The Geopolitics of Deep tech/ The Exponential Age’s Maidan Moment/ Big Tech’s Russia Problem/Planetary Sapience/ Soft Things to Solve Hard Problems
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale Bioyards, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
The Geopolitics of Deep Tech. I am still stunned and even more furious about what is going on in Ukraine. I do really hope that we don’t “get used” to this terrible war, which deeply impacts all of us, even if indirectly. As practicing stoic, I decided to focus on what I control. One obvious thing was to donate to provide humanitarian relief to the many innocent victims of this tragedy. If you have not done it yet you can contribute using?this link?or?this one.?
The other less obvious thing we can focus on has been made clear to me by Azeem Azahr’s brilliant commentary from last week, which I feature below, and even better articulated in his?Friday’s commentary?about the consequences of this war, which is really redefining the world as we know it.?
Technology has always played an important role in geopolitics. Ultimately, technology played an important role in the collapse of the Soviet Union. The big difference with what happened during the cold war is that the technology in focus back then was the result of major state programs with huge budgets and fairly long timelines.?
But the role of technology in the exponential age, as Azeem outlines in his?book, is a very different one. This goes back to what I define as the deep tech approach to innovation, in which lower barriers to innovation and the convergence of technologies lead to a significant expansion (orders of magnitude, not percentages) of the option space, i.e. of what is possible, with timelines that are collapsing (again by at least one order of magnitude). The result is that many things that once seemed impossible all of a sudden are in reach and these can be pushed forward even by “simple” startups. This is generally good but can become critical (in a positive but also negative sense) in a conflictual geopolitical environment.?
Personally, I see three ways in which deep tech will play a role in reshaping the geopolitical landscape, hopefully for the better.
First, it will have a significant impact on the military and defense industry, with a halo effect on civilian innovation as it has already been the case with GPS and even the internet, born as ARPANET. The big difference will be the speed and partially the source of these innovations, which will require a very different approach, more DARPA-like than DOD (e.g.?F35 program). I am not an expert in this area, but it will be very important as we move forward. One just needs to look at?quantum computing?to see things might change very soon in this space.?
Second, this war will (hopefully) accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels. Renewables, and hopefully soon fusion, will dramatically reshape geopolitics as their availability (renewables) is way more distributed as for fossil fuels, providing very little political leverage, as nobody has preferred access to the sun or the wind. On the other side, fusion can eventually completely change the game, leading to energy abundance, with small modular fission reactors playing an intermediate role in the short term. If climate change was not enough of a reason to accelerate the energy shift, now geopolitics will definitely act as an additional booster, and, sadly, governments tend to take the latter more seriously than the former.?
Third, I have been arguing for a while now about the need to shift from an extractive to a generative approach for the whole of our industrial backbone and the need to redo our economical and industrial tissue accordingly. If the pandemic had already shown how brittle the global supply chain was, this is the definitive signal that we urgently need to rethink it and redo it. Deep tech and nature co-design are the ideal tools to redo our economical and industrial tissue for the better, be it through generative manufacturing, synthetic biology, or vertical farming, just to mention a few opportunities.
If you are reading this newsletter, chances are that at least one of the three buckets above is relevant to you. I can only urge all of us to see where and how we can contribute and do our best to accelerate the transition to a better world, addressing the issues of climate change and leveraging technology to change the rules of geopolitics to provide additional leverage to countries and alliances the values of democracy and freedom.
For me the path forward is clear, I will focus even more on the third point, redoing the economic and industrial tissue of modern civilization. I am aware that this is not going to impact directly the war on Ukraine and the short term, but this is what I can control, and I will focus on that.?
Author ?Azeem Azhar?calls Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “the first ?Exponential Age?war involving a great power.” Azhar examines cyber-warfare, Europe’s dependence on Russian gas, and how “the 40-year wave of price-driven globalization has delivered an incredibly fragile web of supply chains, ready to fall over at the slightest provocation.”
Over ?90% of neon?used for lasers in chip manufacturing is sourced in Ukraine, and “many other critical inputs for high-tech industries originate from Russia or Ukraine.” Additionally, “not a single NATO nation, apart from the US, can readily field an army division.”
Despite (or because of) these and other challenges, “this crisis will be an accelerator of change. It will drive investments in advanced technologies, which in turn will drive investments in the decarbonization of industry.” Azeem concludes: “Perhaps we will be able to look at these horrible, painful moments as part of the adjustment process to a new, more sustainable norm.
News items:
Meta’s new AI ?Builder Bot?lets you create “parts of virtual worlds by describing them” in words. According to Mark Zuckerberg: “You’ll be able to create nuanced worlds to explore and share experiences with others with just your voice.”
In the wake of its attack on Ukraine, Russia announced?that it would partially restrict Facebook usage in Russia and Twitter confirmed?it’s also being limited for certain users. According to Vox, Facebook and Twitter are “facing the [increasingly common] demands of an authoritarian government that’s pressuring them to censor content it doesn’t like and to allow propaganda to run unchecked.”
Government restriction of social media and an “open internet” has long been the norm in countries like China, and India recently demanded?that Facebook and Twitter remove political content. According to ?Emerson Brooking, Resident Senior Fellow at Atlantic Council: “I think we’re heading toward an inevitable break in the global internet.”
News items:
Ukrainians founded WhatsApp and PayPal, and companies like Grammarly have major offices in Kyiv. Ukraine “is estimated to have about ?200K tech workers,” and “American technologists are taking a stand with their wallets” to help fund its defense efforts. Just don’t try to donate with PayPal or crypto.
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According to ?Benjamin Bratton, Professor of Visual Arts. Director of Center for Design and Geopolitics at UCLA SD, “Planetary-scale computation — an emergent intelligence that is both machine and human — [gives] us the perspective to see Earth as an interconnected whole. With it, we must now conceive an intentional and worthwhile planetary-scale terraforming.”
Bratton discusses the philosophical implications of “the provocative concept of planetary sapience” and ?terraforming“not of another planet, but of our own.”
According to Bratton: ”In its current commercial form, the primary purpose of planetary-scale computation is to measure and model individual people in order to predict their next impulse. But a more aspirational goal would be to contribute to the comprehension, composition, and enforcement of a shared future that is more rich, diverse, and viable.”
News items:
Can mushrooms save the world? According to the authors of ?The Future is Fungi, mushrooms can not only “open our minds” with ?psychedelic therapy?but also ?replace leather,?provide earth-friendly packaging materials, and “create a circular economy of materials, [that are] grown, fabricated, used, and - at the end of their life cycle - biodegraded or reused.”
The Cloud of the digital is elusive, its inner workings largely mysterious to the wider public - a black box. But just as the clouds above us, however formless or ethereal they may appear to be, are in fact made of matter, the Cloud of the digital is also relentlessly material.
According to a?new case study, “the Cloud is not only material but [it] is also an ecological force.” Described as a ‘Carbonivore,’ ”the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers” powering the Cloud have a devastating impact on our planet.
A single desktop computer “requires 529 lbs of fossil fuels, 49 lbs of chemicals, and over 3,300 lbs of water to manufacture,” and Greenpeace estimates?that less than 16% of e-waste generated annually is recycled. The tremendous ?energy consumption of data centers?is something we’ve previously covered at length.
According to study author ?Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, anthropologist and PhD candidate at MIT: ”The ecological dynamics we find ourselves in are not entirely a consequence of design limits, but of human practices and choices - among individuals, communities, corporations, and governments - combined with a deficit of will and imagination to bring about a sustainable Cloud.
News items:
What if?all?facts are alternative facts? ?Chris Fuchs, Professor of Physics at UMass, is the “leading proponent” of QBism: “A way of giving meaning to the mathematical statements of quantum physics, which would otherwise be abstract mental exercises.” “QBism’s core tenet is that [all] probabilities are?completely?subjective - the personal beliefs of whoever is assigning them - constrained only by the rules of probability theory.”
Hydrogels are “polymers that can absorb a large volume of water while still retaining their shape.” According to Xuanhe Zhao, Professor at MIT: “Except for nails, teeth, and bones, all other components of the body are hydrogels.” Hydrogels “make up our muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and brain.”
Zhao says his lab “invents soft things to solve hard problems.”
Current projects include a surgical robot that can insert an elastomer catheter into the brains of stroke victims, a biocompatible adhesive tape that could replace sutures, and an inflatable prosthetic hand.
According to Zhao, the catheter insertion, which very few surgeons can perform, utilizes “an autonomous system - the doctor conceivably could even be in another city.”
News items:
Centipedes may make you squirm, but biological physicists like ?Daniel Goldman, Professor at Georgia Tech, have codified their unique movements to develop a new breed of robots. According to ?Matthew McHenry, biomechanist at UC Irvine, centipedes have “speed, elegance, and efficiency that are the envy of engineers.”