Why the Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think

People have no idea how fast the world is changing. So said Peter Diamandis to the audience at Singularity University’s Global Summit, taking place this week in San Francisco. Diamandis believes the convergence of multiple technologies is transforming business models, and they’re never going back. For starters, the way businesses are born (in someone’s garage, at a college dorm, on a computer or smartphone screen) and come to thrive (through digitization that leads to exponential growth), in the 21st century is radically different than the way they used to do so 100 or even 50 years ago. But business models may be the least of it. Diamandis said, “Every single walk of life is going to change. Not in 20–30 years, but this decade.” He described the forces he believes are accelerating this rate of change.

Moore’s Law

Gordon Moore famously predicted, in 1965, that computer chips would double in processing power while halving in cost every 18–24 months thereafter. Moore’s Law turned out to be uncannily accurate, and as a result we’ve seen a massive increase in computing power at ever-decreasing costs. Diamandis asked the audience to consider what kind of computing device they could buy with $1,000 10 years ago as opposed to now—and to imagine how that difference will translate 10 years down the road, too. Besides making computers more widely available to the average person, the speed/cost curve is pushing multiple related technologies forward more quickly. “As computational power gets faster,” Diamandis said, “so do networks and sensors, synthetic biology, robotics, 3D printing—and the convergence of these is what’s transforming business models.” Speed begets speed, at least when it comes to tech.

Time Abundance

Think about how you spend your time on a day-to-day basis. For a good chunk of it is, you’re likely  looking at a screen, be it a computer, phone, television, or other device. Another chunk is spent enjoying the company of friends or loved ones, another eating, and so on. These are all pretty standard activities. But what most of us don’t consider is how dramatically the way humans spend our waking hours has changed over the centuries. “We used to have to forage for firewood, water, and food,” Diamandis said. “Tech begins to liberate us. It gives us a vacation from survival.” Stopping into your local grocery to grab ingredients for dinner takes so much less time than hunting or harvesting it. Buying ready-made food that’s already been heated or refrigerated for you takes even less time.

What we’re doing with all the extra time technology has given us is—you guessed it—inventing more technology. “The amount of time we have to innovate is massively increasing,” Diamandis said. Granted, we don’t always choose to use our extra time wisely—but Diamandis’ optimistic take is that the more time tech frees up for us, the better tech we’ll in turn be able to build.

Capital Abundance

A lot of extra time may not get you too far (innovation-wise, at least) if you don’t have any money. But the amount of money available to entrepreneurs has skyrocketed, largely thanks to the way that money is raised and the diversity of sources it comes from. According to Diamandis, there’s more capital available now than there has been at any other time in human history. Crowdfunding has made it possible for someone in a remote part of the world to reach out to people in cities or other countries and get money to start a business. 2017 saw new records in venture investing in the US, Asia, and Europe. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) raise huge amounts of money in remarkably short amounts of time. State-owned sovereign wealth funds as well as privately-held funds (most notably Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son’s $100 billion all-tech Vision Fund) are investing globally, often with a heavy focus on technology. “The velocity of capital that’s flowing is unprecedented,” Diamandis said. “We’re seeing massive investments like never before, not keeping technology at the norm, but actually accelerating it.”

Demonetization

Thanks to digitization and automation, the cost of everything from computing to storage to launching a startup is massively demonetizing. The cost of sequencing a human genome is a perfect (and still shocking) example—sequencing the first human genome cost an estimated total of $2.7 billion; now a startup is aiming to do it for $100. Diamandis himself started a space tourism company called BlastOff! in 1999. “Our cost for getting this company started—for servers, bandwidth, software, everything—was about five million dollars,” he said. Now the cost of starting a business in the US is estimated at $2,000 to $5,000. Cheap credit means more people are willing to take the financial risk of starting a business, and the tools needed to make those businesses successful cost less, too. Phone calls between different countries used to cost dollars per minute—now there are multiple ways to make those calls for free. Connectivity is faster and cheaper than it’s ever been. Businesses can advertise for free or cheap on social media and other online platforms. “Your dollar now goes ten times or a hundred times farther,” Diamandis said.

Communications Abundance

About half the world is currently connected to the internet. But what about the other half? According to Diamandis, 4.2 billion new minds will be coming online in the next 7 years, and they’re going to accelerate the future. “It’s no longer just Silicon Valley,” he said. “It’s the world. What are these people going to invent, create, and discover?” Google, OneWeb, and SpaceX are all working to blanket the earth in high-speed internet, be it via balloons in the stratosphere or satellite constellations in space. China plans to deploy 5G by 2020, and some US telecom companies are starting deployment this year. Besides making your phone 100 times faster, 5G will enable functions like remote precision medicine, interconnected networks of driverless vehicles, virtual and augmented reality, and the sensors and actuators that make up the Internet of Things. “The point is this,” Diamandis said. “In 2017 we had half the world connected—3.8 billion people. By 2022–2025, we’re going to see 8 billion people connected, and at a gigabit connection speed, with access to the world’s information.”

Increased Genius

In the past—and in many parts of the world, the present—people with great ideas who lived in small, remote villages often succumbed to their ingenuity being lost. “You could be the smartest person in the village, but you were stuck there,” Diamandis said. With no connectivity and no way to share knowledge with the larger world, there wasn’t another option. Increasingly as more of the world gets connected, people have the ability to make their ideas known everywhere on the planet. And it’s not just people being connected, he added—their brains may soon be connected too. Companies like Kernel, Neuralink, OpenWater, and BrainGate—among others—are all working on brain-computer communications technology. Diamandis believes this tech will yield (and preserve) a million-fold more intelligence. “Human intelligence is going to be the dominant driver in competitiveness in the century ahead,” he said.

Increased Longevity

It’s generally accepted in the US and elsewhere that once you reach an age somewhere between 60–70, it’s time to hang up your boots, sit back, and relax—for the rest of your life. But, Diamandis argued, “I know a lot of 65- to 70-year-olds who are at the top of their game, and the last thing they want to do is retire. This is when they have the most contacts, the most knowledge, the most wisdom.” Diamandis thinks we’ll soon make 100 the new 60, and longevity is at the center of many companies’ radars, with life-extending tech in the works. Senolytic medicine is working to increase lifespan by selectively killing off aging cells. 3D printing is making slow but steady progress towards being able to print functioning human organs. CRISPR is being used to try to engineer away genetic diseases.

What Is Longevity Escape Velocity?

Longevity escape velocity is defined as the point at which, for every year you’re alive, you can extend your life by more than one year. “We’ll reach that 12 years from now,” Diamandis said. Whether or not the theoretical outcome—living forever—is actually desirable is another story.

What It All Means? Speed.

To sum it all up, what we’ve got is more people sharing more knowledge, at faster speeds and lower costs, than ever before. If speed has already begotten speed, then, it seems the most likely scenario is this phenomenon experiencing even more growth and acceleration going forward. So how do we all take part in it? What if things change too fast for us to keep up? Diamandis is an eternal optimist, and he believes these quicker speeds of change are bringing us an increase in resources to make that change positive. As he put it, “The world is getting faster, and the power you have to change the world is getting greater.” Image Credit: Sorakrai Tangnoi / Shutterstock.com

New CRISPR Method Takes on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy

The advance of CRISPR gene editing technology, which uses an RNA strand to guide an enzyme called Cas9 to cut a specific portion of DNA, has raised concerns and sparked debate as people envision a not-so-distant future populated by bioengineered super-crops, genetically flawless pets, and customized babies. While the method could be used for these purposes, it’s also showing potential as a valuable medical tool, with a seemingly new condition added each week to the list of what CRISPR may one day cure. One recent addition to that list is Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). In a study from University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, researchers used CRISPR to make a single cut at a few strategic points along DNA in cells derived from DMD patients, with the result of potentially correcting most of the 3,000 gene mutations that cause DMD. DMD is a genetic disorder characterized by progressive muscle degeneration and weakness. It mostly affects boys and is caused by defects in the gene that makes dystrophin, a protein that helps strengthen muscle fibers in skeletal and cardiac muscles. Many patients end up in wheelchairs, on respirators, or both, and while advances in cardiac and respiratory care have increased life expectancy into the early 30s, there’s still no cure for the condition. The study on CRISPR for DMD was the cover story of this month’s Science Advances, and it builds on previous studies led by Dr. Eric Olson, director of UT Southwestern’s Hamon Center for Regenerative Science and Medicine, in which CRISPR was used to correct a single gene mutation that caused DMD in mice. The new study showed that various DMD-related mutations can be corrected in human cells by eliminating flawed splice sites in genomic DNA. These splice sites instruct genes to build abnormal dystrophin molecules. The protein then doesn’t function as it should to keep muscle cells intact, and muscles start to break down. Researchers developed 12 guide RNAs to find mutation sites along the dystrophin gene. They cut the DNA at these locations and, in doing so, directed the cellular machinery to skip over the faulty protein sequences. Once the gene was successfully edited, it started building functional dystrophin protein, enhancing the function of muscle tissue. “We found that correcting less than half of the cardiomyocytes (heart muscle cells) was enough to rescue cardiac function to near-normal levels in human-engineered heart tissue,” said Dr. Chengzu Long, lead author of the study and assistant professor of medicine at New York University Langone Health. This single-cut method is an efficient alternative to developing a separate molecular treatment for each one of the gene mutations that cause DMD, and could potentially be used to correct other single-gene mutations like cystic fibrosis or sickle cell anemia. “Not only did we find a practical way of treating many mutations, we have developed a less disruptive method that skips over defective DNA instead of removing it,” said Dr. Rhonda Bassel-Duby, co-author of the study and professor of molecular biology at UT Southwestern. “The genome is highly structured and you don’t want to remove DNA that could potentially be important.” She added that while single-cut editing may be useful for treating other single-gene diseases, the genes involved must still be able to function after certain DNA or RNA sequences are removed. Before we sing CRISPR’s praises too loudly or start banking on it curing all our ailments, though, we must keep in mind that the tool is still very new, and we don’t really know what long-term results or late-onset side effects its use could engender. In fact, we’re not even sure it’ll always work in its current form on humans; one recent study found that some people may be “immune” to CRISPR, as an adaptive immune response can be triggered in people who have been exposed to the bacteria that’s used to engineer CRISPR proteins. Clinical trials using CRISPR to cure blood disorders and sickle-cell disease in humans are slated to start this year in the US. Human trials have already begun in China, where CRISPR is being used to treat cancer and HIV. No peer-reviewed studies from these trials have been published yet, but doctors claim the tool has succeeded in improving some patients’ conditions. Dr. Olson’s lab will continue testing its DMD method for side effects and will also look for ways to improve the precision of the guide RNAs. The team’s work led to the creation of biotech company Exonics Therapeutics, which has licensed the technology from UT Southwestern and is working to optimize the approach and extend it to other neuromuscular diseases. “This is a major advance,” Dr. Bassel-Duby said. “Many different therapies have been put forward, but this one provides real hope to extend and improve the quality of patients’ lives.” Image Credit: nobeastsofierce / Shutterstock.com

This Drone Seamlessly Transitions Between Swimming and Flying

It isn’t unreasonable to think of drones as pesky technological nuisances. Our modern digital ecosystem regularly infringes on traditional notions of privacy and bombards our limited attention spans with stimuli. A swarm of drones hovering overhead seems like the physical manifestation of these intrusions and distractions. But we shouldn’t swat them away just yet. Drones still have practical utility and the potential to change industries.

An Expanding Market

The appeal of drones in the consumer market is obvious. They can capture video footage from exciting angles, serving the vanity of a population obsessed with self-documentation. Beyond that, drones also have commercial and civil government applications that include firefighting, farming, construction, deliveries, and insurance claims. According to Goldman Sachs Research, this contributes to a $100 billion market opportunity between 2016 and 2020.

A drone built by a team at Rutgers University can explore both the sea and the sky, extending the list of suitable applications even further.

Introducing the Naviator

The drone, called the Naviator, is part submarine and part aircraft. It can seamlessly dip into the water and explore, then ascend and navigate the air. Although there are already underwater drones, it is this transitional ability that has attracted attention.

The Office of Naval Research partly funded the project. The military applications seem readily apparent—an aerial and aquatic drone could quickly assess threats in the water or on enemy terrain and evade detection. On an industrial level, the same drone could provide quick assessments of a multitude of assets. And, of course, the drone would also make for a very compelling consumer purchase. It might be buzzing around suburban poolsides in the near future.

The project was overseen by Professor Francisco Javier Diez and emerged from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering’s Applied Fluids Lab.

In an interview, Diez told me that the search and rescue community has expressed strong interest in the Naviator. His team is also having promising discussions with the oil and gas industry. The Naviator could be deployed from a platform or ship, go underwater, perform imaging tasks, and report back.

It could also conduct bridge inspections and identify vulnerabilities. This is vitally important because America’s aging transportation infrastructure might cause accidents, unless repairs and retrofitting measures are implemented wherever appropriate. If the Naviator meets standards while performing these inspection tasks, it could reduce complexity and increase safety.

When scuba divers inspect the hulls of ships, there is always risk of an accident, but the Naviator could take on that risk.

There is, however, one drawback to the drone. I asked Diez about the adequacy of its underwater vision. Diez mentioned that the current model would perform better in the clear waters of Florida, where testing is being done, as opposed to the often cloudy waters of the Northeast. Acoustic imaging could be used to counteract this murkiness, but it makes the drone heavier.

From Sea to Air and Back Again

Diez said the Naviator started out as a student project that didn’t work very well. The concept then underwent engineering refinements.

Initially, they tried placing an inflatable ring around the vehicle that could bring the drone up out of the water, but this method only worked in still waters. It could perform in small pools, but it wouldn’t have been able to withstand practical field testing.

The hard part, Diez said, was figuring out the transition from one environment to the other. Although this raft-like method could bring the vehicle to the surface, they had to prevent the propellers from touching the water. “If they touch the water, you’re back to square one,” said Diez. “Sometimes worse—sometimes you lose control.”

When this buoyancy system proved to be unreliable, the team rethought the propeller propulsion system.

“Now instead of having four propellers on top, we have four on the top and four  on the bottom. That makes it very stable and able to transition from underwater to the air,” Diez said.

The multiple propellers work to push the device out of the water. The bottom four then stop operating, allowing the top four to operate above the waterline and achieve vertical lift.

“You always have one of the two sets of propellers helping with the transition so you’re never in a bad situation,” said Diez. “Even though that is very simple, that made the difference.”

Now Diez’s team wants to increase the battery capacity as well as the payloads the drone can carry in order to increase its usefulness. However, this means the drone itself will have to become significantly bigger. As development continues, they’re looking to add more sensors and improve the vehicle’s robustness, ease of operations, communications system, and speed. In the above video, the early prototype still relies on a cable for its communications.

Security Implications

There is a dark side to drones. Terrorists have already outfitted drones with bombs and grenades, and FBI Director Christopher Wray believes the risk of a domestic, UAS-facilitated attack is steadily increasing. Drones can also be used to smuggle contraband into prisons. Will improved drone technology lead to an arms race, with automated or remote-controlled swarms duking it out in the seas and the skies?

In an interview, Oleg Vornik, Chief Executive Officer of DroneShield, told me his company manufactures technologies that can detect and disable consumer and commercial-grade drones. The detection capability extends for five kilometers and a drone can be defeated when it roves within two kilometers. The defeat works by radio jamming the communications link between a drone and its controller.

“Drones use frequency ranges based around 2.4ghz, 5.8ghz, 433mhz and 915mhz. We target all of those. Plus optionally GPS as drones also use that,” Vornik said.

He added that underwater drone technology will likely evolve in the same way we’ve seen aerial drone technology evolve, with nefarious uses springing up alongside productive uses.

Image Credit: Professor F. Javier Diez, Rutgers University Applied Fluids Lab

By David Pring-Mill

This article originally appeared on Singularity Hub, a publication of Singularity University.

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.

Image Credit: vrender / Shutterstock.com

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.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvM7jFZGAec]

“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.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-X-rN2yXfs]

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.

Image Credit: Here / Shutterstock.com

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