Possible Futures/ Should we Block the Sun/ A Paradox No More: Investing in Automation and People/ AI-Powered VCs

In 2017 I had the pleasure to co-curate Natsai Audrey Chieza TED Talk for our annual TED@BCG in Milan, which I was also co-hosting. I really enjoyed the talk back then and also the interactions with Natsai. I just re-watched it (and I can only recommend it) and realized how prescient that talk was and how much it has shaped my view of the field. Back then, synthetic biology was still a very nascent discipline, but almost all the points raised by Natsai are still valid today.

It was with great excitement that I learned that she just released another TED talk. I featured it in the “Imagination & Creativity” section of this newsletter, but there are a few things in there that, in my opinion, warrant a broader contextualization, as, yet again, Natsai is being very forward-looking, and her thinking can (should) be applied more broadly than only to one of my favorite topics: synthetic biology.

In her new talk, at the end, she says:

“… I do remember wishing for a more just and meaningful world, where all of nature can thrive. In their own significant ways, technology and design have played their role in denying us this, but it is in our power to change that. 

Fundamentally, this means recognizing that the design of, with and from biology is designing systems and not stuff, and that with a truly ambitious design proposition, one that’s based on values that center flourishing, caretaking and equity. We have the opportunity to build truly transformative systems, systems that open up holistic measures of value and impact, and how we think about scaling innovation and doing business for the futures we need.”

I do believe that Natsai’s point applies more broadly, and is of fundamental importance, for the ongoing convergence of science (not only biology), engineering, and design that underlies the extremely powerful wave of innovation that is building.

We have indeed the possibility to design for the futures that we need, but to do so we will have to focus on (re-)designing the systems and not the stuff. It is not an easy task, but recognizing it is the very first necessary step for doing so.

Possible Futures From the Intersection of Nature, Tech and Society

In 1998, biodesigner Natsai Audrey Chieza won a national art competition, receiving a trip to Disneyland Paris. Towards the end, Chieza and other UNESCO delegates created a 20-year time capsule "with each country planting a vision of the future they hoped for." We're nowhere near these imagined futures, says Chieza. Today, she leads Faber Futures, "a biodesign lab fusing design thinking with living biological systems to generate scalable models for sustainable futures." Faber's projects include a toxin-free, water-efficient textile dye, and the Ginkgo Creative residency, "which invites creative practitioners to spend several months developing their own projects from within the Ginkgo Bioworks foundry." Watch her TED talk here.

News items:

Is Consciousness Everywhere?

Experience is in unexpected places, including in all animals, large and small, and perhaps even in brute matter itself.

The Latest Artist Selling NFTs? It’s a Robot.

Sophia has made a splash in the art world — by auctioning off a digital work that it produced in collaboration with a real-life Italian artist. It sold on Thursday for $688,888.

Should We Block the Sun? Scientists Say the Time Has Come to Study It.

Solar geoengineering - artificially cooling the planet by reflecting the sun's rays before they warm the atmosphere - fits right at home in The Ministry for the Future, a near-future novel about a massive heatwave that hits India in 2025, killing millions. As a last resort, researchers in the book spray "fine particles into the atmosphere to reflect more of the sun's heat back into space." But it's also a Plan B scientists are seriously considering - even if it's "very dangerous" if deployed without sufficient research, as Harvard researcher Frank Keutsch notes.

A new report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine urges the US government to spend $100M on solar geoengineering research. While the authors cite some catastrophic risks - upsetting regional weather patterns, relaxing public pressure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and even "creating an 'unacceptable risk of catastrophically rapid warming'" - they argue that greenhouse gas emissions are not falling quickly enough, and that other options should be examined. Critics argue that proposed safeguards aren't enough.

"The steps urged in the report to protect the interests of poorer countries — for example, accounting for farmers in South Asia whose lives could be upended by changes in rain patterns — could fall away once the research begins, according to Prakash Kashwan, a professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. 'Once these kinds of projects get into the political process, the scientists who are adding all of these qualifiers, and all of these cautionary notes, aren’t in control,' Dr. Kashwan said."

News items:

Researchers Turn 5G Networks Into Wireless Power Grids for IoT

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have come up with a novel method of tapping into the over-capacity of 5G mobile networks.

Bill Gates Wants Western Countries to Eat “Synthetic Meat”; Meatable Has Raised $47M to Make It

Two of the best-funded companies in the lab-grown meat market hail from The Netherlands, where Mosa Meat is being challenged by a newer upstart, Meatable, which just announced $47 million in new financing.

VC Firms Have Long Backed AI. Now, They Are Using It.

"I think the gut is never going to go away, but I think it’ll be much more driven by data and analysis than before." - Jai Das, president and partner of Sapphire

VCs are known for going with their gut, but some firms are adding AI tools to help in their decision-making. Correlation Ventures, for example, built a system to "analyze troves of startup data, including from pitch decks supplied by founders seeking funding." The tool "reviews information extracted by humans from pitch decks and other materials submitted by startups. The information is fed into an algorithm trained on data from more than 100,000 venture financing rounds."

EQT Ventures also has its own AI platform, nicknamed Motherbrain, which it uses to rank investment opportunities. "The platform is based on a proprietary database that contains information such as startup financials, web traffic and team member employment history. It scores investment prospects on a scale of 1 to 340, [said Henrik Landgren, a partner at EQT Ventures]. Investment professionals can then explore the highest-ranking prospects first."

News items:

AI Chip Start-up Groq in Fundraising Talks to Take on Nvidia

Semiconductor start-up Groq is in talks with investors about a round of funding that would make it one of the most well-capitalised challengers to specialised artificial intelligence chipmakers such as Nvidia.

OpenAI’s Text-Generating System GPT-3 Is Now Spewing Out 4.5 Billion Words a Day

The best-known AI text-generator is OpenAI’s GPT-3, which the company recently announced is now being used in more than 300 different apps, by "tens of thousands" of developers. 

Y Combinator’s Biotech Startups Incubate a New Generation of Therapies and Tools

There were some exciting biotech startups at YC's recent demo day. Here's a brief rundown.

Atom Bioworks: "The company seems to be fairly close to one of the holy grails of biochemistry, a programmable DNA machine. These tools can essentially 'code' a molecule so that it reliably sticks to a specific substance or cell type, which allows a variety of follow-up actions to be taken. For instance, a DNA machine could lock onto COVID-19 viruses and then release a chemical signal indicating infection before killing the virus."

Entelexo: "[The startup is] committed to developing a promising class of therapeutics called exosomes that could help treat autoimmune diseases. These tiny vesicles (think packages for inter-cell commerce) can carry all kinds of materials, including customized mRNA that can modify another cell’s behavior."

Nuntius Therapeutics: "[Nuntius is] working on ways to deliver cell-specific (i.e. to skeletal muscle, kidney cells, etc) DNA, RNA, and CRISPR-based therapies. This is an issue for cutting-edge treatments: while they can be sure of taking the correct action once in contact with the target cell type, they can’t be sure that the therapeutic agent will ever reach those cells. Like ambulance drivers without an address, they can’t do their jobs if they can’t get there."

News items:

Tiny Robots Can Now Smuggle Drugs Into Brain Tumors

In a study published Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics, a research team in China designed a new kind of bio-hybrid microbot that uses clever biological disguises to get even closer to the source of disease in the body.

Researchers’ Algorithm Designs Soft Robots That Sense

MIT researchers have developed an algorithm to help engineers design soft robots that collect more useful information about their surroundings.

A Paradox No More: Investing in Automation and People

"The presumption might be that building a better bot gives you more bang for your buck. Except the opposite appears to be happening. Automation is here, but so too is a deeper appreciation for and investment in things like upskilling, learning and development, and education for all workers." - Michael Horn and C.J. Jackson of Guild Education

Horn and Jackson give a simple explanation for the paradox of increased automation and more interest in upskilling, learning, and development: "Robots don’t program themselves. Managers are required to design and oversee processes that use technology. In most organizations, that means there’s an urgent need to upgrade talent.... managers are becoming all too aware of the implicit bias that can creep into the algorithms that undergird artificial intelligence — and the need for humans to proactively monitor for and correct it." To introduce this human-machine symbiosis to the workplace, organizations have two choices: bring in external talent or upskill and reskill the current workforce. With tech talent becoming scarcer, organizations are increasingly exploring upskilling and reskilling options.

"As has been reported widely, Walmart, for example, is opening health care clinics across the country. With more than 4,000 stores in the United States, staffing these clinics with qualified health professionals will be critical, which is why Walmart works with schools like Penn Foster to prepare its retail workers for optician and pharmacy technician roles. Given the vast shortage of health professionals across the country, reskilling its own employees creates a more predictable path forward for a role critical to the company’s strategy."

News items:

The Next 25 Years

Since Nature Biotechnology launched in March 1996, biotech has become a US economic powerhouse. To reach its full potential over the next 25 years, touching all corners of the globe, it must become more inclusive.