A Singularity University student taped a picture of Ralph Merkle to a dorm room wall, executive director Salim Ismail tells me. Merkle makes an unlikely pinup, but I get it. He’s a great speaker, engaging students with unusual enthusiasm, clarity, and humor. It doesn’t hurt that what he’s explaining is one of the weirdest, scariest, most promising technologies on the horizon: molecular machines.
There’s some question about whether the concept of a minuscule machine assembled one atom at a time is even physically viable, but Merkle makes it palpable. In today’s session, he details a few gizmos designed by his collegue Robert Frietas, a research associate at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing. Each one is a complex biomedical device designed to float freely in the human bloodstream, fixing problems that make doctors tear their hair out.
Take the respirocyte. “It’s like a tiny scuba tank,” Merkle says, a one-micron container filled with compressed oxygen. Essentially, it’s an artificial red blood cell, except that it would have 100 times a red blood cell’s carrying capacity. “Today your response to a heart attack would be, ‘I’ve got a heart att—’. With respirocytes in your bloodstream, your response is, ‘I’ve got a heart attack. I’ve got an hour or so to get myself into the hands of the emergency medical care system or I’m in big trouble.’”
You’d be in even bigger trouble if your immune system viewed nanobots as a threat, but Merkle doesn’t worry about that. His favorite material, diamond, is biochemically “pretty inert.” As for structures that can’t be produced out of carbon “you just have to design them so the immune system finds them uninteresting,” he says. “If you find a feature that excites the immune system, you just put some fuzz on it.”
Ultimately, he envisions fleets of fuzzy machines floating through the body, replacing DNA, repairing damage, delivering drugs, then being flushed out when their job is done. Once patients experience the benefits, they won’t be any more resistant to nanobots than they are to vaccines, fluorescent dyes, medicated stents, and the other futuristic preparations doctors inject into patients. How far in the future? With adequate funding and good luck, he says, 20 years; without, 40.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Singularity U Day 4: The Internet of Things
What comes after Web 2.0? For David Orban, the next phase is the Internet of Things: a digital lattice of interconnected objects — cars, handbags, sneakers, thermoses. Orban calls these objects spimes. Coined by sci-fi god Bruce Sterling, the term denotes a networked thingy that’s aware of its orientation in space and time. Your cellphone is a spime. A Roomba vacuum cleaner is another. Orban’s company WideTag is cranking out spime-ish gizmos and iPhone apps.
Location- and time-aware devices would be a lot more autonomous — they would take care of themselves rather than making you take care of them. Roomba already plugs itself in when it’s thirsty. A cell phone could go a lot farther toward making sure it had enough juice. Orban hopes the OpenSpime standard will lead the way to rapid proliferation. The danger is that connecting scads of spimes will max out the Internet’s capacity for connections. No problem: the next-gen Internet Protocol v6 is designed to accommodate 1,000 nodes for every person on earth.
If that sounds like overkill, consider claytronics, an initiative to make programmable matter. A lump of claytronics comprizes zillions of tiny programmable spheres, currently 1mm in diameter, eventually 1 micron. At that tiny scale, van der waals forces would bind the spheres into a putty that would hold any contour you impose on it. You’d be able to form the stuff by hand into any shape and determine the color, texture, and other characteristics. And, of course, a claytronic object will be able to change its form and character according to remote commands.
At Orban’s invitation, the class breaks into groups, each charged with conceiving its own new-breed spime. My group dreams up SPORE — Space Projects Offworld Resource Explorer — an autonomous botnet that roams the asteroid belt in search of mining opportunities. Other concepts: a P2P Teddy Bear and the Enlightenment spime cloud, which envelops the user in virtual reality.
The proposals get a little silly, but Orban reminds us that Vint Cerf himself, on Google’s official blog, wrote about delivery of soap to Internet-enabled washing machines. “If Vint Cerf can say something like,” he tells the class, “it’s okay to think crazy.”
Location- and time-aware devices would be a lot more autonomous — they would take care of themselves rather than making you take care of them. Roomba already plugs itself in when it’s thirsty. A cell phone could go a lot farther toward making sure it had enough juice. Orban hopes the OpenSpime standard will lead the way to rapid proliferation. The danger is that connecting scads of spimes will max out the Internet’s capacity for connections. No problem: the next-gen Internet Protocol v6 is designed to accommodate 1,000 nodes for every person on earth.
If that sounds like overkill, consider claytronics, an initiative to make programmable matter. A lump of claytronics comprizes zillions of tiny programmable spheres, currently 1mm in diameter, eventually 1 micron. At that tiny scale, van der waals forces would bind the spheres into a putty that would hold any contour you impose on it. You’d be able to form the stuff by hand into any shape and determine the color, texture, and other characteristics. And, of course, a claytronic object will be able to change its form and character according to remote commands.
At Orban’s invitation, the class breaks into groups, each charged with conceiving its own new-breed spime. My group dreams up SPORE — Space Projects Offworld Resource Explorer — an autonomous botnet that roams the asteroid belt in search of mining opportunities. Other concepts: a P2P Teddy Bear and the Enlightenment spime cloud, which envelops the user in virtual reality.
The proposals get a little silly, but Orban reminds us that Vint Cerf himself, on Google’s official blog, wrote about delivery of soap to Internet-enabled washing machines. “If Vint Cerf can say something like,” he tells the class, “it’s okay to think crazy.”
Singularity U Day 4: Coping with Climate Change
It takes a lot of juice to power the contemporary lifestyle. How to keep the AC going without turning up the burner under Hothouse Earth?
That’s probably the wrong question, says Michel Gelobter, Environment & Energy Track Chair at Singularity University. A better one would be, How much more do we have to mess up the planet to get to a state where we’re not messing it up anymore?
The meat of Gelobter’s presentation is a primer on the laws of thermodynamics and how to use them to determine the best path to sustainable energy. He points out that Newton’s laws, for all their immutable truth, are nicely formulated for the sake of human utility. Take the first law, conservation of energy. If energy never disappears, why do we care about it? Because we need it to be available. At the moment, we’re transferring preserved sunlight into the atmosphere, where it causes problems that require further energy (or a gargantuan decrease in energy consumption) to fix. We need to engineer a more efficient system.
Ultimately, he says, only three kinds of efficiency matter, all derived from thermodynamics, and they all have to do with theoretical maximum efficiency. (For the technically minded, the options are Thermal, Carnot, and Second Law efficiency.) For example, in theory, you can roughly double coal plant efficiently by burning it hotter — an opportunity that many businesses are trying to crack.
On the other hand, the closer you get to theoretical maximum, the harder it is to close the gap. So a smart strategy is to look for technologies that yield the greatest efficiency from the get-go. “That’s the beauty of the laws of thermodynamics,” Gelobter says. They give you a quick way to short-cut the political and economic complexities of the energy business and find out whether you’re operating from a solid foundation in terms of physics. With physics on your side, you’ve got a fighting chance.
That’s probably the wrong question, says Michel Gelobter, Environment & Energy Track Chair at Singularity University. A better one would be, How much more do we have to mess up the planet to get to a state where we’re not messing it up anymore?
The meat of Gelobter’s presentation is a primer on the laws of thermodynamics and how to use them to determine the best path to sustainable energy. He points out that Newton’s laws, for all their immutable truth, are nicely formulated for the sake of human utility. Take the first law, conservation of energy. If energy never disappears, why do we care about it? Because we need it to be available. At the moment, we’re transferring preserved sunlight into the atmosphere, where it causes problems that require further energy (or a gargantuan decrease in energy consumption) to fix. We need to engineer a more efficient system.
Ultimately, he says, only three kinds of efficiency matter, all derived from thermodynamics, and they all have to do with theoretical maximum efficiency. (For the technically minded, the options are Thermal, Carnot, and Second Law efficiency.) For example, in theory, you can roughly double coal plant efficiently by burning it hotter — an opportunity that many businesses are trying to crack.
On the other hand, the closer you get to theoretical maximum, the harder it is to close the gap. So a smart strategy is to look for technologies that yield the greatest efficiency from the get-go. “That’s the beauty of the laws of thermodynamics,” Gelobter says. They give you a quick way to short-cut the political and economic complexities of the energy business and find out whether you’re operating from a solid foundation in terms of physics. With physics on your side, you’ve got a fighting chance.
Singularity U Day 3: Neuroscience
The greatest mysteries yield the biggest opportunities. And for Christopher deCharms, the human brain is the most mysterious thing of all.
A neuroscientist specializing in real-time brain imagery, deCharms suggests that the next wave of knowledge, technology and business will come from cracking the code that gives humans the capacity to perceive, think and act.
He flashes a slide on the screen listing a dozen things we don’t know: How does the brain make choices? Predictions? Plans? How does it produce an impression of identity, of experience? How does it adjust to change? How do we see, hear, touch, taste, smell? Why do we feel motivated one moment, depressed the next? Why do we sleep?
One thing that makes the answers so elusive is the staggering complexity of what the brain does. It’s such a thicket that scientists and philosophers can’t even reach consensus on a definition of consciousness. The quickest route to answers, deCharms says, is to break down the problem into manageable pieces. He differentiates between brain functions that involve high information density — say, reading and writing to the visual cortex — and those involving very small amounts of information, like moderating pain.
“Neurotechnology may benefit from questioning what kinds of low-information-content signals we can read and write before we try to upload and download consciousness,” he says.
Case in point: Deep brain stimulation. DeCharms shows video clips of Parkinsons patients moving involuntarily in a jerky, repetitive, exhausting dance. Their ability to control motion is so disrupted they speak in gasps. Switch on the electrodes reaching into the motor cortex, and suddenly they stand still and start talking about how good it feels.
The rest of deCharms’ presentation is devoted to groundbreaking research in brain cartography, perceptual function, neuronal physiology and several ways to mediate brain activity from drugs to biofeedback. Still, he’s circumspect about the prospect of rapid advance in practical developments.
“If this research follows the usual pattern, progress will take longer than we imagine — but when it happens, it will deliver more benefit than we can imagine,” he says. The bottom line is that the frontier has been breached and wave after wave of troops are flooding over the border, mapping the territory, reshaping it, bringing new capabilities, hopes and challenges.
The mystery won’t remain a mysterious for long.
A neuroscientist specializing in real-time brain imagery, deCharms suggests that the next wave of knowledge, technology and business will come from cracking the code that gives humans the capacity to perceive, think and act.
He flashes a slide on the screen listing a dozen things we don’t know: How does the brain make choices? Predictions? Plans? How does it produce an impression of identity, of experience? How does it adjust to change? How do we see, hear, touch, taste, smell? Why do we feel motivated one moment, depressed the next? Why do we sleep?
One thing that makes the answers so elusive is the staggering complexity of what the brain does. It’s such a thicket that scientists and philosophers can’t even reach consensus on a definition of consciousness. The quickest route to answers, deCharms says, is to break down the problem into manageable pieces. He differentiates between brain functions that involve high information density — say, reading and writing to the visual cortex — and those involving very small amounts of information, like moderating pain.
“Neurotechnology may benefit from questioning what kinds of low-information-content signals we can read and write before we try to upload and download consciousness,” he says.
Case in point: Deep brain stimulation. DeCharms shows video clips of Parkinsons patients moving involuntarily in a jerky, repetitive, exhausting dance. Their ability to control motion is so disrupted they speak in gasps. Switch on the electrodes reaching into the motor cortex, and suddenly they stand still and start talking about how good it feels.
The rest of deCharms’ presentation is devoted to groundbreaking research in brain cartography, perceptual function, neuronal physiology and several ways to mediate brain activity from drugs to biofeedback. Still, he’s circumspect about the prospect of rapid advance in practical developments.
“If this research follows the usual pattern, progress will take longer than we imagine — but when it happens, it will deliver more benefit than we can imagine,” he says. The bottom line is that the frontier has been breached and wave after wave of troops are flooding over the border, mapping the territory, reshaping it, bringing new capabilities, hopes and challenges.
The mystery won’t remain a mysterious for long.
Singularity U Day 3: The Eye of the Hurricane
The Singularity University routine is nonstop. Breakfast at 7:30 am — good, wholesome food, regrettably low on sugary and fatty goodness (presumably consonant with Ray Kurzweil's life-extension regime) — followed by a series of deep-dive lectures in delivered in mind-boggling 90-minute blocks.
Lunch at 12:30 pm isn’t a time to recharge; it’s an opportunity to deliver more information … The first day, it was presentations by grads of last summer’s nine-week program, detailing the businesses they’ve founded since (SU gets one percent) … Yesterday it was a close look at the Tesla electric car parked in the driveway, with a company rep on hand to answer questions (and presumably to take orders). Today, it’s a detailed demo of the SU spinoff that’s farthest along, the Gettaround car-sharing service. Then it’s back to the lecture room to get your brain stuffed anew.
Dinner at 7 pm is a bit more leisurely, but afterward come more lectures and demos. Last night, executive director Salim Ismail’s discourse on metaphysics lasted until 11:30 pm. Get some sleep, rinse, and repeat.
Salim tells me I’ll get a chance to recharge when the lecture portion of the program ends and days are filled with field trips to Silicon Valley businesses — but somehow I doubt it.
Lunch at 12:30 pm isn’t a time to recharge; it’s an opportunity to deliver more information … The first day, it was presentations by grads of last summer’s nine-week program, detailing the businesses they’ve founded since (SU gets one percent) … Yesterday it was a close look at the Tesla electric car parked in the driveway, with a company rep on hand to answer questions (and presumably to take orders). Today, it’s a detailed demo of the SU spinoff that’s farthest along, the Gettaround car-sharing service. Then it’s back to the lecture room to get your brain stuffed anew.
Dinner at 7 pm is a bit more leisurely, but afterward come more lectures and demos. Last night, executive director Salim Ismail’s discourse on metaphysics lasted until 11:30 pm. Get some sleep, rinse, and repeat.
Salim tells me I’ll get a chance to recharge when the lecture portion of the program ends and days are filled with field trips to Silicon Valley businesses — but somehow I doubt it.
Singularity U Day 2: After Hours with Peter Diamandis
After dinner on day two of Singularity University, Peter Diamandis gives a fantastic presentation about the X-Prize and what it means. This is a guy who radiates energy, seriousness, and goodwill. He would have made a first-class motivational speaker, but he’s focused on substantial issues and favors leather jackets over sharkskin suits.
The man doesn’t think small: “My mission on this planet is to be an agent of transformation for the human race moving beyond planet earth,” he says. Which would seem pompous if he didn’t walk the walk. Over 90 minutes, he shows the assembled SU students how it’s done. “if you don’t do what you love,” he counsels, “do something else. Because all of it is hard.”
Diamandis’ approach is to imagine the world as he would like it to be, chart a course to that destination, and identify the first possible stop along the way. If the larger aim is to diversify humanity’s habitats in the universe, then a first logical step is the Ansari X-Prize for private space flight. (That’s not the first step, actually, but the third or fourth — but it makes the point.)
The scope of his accomplishment becomes obvious as he runs down the list of results: “We brought a new industry to market, made the front page of Google, generated 6 billion media impressions, and ended up with the winning vehicle hanging from the ceiling of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum — right above Charles Lindburgh’s Spirit of St Louis. So cool.”
To have an impact, he says, prizes need to attract the right contestants, set a clear, doable goal, make a huge splash, and allow the contest organizer to retain media rights. Do it right, and you’ll attract capital to the problem you’re hoping to solve, pool brainpower worldwide, make heroes of the winners, and change the world’s perception of what is possible. And he’s ready to do it many times over, with competitions underway to revolutionize transportation, genomics, medicine, bionics, brain-computer interfacing, and undersea exploration. The latest prize, for a lunar lander design, was awarded only a couple of weeks ago.
It’s in the activities of another of his enterprises, Zero G, that the human dimension of his work shines brightest. A while back, Stephen Hawking asked for a ticket. “I was told I would kill this guy and ruin my company,” Diamandis says, but he wasn’t going to pass up the chance to introduce the world’s expert on gravity to zero gravity.
It took six months to get the FAA to drop its requirement that passengers be able-bodied, and when the wheelchair bound astrophysicist was finally aloft, he cajoled the flight crew into flying not one, not two, but eight parabolas. The scientist is paralyzed except for a few muscles in his face, Diamandis says. Yet in the photos Diamandis flashes on the screen behind him, his customer wears a child’s wide-eyed grin.
SU Exec Program Day 2: Biotech & Bioinformatics
Subsequent to writing up Ralph Merkle's initial lectures, I was so harried that I satisfied myself with sending posts to Wired's Epicenter blog and dispensed with trying to put up everything on Blogger. However, I'd like this blog to represent the complete Singularity U experience, so I'm re-posting the Wired posts here, in order (hopefully). We pick up the thread with Andrew Hessel:
Biotech is a hidebound industry. Elephantine budgets. Glacial development timelines. Stultifying regulatory oversight. Pitiful productivity. Andrew Hessell, once employed by a major biotech drug developer (unnamed) and now an evangelist of synthetic biology, observes that, while biotech and IT share important characteristics — both had similar inception dates and depend on information — they’ve followed completely different trajectories.
The reasons, he says, boil down to greed and fear. Where the captains of IT formed partnerships, forged standards, and opened their source code (however reluctantly), biotech moguls protected their turf tooth and claw, and still do.
Now biotech’s dark lords face a digital-age army, people raised with a networked mindset, bent on taking over the territory. And that, in Hessel’s view, makes biotech the next IT.
The price of gene sequencing is falling precipitously; the $1000 human genome is on the horizon. Inexpensive tools are becoming available, such as LavaAmp, a $10 gene amplifier, currently in prototype. Meanwhile, molecular biologists are beginning to understand how to engineer processes like photosynthesis and sugar metabolism.
MIT’s BioBricks program is recruiting hundreds of bright students every year, teaching them how to create synthetic organisms by snapping together DNA components like Legos. Student teams are engineering new industrial processes and programming VR biotech training. And the DIYbio movement is gaining momentum, poised to make end runs around industry and government. “This isn’t heavy programming,” Hessel says. “More like writing a script for Excel.”
The reward? Multibillion-dollar opportunities removing bottlenecks from the current system. People need drugs. They value health. They will pay for a new generation of medicines, diagnostics, protective measures, tests and measurements. Make biotech more like infotech, Hessel says, and it will happen.
Biotech is a hidebound industry. Elephantine budgets. Glacial development timelines. Stultifying regulatory oversight. Pitiful productivity. Andrew Hessell, once employed by a major biotech drug developer (unnamed) and now an evangelist of synthetic biology, observes that, while biotech and IT share important characteristics — both had similar inception dates and depend on information — they’ve followed completely different trajectories.The reasons, he says, boil down to greed and fear. Where the captains of IT formed partnerships, forged standards, and opened their source code (however reluctantly), biotech moguls protected their turf tooth and claw, and still do.
Now biotech’s dark lords face a digital-age army, people raised with a networked mindset, bent on taking over the territory. And that, in Hessel’s view, makes biotech the next IT.
The price of gene sequencing is falling precipitously; the $1000 human genome is on the horizon. Inexpensive tools are becoming available, such as LavaAmp, a $10 gene amplifier, currently in prototype. Meanwhile, molecular biologists are beginning to understand how to engineer processes like photosynthesis and sugar metabolism.
MIT’s BioBricks program is recruiting hundreds of bright students every year, teaching them how to create synthetic organisms by snapping together DNA components like Legos. Student teams are engineering new industrial processes and programming VR biotech training. And the DIYbio movement is gaining momentum, poised to make end runs around industry and government. “This isn’t heavy programming,” Hessel says. “More like writing a script for Excel.”
The reward? Multibillion-dollar opportunities removing bottlenecks from the current system. People need drugs. They value health. They will pay for a new generation of medicines, diagnostics, protective measures, tests and measurements. Make biotech more like infotech, Hessel says, and it will happen.
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