an honor! See you (hopefully) soon, in a new form.?

Wishing you all a 2024 full of Justice, Courage, Wisdom, and Temperance.

Yours truly,

The Antidisciplinarian?

Deep Tech Exits: Not Just Science Fiction Anymore

Startup exits “hit all time lows” in 2023, thanks in part to dwindling access to “cheap money” and “skyrocketing” interest rates. However, Q3 showed signs of life , and “deep tech” startups, defined as “novel technologies or those using engineering-led innovations, have contributed to that initial, slow rebound.” Maybe lucrative “deep tech exits” aren’t just the stuff of wild speculation.

According to Karthee Madasamy , Founding Managing Partner at MFV : “The landscape of deep tech exits has evolved significantly over the past decade. As the sector continues to mature, it’s clear that these innovations are no longer science fiction, and neither are the value of the deep tech businesses being built or the opportunities for significant exits.”

?News items:

Innovation of the Year: BYD Blade Battery

And the winner is… BYD’s Blade Battery . The “EV experts” at Electrifying named the battery its New Car Awards 2024: Innovation of the Year. The Blade sets “new standards for safety and energy density, as well as reducing dependency on rare-earth metals.”

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17 Predictions for 2024: From RAG to Riches to Beatlemania and National Treasures

‘Tis the season… for predicting the future. Nvidia, the “chipmaker that became an AI superpower ,” has just released its 2024 AI predictions from 17 of its corporate leaders. No Jensen Huang. who’s busy in Southeast Asia , but VPs and directors all weigh in on the year ahead in AI.

Ian Buck, VP of Hyperscale and HPC, calls AI “the new space race, with every country looking to create its own center of excellence for driving significant advances in research and science and improving GDP.”

“The democratization of development,” says VP of Developer Relations Richard Kerris means that “virtually anyone, anywhere will soon be set to become a developer.” It’s a quick read, and the hot takes come from actual players at the cutting edge of the AI revolution.

News items:

Google’s Gemini Isn’t the Generative AI Model We Expected

Google DeepMind’s new Gemini GenAI model just debuted. “Sort of.” Gemini “comes in three flavors: Ultra, Pro, and Nano (which is available in two sizes, Nano-1 (1.8B parameters) and Nano-2 (3.25B parameters). Google’s Bard chatbot now runs on “a fine-tuned version of Gemini Pro.”

Google was characteristically tightlipped about Gemini’s training dataset — and the carbon footprint of developing it. Asked whether Gemini hallucinates “facts,” Eli Collins , VP, Product at DeepMind, replied that it “wasn’t a solved research problem.”

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Brain Implants Show Promise for People With Traumatic Brain Injuries in Small Study

Over 5M Americans live today with “disability related to traumatic brain injury.” About 2.5M Americans sustain a new TBI annually. “One of the major problems is that there really are no effective therapies for traumatic brain injury,” said Stanford Neurosurgery Professor Jaimie Henderson . That may be about to change.

A new thalamus-stimulating implant , designed by Henderson and his team, could help “revive cognitive functions in those with TBI.” It "could help millions of people who are suffering, often in silence, from the effects of traumatic brain injury.” Participants in the study recorded test scores “between 15 and 52% higher compared with their pre-implant results.” Cornell professor Nicholas Schiff , co-authored the study and said , “I think that was our biggest surprise: the size of the improvement.” The neuroimplant could potentially help people even years after the initial TBI occurred.

News items:

Ultrasound Enables Remote 3-D Printing—Even in the Human Body

New direct-sound printing technology could one day “enable minimally invasive tissue engineering and bioimplant repair within the human body ,” among many other promising applications. Researchers have 3-D printed a solid object “by exposing a liquid to a focused field of sound waves — transmitted through a solid wall.”

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The Biggest Digital Art Trends We’ll See in 2024, as Predicted by ILM, WēTā FX and Other Industry Creatives

This survey of “leading industry creatives” forecasts 2024’s “biggest digital art trends,” such as artists diversifying their income sources and CGI continuing its (unjustified) descent into the realm of the uncool .

MidJourney and other GenAI-enabled (created?) art will continue to proliferate despite multiple lawsuits by creators and Getty Images over unlicensed training data. Can it be stopped ? And if not by the courts, by “audiences clearly not happy seeing cheap content” made using GenAI?

News items:

Artificial Intelligence Is an Unreliable Narrator

Academy and Emmy-nominated composer Kris Bowers argues by that treating AI as an “unreliable narrator… [we] might make its creations feel less threatening…” “As an artist,“ writes Bowers, “I’m excited to see how A.I. grows, and to respond to anything it “makes” in the same way I would any other creator: with a dose of professional skepticism and an eye toward the sources that inspired it.”

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EU Reaches Landmark Deal on World’s First Comprehensive AI Regulation

The EU continues to lead the way in attempting to regulate technological innovation. First, the GDPR in 2018 and now the AI Act has been approved. As the NY Times says , “European policymakers focused on AI's riskiest uses by companies and governments, including those for law enforcement and the operation of crucial services like water and energy.”

The act is almost guaranteed to become law by 2025. That leaves “room for a lot of technological evolution until then.” Nonetheless, European Commissioner Thierry Breton X’d, “Historic! The EU becomes the very first continent to set clear rules for the use of AI ???? The #AIAct is much more than a rulebook — it's a launchpad for EU startups and researchers to lead the global AI race. The best is yet to come! ??”

?News items:

AI Firms ‘Should Include Members of Public on Boards to Protect Society’

In this recent interview, 2018 Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio expressed that “AI firms must have oversight from members of the public, as advances in the technology accelerate rapidly.” Otherwise, Bengio said, “How do we make sure that these advances are happening in a way that doesn’t endanger the public? How do we make sure that they’re not abused for increasing one’s power?”