Hi, I just finished watching the livestream interview with Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis on the launch of the Carbon Removal XPrize and these started as my extemporaneous notes, which I then went back over and filled in with links to specific points in the video where they are discussed, and ultimately ended up adding in some direct quotes and time markers where I thought relevant. This is a really fun interview, as Peter Diamandis and Elon are good friends, so even if you are not interested in CDR, I highly suggest you watch the "tangents" I link below. Elon shares some interesting tidbits throughout, and sometimes they struggle to stay on topic (but I'm sure you will love when they go off topic. And definitely don't miss Elon's answer to the last question, where Elon goes pretty deep on the meaning of life and why we are here. I am mostly going to use this post to transcribe what they said about the contest and will do an analysis later. So this is Part I and I will follow up with a Part II where I will will go over the written rules and share my thoughts (very…
While on a livestream with hundreds redditors from /r/oculus, I bump into non-other than Oculus Rift Founder, Palmer Luckey. Even though he is on his way out to the airport, he is gracious enough to grant me an interview if I can "walk-and-talk" with him. With no PR agents or handlers around, as we wind our way through the maze of display booths and crowds, Palmer gives me a very candid and genuine view into his insights on the release and adoption stages of VR. Days earlier and to great fanfare, preslaes for the Oculus Rift had begun. While demand was great, among early adopters there was some controversy regarding the price. Watch the interview to see how Palmer responds to this criticism and lays out his vision for how the technology will likely evolve. I believe this is his only interview where he makes the comparison to Telsa and how Elon planned to bring electric cars to the masses: "Luckey: For this entire generation. I think something similar to this is what Elon Musk has done with Tesla. His goal has always been to bring electric cars to the masses; that’s always been the goal. But the first car…
Cadida auris, is a fugus that is "pretty much unbeatable and difficult to identify," and which the CDC says causes nearly 50% of patients to die within 90 days. It has an overall mortality rate of 30%-60%. If you get this thing, it is very likely that you will die before they have even figured out what you have. And it's so persistent that after you die, the hospital has to tear out the ceiling tiles to fully rid the hospital of the fungus: Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it. “Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump,” said Dr. Scott Lorin, the hospital’s president. “The mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive.” Source That last part about tearing out the ceiling tiles is what made me rewind the article as I listened to it back in April. Hospitals have had to shut down entire wings and even close…
Tech trends towards 2018 (Note: this was written quickly in the hours right before midnight on 12/31/17 and needs some editing, so please disregard typos) "Self-driving" cars There is a lot of competition and this area is definitely heating up for 2018. Waymo, a spin-off of Google appears to be in the lead for actual self-driving, fully autonomous, no driver in the car type of service. They have some service running in Arizona and will begin picking up passengers soon. Uber has cars running in Pittsburg that have drivers in them. GM acquired Cruise, who has a fleet driving around SF, with human drivers monitoring the system, that can be used by their employees. Tesla has autopilot that drives pretty well on the highway and has some amazing abilities to avoid accident that are two cars in front, by bouncing radar off the ground. Autonomous cars should be a pretty fruitful area this year and next. Rockets SpaceX made great progress this year, launching at least once a month, and landing 14 boosters with 100% recovery. That is an amazing rate of progress as they lost 3/8 last year. The idea of reusable rockets changes the entire equation of…
These days, the most popular business model seems to be: Uber for X. A basic model that takes an old industry, cuts out the middle man and then adds on-demand functionality to it. There are numerous articles on the concept and even collections on Product Hunt devoted to it. But today, I am introducing a new business model concept, one that I’ve noticed appearing more and more frequently, yet that I could not find written about anywhere else. After watching the most recent demo day from biotechnology accelerator, IndieBio, I decided to capture my thoughts on the burgeoning concept. The business model concept I would like to coin is “X without Y”, meaning creating a desirable end product, without utilizing the conventional source associated with it. For example, at the demo day, there was a company called Mycoworks that is making leather from mushroom mycelium and it actually feels real. It is “leather without the cow.” There was another company, BioNascent, that is making “human milk without humans” by creating the same proteins found in breastmilk in the same ratios, but in a bioreactor instead of a breast. Ava Labs, another IndieBio startup, is creating “wine without grapes,” by molecularly…
Every time I hear a story about the impacts of global warming, it mentions how it is the current generation's grandkids' problem. This is one of the things that makes the problem so hard to deal with. Humans are terrible about thinking through the future beyond what will happen to us, and also the imperative also seems to be one of selfishness, and a "that's not my problem" kind of mentality. This is the exact reason why if people are going to live significantly longer, it suddenly becomes their problem and it suddenly becomes an important problem to solve. As a futurist and longevity activist, I am constantly in the position of describing to older people, the impact of life extension in the near future and the conversation almost always follows the same course. Most people around 50 years or older sadly have already accepted and come to terms with their "impending" mortality. They don't necessarily "want" to live longer and seem to accept the world as is. But, as I continue to expand upon the ideas and theories of the future and coming medical advances, they can start to see the tip of possibility that maybe they could live…
Virtual reality is coming and it is going to be huge. The headsets are starting to get to where they need to be, but they will require a $1500 computer plus many accessories. The generation 3 types VR systems will really push way beyond that level. The needed parts will quickly be integrated and the chips advanced and specialized. You should watch the entire video, but I have embedded it here at the 12 minutes and 18 second mark, as David Hotlz, the CTO and co-founder of Leap Motion sees is the future. He has a unparalleled experience in knowing what people are working on because Leap Motion makes a infrared sensor that is being attached to many VR helments to allow them to "see" depth and objects in front of the headset.
There is an old futurist saying about complex jobs once done by humans: "The factory of the future will only have two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment." Sooner or later, we are going to have to come to terms with the fact that humans are the largest single point of failure in most situations. We are easily distracted, perform inconsistently, and are affected by emotions and other externalities in ways that can compromise performance and cost lives. What is even scarier is that when we take part in something like commercial flight, hundreds of people's lives are in the hands of one or two individuals. In the case of the Germanwings' flight that crashed in the Alps, it has become apparent that the crash was deliberate. The pilot went to the bathroom, leaving the co-pilot in charge, and upon returning found the door locked as it was supposed to be. But when the captain knocked, there was no answer and so he continued knocking and can be heard on the cockpit recording, repeatedly identifying himself and trying to break the down the…
This papers discusses a new technique that uses ultrasound to remove amyloid beta plaques that have built up in the brain. At first read, I presumed that something with the sound waves was shaking the plaques free, but on a deeper reading it is clear that what the sound waves are doing is opening up the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and enabling the brains natural defenses, microglia, to come in and break down the plaques. This seems like a significant advance if they are able to show similar results in humans, and at the same time show no damage being caused to the brain. They are using the energy from ultrasound to narrowly focus on a specific spot of the brain and with 6 to 8 treatments over 6 to 8 weeks they are able to remove 50% of the amyloid and restore memory functions in 3 independent memory tests. They are able to restore memory functions to what you would find in normal mice. They were concerned about causing damage from circulating plaques and thought the amyloid would be cleared and found in the blood, but they could not find it in the blood.they found the most of the plaque…
It's not every day that a new type of 3D printing technology is invented. Our current modes of 3D printing or as they have been known for decades, "additive manufacturing", have become cheaper and more widely distributed, but there has been no great advances in the field. Today comes a new entrant, with an entirely new method of production that uses light projected through an oxygen-permeable window to cure a UV sensitive material. The company, Carbon3D has been in stealth mode for two years and came out today with a TED talk and publication in Science. The video below is sped up 7X, but it still is way faster than any other technique currently in existence. The call out current 3D printing as really being a series of 2D printing over and over again. It's a shot across the bow to companies like Makerbot. And Makerbot may have reason to be scared of the technology. They coined the abbreviation CLIP for continuous liquid printing, and it is supposedly 25-100 times faster than traditional printing. In addition to the speed, because the printer doesn't use layers, it has a smooth surface, unlike most 3D printed materials. "Traditional 3D printing requires…
"A human patient with late stage leukemia will be given DNA nanobot treatment. Without the DNA nanobot treatment the patient would be expected to die in the summer of 2015. Based upon animal trials they expect to remove the cancer within one month. Within 1 or 2 years they hope to have spinal cord repair working in animals and then shortly thereafter in humans. This is working in tissue cultures." This is an amazing development because by using nanotechnology to guide drugs directly to specific sites, they will be able to use drugs that have been withdrawn from the market for side-effects or toxicity. via Next Big Future: Ido Bachelet DNA nanobots summary with a couple of extra videos.