Digitized to Democratized: These Are the 6 Ds of Exponential Technologies

“The Six Ds are a chain reaction of technological progression, a road map of rapid development that always leads to enormous upheaval and opportunity.”

–Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Bold

We live in incredible times. News travels the globe in an instant. Music, movies, games, communication, and knowledge are ever-available on always-connected devices. From biotechnology to artificial intelligence, powerful technologies that were once only available to huge organizations and governments are becoming more accessible and affordable thanks to digitization.

The potential for entrepreneurs to disrupt industries and corporate behemoths to unexpectedly go extinct has never been greater.

One hundred or fifty or even twenty years ago, disruption meant coming up with a product or service people needed but didn’t have yet, then finding a way to produce it with higher quality and lower costs than your competitors. This entailed hiring hundreds or thousands of employees, having a large physical space to put them in, and waiting years or even decades for hard work to pay off and products to come to fruition.

But thanks to digital technologies developing at exponential rates of change, the landscape of 21st-century business has taken on a dramatically different look and feel.

The structure of organizations is changing. Instead of thousands of employees and large physical plants, modern start-ups are small organizations focused on information technologies. They dematerialize what was once physical and create new products and revenue streams in months, sometimes weeks.

It no longer takes a huge corporation to have a huge impact.

Technology is disrupting traditional industrial processes, and they’re never going back. This disruption is filled with opportunity for forward-thinking entrepreneurs.

The secret to positively impacting the lives of millions of people is understanding and internalizing the growth cycle of digital technologies. This growth cycle takes place in six key steps, which Peter Diamandis calls the Six Ds of Exponentials: digitization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization.

According to Diamandis, cofounder and chairman of Singularity University and founder and executive chairman of XPRIZE, when something is digitized it begins to behave like an information technology.

Newly digitized products develop at an exponential pace instead of a linear one, fooling onlookers at first before going on to disrupt companies and whole industries. Before you know it, something that was once expensive and physical is an app that costs a buck.

Newspapers and CDs are two obvious recent examples. The entertainment and media industries are still dealing with the aftermath of digitization as they attempt to transform and update old practices tailored to a bygone era. But it won’t end with digital media. As more of the economy is digitized—from medicine to manufacturing—industries will hop on an exponential curve and be similarly disrupted.

Diamandis’s 6 Ds are critical to understanding and planning for this disruption.

The 6 Ds of Exponential Organizations are Digitized, Deceptive, Disruptive, Demonetized, Dematerialized, and Democratized.

Diamandis uses the contrasting fates of Kodak and Instagram to illustrate the power of the six Ds and exponential thinking.

Kodak invented the digital camera in 1975, but didn’t invest heavily in the new technology, instead sticking with what had always worked: traditional cameras and film. In 1996, Kodak had a $28 billion market capitalization with 95,000 employees.

But the company didn’t pay enough attention to how digitization of their core business was changing it; people were no longer taking pictures in the same way and for the same reasons as before.

After a downward spiral, Kodak went bankrupt in 2012. That same year, Facebook acquired Instagram, a digital photo sharing app, which at the time was a startup with 13 employees. The acquisition’s price tag? $1 billion. And Instagram had been founded only 18 months earlier.

The most ironic piece of this story is that Kodak invented the digital camera; they took the first step toward overhauling the photography industry and ushering it into the modern age, but they were unwilling to disrupt their existing business by taking a risk in what was then uncharted territory. So others did it instead.

The same can happen with any technology that’s just getting off the ground. It’s easy to stop pursuing it in the early part of the exponential curve, when development appears to be moving slowly. But failing to follow through only gives someone else the chance to do it instead. 

The Six Ds are a road map showing what can happen when an exponential technology is born. Not every phase is easy, but the results give even small teams the power to change the world in a faster and more impactful way than traditional business ever could.

Image Credit: Mohammed Tareq / Shutterstock

How Blockchain Is Helping Democratize Access to Credit

Inclusive and sustainable economic growth is goal 8 on the UN’s list of 17 sustainable development goals to be accomplished by 2030. Goal 8’s description emphasizes job creation, but acknowledges the fact that there’s a lot more to escaping poverty than simply being employed. Lack of financial inclusiveness is a part of this—say you’re making just enough money to get by, but you’re not able to save much, accumulate interest, or get a loan. How will your quality of life improve?

Access to credit is a major barrier for people in developing countries. As Ed Rodrigues, founder and CEO of Swapy Network put it, “Credit is a wonderful tool to unleash peoples’ potential. Be it to further one’s education, start a business, finance healthcare or a home improvement, credit is key for people at the bottom of the pyramid to have a better life.”

Rodrigues’ motivation to create a business geared towards enabling universal access to credit stemmed from his experience as a student in Brazil. After completing his undergraduate work Rodrigues dreamed of doing an MBA in the US. His qualifications and enthusiasm weren’t lacking, but he found it impossible to get an affordable loan. “Ultimately, I couldn’t accomplish my dream because of the lack of access to credit,” he said.

He decided to build a tool that would help prevent others from being held back by this same barrier.

One look at the base interest rates of several of the world’s central banks makes it clear that interest rates vary considerably by country, and are influenced by many different factors. Currently, nations like Switzerland and Japan actually have negative interest rates, and the US, South Korea, and Australia hover around 1.5 percent. Meanwhile, borrowers in Indonesia, Brazil, and Mexico are paying over 6.5 percent in interest.

These rates only get higher with each degree of separation from central bank rates. As the perceived risk of loans increases, lenders add interest to the central bank rate to compensate. By the time borrowing funnels down to people buying homes or starting businesses, loans in developing countries often aren’t affordable to average citizens, thus engendering a vicious cycle and perpetuating poverty.

Rodrigues envisioned a way to overcome constraints like national borders; if a Brazilian citizen is as trustworthy as a Japanese citizen—and there’s a proven way to back up that claim—why shouldn’t, say, a student in Brazil be able to borrow money at a rate comparable to what a Japanese student pays?

Enter blockchain, the technology Rodrigues believes can make this vision a reality. “Blockchain is changing both the technology and the power structure behind the credit industry,” Rodrigues said. “It’s shaking power structures that previously had to rely on banks, credit bureaus, and nation-states as middlemen.”

Blockchain is increasingly being tested as a way to track that which was previously difficult to pin down, from securing virtual assets to giving refugees an immutable financial identity.

Put simply, blockchain is a database of encrypted transactions stored across a network of computers. That network actively participates in the validation, upkeep, and accuracy of the database, and is paid for doing so in cryptocurrencies.

Swapy Network will run on the Ethereum blockchain and issue its own cryptographic tokens, called Swapy Tokens, to be used to buy and sell various services across the company’s three products.

Swapy Exchange: Connects lenders in countries with low interest rates to credit companies in countries with high interest rates. This allows credit companies to raise funds at lower rates and thus be able to lend at lower rates domestically.

Swapy Financial ID: Lets users build a digital, globally-valid financial identity. Users can log financial information like bank statements or investments straight from their phones with a mobile app, and must designate an organization to validate all logged data. The app is open-source, and data is encrypted in decentralized storage (such as IPFS) and recorded in the Ethereum blockchain. Users can choose their preferred level of data privacy.

Swapy DataMarket: Our personal data is valuable, and in many cases it’s constantly being collected, whether we want it to be or not. The Swapy Data Market gives users control over their financial data. Individuals can profit from making their data available, and companies can analyze data sets to more effectively grow their business. Importantly, this system means access to data isn’t limited to the biggest players in financial markets.

Swapy Network’s software development started in July 2017, and after getting funding from well-known investors like Tim Draper and Don Tapscott, the team is currently in the final stages of preparing for its initial coin offering (ICO). ICOs are a fundraising method for new cryptocurrencies in which a portion of the currency—in this case, Swapy Tokens—is offered to early investors in exchange for legal tender or established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ether. The company hopes to raise the equivalent of $30 million in ethers (Ethereum cryptocurrency) to finance its protocol and app development over the next five years.

Democratizing access to credit, giving people control of their data, and creating borderless, immutable financial identities are all worthwhile aims. If they’re ever achieved at scale, though, they’d not only have a huge impact on poverty alleviation, they’d also bring about a fundamental shift in the way the economy works, both at a national and international level.

Whether blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and startups like Swapy will be able to upset lending in the same way that, say, ride-hailing apps upset transit or house-sharing apps upset hospitality remains to be seen. In the meantime, getting affordable loans to the people who need them most is a noble and important goal to work towards.

Image Credit: terng99 / Shutterstock.com

Everyone Is Talking About AI—But Do They Mean the Same Thing?

In 2017, artificial intelligence attracted $12 billion of VC investment. We are only beginning to discover the usefulness of AI applications. Amazon recently unveiled a brick-and-mortar grocery store that has successfully supplanted cashiers and checkout lines with computer vision, sensors, and deep learning. Between the investment, the press coverage, and the dramatic innovation, “AI” has become a hot buzzword. But does it even exist yet?

At the World Economic Forum Dr. Kai-Fu Lee, a Taiwanese venture capitalist and the founding president of Google China, remarked, “I think it’s tempting for every entrepreneur to package his or her company as an AI company, and it’s tempting for every VC to want to say ‘I’m an AI investor.’” He then observed that some of these AI bubbles could burst by the end of 2018, referring specifically to “the startups that made up a story that isn’t fulfillable, and fooled VCs into investing because they don’t know better.”

However, Dr. Lee firmly believes AI will continue to progress and will take many jobs away from workers. So, what is the difference between legitimate AI, with all of its pros and cons, and a made-up story?

If you parse through just a few stories that are allegedly about AI, you’ll quickly discover significant variation in how people define it, with a blurred line between emulated intelligence and machine learning applications.

I spoke to experts in the field of AI to try to find consensus, but the very question opens up more questions. For instance, when is it important to be accurate to a term’s original definition, and when does that commitment to accuracy amount to the splitting of hairs? It isn’t obvious, and hype is oftentimes the enemy of nuance. Additionally, there is now a vested interest in that hype—$12 billion, to be precise.

This conversation is also relevant because world-renowned thought leaders have been publicly debating the dangers posed by AI. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg suggested that naysayers who attempt to “drum up these doomsday scenarios” are being negative and irresponsible. On Twitter, business magnate and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk countered that Zuckerberg’s understanding of the subject is limited. In February, Elon Musk engaged again in a similar exchange with Harvard professor Steven Pinker. Musk tweeted that Pinker doesn’t understand the difference between functional/narrow AI and general AI.

Given the fears surrounding this technology, it’s important for the public to clearly understand the distinctions between different levels of AI so that they can realistically assess the potential threats and benefits.

As Smart As a Human?

Erik Cambria, an expert in the field of natural language processing, told me, “Nobody is doing AI today and everybody is saying that they do AI because it’s a cool and sexy buzzword. It was the same with ‘big data’ a few years ago.”

Cambria mentioned that AI, as a term, originally referenced the emulation of human intelligence. “And there is nothing today that is even barely as intelligent as the most stupid human being on Earth. So, in a strict sense, no one is doing AI yet, for the simple fact that we don’t know how the human brain works,” he said.

He added that the term “AI” is often used in reference to powerful tools for data classification. These tools are impressive, but they’re on a totally different spectrum than human cognition. Additionally, Cambria has noticed people claiming that neural networks are part of the new wave of AI. This is bizarre to him because that technology already existed fifty years ago.

However, technologists no longer need to perform the feature extraction by themselves. They also have access to greater computing power. All of these advancements are welcomed, but it is perhaps dishonest to suggest that machines have emulated the intricacies of our cognitive processes.

“Companies are just looking at tricks to create a behavior that looks like intelligence but that is not real intelligence, it’s just a mirror of intelligence. These are expert systems that are maybe very good in a specific domain, but very stupid in other domains,” he said.

This mimicry of intelligence has inspired the public imagination. Domain-specific systems have delivered value in a wide range of industries. But those benefits have not lifted the cloud of confusion.

Assisted, Augmented, or Autonomous

When it comes to matters of scientific integrity, the issue of accurate definitions isn’t a peripheral matter. In a 1974 commencement address at the California Institute of Technology, Richard Feynman famously said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.” In that same speech, Feynman also said, “You should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist.” He opined that scientists should bend over backwards to show how they could be wrong. “If you’re representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you’re doing—and if they don’t want to support you under those circumstances, then that’s their decision.”

In the case of AI, this might mean that professional scientists have an obligation to clearly state that they are developing extremely powerful, controversial, profitable, and even dangerous tools, which do not constitute intelligence in any familiar or comprehensive sense.

The term “AI” may have become overhyped and confused, but there are already some efforts underway to provide clarity. A recent PwC report drew a distinction between “assisted intelligence,” “augmented intelligence,” and “autonomous intelligence.” Assisted intelligence is demonstrated by the GPS navigation programs prevalent in cars today. Augmented intelligence “enables people and organizations to do things they couldn’t otherwise do.” And autonomous intelligence “establishes machines that act on their own,” such as autonomous vehicles.

Roman Yampolskiy is an AI safety researcher who wrote the book “Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach.” I asked him whether the broad and differing meanings might present difficulties for legislators attempting to regulate AI.

Yampolskiy explained, “Intelligence (artificial or natural) comes on a continuum and so do potential problems with such technology. We typically refer to AI which one day will have the full spectrum of human capabilities as artificial general intelligence (AGI) to avoid some confusion. Beyond that point it becomes superintelligence. What we have today and what is frequently used in business is narrow AI. Regulating anything is hard, technology is no exception. The problem is not with terminology but with complexity of such systems even at the current level.”

When asked if people should fear AI systems, Dr. Yampolskiy commented, “Since capability comes on a continuum, so do problems associated with each level of capability.” He mentioned that accidents are already reported with AI-enabled products, and as the technology advances further, the impact could spread beyond privacy concerns or technological unemployment. These concerns about the real-world effects of AI will likely take precedence over dictionary-minded quibbles. However, the issue is also about honesty versus deception.

Is This Buzzword All Buzzed Out?

Finally, I directed my questions towards a company that is actively marketing an “AI Virtual Assistant.” Carl Landers, the CMO at Conversica, acknowledged that there are a multitude of explanations for what AI is and isn’t.

He said, “My definition of AI is technology innovation that helps solve a business problem. I’m really not interested in talking about the theoretical ‘can we get machines to think like humans?’ It’s a nice conversation, but I’m trying to solve a practical business problem.”

I asked him if AI is a buzzword that inspires publicity and attracts clients. According to Landers, this was certainly true three years ago, but those effects have already started to wane. Many companies now claim to have AI in their products, so it’s less of a differentiator. However, there is still a specific intention behind the word. Landers hopes to convey that previously impossible things are now possible. “There’s something new here that you haven’t seen before, that you haven’t heard of before,” he said.

According to Brian Decker, founder of Encom Lab, machine learning algorithms only work to satisfy their preexisting programming, not out of an interior drive for better understanding. Therefore, he views AI as an entirely semantic argument.

Decker stated, “A marketing exec will claim a photodiode controlled porch light has AI because it ‘knows when it is dark outside,’ while a good hardware engineer will point out that not one bit in a register in the entire history of computing has ever changed unless directed to do so according to the logic of preexisting programming.”

Although it’s important for everyone to be on the same page regarding specifics and underlying meaning, AI-powered products are already powering past these debates by creating immediate value for humans. And ultimately, humans care more about value than they do about semantic distinctions. In an interview with Quartz, Kai-Fu Lee revealed that algorithmic trading systems have already given him an 8X return over his private banking investments. “I don’t trade with humans anymore,” he said.

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This 3D Printed House Goes Up in a Day for Under $10,000

There aren’t a ton of ways to build a house other than the way houses have always been built, which is to say, by putting up four walls then adding a roof. This ages-old technique had to be modernized at some point, though, and as with everything else in our lives these days, technology’s delivering that modernization. In this case, instead of being built the old-fashioned way, houses can now be printed.

Last week at the South By Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, construction technologies startup ICON and housing nonprofit New Story unveiled their version of a 3D printed house. The model is 650 square feet and consists of a living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and shaded porch. It went from zero to finished in under 24 hours, and it cost less than $10,000. Equivalent homes built in developing countries will cost a mere $4,000 each.

This isn’t the first 3D printed house to spring up (or, rather, to be plopped down); there are similar structures created with similar technology in Russia, Dubai, Amsterdam, and elsewhere, but this is the first permitted 3D printed home to go up in the US.

ICON’s crane-like printer is called the Vulcan, and it pours a concrete mix into a software-dictated pattern; instead of one wall going up at a time, one layer is put down at a time, the whole structure “growing” from the ground up. The printer consists of an axis set on a track, giving it a flexible and theoretically unlimited print area.

“With 3D printing, you not only have a continuous thermal envelope, high thermal mass, and near zero-waste, but you also have speed, a much broader design palette, next-level resiliency, and the possibility of a quantum leap in affordability,” said Jason Ballard, ICON’s co-founder. “This isn’t 10 percent better, it’s 10 times better.”

The house has a greater purpose than just wowing techies, though. ICON and New Story’s vision is one of 3D printed houses acting as a safe, affordable housing alternative for people in need. New Story has already built over 800 homes in Haiti, El Salvador, Bolivia, and Mexico, partnering with the communities they serve to hire local labor and purchase local materials rather than shipping everything in from abroad.

New Story is in the process of raising $600,000 to fund a planned 100-home community in El Salvador. It will be the first-ever community of 3D printed homes. Printing will begin later this year, and the goal is for families to be moving in by Q3 of 2019. Donors can fund a full house with just $4,000.

Six hundred and fifty square feet may not sound like much space for more than one to two people, but it’s a huge step up from the lean-tos and shacks that make up the slums where millions of people live. ICON and New Story hope the Salvadorian community will serve as a scalable model that can be exported to developing countries around the world, providing a high-quality housing option for the millions who currently lack  one.

“Instead of waiting for profit motivation to bring construction advances to the global south, we are fast-tracking innovations like 3D home printing that can be a powerful tool toward ending homelessness,” said Alexandria Lafci, COO of New Story.

The homes are built to the International Building Code structural standard and are expected to last as long or longer than standard concrete masonry unit homes.

While 3D printed houses are a great alternative to the flimsy lean-tos millions of people call home, there are some limitations to consider in terms of them being a solution to global housing shortages.

The biggest need for affordable, safe housing in the developing world is in or near big cities; take the slums of Cape Town, Nairobi, or Mumbai as an example. Replacing families’ current homes in these locations with printed houses may prove difficult simply due to space constraints; 3D printed communities are far more practical in rural areas where there’s less population density, and may not be a truly scalable solution in urban areas until the communities get vertical. 3D printed high-rises are already in the works, though not yet for the purpose of affordable housing.

If skyscrapers can be printed and used as offices, it’s only a matter of time before they can be used for housing as well. And in the meantime, $4,000 a pop for a safe, cozy home where there was no home before is a solid step in the right direction.

Image Credit: New Story

This 3D Printed Electric Car Will Enter Production This Year

Cars have gone from a “get me from point A to point B by burning gas” mode of transportation to a dream project for innovative techies. Cars can now run on electricity, be summoned by smartphone apps in cities all over the world, and are being developed to navigate without a human behind the wheel.

And now, they can be 3D printed too.

Two companies recently announced the release of LSEV, a small electric car whose every visible component is 3D printed except the chassis, seats, and glass. At just eight feet long, four feet wide, and five feet high, the LSEV looks a lot like a Smart Car, but is even a little bit smaller.

LSEV is the brainchild of Shanghai-based 3D printing materials company Polymaker and Turin, Italy-based electric car startup XEV. The car reportedly has a max of 43 miles per hour and can go up to 93 miles on one charge. The relatively slow speed means LSEV won’t be much use for highway driving, but the 93-mile range will allow for a good amount of city or local driving.

A great example of a vehicle that drives a lot but doesn’t drive too fast is your neighborhood mail delivery truck. As it happens, one of LSEV’s first large orders came from Poste Italiane. The Italian postal service provider reportedly wants 5,000 3D printed electric cars. An additional 2,000 LSEVs have already been ordered by ARVAL, a car-leasing company owned by French banking group BNP Paribas.

While LSEV isn’t the first-ever 3D printed car—American companies Local Motors and Divergent 3D each have their own versions—it is being marketed as the first one that’s mass-producible.

LSEV’s production is scheduled to start in late 2018, with the first deliveries for the European orders taking place by mid-2019 at a price of $10,000 apiece. Printing the parts for one car and assembling them into a finished product currently takes three days.

This may sound like a long time compared to, say, 3D printing an entire house in one day, but it’s about on par with the time it takes to manufacture a regular car, estimated to be 30-35 hours. Just trade out stamping, welding, and painting for printing, metals and rubber for enhanced nylon, polylactic acid, and rubber-like thermoplastic polyurethane.

Even if a lot of time isn’t saved in LSEV’s manufacturing, with just 57 parts, it’s undeniably simpler than regular cars, which average over 20,000 parts (that’s counting every last screw and bolt).

Many cities around the world have been built in such a way that cars are an indispensable part of them, especially in the US. Being able to produce cars more quickly and cheaply, then, is mostly a good thing, especially when the cars are electric.

But taking a longer-term view, it’s worth considering whether faster, cheaper, simpler car production will serve us down the road. One glimpse of highways or city streets packed bumper-to-bumper with honking, stressed-out drivers is enough to make you wonder if there’s a better way.

Of course, this doesn’t mean innovation in the auto world is going to grind to a halt. But it’s nice to think there are likely people out there working on 3D printed electric bikes, better public transit, and new car sharing and ride hailing solutions, too.

Image Credit: Polymaker

Custom-Grown Bones, and Other Wild Advances in Regenerative Medicine

The human body has always been an incredible machine, from the grand feats of strength and athleticism it can accomplish down to the fine details of each vein, nerve, and cell. But the way we think about the body has changed over time, as has our level of understanding of it.

In Nina Tandon’s view, there have been two different phases of knowledge here. “For so much of human history, medicine was about letting the body come to rest, because there was an assumed proportionality attributed to the body,” she said.

Then, around the turn of the last century, we started developing interchangeable parts (whether from donors, or made of plastic or metal), and thinking of our bodies a bit more like machines. “We’re each made out of 206 bones held together by 360 joints,” Tandon said. “But many of us are more than that. By the time we go through this lifetime, 70 percent of us will be living with parts of our body that we weren’t born with.”

If that percentage seems high—it did to me—consider all the things that count as ‘parts’ of our bodies that are artificial: Dental implants. Pacemakers. IUDs. Joint replacements.

Now, though, we’re moving into a third phase of bodily knowledge. “We are an ecosystem of cellular beings, trillions of cells,” Tandon said. “We finally realized that man is a modular system, and cells are the pixels in this world.”

Tandon is co-founder and CEO of EpiBone, a company working on custom-growing bones using patients’ own stem cells. In a talk at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine in San Diego this week, Tandon shared some of her company’s work and her insights into regenerative medicine, a field with tremendous promise for improving human well-being.

What sets the third phase of knowledge apart from the second phase is that we’re learning how to fix and rebuild our own bodies using, well, our own bodies. Some examples include CAR-T therapies, which fight cancer using a patient’s own cells; regenerative medicine, which uses stem cells to repair body parts or make new ones; and microbiome analyses, which use our gut bacteria to fashion personalized dietary treatments.

Tandon’s expertise, though, is in personalized bones (not a term you ever thought you’d hear, is it?). “Bone is the most transplanted human tissue after blood,” she said. “And we’re replacing over a million joints every year in this country alone, just because of a couple millimeters of damaged cartilage. Welcome to the hundred-billion-dollar medical device industry.”

Epibone is working on doing it better. Here are some details of their method.

First, patients undergo a CT scan to determine the size and shape of the bone they need. Stem cells are extracted from the adipose (fatty) tissue in the abdomen. A scaffold model of the bone is created, as is a custom bioreactor to grow the bone in, while the extracted stem cells are prodded to differentiate into osteoblasts (bone cells).

When they’re ready, the stem cells are infused into the bone scaffold, and a personalized bone graft grows in the bioreactor in just three weeks. When the new bone is implanted into the patient’s body, the surrounding tissue seamlessly integrates with it; the custom size and shape ensure it will fit, there’s no risk of rejection since it contains the patient’s own cells, and since it’s made of living tissue, it’s likely to require far less revision than other types of implants.

Epibone is hoping to start human clinical trials next year, and it’s in good company; Tandon mentioned several concurrent projects in regenerative medicine that show we’ve truly entered the “biofabrication age,” as she put it.

Humacyte is working on bioengineered acellular vessels, and is currently in phase three clinical trials. Emulate Bio miniaturizes organoids on tissue chips. CollPlant has engineered tobacco plants to produce recombinant human collagen. Ecovative uses mushrooms to engineer sustainable advanced materials. BioMASON created a concrete that self-heals its cracks using water-activated bacteria.

“Cellular therapies can also involve using bugs as drugs,” Tandon said. “Imagine a probiotic yogurt being a kind of diagnostic device in the future using these little micro machines called bacteria.” To that end, Sangeeta Bhatia’s lab at MIT has engineered bacteria to glow green in the presence of colon cancer cells.

The list goes on—companies are building tools so wild that many still sound like science fiction.

As they continue to advance, Tandon noted, we must always consider the ethics behind these technologies and how we’re using them, and the conversations need to go beyond hot-button issues like designer babies or body modification.

“Are the modalities of government grant funding, angel funding, and VC really incentivizing us to develop the technologies that we want to see?” she asked. Access to biotech tools and treatments is an ethical consideration as well; scale and cost control must be foremost in biotech developers’ minds, so as not to end up with solutions for only the wealthy and privileged.

Regenerative medicine will certainly pose challenges, but its possibilities are vast and exciting.

In closing, Tandon asked the audience to envision a future where all the extra parts our bodies need “…are made not out of metal, not out of ceramic, not out of parts carved from other peoples’ bodies—but made out of ourselves.”

Image Credit: ChooChin / Shutterstock.com

Breaking Out of the Corporate Bubble With Uncommon Partners 

For big companies, success is a blessing and a curse. You don’t get big without doing something (or many things) very right. It might start with an invention or service the world didn’t know it needed. Your product takes off, and growth brings a whole new set of logistical challenges. Delivering consistent quality, hiring the right team, establishing a strong culture, tapping into new markets, satisfying shareholders. The list goes on.

Eventually, however, what made you successful also makes you resistant to change.

You’ve built a machine for one purpose, and it’s running smoothly, but what about retooling that machine to make something new? Not so easy. Leaders of big companies know there is no future for their organizations without change. And yet, they struggle to drive it.

In their new book, Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company’s Future, Kyle Nel, Nathan Furr, and Thomas Ramsøy aim to deliver a roadmap for corporate transformation.

The book focuses on practical tools that have worked in big companies to break down behavioral and cognitive biases, envision radical futures, and run experiments. These include using science fiction and narrative to see ahead and adopting better measures of success for new endeavors.

A thread throughout is how to envision a new future and move into that future.

We’re limited by the bubbles in which we spend the most time—the corporate bubble, the startup bubble, the nonprofit bubble. The mutually beneficial convergence of complementary bubbles, then, can be a powerful tool for kickstarting transformation. The views and experiences of one partner can challenge the accepted wisdom of the other; resources can flow into newly co-created visions and projects; and connections can be made that wouldn’t otherwise exist.

The authors call such alliances uncommon partners. In the following excerpt from the book, Made In Space, a startup building 3D printers for space, helps Lowe’s explore an in-store 3D printing system, and Lowe’s helps Made In Space expand its vision and focus.

The above excerpt appears in the new book Leading Transformation: How to Take Charge of Your Company’s Future by Kyle Nel, Nathan Furr, and Thomas Ramsøy, published by Harvard Business Review Press.

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5 Technologies Bringing Healthcare Systems into the Future

If you think you’ve got a bad case of the travel bug, get this: Dr. John Halamka travels 400,000 miles a year. That’s equivalent to fully circling the globe 16 times.

Halamka is chief information officer at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a professor at Harvard Medical School, and a practicing emergency physician. In a talk at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine last week, Halamka shared what he sees as the biggest healthcare problems the world is facing, and the most promising technological solutions from a systems perspective.

“In traveling 400,000 miles you get to see lots of different cultures and lots of different people,” he said. “And the problems are really the same all over the world. Maybe the cultural context is different or the infrastructure is different, but the problems are very similar.”

Less of This, More of That

From Asia to Europe and Africa to America, societies are trying to figure out how best to manage an aging population. Japan is perhaps the most dramatic example: “In Japan 25 percent of the population is over the age of 65, the birth rate is 1.4, and hardly any primary care physicians are going into the profession,” Halamka said.

Longer lifespans around the world are a testament to medical progress, but they also mean rising healthcare costs and higher rates of chronic disease. Combine that with low birth rates and the implications are magnified; there’s not going to be anyone to pay for the care of this aging society.

That care isn’t just for the body, it’s for the mind too. Anxiety and depression have become something of an epidemic, whether due to the relentless pace of modern life, the isolation of increasingly individualist cultures, or the comparisons and competitiveness brought about by social media. “Across the world no one’s really addressing the mental health burden very well,” Halamka said.

All these issues would be more solvable if there were more people to work on solving them—that is, more doctors. But there’s actually a marked shortage of clinicians, and of specialization in the most high-demand fields. “You’re not seeing a distribution of the kind of services people need,” Halamka said. This is especially a problem in rural areas.

Finally, the systems we’ve built to help with the above problems have themselves become a problem. Multiple countries are trying to figure out how to deal with a lack of interoperability and data sharing in their medical information technology.

Rather than being highly imaginative or far-reaching, Halamka noted, many of the healthcare technologies the world needs are actually quite simple and practical.

The Tech That Can Help

Machine Learning

Working for the Bush and Obama administrations, Halamka was a first-hand witness to the way regulation can create a burden for clinicians. Between the FDA recommending that doctors monitor patient implants at every visit, the CDC recommending a travel history be taken at every visit, Medicare and Medicaid putting forth 20 quality measures for every visit, Halamka said, “By the time we were done, there were 140 required data elements to be entered at every visit while making eye contact, being empathetic and never committing malpractice. It’s not possible!”

This is where machine learning can help. Halamka joked that if AI can replace your doctor, AI should replace your doctor; the things we really want our doctors to do—listen to us, respect our care preferences, guide us through all the possibilities—can’t be done by a machine.

But AI can reduce clinicians’ burden of documentation using functions like natural language processing. Imagine a version of Alexa that listens to doctor-patient conversations, takes notes, and produces charts—all the doctor has to do is review and sign.

AI can also augment physicians’ capacity to understand evidence and make informed decisions. “There are 800 papers published in my field every week,” Halamka said. “I’m a little behind on my reading.”

Those decisions can run from which antibiotic to prescribe a patient to the amount of time to reserve an operating room for. After implementing a machine learning algorithm that predicted how much time patients would need in the OR by comparing them to thousands of similar patients, Beth Israel was able to free up 30 percent of its OR schedule and enhance its throughput.

Internet of Things

Earlier this year, Halamka was diagnosed with primary hypertension. His lifestyle and diet essentially couldn’t be healthier—he’s a vegan who avoids both caffeine and alcohol—but it turned out the condition was hereditary. His doctor prescribed beta blockers. “Ugh,” he said. “They’re like negative espresso.” 50 milligrams of metoprolol was the dose for a person of his size, age, and gender—but, he realized, all that had no bearing on his body’s ability to metabolize metoprolol.

So he decided to do a little experiment. While varying the dosage, he used sensors around his home and office to monitor his mood, energy, blood pressure, pulse, and other indicators. “I was able to tailor my medication to the right dose, with the right output, and the fewest side effects for me,” he said. “And that’s the kind of thing we all want.”

In the near future we’ll be able to 3D print pills, assess their efficacy with the smart devices in our homes, and tailor them to the optimal dosage for our bodies.

Big Data

Halamka pointed out that there are 26 different electronic health records (EHRs) used in the Boston region alone. But Fast Health Interoperability Resources (FHIR), an application programming interface for exchanging electronic health records, will soon enable new ways to aggregate data from different EHRs. Patients will be able to look at their lifetime experience, and not just a single silo in a single EHR.

“My hope is the data of the past will inform the care of patients in the future,” Halamka said.

When his wife, who is Korean, was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, he used an open source tool called i2b2 to mine data from Harvard’s 17 hospitals, looking at treatments and outcomes of women with the same type of cancer and of the same age and ethnicity.

He found that Taxol, the drug used to treat this cancer, causes neuropathy (numbness in the hands and feet) in Asian women. “My wife is an artist, so saying ‘you’re cured but you can’t work ever again’ wasn’t a desirable outcome,” Halamka said. So they did a clinical trial of one, taking her Taxol dose down by 50 percent. Today she’s well and functional, and her hands and feet are just as they were before treatment. That is the kind of thing we need to use big data for, he said.

Telemedicine

Halamka is the nation’s expert in poisonous mushrooms and plants, and he does 900 telemedicine consultations every year (he is malpractice insured in all 50 US states).

He said, “Here I am with my iPhone, receiving images and cases from all over the world, and through just a virtual interaction, developing a care plan that keeps people healthy. It’s low cost and it’s efficient. And that’s the kind of expertise we all need access to, whether we’re urban or rural, whether you’re in the US or elsewhere.”

One challenge, however, is policy. State licenses and malpractice insurance can make crossing borders complicated. If a doctor in, say, North Dakota consults Halamka for a mushroom poisoning and Halamka advises a certain treatment, the North Dakota doctor ultimately decides whether to offer the treatment or not.

Blockchain

Halamka believes one of the main use cases for blockchain in medical IT is in auditing and integrity. When Harvard doctors are sued for malpractice, he said, he’s asked to provide 20 years’ worth of medical records to the plaintiff attorney, but there’s no guarantee or way to prove those records haven’t been altered in any way.

A blockchain audit trail would fix this problem. “When a note is signed put a hash of that note into the blockchain, twenty years go by, you can validate the note has not been changed,” Halamka said. You could also use it to show patient consent, or incentivize them to contribute their data or comply with treatment regimens.

On Their Way, Already Here

The technologies and use cases Halamka outlined aren’t decades or even years out—they’re up and running in hospitals today. Beth Israel Deaconess, he said, is using machine learning to read faxes, apply metadata, and insert information into medical records. They’re using mobile and an internet of things to keep congestive heart failure patients healthy in their homes. They’re pushing data across the community to track where patients are receiving care and help coordinate the best care at the lowest cost.

Robots that can perform precision surgery and AIs that can diagnose rare illnesses in minutes aren’t going to eliminate our need for physicians. In fact, if it’s applied in the right ways, tech will not only help doctors practice at the top of their licenses and hospitals to run with utmost efficiency—it will reduce the likelihood that we’ll end up there to begin with.

Image Credit: metamorworks / Shutterstock.com

Why the World Is Still Getting Better—and That’s Likely to Continue

If you read or watch the news, you’ll likely think the world is falling to pieces. Trends like terrorism, climate change, and a growing population straining the planet’s finite resources can easily lead you to think our world is in crisis.

But there’s another story, a story the news doesn’t often report. This story is backed by data, and it says we’re actually living in the most peaceful, abundant time in history, and things are likely to continue getting better.

The News vs. the Data

The reality that’s often clouded by a constant stream of bad news is we’re actually seeing a massive drop in poverty, fewer deaths from violent crime and preventable diseases. On top of that, we’re the most educated populace to ever walk the planet.

“Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceful era in the existence of our species.” –Steven Pinker

In the last hundred years, we’ve seen the average human life expectancy nearly double, the global GDP per capita rise exponentially, and childhood mortality drop 10-fold.

That’s pretty good progress! Maybe the world isn’t all gloom and doom.

If you’re still not convinced the world is getting better, check out the charts in this article from Vox and on Peter Diamandis’ website for a lot more data.

Abundance for All Is Possible

So now that you know the world isn’t so bad after all, here’s another thing to think about: it can get much better, very soon.

In their book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis suggest it may be possible for us to meet and even exceed the basic needs of all the people living on the planet today.

“In the hands of smart and driven innovators, science and technology take things which were once scarce and make them abundant and accessible to all.”

This means making sure every single person in the world has adequate food, water and shelter, as well as a good education, access to healthcare, and personal freedom.

This might seem unimaginable, especially if you tend to think the world is only getting worse. But given how much progress we’ve already made in the last few hundred years, coupled with the recent explosion of information sharing and new, powerful technologies, abundance for all is not as out of reach as you might believe.

Throughout history, we’ve seen that in the hands of smart and driven innovators, science and technology take things which were once scarce and make them abundant and accessible to all.

In Abundance, Diamandis and Kotler tell the story of how aluminum went from being one of the rarest metals on the planet to being one of the most abundant…

In the 1800s, aluminum was more valuable than silver and gold because it was rarer. So when Napoleon III entertained the King of Siam, the king and his guests were honored by being given aluminum utensils, while the rest of the dinner party ate with gold.

But aluminum is not really rare.

In fact, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3% of the weight of our planet. But it wasn’t until chemists Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult discovered how to use electrolysis to cheaply separate aluminum from surrounding materials that the element became suddenly abundant.

The problems keeping us from achieving a world where everyone’s basic needs are met may seem like resource problems — when in reality, many are accessibility problems.

The Engine Driving Us Toward Abundance: Exponential Technology

History is full of examples like the aluminum story.  The most powerful one of the last few decades is information technology. Think about all the things that computers and the internet made abundant that were previously far less accessible because of cost or availability …

Here are just a few examples:

• Easy access to the world’s information
• Ability to share information freely with anyone and everyone
• Free/cheap long-distance communication
• Buying and selling goods/services regardless of location

Less than two decades ago, when someone reached a certain level of economic stability, they could spend somewhere around $10K on stereos, cameras, entertainment systems, etc — today, we have all that equipment in the palm of our hand.

Now, there is a new generation of technologies heavily dependant on information technology and, therefore, similarly riding the wave of exponential growth. When put to the right use, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing, nano-materials and digital biology make it possible for us to drastically raise the standard of living for every person on the planet.

These are just some of the innovations which are unlocking currently scarce resources:

• IBM’s Watson Health is being trained and used in medical facilities like the Cleveland Clinic to help doctors diagnose disease. In the future, it’s likely we’ll trust AI just as much, if not more than humans to diagnose disease, allowing people all over the world to have access to great diagnostic tools regardless of whether there is a well-trained doctor near them.

• Solar power is now cheaper than fossil fuels in some parts of the world, and with advances in new materials and storage, the cost may decrease further. This could eventually lead to nearly-free, clean energy for people across the world.

• Google’s GMNT network can now translate languages as well as a human, unlocking the ability for people to communicate globally as we never have before.

• Self-driving cars are already on the roads of several American cities and will be coming to a road near you in the next couple years. Considering the average American spends nearly two hours driving every day, not having to drive would free up an increasingly scarce resource: time.

The Change-Makers

Today’s innovators can create enormous change because they have these incredible tools—which would have once been available only to big organizations—at their fingertips. And, as a result of our hyper-connected world, there is an unprecedented ability for people across the planet to work together to create solutions to some of our most pressing problems today.

“In today’s hyperlinked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.” –Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance

According to Diamandis and Kotler, there are three groups of people accelerating positive change.

1. DIY Innovators

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Homebrew Computer Club was a meeting place of “do-it-yourself” computer enthusiasts who shared ideas and spare parts. By the 1990s and 2000s, that little club became known as an inception point for the personal computer industry — dozens of companies, including Apple Computer, can directly trace their origins back to Homebrew.

Since then, we’ve seen the rise of the social entrepreneur, the Maker Movement and the DIY Bio movement, which have similar ambitions to democratize social reform, manufacturing, and biology, the way Homebrew democratized computers. These are the people who look for new opportunities and aren’t afraid to take risks to create something new that will change the status-quo.

2. Techno-Philanthropists

Unlike the robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries, today’s “techno-philanthropists” are not just giving away some of their wealth for a new museum, they are using their wealth to solve global problems and investing in social entrepreneurs aiming to do the same.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given away at least $28 billion, with a strong focus on ending diseases like polio, malaria, and measles for good. Jeff Skoll, after cashing out of eBay with $2 billion in 1998, went on to create the Skoll Foundation, which funds social entrepreneurs across the world. And last year, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan pledged to give away 99% of their $46 billion in Facebook stock during their lifetimes.

3. The Rising Billion

Cisco estimates that by 2020, there will be 4.1 billion people connected to the internet, up from 3 billion in 2015. This number might even be higher, given the efforts of companies like Facebook, Google, Virgin Group, and SpaceX to bring internet access to the world. That’s a billion new people in the next several years who will be connected to the global conversation, looking to learn, create and better their own lives and communities.In his book, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C.K. Pahalad writes that finding co-creative ways to serve this rising market can help lift people out of poverty while creating viable businesses for inventive companies.

The Path to Abundance

Eager to create change, innovators armed with powerful technologies can accomplish incredible feats. Kotler and Diamandis imagine that the path to abundance occurs in three tiers:

• Basic Needs (food, water, shelter)
• Tools of Growth (energy, education, access to information)
• Ideal Health and Freedom

Of course, progress doesn’t always happen in a straight, logical way, but having a framework to visualize the needs is helpful.

Many people don’t believe it’s possible to end the persistent global problems we’re facing. However, looking at history, we can see many examples where technological tools have unlocked resources that previously seemed scarce.

Technological solutions are not always the answer, and we need social change and policy solutions as much as we need technology solutions. But we have seen time and time again, that powerful tools in the hands of innovative, driven change-makers can make the seemingly impossible happen.

You can download the full “Path to Abundance” infographic here. It was created under a CC BY-NC-ND license. If you share, please attribute to Singularity University.

Image Credit: janez volmajer / Shutterstock.com

Innovation Is on the Rise Worldwide. How Do You Measure It?

How do you measure innovation?

Thanks to dropping costs, technology has become far more accessible than it used to be, and its proliferation has unleashed the creativity and resourcefulness of people around the world. We know great ideas are coming to life from China to Brazil and everywhere in between. But how do you get a read on the pulse of innovation in a given country across its economy?

A new report from the Singularity University chapter in Kiev, Ukraine aims to measure the country’s innovation with a broad look at several indicators across multiple sectors of the economy. The authors hope the Ukraine in the Global Innovation Dimension report can serve as a useful guide and an inspiration for those interested in similarly examining progress in their own countries or cities.

Over the 10-year period between 2007 and 2017, the authors looked at overall patenting activity, research in information technologies, international scientific publications by Ukrainian authors, mechanical engineering research, and patenting activity in agriculture, renewable energy, and pharmaceuticals.

Report co-author Igor Novikov said, “We chose agrotech, renewables, and pharma because there’s plenty of hype and media coverage surrounding these spheres, with a common understanding that Ukraine is quite strong in these fields. We wanted our first report to explore whether that in fact is the case.”

The authors used neighboring Poland as a basis of comparison for patenting activity. For perspective, Ukraine has a population of almost 44 million people, while Poland’s population is just over 38 million.

“Poland has strong historic and business connections with Ukraine, and is traditionally viewed as the closest ally and friend,” Novikov said. “Poland went through what Ukraine is going through right now over 27 years ago, and we wanted to see how a similar country, but within the EU market, is doing.”

He added that comparing Ukraine to the US, China, or even Russia wouldn’t be practical, as the countries’ circumstances are drastically different. However, it’s becoming more and more relevant to account for and be aware of activity in places that aren’t known as innovation hubs.

Silicon Valley’s heyday as the center of all things tech shows signs of being on the decline. But besides the issues the Valley and its most well-known companies have faced, the decentralized, accessible nature of technology itself is also helping democratize innovation. If you have a mobile phone, internet connectivity, and the time and dedication to bring an idea to life, you can do it—almost anywhere in the world. Those who stand to benefit most from this wave of nascent innovation are people farthest-removed from traditional tech hubs, in places with local problems that require local solutions.

The authors of the Ukraine report noted that innovation isn’t worth much if it doesn’t catalyze economic growth; the opportunity to commercialize intellectual property is crucial.

Novikov and his coauthors see their report as just the beginning. They plan to delve into additional industries and further examine the factors influencing creativity and inventiveness in Ukraine.

“This report is actually the first part of a series of such studies, our mission being to fully understand the innovation landscape of our country,” Novikov said.

Image Credit: Uhryn Larysa / Shutterstock.com