Deep Tech Beauty Shot/ Radical Longevity/ AI Designed Chips/ AI Voice Actors More Human Than Ever/ Regulating Mind-Reading Tech Before It Exists

Deep Tech Beauty Shot. I am a huge fan of the?House of Beautiful Business?(HoBB). The work they are doing to make business “beautiful” is something very dear to my heart.??Also, their content is amongst the most provocative (and yet sensible) I get exposed to. It is a big source of inspiration for me and every week I eagerly wait for their weekly inspiring?Beauty Shots.

So I was very excited when Tim Leberecht, the deus-ex-machina of the House of Beautiful Business, asked me if I wanted to co-curate and collaborate on one issue of their?Beauty Shots, focused on Deep Tech. I have been writing and talking about the topic for a while, and I was really impressed to see how the team at the HoBB managed to give a very different spin to the topic, in perfect HoBB style, with results that went way beyond my expectations. I encourage you to have a look at the whole beauty shot, and, if you have not already, to subscribe to them, as they are worth it. Here are a few nice snippets:

?Deep Tech is where Romanticism meets Science, where (moral) imagination meets Exponential Tech. Moving beyond human-centered design,?DeepTech?heralds a shift from business that is exploitative to business that is generative. After the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we’ll be co-designing with nature. We’ll work with atoms instead of bits. We won’t just go circular, but come full circle. And it will change everything.“

?DeepTech, by its very nature, is mind-blowing, encompassing the edges of scientific development in biology, chemistry, electronics, engineering, finance, and health—and the convergence of all of the above. The potential for change that these technologies promise is staggering.“

?“We are in the midst of a major societal?transformation,?comparable to our transition from hunters to farmers over 10,000 years ago. This time, it’s a shift from the exploitative paradigm that marked the first and second Industrial Revolutions to a more generative one. In the Fourth?Industrial?Revolution, or 4IR, we’re beginning to co-design with nature at an atomic level. Call us atomic farmers.”?This is actually a quote from the conversation with me, I am aware it is very autoreferential to have your own quote in your own newsletter (sorry for that), but I really liked the way they captured it.

I wrote last week about the importance of art?as?the fastest way to make a Deep Tech future real now?(Generative Futurism).?As part of the work on the Beauty Shot, I had an?in-depth interview/discussion?with artist?and bio-fabrication entrepreneur?Maurizio Montalti.?This has been one of the highlights of the past months for me. We went fairly deep on deep tech/nature co-design and got very philosophical. It is a bit of longer read, but worth it.?

To close with a quote from the conversation:?“There’s a lot of nostalgia that “things used to be better.” But nature has never been one thing. Evolution is part of nature“

PS One more plug for the HoBB (yes, I am that big of a fan), their annual conference is one of the most inspiring moments of the year. Have a look at the program to realize I am not exaggerating. If you have not yet considered attending “Concrete Love” think about it, you can do it virtually or apply for the IRL experience.

When 90 Is Young: What a Moonshot VC Thinks About Radical Longevity

Longevity Vision Fund?founder?Sergey Young?buckets longevity into three buckets: Horizon One, Horizon Two, and Far Horizon. Horizon One is tech we have today - wearables, telemedicine, diet, apps, the "boring stuff"... that's actually not boring at all ("things like early cancer diagnostics completely disrupt the space of oncology. In radiology, for instance, we’re seeing diagnosis by AI and human radiologists"). Horizon Two is 5-15 years from today, tech that will not just slow down aging, but reverse it - gene therapy, regenerative medicine, and age reversal drugs.

The Far Horizon is what Young is both excited and fearful about - concepts like complete organ replacement, brain-computer interfaces, and an "Internet of body." The biggest obstacle isn't the pace of tech - it's how fast it can get approval. As Young notes, "it's widely cited that it takes?an average of 17 years?for research evidence to reach clinical practice. So we need new disruptive technologies to disrupt the current systems or develop a parallel system."

"Think about phones. Thirty years ago, a very basic cell cost thousands. Right now, you can buy a working smartphone for as low as $9. That’s exactly what will happen in healthcare. It will be more valuable, more direct-to-consumer, more data-driven, and more efficient. In 10 years, I expect the largest healthcare players will be?Google,Microsoft,?Amazon?and?Apple. Because they have the data."

News items:

How Mirrors Could Power the Planet... and Prevent Wars

Concentrated solar power might just revolutionize the energy sector as we know it. See Freethink's video below.

Need to Fit Billions of Transistors on a Chip? Let AI Do It

You've probably seen one of those How It's Made videos?on microchip design and manufacture?- it's an enormously complex process, requiring the ultra-precise arrangement of billions of components on tiny surfaces. While machines automate much of the fabrication process, efforts to automate chip design have fallen flat these last few decades.

This is slowly changing, as chipmakers like Nvidia and Google experiment with AI tools that help arrange chip components.?Haoxing Ren?at Nvidia, for example, is testing reinforcement learning algorithms for the task, and believes it will cut engineering efforts in half: "you will probably see a major part of the chips that are designed with AI" in the distant future. In June, Google?published a Nature paper?that demonstrated using AI "could produce a chip design in a matter of hours rather than weeks."

Even in the future, humans supervision will be required, says Ren: "because reinforcement algorithms can sometimes behave in unpredictable ways, which could lead to costly errors in design or even manufacturing if an engineer fails to spot them. For example, research has shown how game-playing reinforcement learning algorithms can?fixate on a strategy that leads to short-term gain but ultimately fails."

News items:

Stumble-Proof Robot Adapts to Challenging Terrain in Real Time

Researchers at Facebook AI have created a new model for robotic locomotion that adapts in real time to any terrain it encounters, changing its gait on the fly to keep trucking when it hits sand, rocks, stairs, and other sudden changes.

Digital Communications Technology & Collective Behavior

A few weeks ago I covered?Stewardship of global collective behavior, a paper written by 17 researchers specializing in fields as diverse as climate science and philosophy arguing that "our lack of understanding about the collective behavioral effects of new technology is a danger to democracy and scientific progress." But just as important as the surface message of the study was the confluence of disciplines - and how vital it is to bring together experts from different fields to figure out societal issues. On a?The Sunday Show?podcast, Tech Policy Press CEO?Justin Hendrix interviewed several of the paper's authors. Lots of great quotes, particularly around the 30-minute mark when the authors discuss the antidisciplinary nature of the study:

"I'd like to see people in the tech community read this and start to think about the larger scale impact of our massive restructuring of our information ecosystem, what impact that's having. I would like to see people in the social sciences and humanities read this, recognize this as a critically important problem in terms of understanding who we are right now and where we're headed in a very short period of time. I'd like to see natural scientists read this. People who are doing work in complex systems and things like that and realize that this is one of the great urgent, unsolved problems. It's an interesting problem, it's a critical problem, and it's a very hard problem, and we're going to need input from a lot of places."

News items:

Heart Health: Design Cities Differently and It Can Help Us Live Longer

By 2050, it is projected that?almost 70%?of the world’s population will be living in cities, up from 55% today - the fastest urban growth is happening in Asia and Africa, which is also where we’re seeing a?rapid rise?in people suffering from, and dying of, heart disease.

AI Voice Actors Sound More Human Than Ever—and They’re Ready to Hire

WellSaid Labs, an Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence spinoff, downplays their AI prowess - their synthetic text-to-speech (TTS) agents sound eerily human on thier front page. Stumbling upon it, you'd need a moment to notice they're all synthetic. Recently securing?$10M in funding, WellSaid is part of a growing cohort of artificial voice startups:Sonatic, which offers "AI-generated voices" for games and films;?Resemble.ai, which offers synthetic voices for voice assistants; and?VocaliD, which pushes "humanized voice-as-a-service" for content.

Synthetic voices are scalable and personalized - you can adjust in-game dialogue or advertising on the fly. If you watch the Sonatic video below, the difference between your traditional words-glued-together TTS and something produced with deep learning is stark. So how do these startups achieve subtleties like expressiveness, realistic inconsistencies, pitch, timbre?

"Capturing these nuances involves finding the right voice actors to supply the appropriate training data and fine-tune the deep-learning models. WellSaid says the process requires at least an hour or two of audio and a few weeks of labor to develop a realistic-sounding synthetic replica.... But there are limitations to how far AI can go. It’s still difficult to maintain the realism of a voice over the long stretches of time that might be required for an audiobook or podcast. And there’s little ability to control an AI voice’s performance in the same way a director can guide a human performer."

News items:

Creepypasta and the Search for the Ghost in the Machine

Oral ghost stories began to evolve into "creepypasta" - paranormal tales intended to frighten readers. Ars Technica explores the inventive world of gaming creepypastas over the years.

We Need to Regulate Mind-Reading Tech Before It Exists

A month ago I covered the surprise announcement that Chile's?National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research?was beginning to debate a neurorights bill, which aims to protect identity, free will, mental privacy, and other basic rights for brain activity. This week I am diving a bit deeper with?Abel Wajnerman Paz, assistant professor at the Alberto Hurtado University in Chile. According to Paz,?two bills?- "a constitutional reform bill, which is awaiting approval by the Chamber of Deputies, and a bill on neuro-protection" - plan to provide basic neuro-rights for citizens.

"By treating neuro-data as an organ, the [neuro-protection] law prohibits Chileans from being compelled to give up brain data and, crucially, its collection will require explicit 'opt-in' authorization. Another implication of this legal analogy is that brain data cannot be sold; it can only be donated for altruistic purposes. The buying and selling of brain data is prohibited, regardless of consent.... Chile's proposal will likely be the first of many national regulatory frameworks on neuro-rights. For instance, Spain’s recent Digital Rights Charter includes in Article 24 some of the same neuro-rights that Chile is proposing to ascend to a constitutional level."

News items:

Sama Validates Its Ethical AI Supply Chain Through A Randomized Control Study With MIT

Sama, a training data and validation company based in San Francisco, believes AI can enhance how we work and is advocating for "human-in-the-loop," a work model that requires human involvement even with advanced technology.