Europe’s Deep Tech Paradox/ Agricultural Innovation is a Necessity/ Incredible Detailed Map of the Human Brain/ Instant Evolution/ Creepy New Digital
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
Europe’s Deep Tech Paradox. In June 2023 I had the honor to give a keynote speech (starting at 1h11m) at a conference organized as part of the Swedish EU Presidency focused on “Deep tech entrepreneurship for an innovative, resilient, and competitive internal market”. The outcome of that conference has been summarized in a report (released a few weeks ago), that I consider to be one of the best documents ever produced outlining what needs to happen in Europe to really be able to profit from the deep tech innovation wave ahead of us.
The organizers asked me to write a foreword to the report, which I was delighted to write. I have turned the foreword (with minimal modifications) into a standalone post titled Europe’s Deep Tech Paradox – A Generative Industrial Revolution Ahead and the Inability to Lead it, Despite the Capability, which I hope will trigger some reflections and ideally some actions, together with the report.
I do encourage all of you to read the post and also to read the report, as both address all the key issues that need to be tackled to get Europe to profit from the deep tech innovation wave ahead of us…
Feedback, as always, very welcome.
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Agricultural Innovation and Improved Nutrition Are Necessary for a Climate-Stressed World
“July 2023 was the hottest month ever recorded,” and crippling heat waves are occurring worldwide. In Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, over 3B people are among the most at risk. Heat itself isn’t the most significant threat. Insteadhunger and malnutrition brought on by “climate shocks… could drive 132 million more people into extreme poverty by 2030.
Innovation could help address this potential catastrophe in numerous ways, including greater adoption of “naturallyclimate-smart and nutritious crops and pursuit of “more resilient, lower-emission small-scale livestock production."
News items:
An interview with Bedrock Energy CEO and co-founder Joselyn Lai explores the company’s mission to “make geothermal [HVAC systems] more accessible” to the commercial real estate market and address “the fact that building heating and cooling is an incredibly stubborn source of carbon emissions, and also a huge draw on power and a huge source of increasing power demand over time as the planet gets hotter.”
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Scientists Just Drafted an Incredibly Detailed Map of the Human Brain
After five years of research, a “massive suite of papers” provides “large-scale whole-brain cell atlases for humans and non-human primates.” These “3-D maps of the brain… provide unprecedented resolution of the whole brain,” including “the location and function of more than 3,000 cell types in adult and developing” humans.
Co-lead author Ed Lein says, “This is far and away the most complete description of the human brain at this kind of level and the first description in many brain regions.”
News items:
When it comes to LLMs, bigger may not always be better. Models “thousands of times smaller than GPT-3.5” trained on a dataset of “roughly 2 million stories” produced by GPT-4 outperformed bigger “more general” LLMs at telling “coherent [children’s] stories.”
Two recently published papers explore “Where and why [dataset] size matters.” DeepMind researcher Timothy Nguyenbelieves, “There should be a science of that, and this paper is hopefully the beginning of a rich story.”
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Instant Evolution: AI Designs New Robot From Scratch in Seconds
A new AI tool “runs on a lightweight personal computer” and “can intelligently design robots from scratch.” Given a prompt to “design a robot that can walk across a flat surface,” the AI succeeded “in mere seconds,” arriving at a solution that “took nature billions of years.”
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Study lead author Sam Kriegman says, “We discovered a very fast AI-driven design algorithm that bypasses the traffic jams of evolution without falling back on the bias of human designers.” Calling the process “instant evolution,” Kriegman said, “When people look at this robot, they might see a useless gadget. I see the birth of a brand-new organism.”
News items:
Ehang’s EH216-S AAV, a two “passenger-carrying autonomous electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) aircraft,” was recently cleared to operate in China.
Ehang CEO Huazhi Hu is already eyeing overseas expansion and “predicts that in about five years, [autonomous] air taxis will be a common sight in many cities.”
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In A New Era Of Deepfakes, AI Makes Real News Anchors Report Fake Stories
In “an inflection point for manipulated media, ”deepfake videos of well-known newscasters like Gayle King and Anderson Cooper are increasingly “drawing more eyeballs than legitimate clips posted on news organizations’ blue-check social media accounts.”
Experts worry that “easy-to-use, readily available AI software” that “nearly anyone” can use to create deepfakes and disinformation “will transform the looming 2024 elections into a chaotic Wild West.”
News items:
A 21 computer-science student has rendered several lines from an earthquake-damaged papyrus scroll from AD 79 legible for the first time. The papyri may have belonged to Julius Caesar’s father-in-law and could “revolutionize our knowledge of ancient history and literature,” says Thea Sommerschield, historian of ancient Greece and Rome at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy.
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The Creepy New Digital Afterlife Industry
The business of digital life after death is booming. HereAfter “offers interactive memories in [a deceased] loved one’s voice,” and MyWishes “sends prescheduled messages to loved ones after the user’s death.”
“Datafication” ensures “almost everyone who uses technology today” will leave behind “digital traces” that “outlive our physical selves.” Your data is “essentially forever; we are most certainly not.” If you wish to control your digital eternity postmortem, “digital estate planning” is a must. Get started with this checklist to help “prevent the unauthorized uses of our posthumous selves” and reduce the “risk [of] becoming a digital immortal that others have created.”
News items:
AI ethicists like Ali Alkhatib are “totally burnt out,” largely due to the “grandiose claims and unacknowledged harms” by GenAI companies like Open AI.
According to Alkhatib: “The space rewards unreasonable claims about what you can do. To make those claims, you have to be pretty willing to be transgressive… What OpenAI is doing is sort of unreasonable, which is a challenging thing for them to acknowledge or face.”
Start-Up Ecosystem Builder | Vinnova | European Innovation Council (EIC)
1 年Thanks for sharing and for your contribution Massimo Portincaso both content wise and for your foreword ??
Occasional inventor & applied epistemologist ?? Imagining fascinating things and working to make them real
1 年great summaries ?? I especially appreciate the link to the European DeepTech Report - where fascinating #perspectives are offered ?? "Furthermore, through deep tech, humanity is just about to undergo a similar transition to the one that happened 10.000 years ago, when we moved from being hunter-gatherers to becoming farmers. We are now in the process, and in the necessity, of moving from being hunter-gatherers of resources to becoming farmers at the atomic level. And while the previous transition took centuries, this one will have to happen in 20 years". YES, we can and do manipulate atoms, pretty routinely now, and don't yet fully appreciate the significance of the #wizardry. In a #century, perhaps less, we'll likely be able to manipulate and #farm #quarks. We need to #educate ourselves and really everyone, about this #Magic at our #FIngertips,