manufacturing

this tesla manufacturing facility is amazing - especially the dexterity and multiple functions of the many robots. i am surprised that there are even the 3000 human workers. i predict that in 5 years, the number of humans in manufacturing will halve; in 10 years there will be complete automation of manufacturing process - globally...

global inequalities

a stunning explication of global inequalities - 300 people have more than the bottom 3 billion. moreover, the rich world has moved on to colonialism by other means - they continue to extract trillions from the poor. it's clear that scarcity is a structural artefact of the current global system - will technology enabled abundance help "change the rules". we need to better understand the 300 psychopaths that steal from the rest and find a way to address and expose their pathology. there needs to be an active global dialogue about the snowballing properties of capital...

the "tax-free tour" gives a rare glimpse into the psycho-pathology of governing plutocrats. while billions toil for nothing, those with trillions, simply hoard - is there a cure for this sickness:

  

solar @ grid parity

deutsche bank has released a report concluding that the cost of unsubsidized solar power is about the same as the cost of electricity from the grid in india and italy, and that by 2014 even more countries will achieve solar “grid parity.”

during 2013, china is expected to supplant germany as the world’s biggest solar market. china expects to add 10 gigawatts of new solar projects this year, “more than double its previous target and three times last year’s expansion.”

in 2012, us solar installations grew 73% over 2011 levels, driven by third party leasing agreements that eliminate up front costs in rooftop installation. the price of installed pv systems fell 27%.

low-cost desalination

fresh water availability is a key global issue. reuters reports on a graphene (clearly a key material for the future) based filtration technology that is less expensive and more efficient than current reverse osmosis tech:

The process, officials and engineers at Lockheed Martin Corp say, would enable filter manufacturers to produce thin carbon membranes with regular holes about a nanometer in size that are large enough to allow water to pass through but small enough to block the molecules of salt in seawater. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter.

Because the sheets of pure carbon known as graphene are so thin - just one atom in thickness - it takes much less energy to push the seawater through the filter with the force required to separate the salt from the water, they said.

The development could spare underdeveloped countries from having to build exotic, expensive pumping stations needed in plants that use a desalination process called reverse osmosis.

"It's 500 times thinner than the best filter on the market today and a thousand times stronger," said John Stetson, the engineer who has been working on the idea. "The energy that's required and the pressure that's required to filter salt is approximately 100 times less."

Access to clean drinking water is increasingly seen as a major global security issue. Competition for water is likely to lead to instability and potential state failure in countries important to the United States, according to a U.S. intelligence community report last year.

"Between now and 2040, fresh water availability will not keep up with demand absent more effective management of water resources," the report said. "Water problems will hinder the ability of key countries to produce food and generate electricity."

About 780 million people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water, the United Nations reported last year.

i doubt - however - that lockheed martin would have any kind of humanitarian agenda. the best hope for widespread application would be if multiple labs in the developing world developed this on their own. i think there is enough expertise and pressure to do so...

tighter

i guess i am constantly trying to resolve the debate between the promise and peril of technology. technology can take us to abundance, but it can also be used to create a system of total control. technology itself is neutral - the key to societal state are it's operators. consider that in light of noam chomsky's conclusion about what the masters of this world seem to want - "all for us, nothing for the rest". thus, inspite of all my optimism about tech, i see real insight in ran prieur's sentiment:

I was a doomer optimist. For my entire life the world has been getting tighter and tighter, and I was hopeful that I would see it crack open into freedom and possibility. I'm too young to remember the 1960's, but I remember as a kid roaming the neighborhood unsupervised, I remember when small airports had no security at all, when surveillance cameras were rare, when there were no seat belt laws, when you could share information without having to overcome DRM, when only young people had to show ID to buy alcohol.

My fear now is that it will never again get looser, that a tech crash is almost impossible, and that technology will make the control systems more airtight while channeling our urge for freedom into artificial worlds. You could even argue that this is part of the "collapse": increasing poverty causes increasing crime causes increasing fear causes increasing popular consent for strong central control.

after the crash of 2008 and the "slow emergency" that followed, it is clear that the masses do not have agency to effect epistemic change. the "arab spring" forced change of regime, but vestiges of the old seem to be taking hold again. the power of capital seems total - in the west and east...

tech concentrates wealth

this is a surprising document indeed - it lays bare the true extent of income inequality in america. i imagine a similar - or more severe - story in the rest of the world. i daresay technology has something to do with this as tech extends span of control and augments human potentiality. technology aids wealth concentration. more and more prosperous companies are employing less and less people. there clearly needs to be a new social contract that redistributes abundance. capital and technology operate with positive network externalities (i.e. they tend to snowball) and are locking-in/locking-out populations. 

a different way of living

federico pistono points out two deficiencies of the current monetary system - a. inefficiency: he gives the example of the food supply. we currently produce enough food to feed 17-18 billion people, however, 2 of the total 7 billion people on the planet are undernourished. that is insane, b. debt slavery is a necessary artefact of the current design of the monetary system.

are there any change incentives for the plutocrats who created this mess - perhaps few given that they are untouchable. pistono suggests the rationale of positive externalities for them in a contended world of abundance. but then again - we do not understand the motivations of the few that control so much - what is logical for us may not hold their interest - it was benjamin disraeli who said "the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."

gamechanger - supercapacitors

supercapacitors have the capability to immediately ease the current choke point to massive renewables roll-out - battery tech. as this short film shows batteries are high storage + slow charge & discharge; capacitors are low storage + fast charge & discharge but graphene-based supercapacitors combine the best qualities of batteries and capacitors and are high storage + fast charge and discharge. if successfully industrialized (and they will be because they are cheap and easy to make) this can give us the super renewables smart grids we need for green power and transportation... 

electric vehicles - for entire countries

a better place is not an electric car company, they provide the batteries and their attendant charging/swapping infrastructure. israel, denmark and australia are trying out their model - it is compelling - batteries (fuel) are a tech play and get cheaper each year - expect the equivalent of $10 barrel of oil within 10 years. this kind of innovation will kill oil fast - and benefit everyone - perhaps the true value of better place is as a bridge to the point where battery tech doesn't need switching stations.

imagine marrying this with driverless tech - transportation can be solved within the decade. shai agassi points to china as a leader in electric transportation that is moving forward rapidly on developing the ecosystem for electric transportation - it's good to have an outsider (to the oil vested interests massed in the us and uk) that can yank us all out of the oil rut...

what's wrong with the news?

charles lewis confirms what most people suspect - that access to power is more limited now than ever before, inspite of all our 24/7 information technology - decision makers interface with the public only via public relations (which is what public news has become). increasingly, the reality of most people is stitched from pr, spin and advertising. to be discerning consumers of media filtering junk to develop an accurate - if at all that is possible - and independent perspective is the skill to have. technology enabled information profusion would prefer to delude - passive unquestioning consumers are good for business...

breakthrough "prize"

this is a good development even though my sense is that prizes promote secrecy - and competition - and prevent true broad-based collaboration - and cooperation - which is more essential to crack humanity's grand challenges. do we really need more celebrities? we need broad based support for the sciences, especially in critical areas.

in the future, essential corporations like google and ibm should begin to evolve and morph into public utilities while connecting their profit streams to global societal costs. what we need to take aim at is the corporate life form which is sociopathic and extractive by design and transform it into a collaborative expert organism that nourishes society. in any case, the breakthrough prizes are better than nothing:

The Silicon Valley aristocrats Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Yuri Milner have jointly established the most lucrative annual prize in the history of science to reward research into curing diseases and extending human life.

The newly created Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation on Wednesday announces the first 11 winners of an award intended to inject excitement into the sometimes lonely, underfunded quests to understand and combat cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and other maladies.

Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook; Brin, who co-founded Google; and Milner, a venture capitalist, have dipped into their fortunes to sponsor awards worth $3m each, compared with a Nobel prize's monetary value of $1.1m. 

"With the mapping of the genome sequence there are expectations of significant progress in the next 10 or 20 years so I think the timing is really appropriate to create an incentive for the best scientific minds," Milner told the Guardian in an interview on the eve of the announcement.

brain activity project

obama has recently announced the brain activity project which promises to be a 10 year multi billion project to study brain activity. a recent new york times article discusses project approach:

The advent of new technology that allows scientists to identify firing neurons in the brain has led to numerous brain research projects around the world. Yet the brain remains one of the greatest scientific mysteries.

Composed of roughly 100 billion neurons that each electrically “spike” in response to outside stimuli, as well as in vast ensembles based on conscious and unconscious activity, the human brain is so complex that scientists have not yet found a way to record the activity of more than a small number of neurons at once, and in most cases that is done invasively with physical probes.

But a group of nanotechnologists and neuroscientists say they believe that technologies are at hand to make it possible to observe and gain a more complete understanding of the brain, and to do it less intrusively.

In June in the journal Neuron, six leading scientists proposed pursuing a number of new approaches for mapping the brain.

this is a different methodology from the european hbp (human brain project) which is a bottom-up computational simulation of the brain. according to the article: 

Critics, however, say the simulation (of the european hbp) will be built on knowledge that is still theoretical, incomplete or inaccurate.

the american project promises to be based on observation and empirical evidence to build a "map" of brain activity and process. it will be exciting when the many different teams begin to pool findings and when these findings flow into ai application...

workers of the world - relax!

tricorder update

looks like scanadu is making real progress on the tricorder x-prize quest with a variety of simple devices:

excerpt from a fast company report:

The Scanadu SCOUT is incredibly easy to use--just raise the handheld device (connected by Bluetooth to a smartphone) to your temple, and wait 10 seconds for it to scan your vital signs, including temperature, ECG, SPO2, heart rate, breathing rate, and pulse transit time (that helps measure blood pressure). "It lets the consumer explore all the diagnostic possibilities of an emergency room," explains co-founder Walter De Brouwer, a Belgian futurist and entrepreneur who first prototyped a backpack-sized tricorder-like device in the late 1990s.

The device, which will retail for under $150, was surprisingly difficult to build. "It didn’t seem like a complex problem in the beginning," laughs De Brouwer. "I’ve done many scientific projects in my life, and this was the most difficult of them all. Basically you are up against a time budget and real estate which is very limited."

future profession - artist

in an abundant world enabled by technology, perhaps only one profession will exist - artist...

curating public space

i like the idea of rethinking the interfaces between the private and the public - to begin to not just focus on private temples of culture but facilitate a "leakage," an "erosion of the edges" to let beauty flow to a larger audience and to the public at large.

museums have to reach out to the larger context - new technology in building and learning will facilitate this more and more. what we need is the will to reach out...

the iron triangle

we can't expect any positive impacts of new technology as long as the iron triangle works to bring war to the world. the following documentary is a brilliant expose of the carlyle group - a private equity firm that is heavily involved in the defense (read "offence") business. some key points - a. what eisenhower called the "military industrial complex" is more aptly termed the "iron triangle" - a convergence of military, big business and politics - a sickening group of powerful individuals invested in war - "wartime is boomtime for business", b. senior leaders (particularly in the us and uk) around the world are profoundly invested in war industries as they are heavily government regulated ("you set up the policies. you leave office. you go into business. you exploit those policies") - conflicts of interest abound, c. a lot of players that form the iron triangle are hard to understand as they are privately held (like the carlyle group) - "it's like shadow boxing with a ghost," d. the iron triangle has the power to shape public thinking - they can easily make the case for war/military spending even when it is inessential, e. oil money (easy, plentiful and desperate to hold it's value) plays a major role in the global iron triangle.

until the iron triangle dissolves and the era of oil (elite energy) ends, it is clear that we cannot have a livable world...

battery breakthrough

nanotechnology now reports a breakthrough in battery technology at usc. energy storage technology is the achilles heel of plans to roll out renewables faster and in more applications. there is major evolution and in 5 years storage may no longer be a choke point:

Cheap, strong lithium-ion battery developed at USC. New design uses silicon nanoparticles to improve capacity and recharge more quickly.

The new batteries—which could be used in anything from cell phones to hybrid cars—hold three times as much energy as comparable graphite-based designs and recharge within 10 minutes. The design, currently under a provisional patent, could be commercially available within two to three years.

"It's an exciting research. It opens the door for the design of the next generation lithium-ion batteries," said Chongwu Zhou, professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, who led the team that developed the battery. Zhou worked with USC graduate students Mingyuan Ge, Jipeng Rong, Xin Fang and Anyi Zhang, as well as Yunhao Lu of Zhejiang University in China. Their research was published in Nano Research in January.

health future

i love vinod khosla's report entitled "20% doctors included - speculations and musings of a technology optimist". it gives us a picture of the future of healthcare that is rooted in current developments. let me begin with the summary he opens with:

1.   Healthcare today is often really the “practice of medicine” rather than the “science of medicine”. In the worst cases of the practice of medicine, doctors just take moderately educated shots in the dark when it comes to patient care. Physicians should be much more scientific and data-driven. That’s hard for the average physician to pull off without technology, because of the increasing amount of data and research released every year. Next-generation medicine will be the scientific arrival at diagnostic and treatment conclusions and real testing of what’s actually going on in your body. And, it will be much more personalized than your physician can provide. Data science will be key to this.

2.   Technology makes up for human deficiencies and amplifies strengths – MDs and even other less trained medical professionals can do much more than they do now. By 2025 more data-driven, automated healthcare will displace up to 80% of physicians’ diagnostic and prescription work. It will AMPLIFY physicians by arming them with more complete, synthesized, and up-to-date research data, all leading to better patient outcomes. Computers are much better than people at organizing and recalling information. They have larger and less corruptible memories, remember more complex information much more quickly and completely, and make far fewer mistakes than a hot shot MD from Harvard. Contrary to popular opinion, they’re also better at integrating and balancing considerations of patient symptoms, history, demeanor, environmental factors, and population management guidelines than the average physician.

3.   The healthcare transition will start incrementally and develop slowly in sophistication, much like a great MD who starts with seven years of med school and then spends a decade training with the best practitioners by watching, learning, and experiencing. Expect many laughing-stock attempts by “toddler MD computer systems” early in their evolution and learning. These systems will grow with the help of the top MDs and AMPLIFY them so everyone can have the best, most researched care, not the average, overburdened, and rushed doctor the average person gets today!  In fact, the very best MDs will be an integral part of designing and building these advanced systems.

4.   The systems of 10-15 years from now (which is the time frame I am talking about) will overcome many of the short-term deficiencies of today’s technologies. By analogy, using today’s technology then would be like our carrying the multi-pound phones from 1987 (they were floor mounted cell phones with big handsets and heavy cords) in our pockets rather than iPhones. There will be point innovations that seem immaterial, but, when there are enough of them, they will integrate with each other and start to feel like a revolution. In the meantime, expect these early systems and tools to be the butt of jokes from many a writer or MD. Early printers, typically “dot matrix”, did not exactly cut it for business correspondence, let alone replace traditional means. Early medical systems will be used in non-critical roles or under physician supervision. Eventually, this shift in how healthcare is delivered will allow for less money to be spent on capital equipment, cutting health care costs. It will allow us to provide care to those who don’t have it now. And, it will prevent simple things from getting worse before being addressed.

5.   The human element of care, provided by humane humans, not rushed, overloaded MDs, will still be around. These people may have MDs anyway, but they won’t need ten or twenty years of medical school training. Or, when they have the training, they will become much better diagnosticians and caregivers. Beyond diagnosis and treatment, there are many things doctors do that won’t be replaced.

6.   The problem in healthcare is not with doctors, many of whom are accomplished, caring, honest, and compassionate providers. The problem is the incredible increase in complexity of the newly enabled data (some extrinsic), vast amounts of research, longitudinal health records, and histories without the self-reporting inaccuracies of the patient that allows for the much more integrative analysis that is now possible.  The problem is also the misalignment of incentives in medicine, where organizations try to maximize revenue (extra surgeries anyone?) at the expense of optimizing care. This is why innovation will most likely happen from the outside. It is also important to realize that I refer to the “AVERAGE GLOBAL doctor” or healthcare concern, not every doctor or company. The standards of performance in some parts of the world and in some parts of this country are very different than those in the best metropolitan hospitals in the United States. I also note that 50% of MD’s are below average though every doctor most people  know is above average!

a case for replacing doctors (in their current form) altogether is emerging, though - as you can see - he treads carefully on this issue. he goes on to mention several new start-ups that are actually beginning to create this new healthcare future:

ZocDoc - allows patients to check in for an appointment and provide basic information ahead of time.
AliveCor - makes an iPhone case to take an ECG after every workout. 
CellScope - which produces low-cost iPhone attachments for imaging skin moles, rashes, ear infections, and (in the future) your retina or throat.
SkinVision - uses the fractal nature of patterns in a skin image to determine more accurately than most general physicians whether you have skin cancer.
Eyenetra - makes a device that can give you an eye test and fit you for eyeglasses at little cost or hassle.
Adamant - is a very risky startup that’s attempting to produce a chip that can detect hundreds of gases in your breath. If you’re asthmatic, it can measure the level of nitrous oxide and predict whether you’re at risk of having an attack. If you’re diabetic and have ketones in your breath, it can detect that too and tell you that your body is undergoing ketosis. It can detect if you have lung cancer and even tell you what type of lung cancer. It will even detect whether you’re burning fat or sugars during exercise, because each results in different component concentrations in your breath. This little chip will do all this inexpensively, for far less than a big, expensive CT scanner that’ll just tell you that you have a nodule in your lungs but can’t tell you what kind of lung cancer you have. Eventually, you won’t have a doctor stare at you and tell you that you look well; instead, your doctor will be able to look at the levels of hundreds of compounds in your breath and know whether you’re well.
Ginger.io - determines patients’ mental health based on a variety of metrics. It can monitor your rate of emailing, tweeting, texting, and calling to gauge your social activity. Using motion sensors and your phone’s GPS, it can even know if you’re hiding in your bedroom, eating in your kitchen, or just staying in bed. By watching for changes in your behavior, it can tell how you’re doing far better than a psychiatrist could possibly determine and actually calls your psychiatrist if you’re in the danger zone of an episode. For example, detecting a behavioral pattern change that’s indicative of bipolar disorder could help us prevent shooting sprees of the type we’ve seen recently.
Proteus - is helping address drug non-compliance, one of the biggest problems in medicine. They’ve designed a clever system that combines a pill sensor, a body patch, and a mobile app. They attach a tiny, ingestible sensor to pills that gets activated by stomach acids. When a patient takes the pill, the sensor sends a signal to the body patch, which then relays the signal to the app. This system will allow caregivers to remotely monitor patient adherence by individual, time-stamped pill consumption events. This is a far better solution than having your doctor base a diagnosis on the one-time blood test done in the clinic. 

Empatica - uses sensors on patients’ wrists to measure bio-signals that correlate with emotion. Imagine having a continuous and, more importantly, accurate and objective measurement of your emotions for a month instead of only the latest, biased description that you might give (or forget to give) to your hurried physician.  

AirStrip Technologies - provides real-time vital signs to physicians’ mobile devices. 

Sotera Wireless - provides a battery-powered mobile device for monitoring vital signs. 

Agile Diagnosis/Lifecom - are improving clinical decision-making by providing decision trees with probability-based outcomes for physicians at the point of care. These and other startups are forcing us to rethink healthcare from diagnostics to treatment. 

dr. daniel kraft's talk - appended below - reinforces and animates khosla's views. khosla, kraft and other people connected with the cutting edge of medicine are alerting us to myriad new technologies - but as they all say - the real advantages will flow from their convergence. development - maturation - convergence - maturation will take at least a decade. the era of systems medicine begins in 2020...

ai > human doctor

as per a recent indiana university study, researchers found the following:

consider how these gaps will only widen given the nearly limitless learning potential of ai systems and an exponential rate of positive change. quoting from the gigaom piece on it:

A pair of Indiana University researchers has found that a pair of predictive modeling techniques can make significantly better decisions about patients’ treatments than can doctors acting alone. How much better? They claim a better than 50 percent reduction in costs and more than 40 percent better patient outcomes.

The idea behind the research, carried out by Casey Bennett and Kris Hauser, is simple and gets to the core of why so many people care so much about data in the first place: If doctors can consider what’s actually happening and likely to happen instead of relying on intuition, they should be able to make better decisions.

In order to prove out their hypothesis, the researchers worked with “clinical data, demographics and other information on over 6,700 patients who had major clinical depression diagnoses, of which about 65 to 70 percent had co-occurring chronic physical disorders like diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease.” They built a model using Markov decision processes — which predict the probabilities of future events based on those immediately preceding them — and dynamic decision networks — which extend the Markov processes by considering the specific features of those events in order to determine the probabilities. Essentially, their model considers the specifics of a patient’s current state and then determines the best action to effect the best possible outcome.

it is only a matter of time that ai will largely replace the human doctor who has corruptible, limited memory and a whole host of human biases that ai does not. i expect empathy providers armed with ai's as the preferred mode of healthcare delivery in a 10-15 year time horizon...