Nature Co-Design / Leadership Through Exponential Change/ Green Hydrogen/ Humanity’s Largest Art Project/ A Xenobot Future

The week started with good news and continued with even better ones. BioNTech and Pfizer announced that results of the last phase of the vaccine trials were in and that the efficacy of the vaccine developed by the German biotech startup is around 90%. It cannot be stressed enough how important this milestone is, eventually there is light at the end of the corona-tunnel despite all of the current difficulties.

But there is another historical moment hidden in the announcement that went unnoticed, and rightly so given the havoc the coronavirus is producing on the world. This vaccine is the first official step leading us into the era of nature co-design. 

I had written in May about Moderna, the other company working on an mRNA vaccine, and in the final phases of the trials. What I wrote back then applies to BioNTech as well, the reality of a post covid world is going to be massively shaped by deep tech companies like BioNtech and Moderna. And one of the ways they are going to do so is through nature co-design.

Nature co-design is very different from partnering with nature, something we have been doing since the beginning of civilization. And it not about bio-mimicry either, i.e. getting inspiration from nature to solve problems. Nature co-design is about using nature as an engineering and manufacturing platform. We are only at the beginning of it and using mRNA to create a vaccine is only a first step, but we have now the tools to work with nature in a completely different way. Nature co-design has the potential to fundamentally reshape our society for the better.

To understand the power of what is happening, one needs to realize that by leveraging the mRNA technology we are basically writing the “software” for the human body to produce the desired immune system response. We are not producing something externally and then injecting it, we are using nature instead (through the mRNA) as an engineering platform and the human body as the “manufacturing” platform. Such an approach was considered simply impossible for years, with the scientific community dismissive of the technology.

I am going to discuss nature co-design on Friday at Hello Tomorrow and a report on it will be published soon, so, more to come, stay tuned.

What It Takes to Lead Through an Era of Exponential Change

"The pace of change has picked up. More than that, whereas we used to experience disruptions followed by periods of stability, change now is increasingly perpetual, pervasive, and exponential." - HBR

The biblical flood of upending change that has crashed over 2020 - and continues still to descend - has accelerated innovations we thought would take years to come to fruition. Leaders caught unawares in the swell of overlapping economic, health, and logistical crises are trying to ascertain why they were unprepared. Why is it that, in the information age, we're so shocked by sudden, rapid change? Stanford's director of Health and Human PerformanceAneel Chima and inventor and entrepreneur Ron Gutman believe it's our reliance on a relatively linear perspective:

"Human minds evolved for thinking linearly and locally in the face of challenge, not exponentially and systemically. Noted futurist Ray Kurzweil asserted, 'The future is widely misunderstood. Our forebears expected it to be pretty much like their present, which had been pretty much like their past.' But, projecting our pasts onto our futures exposes a fundamental error: Linear thinking can never catch-up and adapt to the perpetual, pervasive, and exponential [or three-deminsional/3-D] change occurring around us."

Chima and Gutman convened with Stanford colleagues to discuss the future of leadership and change-making, and came up with the concept of Sapient Leadership, characterized by someone "wise, sagacious, and discerning in navigating change while also being humane in the face of change that can often feel alien." Chima and Gutman lay out a basic framework for Sapient Leadership in an HBR dive: "Leader humility, authenticity, and openness instills trust and psychological safety. In turn, trust and psychological safety empower individuals and teams to perform at their highest capabilities. Additionally, continuously learning teams are essential for keeping pace with and effectively navigating 3-D change."

Humanity’s Largest Art Project

Game of Thrones, as you might have guessed, is the most expensive TV show of all time, costing upwards of $15M per episode by its eighth and final season. Ernest Oppetit, product manager at SoftBank-backed Improbable, does a bit of napkin math: assuming the 3,589 people involved worked the entire eight-year span of the show, that nets us about 28,712 person-years... give or take. The Taj Mahal took 20k workers and 21 years to build, coming out at 420k person-years. So the Taj took 15x as long as an eight-year-long epic TV show.

How will these artistic efforts compare in the next few decades? With emerging technology such as 3D-printed houses and building components (for more on this, check out the Sharples brothers' work in modular building design), virtual production (The Mandalorian is a quintessential example), and machine learning, it seems like construction, development, and even creativity itself will get more efficient. So we look elsewhere to find humanity's largest and lengthiest art projects: collaborative endeavors, such as prototypical metaverses like Minecraft and Roblox. An early, intriguing example is Decentraland: a virtual world owned by its users on a public blockchain.

AI Pioneer Geoff Hinton: “Deep Learning Is Going to Be Able to Do Everything”

MIT Technology Review spoke with Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton on the future of deep learning. The researcher - who pioneered the field and has stuck with it since the 80s - needs little introduction, so we've gathered some of our favorite quotes from the piece.

Will we be able to approximate all human intelligence through deep learning?

"Yes. Particularly breakthroughs to do with how you get big vectors of neural activity to implement things like reason. But we also need a massive increase in scale. The human brain has about 100 trillion parameters or synapses. What we now call a really big model, like GPT-3, has 175 billion. It’s a thousand times smaller than the brain."

A lot of the people in the field believe that common sense is the next big capability to tackle. Do you agree?

"I agree that that’s one of the very important things. I also think motor control is very important, and deep neural nets are now getting good at that. In particular, some recent work at Google has shown that you can do fine motor control and combine that with language so that you can open a drawer and take out a block, and the system can tell you in natural language what it’s doing."

What do you believe to be your most contrarian view on the future of AI?

"Well, my problem is I have these contrarian views and then five years later, they’re mainstream. Most of my contrarian views from the 1980s are now kind of broadly accepted. It’s quite hard now to find people who disagree with them. So yeah, I’ve been sort of undermined in my contrarian views."

Scientists Just Stored 52 Pages of Mozart in DNA

One reason DNA has great potential as a storage medium is its resilience: "From a resiliency and storage density perspective, nothing beats DNA. Properly stored, DNA can last for at least 500 years. And a gram of DNA can store over 200PB of data," notes Gartner. Furthermore, it's insanely space-efficient: Researcher Michael Chui said that "one kilogram of raw DNA could store all the world’s data today." The concept behind DNA storage isn't complex: digital content is mapped to four nucleotides (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine). Each nucleotide represents two bits. These nucleotide codes are then used to create synthetic DNA, which is replicated and stored in DNA strands. These strands are copied millions of times to make reading data easier.

The only issue is, the techniques to accomplish this are still crude and expensive: "Despite two successful prototypes, [DNA storage and computing] is currently rudimentary and expensive with significant technical barriers to mainstream use. However, the impact of a successful DNA computing and storage option would transform data storage, processing parallelism and computing efficiency," says Gartner. As of last year, for example, Twist Bioscience, which offers DNA-based storage, quoted a price of $1,000 per megabyte (or $6,000 per iPhone photo). Researchers in Europe recently published a Nature Communications paper, detailing a process that could make DNA storage more efficient, storing 52 pages of Mozard sheet music (100 kb) as an example. If you'd like a brief refresh on DNA storage, TED-Ed has a nice five-minute explainer that's worth a watch.

News items:

The UK Task-Force Trying to Get Quantum Computers Out of Labs

The research program DISCOVERY will pool expertise to help overcome some of the biggest technological and logistical barriers the quantum computing industry faces.

The Xenobot Future Is Coming—Start Planning Now

For nearly three decades, groups have gathered to discuss the same questions around genetic editing: "regulatory uncertainties, access to research funding, intellectual property ownership" on the research side, and "national security and public backlash to engineered 'designer babies'" on the government end. But these questions ultimately proved reductive, says Wired guest author Amy Webb, founder at the Future Today Institute - in part because they only imagined a future where we "cut, copied, and pasted existing genetic material. They failed to see a future in which anyone could create life from scratch." With tools like CRISPR and the field of synthetic biology, we now have the ability to write life, not just read and edit it. That includes the creation of xenobots.

"Earlier this year, a group of researchers started with a cluster of stem cells from an African clawed frog as a base and then used a supercomputer, a virtual environment, and evolutionary algorithms to create 100 generations of prototypes to build. The result: a tiny blob of programmable tissue called a xenobot." We covered this back in April. The hope is that these tiny living robots - which are viruses - can one day be injected into humans and deliver targeted medicine, "like the thumb drive you stick into your computer to transfer files between devices."

Green Hydrogen: Could It Be Key to a Carbon-Free Economy?

Back in July, we learned via Bloomberg that Air Products & Chemicals signed an accord with Saudi-based ACWA Power International to build a $5B hydrogen-based ammonia plant powered by renewable energy, as part of the ambitious Neom smart city project. The green hydrogen plant, already in production for the last four years, is powered by wind and solar projects across the desert. (Neom currently looks something like this...)

As a zero-emissions-fuel hydrogen has immense promise, but there's a reason it hasn't been as popular as lithium batteries for powering vehicles. Electric cars outsell hydrogen-based cars at a ratio of 307-to-1. More, critics have been telling the public and private sector to stop wasting billions on hydrogen fuel cells. Add to that the mind-boggling costs associated with setting up hydrogen fueling infrastructure, and hydrogen-powered cars seem a remote reality.ZeroAvia CEO Val Miftakhov, whose company produces hydrogen-fueled powertrains for aircraft, actually agrees with this sentiment but believes efforts have been focused on the wrong market - light-duty road transport.

"Light-duty personal vehicles are the worst possible segment, where even the current batteries are good enough," said Miftakhov in an April Aeronautics feature. Yale Environment 360 pushes the same message: "while wind and solar energy can provide the electricity to power homes and electric cars, green hydrogen could be an ideal power source for energy-intensive industries like concrete and steel manufacturing, as well as parts of the transportation sector that are more difficult to electrify." Analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council Rachel Fakhry adds that "the last 15 percent of the economy is hard to clean up — aviation, shipping, manufacturing, long-distance trucking." While hydrogen has seen comparatively little interest in the US - initiatives in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia are more prevalent - new projects are underway, including a "green hydrogen power plant in Utah that will replace two aging coal-fired plants and produce electricity for southern California."

News items:

Where Biology And Computers Combine, Trillions Await Those Who Can Scale Up: An Interview With Lattice Automation Co-Founder Doug Densmore

"An automated revolution in biotechnology, where cheap computing meets mass-reproducible synthetic biology, begetting an industry with the potential to surpass anything that went before it."

A Step Forward in the Promise of Ultrafast ‘Hyperloops’

Virgin Hyperloop became the first company to conduct a human test of the technology on Sunday at its 500-meter test track in the desert north of Las Vegas.

Shrimpy Nanotech Could Carry Drugs to Tumors

A nanoparticle-based drug delivery system can ferry a potent anti-cancer drug through the bloodstream safely, researchers report.

Ten Years On, Kinect’s Legacy Goes Beyond Xbox

Quick, what was Xbox 360's best-selling game? Perhaps the ubiquitous Minecraft? Not by far - that was outsold by The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Maybe Halo 3? No again - GTA V beat it by some 3M copies. It was, in fact, Kinect Adventures, which sold a staggering 24M copies. So the original Kinect was a resounding success, right? For a few years, it was. Ellen used it on her show; Oprah gave it away on hers; it won the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling gadget. Starting as a skunkworks project that eventually took on the Wii, the Kinect was ahead of its time: "Whereas the Wii could only monitor the movement of one hand, Microsoft could offer full-body skeletal tracking, identifying physical gestures and the tech could even recognize faces."

In 2013, Xbox One shipped with a Kinect. It also had facial recognition, years before Face ID, and could start with a wake word before Alexa had permeated American homes. So what happened? In short, the price. The Xbox One - which came with a Kinect - initially retailed for $100 more than the PS4, a critical mistake that eventually saw the unbundling of the Kinect (and its fade into obscurity). Now, the device finds a niche home in research and business applications: "Microsoft resurrected Kinect with an Azure-branded version for businesses. It’s already been tested by supermarkets for grab-and-go checkout services, and healthcare companies looking to identify patient falls." For a full history, we recommend Polygon's long-read.

Automakers Use Virtual Reality to Cut the Development Time for Vehicles Like the Hummer EV

In April, Ars Technica interviewed Jaguar's director of design Julian Thomson, who had been leading a 300-person team from his home. Used to walking around, looking, and feeling clay designs, Thompson, who prior to the pandemic moved to a 12k m2 space with "state-of-the-art CNC clay modeling equipment, VR caves, and an 11m 4K display wall," was now stuck in his attic with an iPad.

Ford tried a more immersive workaround: in May, Automobile Magazine spoke with the automaker's global design director Joel Piaskowski, whose team had begun using VR headsets in the design process while working from home. The company had already been employing VR in various uses cases for two years, but Piaskowski noted that "the fidelity of what you're looking at in your goggles is much higher than even a couple of years ago... it's a very effective tool." But like Thomson, Piaskowski missed "the camaraderie of seeing each other."

Growing pains aside, the tech has become more ingrained in industry workflows. GM recently unveiled that their 2022 GMC Hummer EV was created in rapid time thanks in part to VR. CEO Mary Barra tweeted that the process was a "new benchmark in GM’s ability to quickly bring EV products to market." How fast? According to CNBC, "what historically took GM and other automakers five to seven years to develop and launch a new vehicle is expected to be cut to under three years for the Hummer EV."

"For the Hummer EV, the primary method for the 'theme creation' and selection of the vehicle’s interior was virtual reality, mainly prior to the pandemic. No scale models or clay busts – traditional methods of design for automakers – were used during the initial selection of the Hummer EV’s interior, according to GM." Michael McBride, GM's global director of design business operations, said that going forward, "you’ll just continue to hear us talk more and more about using [such technologies] on various products. you’ll just continue to hear us talk more and more about using it on various products."

News items:

3D-Scanning Canvas App Shows What iPhone 12 Pro's Lidar Can Do

The Canvas app 3D scans homes using the iPhone 12 Pro's LiDAR.

Who Should Get a Covid-19 Vaccine First?

As deep tech moves technological and biological innovation into the spheres of health, it raises a number of ethical public health questions that we need to start being more cognizant of. Vaccine development is a great example. The first thing to consider is that in the US the assumption has been that there is (usually) enough vaccines to go around, or barring that, the hope is that enough people will be gain immunity post-infection (or get inoculated) to limit the pathogen's circulation - this is what's referred to as herd immunity. Like it's done with every other aspect of life, COVID-19 has undermined both assumptions: distribution will take time while herd immunity is difficult to achieve with a new disease.

This brings to mind H1N1, or swine flu, which surfaced suddenly in 2009, causing delays in vaccine production. The CDC was faced with the task of deciding who would be first to receive inoculation. One key paper around that time demonstrated that "children 5 to 19 are responsible for most transmission and for the spread of infection to their parents' age groups," and advised prioritizing patients aged 5 to 19, "as well as those roughly in their parents' age group" to best protect the rest of the population. Now, agencies are faced with similar, if not more difficult, quandaries:

"Ethicists wrestle with whether society should simply aim to minimize deaths — or if other factors should be determinant... if there was only enough vaccine that’s 60 percent effective to cover 30 percent of the population, we’d face a choice: Giving it to younger people would minimize symptomatic infections and non-I.C.U. hospitalizations, whereas giving it to older people would minimize I.C.U. hospitalizations and deaths. Hospitalizations... strain the health care system. Complicating matters, racial and ethnic minority groups have borne a disproportionate burden from the disease so far, which means, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, that any vaccination strategy has a 'moral imperative' to explicitly address that imbalance."

What AI Can Learn From Parents

Can data scientists properly parent a stubborn, unethical AI? In his book, The Alignment Problem, writer and programmer Brian Christian believes to an extent, we can. Roboticist and UC Berkley psychologist Alison Gopnikelaborates: "As parents, we don’t want our children to have exactly the same preferences and accomplishments that we do. We want them to have their own goals and values, which may turn out to be better than our own." The WSJ piece is all too brief, as Gopnik's in-depth work at Berkley is fascinating, but it serves as a gentle introduction to her ideas.

These include creating curiosity-driven agents instead of those built to copy movements or learn through random motion - "seemingly illogical fiddling that in the end lands them on an answer," as she noted in Wired last November. We highly recommend her February 2019 essay Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old? and her Vox interview, Kids’ brains may hold the secret to building better AI.

News items:

For His Monthly Intention, Pope Francis Prayed AI Will Be Beneficial for Humanity

"We pray that the progress of robotics and artificial intelligence may always serve humankind," reads Francis' intention for November.