HoBB Part I/ AI Reinventing Computers/ The Forgotten Half of EV Disruption/ CAD to Design Organisms/ Big Tech and the Quest for Eternal Youth
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
HoBB Part I. This week I am writing while at the?House of Beautiful Business ?(HoBB) in Lisbon, this year dedicated to “Concrete Love ”. I will go more in depth on content next week, after having heard the rest of the sessions and also had an opportunity to better digest and assimilate the many intellectual and sensorial inputs I received during the conference. In case you should be interested, here is a?good summary of the first day , and here is a?good summary of yesterday’s session .
Instead, this week I would like to share three reflections that emerged during the attendance:
·???????First: I am aware I am stating the obvious, but it feels so good being again at a conference. And it is a “hugely-introverted-conference-hater” writing this. I had completely consumed the social capital I had cumulated in previous years, and it is a great feeling starting to fill the tank again, especially in a fabulous environment as the HoBB
·???????Second: Not only the content so far was inspiring and insightful, as it has always been the case at the HoBB. This year the production value was greatly increased, everything is extremely professional and polished. This is something that I had wished for myself in the previous editions, as things were not always perfect. So, you would imagine that it made me happy, right? Surprisingly this was not the case. While I enjoyed the new set up (and the incredible location) I found myself missing a bit of the scrappiness that made the HoBB a real House and not a Hotel of Beautiful Business. I asked myself why this was the case. Why was I missing it? Ultimately the team did exactly what I had always wished for. I came to realize something that applies way beyond the HoBB. First, that we should always first fully realize the beauty of what we have before wishing for something different. Second, that we need to let it go, and appreciate things (and people) for what/who they are and not for what we would like them to be. The HoBB is coming of age (in a beautiful way), and I need to accept it the same way you have to accept that your children have grown up, even if you loved to cuddle with them when they were younger.
·???????Third: I have spent the last months very deep in the weeds of deep tech and nature co-design, and it was extremely good and much needed to be able to open the aperture quite a bit and look at very different realms, to connect very different thoughts and idea and nurture the brain with unconventional and unorthodox thinking.
More thoughts on the HoBB to follow next week.?
When a patient is added to the national organ transplant waiting list, the average waiting time could be three to five years, depending on where they are in the country. About a dozen people die every year waiting to move on the list. One idea is to grow human-compatible organs in pigs. Genetic engineering and cloning tech have made this a reality - but experimental organs are a controversial thing to test in patients.
Surgeons at NYU Langone recently had a breakthrough in this field. With the family's consent, a brain-dead patient received a pig kidney. After 54 hours of tracking the patient's response, there were still many unanswered questions, but the surgery was a success: "The organ started functioning normally, making urine and the waste product creatinine 'almost immediately,' according to Dr. Robert Montgomery... who performed the procedure in September.... 'A lot of kidneys from deceased people don’t work right away, and take days or weeks to start. This worked immediately.'"
That's a big deal. There are over 100k Americans on the transplant waiting list; 500k Americans require dialysis to survive. Genetically engineering pigs to grow organs that are less likely to be rejected could be "the solar and wind of organ availability," says Montgomery. "Pigs offered advantages over primates for organ procurement — they are easier to raise, reach maturation faster, and achieve adult human size in six months. Pig heart valves are routinely transplanted into humans, and some patients with diabetes have received pig pancreas cells. Pig skin has also been used as temporary grafts for burn patients."
News items:
Most bioengineers will likely tell you the basic goal of those in the field is to make new, useful stuff. Drew Endy, PhD, a bioengineer at Stanford University, has a different goal: "To create a planetary-scale civilization that harnesses bioengineering to flourish in partnership with nature. That, and a renewal of liberal democracy for the 21st century."
Hard materials are in high demand in engineering applications; in this paper, researchers demonstrate a potential low-cost and sustainable hard material - made from natural wood - with the potential to replace plastic table utensils and steel nails.
The Pixel 6 is a hardware milestone - the first phone to have a separate AI chip alongside the standard processor. As AI, and hardware dedicated to inference, makes its way to the masses, the very definition of what computers are morphs, believes MIT Technology Review's?Will Douglas Heaven . Particularly, this change is occuring on three fronts: "how computers are made, how they’re programmed, and how they’re used. Ultimately, it will change what they are for." Or as director of the parallel computing lab at Intel?Pradeep Dubey ?puts it, "the core of computing is changing from number-crunching to decision-making." Let's explore these three fronts a little deeper.
How computers are made:?"Traditional computing gains came as machines got faster at carrying out one calculation after another.... But the deep-learning models that make current AI applications work require a different approach: they need vast numbers of less precise calculations to be carried out all at the same time. That means a new type of chip is required."
How computers are told what to do:?"For the past 40 years we have been programming computers; for the next 40 we will be training them, says Chris Bishop, head of Microsoft Research in the UK.... With machine learning, programmers no longer write rules. Instead, they create a neural network that learns those rules for itself."
What computers are for:?"Machines no longer need a keyboard or screen for humans to interact with. Anything can become a computer. Indeed, most household objects, from toothbrushes to light switches to doorbells, already come in a smart version. But as they proliferate, we are going to want to spend less time telling them what to do. They should be able to work out what we need without being told."
News items:
A collaboration between IBM and Russian researchers has resulted in the development of optical switches that can outperform traditional transistor-based switches by operating up to 1,000 times faster.
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Senses & Motion
The transition to EVs will come, but it will be a lot slower than the media makes it appear to be. As it arrives, however, metal fabricators, corn growers, auto mechanics, and many other roles will have to adapt. EVs contain a fraction of the parts traditional vehicles do, and don't need fossil fuels, corn-based ethanol, radiators, fuel tanks, or exhaust systems; and there's no oil to change, no need for spark plugs, no mufflers wearing out. In the US alone, there are 4.7M people selling and servicing vehicles. That's a lot of adaptation.
The current administration is pushing for a faster transition - President Biden signed an executive order "setting a goal of having half of all vehicles sold in the U.S. be emission-free by the end of the decade. China, he said, is winning the race to make electric vehicles and the U.S. must catch up." Unions are pushing for worker protection - not unaware of the inexorable change but wary of workers left in the cold. But the jobs that will be created won't really resemble the ones lost. CSO?Paul Eichenberg ?said it's like comparing apples and oranges: "They are chemical companies, they are materials companies and, as you have this change, there is just a fundamental difference."
News items:
With the likes of Uber and Boeing developing eVTOL (electric vertical take-off and landing) flying taxis, one report predicts that by 2040 there will be 430,000 such vehicles in operation around the world.
Imagination & Creativity
Whether inherited or acquired during our lifetimes, many debilitating diseases are caused by mutations in the human genome. Finding a cure relies first on understanding the exact mutations. A group of researchers is releasing a tool that may help identify the combinations of mutations that cause genetic diseases - a critical first step in the R&D process. Here's how the tool works:
"With this CAD program, medical researchers will be able to quickly design hundreds of different genomes with any combination of mutations and send the genetic code to a company that manufactures strings of DNA. Those fragments of synthesized DNA can then be sent to a foundry for assembly, and finally to a lab where the designed genomes can be tested in cells. Based on how the cells grow, researchers can use the CAD program to iterate with a new batch of redesigned genomes, sharing data for collaborative efforts. Enabling fast redesign of thousands of variants can only be achieved through automation; at that scale, researchers just might identify the combinations of mutations that are causing genetic diseases."
News items:
Lack of access to physical galleries opened people’s eyes to digital possibilities. Will they revolutionize how we interact with art—or just be a placebo?
Running now in Shoreditch, Deeep AI Art Fair is a showcase of the latest up and comers making art using artificial intelligence.
Society & Ethics (S&E)
We've taken being "old" as a given since, well, ever. But a relatively young (no pun intended) industry is springing up to stymie the ageing process. As?Cellular Longevity 's 27-year-old founder?Celine Halioua ?suggests, "we’ll have an ageing drug by the time it’s relevant for me." Humans have always dreamed of eternal youth, but in 2010s we saw unprecedented investment: Sergey Brin and Larry Page helped launch?Calico , a Google subsidiary focused on combating ageing, Jeff Bezos invested in Russian billionaire Yuri Milner’s?Altos Labs , and Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison are also investing in the space. Also note the difference between life extensionism ("a belief in the possibility and desirability of a significant prolongation of healthy human life") and anti-ageing science, which works at the level of gene therapy, cell hacking, and reconstituting blood.
"The entrepreneurs in this fledgling field are determined that the end of ageing will come via therapies approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA). The elixir of youth won’t be a single drug, but a regimen of treatments that knock out different hallmarks of ageing and allow us to get older without losing our bodies and minds. We will still die: there will be accidents as well as diseases unrelated to age (children still get fatal cancers, after all). But death will become increasingly remote, and no longer preceded by years of inevitable decline."
News items:
Carnegie Mellon University researchers are challenging a long-held assumption that there is a trade-off between accuracy and fairness when using machine learning to make public policy decisions.?