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#436488 Tech’s Biggest Leaps From the Last 10 ...
As we enter our third decade in the 21st century, it seems appropriate to reflect on the ways technology developed and note the breakthroughs that were achieved in the last 10 years.
The 2010s saw IBM’s Watson win a game of Jeopardy, ushering in mainstream awareness of machine learning, along with DeepMind’s AlphaGO becoming the world’s Go champion. It was the decade that industrial tools like drones, 3D printers, genetic sequencing, and virtual reality (VR) all became consumer products. And it was a decade in which some alarming trends related to surveillance, targeted misinformation, and deepfakes came online.
For better or worse, the past decade was a breathtaking era in human history in which the idea of exponential growth in information technologies powered by computation became a mainstream concept.
As I did last year for 2018 only, I’ve asked a collection of experts across the Singularity University faculty to help frame the biggest breakthroughs and moments that gave shape to the past 10 years. I asked them what, in their opinion, was the most important breakthrough in their respective fields over the past decade.
My own answer to this question, focused in the space of augmented and virtual reality, would be the stunning announcement in March of 2014 that Facebook acquired Oculus VR for $2 billion. Although VR technology had been around for a while, it was at this precise moment that VR arrived as a consumer technology platform. Facebook, largely fueled by the singular interest of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has funded the development of this industry, keeping alive the hope that consumer VR can become a sustainable business. In the meantime, VR has continued to grow in sophistication and usefulness, though it has yet to truly take off as a mainstream concept. That will hopefully be a development for the 2020s.
Below is a decade in review across the technology areas that are giving shape to our modern world, as described by the SU community of experts.
Digital Biology
Dr. Tiffany Vora | Faculty Director and Vice Chair, Digital Biology and Medicine, Singularity University
In my mind, this decade of astounding breakthroughs in the life sciences and medicine rests on the achievement of the $1,000 human genome in 2016. More-than-exponentially falling costs of DNA sequencing have driven advances in medicine, agriculture, ecology, genome editing, synthetic biology, the battle against climate change, and our fundamental understanding of life and its breathtaking connections. The “digital” revolution in DNA constituted an important model for harnessing other types of biological information, from personalized bio data to massive datasets spanning populations and species.
Crucially, by aggressively driving down the cost of such analyses, researchers and entrepreneurs democratized access to the source code of life—with attendant financial, cultural, and ethical consequences. Exciting, but take heed: Veritas Genetics spearheaded a $600 genome in 2019, only to have to shutter USA operations due to a money trail tangled with the trade war with China. Stay tuned through the early 2020s to see the pricing of DNA sequencing fall even further … and to experience the many ways that cheaper, faster harvesting of biological data will enrich your daily life.
Cryptocurrency
Alex Gladstein | Chief Strategy Officer, Human Rights Foundation
The past decade has seen Bitcoin go from just an idea on an obscure online message board to a global financial network carrying more than 100 billion dollars in value. And we’re just getting started. One recent defining moment in the cryptocurrency space has been a stunning trend underway in Venezuela, where today, the daily dollar-denominated value of Bitcoin traded now far exceeds the daily dollar-denominated value traded on the Caracas Stock Exchange. It’s just one country, but it’s a significant country, and a paradigm shift.
Governments and corporations are following Bitcoin’s success too, and are looking to launch their own digital currencies. China will launch its “DC/EP” project in the coming months, and Facebook is trying to kickstart its Libra project. There are technical and regulatory uncertainties for both, but one thing is for certain: the era of digital currency has arrived.
Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship
Pascal Finnette | Chair, Entrepreneurship and Open Innovation, Singularity University
For me, without a doubt, the most interesting and quite possibly ground-shifting development in the fields of entrepreneurship and corporate innovation in the last ten years is the rapid maturing of customer-driven product development frameworks such as Lean Startup, and its subsequent adoption by corporates for their own innovation purposes.
Tools and frameworks like the Business Model Canvas, agile (software) development and the aforementioned Lean Startup methodology fundamentally shifted the way we think and go about building products, services, and companies, with many of these tools bursting onto the startup scene in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
As these tools matured they found mass adoption not only in startups around the world, but incumbent companies who eagerly adopted them to increase their own innovation velocity and success.
Energy
Ramez Naam | Co-Chair, Energy and Environment, Singularity University
The 2010s were the decade that saw clean electricity, energy storage, and electric vehicles break through price and performance barriers around the world. Solar, wind, batteries, and EVs started this decade as technologies that had to be subsidized. That was the first phase of their existence. Now they’re entering their third, most disruptive phase, where shifting to clean energy and mobility is cheaper than continuing to use existing coal, gas, or oil infrastructure.
Consider that at the start of 2010, there was no place on earth where building new solar or wind was cheaper than building new coal or gas power generation. By 2015, in some of the sunniest and windiest places on earth, solar and wind had entered their second phase, where they were cost-competitive for new power. And then, in 2018 and 2019, we started to see the edge of the third phase, as building new solar and wind, in some parts of the world, was cheaper than operating existing coal or gas power plants.
Food Technology
Liz Specht, Ph. D | Associate Director of Science & Technology, The Good Food Institute
The arrival of mainstream plant-based meat is easily the food tech advance of the decade. Meat analogs have, of course, been around forever. But only in the last decade have companies like Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods decided to cut animals out of the process and build no-compromise meat directly from plants.
Plant-based meat is already transforming the fast-food industry. For example, the introduction of the Impossible Whopper led Burger King to their most profitable quarter in many years. But the global food industry as a whole is shifting as well. Tyson, JBS, Nestle, Cargill, and many others are all embracing plant-based meat.
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Jody Medich | CEO, Superhuman-x
The breakthrough moment for augmented and virtual reality came in 2013 when Palmer Lucky took apart an Android smartphone and added optic lenses to make the first version of the Oculus Rift. Prior to that moment, we struggled with miniaturizing the components needed to develop low-latency head-worn devices. But thanks to the smartphone race started in 2006 with the iPhone, we finally had a suite of sensors, chips, displays, and computing power small enough to put on the head.
What will the next 10 years bring? Look for AR/VR to explode in a big way. We are right on the cusp of that tipping point when the tech is finally “good enough” for our linear expectations. Given all it can do today, we can’t even picture what’s possible. Just as today we can’t function without our phones, by 2029 we’ll feel lost without some AR/VR product. It will be the way we interact with computing, smart objects, and AI. Tim Cook, Apple CEO, predicts it will replace all of today’s computing devices. I can’t wait.
Philosophy of Technology
Alix Rübsaam | Faculty Fellow, Singularity University, Philosophy of Technology/Ethics of AI
The last decade has seen a significant shift in our general attitude towards the algorithms that we now know dictate much of our surroundings. Looking back at the beginning of the decade, it seems we were blissfully unaware of how the data we freely and willingly surrendered would feed the algorithms that would come to shape every aspect of our daily lives: the news we consume, the products we purchase, the opinions we hold, etc.
If I were to isolate a single publication that contributed greatly to the shift in public discourse on algorithms, it would have to be Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction from 2016. It remains a comprehensive, readable, and highly informative insight into how algorithms dictate our finances, our jobs, where we go to school, or if we can get health insurance. Its publication represents a pivotal moment when the general public started to question whether we should be OK with outsourcing decision making to these opaque systems.
The ubiquity of ethical guidelines for AI and algorithms published just in the last year (perhaps most comprehensively by the AI Now Institute) fully demonstrates the shift in public opinion of this decade.
Data Science
Ola Kowalewski | Faculty Fellow, Singularity University, Data Innovation
In the last decade we entered the era of internet and smartphone ubiquity. The number of internet users doubled, with nearly 60 percent of the global population connected online and now over 35 percent of the globe owns a smartphone. With billions of people in a state of constant connectedness and therefore in a state of constant surveillance, the companies that have built the tech infrastructure and information pipelines have dominated the global economy. This shift from tech companies being the underdogs to arguably the world’s major powers sets the landscape we enter for the next decade.
Global Grand Challenges
Darlene Damm | Vice Chair, Faculty, Global Grand Challenges, Singularity University
The biggest breakthrough over the last decade in social impact and technology is that the social impact sector switched from seeing technology as something problematic to avoid, to one of the most effective ways to create social change. We now see people using exponential technologies to solve all sorts of social challenges in areas ranging from disaster response to hunger to shelter.
The world’s leading social organizations, such as UNICEF and the World Food Programme, have launched their own venture funds and accelerators, and the United Nations recently declared that digitization is revolutionizing global development.
Digital Biology
Raymond McCauley | Chair, Digital Biology, Singularity University, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, BioCurious; Principal, Exponential Biosciences
CRISPR is bringing about a revolution in genetic engineering. It’s obvious, and it’s huge. What may not be so obvious is the widespread adoption of genetic testing. And this may have an even longer-lasting effect. It’s used to test new babies, to solve medical mysteries, and to catch serial killers. Thanks to holiday ads from 23andMe and Ancestry.com, it’s everywhere. Testing your DNA is now a common over-the-counter product. People are using it to set their diet, to pick drugs, and even for dating (or at least picking healthy mates).
And we’re just in the early stages. Further down the line, doing large-scale studies on more people, with more data, will lead to the use of polygenic risk scores to help us rank our genetic potential for everything from getting cancer to being a genius. Can you imagine what it would be like for parents to pick new babies, GATTACA-style, to get the smartest kids? You don’t have to; it’s already happening.
Artificial Intelligence
Neil Jacobstein | Chair, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Singularity University
The convergence of exponentially improved computing power, the deep learning algorithm, and access to massive data resulted in a series of AI breakthroughs over the past decade. These included: vastly improved accuracy in identifying images, making self driving cars practical, beating several world champions in Go, and identifying gender, smoking status, and age from retinal fundus photographs.
Combined, these breakthroughs convinced researchers and investors that after 50+ years of research and development, AI was ready for prime-time applications. Now, virtually every field of human endeavor is being revolutionized by machine learning. We still have a long way to go to achieve human-level intelligence and beyond, but the pace of worldwide improvement is blistering.
Hod Lipson | Professor of Engineering and Data Science, Columbia University
The biggest moment in AI in the past decade (and in its entire history, in my humble opinion) was midnight, Pacific time, September 30, 2012: the moment when machines finally opened their eyes. It was the moment when deep learning took off, breaking stagnant decades of machine blindness, when AI couldn’t reliably tell apart even a cat from a dog. That seemingly trivial accomplishment—a task any one-year-old child can do—has had a ripple effect on AI applications from driverless cars to health diagnostics. And this is just the beginning of what is sure to be a Cambrian explosion of AI.
Neuroscience
Divya Chander | Chair, Neuroscience, Singularity University
If the 2000s were the decade of brain mapping, then the 2010s were the decade of brain writing. Optogenetics, a technique for precisely mapping and controlling neurons and neural circuits using genetically-directed light, saw incredible growth in the 2010s.
Also in the last 10 years, neuromodulation, or the ability to rewire the brain using both invasive and non-invasive interfaces and energy, has exploded in use and form. For instance, the Braingate consortium showed us how electrode arrays implanted into the motor cortex could be used by paralyzed people to use their thoughts to direct a robotic arm. These technologies, alone or in combination with robotics, exoskeletons, and flexible, implantable, electronics also make possible a future of human augmentation.
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Posted in Human Robots
#436437 Why AI Will Be the Best Tool for ...
Dmitry Kaminskiy speaks as though he were trying to unload everything he knows about the science and economics of longevity—from senolytics research that seeks to stop aging cells from spewing inflammatory proteins and other molecules to the trillion-dollar life extension industry that he and his colleagues are trying to foster—in one sitting.
At the heart of the discussion with Singularity Hub is the idea that artificial intelligence will be the engine that drives breakthroughs in how we approach healthcare and healthy aging—a concept with little traction even just five years ago.
“At that time, it was considered too futuristic that artificial intelligence and data science … might be more accurate compared to any hypothesis of human doctors,” said Kaminskiy, co-founder and managing partner at Deep Knowledge Ventures, an investment firm that is betting big on AI and longevity.
How times have changed. Artificial intelligence in healthcare is attracting more investments and deals than just about any sector of the economy, according to data research firm CB Insights. In the most recent third quarter, AI healthcare startups raised nearly $1.6 billion, buoyed by a $550 million mega-round from London-based Babylon Health, which uses AI to collect data from patients, analyze the information, find comparable matches, then make recommendations.
Even without the big bump from Babylon Health, AI healthcare startups raised more than $1 billion last quarter, including two companies focused on longevity therapeutics: Juvenescence and Insilico Medicine.
The latter has risen to prominence for its novel use of reinforcement learning and general adversarial networks (GANs) to accelerate the drug discovery process. Insilico Medicine recently published a seminal paper that demonstrated how such an AI system could generate a drug candidate in just 46 days. Co-founder and CEO Alex Zhavoronkov said he believes there is no greater goal in healthcare today—or, really, any venture—than extending the healthy years of the human lifespan.
“I don’t think that there is anything more important than that,” he told Singularity Hub, explaining that an unhealthy society is detrimental to a healthy economy. “I think that it’s very, very important to extend healthy, productive lifespan just to fix the economy.”
An Aging Crisis
The surge of interest in longevity is coming at a time when life expectancy in the US is actually dropping, despite the fact that we spend more money on healthcare than any other nation.
A new paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that after six decades of gains, life expectancy for Americans has decreased since 2014, particularly among young and middle-aged adults. While some of the causes are societal, such as drug overdoses and suicide, others are health-related.
While average life expectancy in the US is 78, Kaminskiy noted that healthy life expectancy is about ten years less.
To Zhavoronkov’s point about the economy (a topic of great interest to Kaminskiy as well), the US spent $1.1 trillion on chronic diseases in 2016, according to a report from the Milken Institute, with diabetes, cardiovascular conditions, and Alzheimer’s among the most costly expenses to the healthcare system. When the indirect costs of lost economic productivity are included, the total price tag of chronic diseases in the US is $3.7 trillion, nearly 20 percent of GDP.
“So this is the major negative feedback on the national economy and creating a lot of negative social [and] financial issues,” Kaminskiy said.
Investing in Longevity
That has convinced Kaminskiy that an economy focused on extending healthy human lifespans—including the financial instruments and institutions required to support a long-lived population—is the best way forward.
He has co-authored a book on the topic with Margaretta Colangelo, another managing partner at Deep Knowledge Ventures, which has launched a specialized investment fund, Longevity.Capital, focused on the longevity industry. Kaminskiy estimates that there are now about 20 such investment funds dedicated to funding life extension companies.
In November at the inaugural AI for Longevity Summit in London, he and his collaborators also introduced the Longevity AI Consortium, an academic-industry initiative at King’s College London. Eventually, the research center will include an AI Longevity Accelerator program to serve as a bridge between startups and UK investors.
Deep Knowledge Ventures has committed about £7 million ($9 million) over the next three years to the accelerator program, as well as establishing similar consortiums in other regions of the world, according to Franco Cortese, a partner at Longevity.Capital and director of the Aging Analytics Agency, which has produced a series of reports on longevity.
A Cure for What Ages You
One of the most recent is an overview of Biomarkers for Longevity. A biomarker, in the case of longevity, is a measurable component of health that can indicate a disease state or a more general decline in health associated with aging. Examples range from something as simple as BMI as an indicator of obesity, which is associated with a number of chronic diseases, to sophisticated measurements of telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes that shorten as we age.
While some researchers are working on moonshot therapies to reverse or slow aging—with a few even arguing we could expand human life on the order of centuries—Kaminskiy said he believes understanding biomarkers of aging could make more radical interventions unnecessary.
In this vision of healthcare, people would be able to monitor their health 24-7, with sensors attuned to various biomarkers that could indicate the onset of everything from the flu to diabetes. AI would be instrumental in not just ingesting the billions of data points required to develop such a system, but also what therapies, treatments, or micro-doses of a drug or supplement would be required to maintain homeostasis.
“Consider it like Tesla with many, many detectors, analyzing the behavior of the car in real time, and a cloud computing system monitoring those signals in real time with high frequency,” Kaminskiy explained. “So the same shall be applied for humans.”
And only sophisticated algorithms, Kaminskiy argued, can make longevity healthcare work on a mass scale but at the individual level. Precision medicine becomes preventive medicine. Healthcare truly becomes a system to support health rather than a way to fight disease.
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Posted in Human Robots
#435575 How an AI Startup Designed a Drug ...
Discovering a new drug can take decades, billions of dollars, and untold man hours from some of the smartest people on the planet. Now a startup says it’s taken a significant step towards speeding the process up using AI.
The typical drug discovery process involves carrying out physical tests on enormous libraries of molecules, and even with the help of robotics it’s an arduous process. The idea of sidestepping this by using computers to virtually screen for promising candidates has been around for decades. But progress has been underwhelming, and it’s still not a major part of commercial pipelines.
Recent advances in deep learning, however, have reignited hopes for the field, and major pharma companies have started tying up with AI-powered drug discovery startups. And now Insilico Medicine has used AI to design a molecule that effectively targets a protein involved in fibrosis—the formation of excess fibrous tissue—in mice in just 46 days.
The platform the company has developed combines two of the hottest sub-fields of AI: the generative adversarial networks, or GANs, which power deepfakes, and reinforcement learning, which is at the heart of the most impressive game-playing AI advances of recent years.
In a paper in Nature Biotechnology, the company’s researchers describe how they trained their model on all the molecules already known to target this protein as well as many other active molecules from various datasets. The model was then used to generate 30,000 candidate molecules.
Unlike most previous efforts, they went a step further and selected the most promising molecules for testing in the lab. The 30,000 candidates were whittled down to just 6 using more conventional drug discovery approaches and were then synthesized in the lab. They were put through increasingly stringent tests, but the leading candidate was found to be effective at targeting the desired protein and behaved as one would hope a drug would.
The authors are clear that the results are just a proof-of-concept, which company CEO Alex Zhavoronkov told Wired stemmed from a challenge set by a pharma partner to design a drug as quickly as possible. But they say they were able to carry out the process faster than traditional methods for a fraction of the cost.
There are some caveats. For a start, the protein being targeted is already very well known and multiple effective drugs exist for it. That gave the company a wealth of data to train their model on, something that isn’t the case for many of the diseases where we urgently need new drugs.
The company’s platform also only targets the very initial stages of the drug discovery process. The authors concede in their paper that the molecules would still take considerable optimization in the lab before they’d be true contenders for clinical trials.
“And that is where you will start to begin to commence to spend the vast piles of money that you will eventually go through in trying to get a drug to market,” writes Derek Lowe in his blog In The Pipeline. The part of the discovery process that the platform tackles represents a tiny fraction of the total cost of drug development, he says.
Nonetheless, the research is a definite advance for virtual screening technology and an important marker of the potential of AI for designing new medicines. Zhavoronkov also told Wired that this research was done more than a year ago, and they’ve since adapted the platform to go after harder drug targets with less data.
And with big pharma companies desperate to slash their ballooning development costs and find treatments for a host of intractable diseases, they can use all the help they can get.
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Posted in Human Robots
#434753 Top Takeaways From The Economist ...
Over the past few years, the word ‘innovation’ has degenerated into something of a buzzword. In fact, according to Vijay Vaitheeswaran, US business editor at The Economist, it’s one of the most abused words in the English language.
The word is over-used precisely because we’re living in a great age of invention. But the pace at which those inventions are changing our lives is fast, new, and scary.
So what strategies do companies need to adopt to make sure technology leads to growth that’s not only profitable, but positive? How can business and government best collaborate? Can policymakers regulate the market without suppressing innovation? Which technologies will impact us most, and how soon?
At The Economist Innovation Summit in Chicago last week, entrepreneurs, thought leaders, policymakers, and academics shared their insights on the current state of exponential technologies, and the steps companies and individuals should be taking to ensure a tech-positive future. Here’s their expert take on the tech and trends shaping the future.
Blockchain
There’s been a lot of hype around blockchain; apparently it can be used for everything from distributing aid to refugees to voting. However, it’s too often conflated with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, and we haven’t heard of many use cases. Where does the technology currently stand?
Julie Sweet, chief executive of Accenture North America, emphasized that the technology is still in its infancy. “Everything we see today are pilots,” she said. The most promising of these pilots are taking place across three different areas: supply chain, identity, and financial services.
When you buy something from outside the US, Sweet explained, it goes through about 80 different parties. 70 percent of the relevant data is replicated and is prone to error, with paper-based documents often to blame. Blockchain is providing a secure way to eliminate paper in supply chains, upping accuracy and cutting costs in the process.
One of the most prominent use cases in the US is Walmart—the company has mandated that all suppliers in its leafy greens segment be on a blockchain, and its food safety has improved as a result.
Beth Devin, head of Citi Ventures’ innovation network, added “Blockchain is an infrastructure technology. It can be leveraged in a lot of ways. There’s so much opportunity to create new types of assets and securities that aren’t accessible to people today. But there’s a lot to figure out around governance.”
Open Source Technology
Are the days of proprietary technology numbered? More and more companies and individuals are making their source code publicly available, and its benefits are thus more widespread than ever before. But what are the limitations and challenges of open source tech, and where might it go in the near future?
Bob Lord, senior VP of cognitive applications at IBM, is a believer. “Open-sourcing technology helps innovation occur, and it’s a fundamental basis for creating great technology solutions for the world,” he said. However, the biggest challenge for open source right now is that companies are taking out more than they’re contributing back to the open-source world. Lord pointed out that IBM has a rule about how many lines of code employees take out relative to how many lines they put in.
Another challenge area is open governance; blockchain by its very nature should be transparent and decentralized, with multiple parties making decisions and being held accountable. “We have to embrace open governance at the same time that we’re contributing,” Lord said. He advocated for a hybrid-cloud environment where people can access public and private data and bring it together.
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Augmented and virtual reality aren’t just for fun and games anymore, and they’ll be even less so in the near future. According to Pearly Chen, vice president at HTC, they’ll also go from being two different things to being one and the same. “AR overlays digital information on top of the real world, and VR transports you to a different world,” she said. “In the near future we will not need to delineate between these two activities; AR and VR will come together naturally, and will change everything we do as we know it today.”
For that to happen, we’ll need a more ergonomically friendly device than we have today for interacting with this technology. “Whenever we use tech today, we’re multitasking,” said product designer and futurist Jody Medich. “When you’re using GPS, you’re trying to navigate in the real world and also manage this screen. Constant task-switching is killing our brain’s ability to think.” Augmented and virtual reality, she believes, will allow us to adapt technology to match our brain’s functionality.
This all sounds like a lot of fun for uses like gaming and entertainment, but what about practical applications? “Ultimately what we care about is how this technology will improve lives,” Chen said.
A few ways that could happen? Extended reality will be used to simulate hazardous real-life scenarios, reduce the time and resources needed to bring a product to market, train healthcare professionals (such as surgeons), or provide therapies for patients—not to mention education. “Think about the possibilities for children to learn about history, science, or math in ways they can’t today,” Chen said.
Quantum Computing
If there’s one technology that’s truly baffling, it’s quantum computing. Qubits, entanglement, quantum states—it’s hard to wrap our heads around these concepts, but they hold great promise. Where is the tech right now?
Mandy Birch, head of engineering strategy at Rigetti Computing, thinks quantum development is starting slowly but will accelerate quickly. “We’re at the innovation stage right now, trying to match this capability to useful applications,” she said. “Can we solve problems cheaper, better, and faster than classical computers can do?” She believes quantum’s first breakthrough will happen in two to five years, and that is highest potential is in applications like routing, supply chain, and risk optimization, followed by quantum chemistry (for materials science and medicine) and machine learning.
David Awschalom, director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange and senior scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, believes quantum communication and quantum sensing will become a reality in three to seven years. “We’ll use states of matter to encrypt information in ways that are completely secure,” he said. A quantum voting system, currently being prototyped, is one application.
Who should be driving quantum tech development? The panelists emphasized that no one entity will get very far alone. “Advancing quantum tech will require collaboration not only between business, academia, and government, but between nations,” said Linda Sapochak, division director of materials research at the National Science Foundation. She added that this doesn’t just go for the technology itself—setting up the infrastructure for quantum will be a big challenge as well.
Space
Space has always been the final frontier, and it still is—but it’s not quite as far-removed from our daily lives now as it was when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969.
The space industry has always been funded by governments and private defense contractors. But in 2009, SpaceX launched its first commercial satellite, and in subsequent years have drastically cut the cost of spaceflight. More importantly, they published their pricing, which brought transparency to a market that hadn’t seen it before.
Entrepreneurs around the world started putting together business plans, and there are now over 400 privately-funded space companies, many with consumer applications.
Chad Anderson, CEO of Space Angels and managing partner of Space Capital, pointed out that the technology floating around in space was, until recently, archaic. “A few NASA engineers saw they had more computing power in their phone than there was in satellites,” he said. “So they thought, ‘why don’t we just fly an iPhone?’” They did—and it worked.
Now companies have networks of satellites monitoring the whole planet, producing a huge amount of data that’s valuable for countless applications like agriculture, shipping, and observation. “A lot of people underestimate space,” Anderson said. “It’s already enabling our modern global marketplace.”
Next up in the space realm, he predicts, are mining and tourism.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work
From the US to Europe to Asia, alarms are sounding about AI taking our jobs. What will be left for humans to do once machines can do everything—and do it better?
These fears may be unfounded, though, and are certainly exaggerated. It’s undeniable that AI and automation are changing the employment landscape (not to mention the way companies do business and the way we live our lives), but if we build these tools the right way, they’ll bring more good than harm, and more productivity than obsolescence.
Accenture’s Julie Sweet emphasized that AI alone is not what’s disrupting business and employment. Rather, it’s what she called the “triple A”: automation, analytics, and artificial intelligence. But even this fear-inducing trifecta of terms doesn’t spell doom, for workers or for companies. Accenture has automated 40,000 jobs—and hasn’t fired anyone in the process. Instead, they’ve trained and up-skilled people. The most important drivers to scale this, Sweet said, are a commitment by companies and government support (such as tax credits).
Imbuing AI with the best of human values will also be critical to its impact on our future. Tracy Frey, Google Cloud AI’s director of strategy, cited the company’s set of seven AI principles. “What’s important is the governance process that’s put in place to support those principles,” she said. “You can’t make macro decisions when you have technology that can be applied in many different ways.”
High Risks, High Stakes
This year, Vaitheeswaran said, 50 percent of the world’s population will have internet access (he added that he’s disappointed that percentage isn’t higher given the proliferation of smartphones). As technology becomes more widely available to people around the world and its influence grows even more, what are the biggest risks we should be monitoring and controlling?
Information integrity—being able to tell what’s real from what’s fake—is a crucial one. “We’re increasingly operating in siloed realities,” said Renee DiResta, director of research at New Knowledge and head of policy at Data for Democracy. “Inadvertent algorithmic amplification on social media elevates certain perspectives—what does that do to us as a society?”
Algorithms have also already been proven to perpetuate the bias of the people who create it—and those people are often wealthy, white, and male. Ensuring that technology doesn’t propagate unfair bias will be crucial to its ability to serve a diverse population, and to keep societies from becoming further polarized and inequitable. The polarization of experience that results from pronounced inequalities within countries, Vaitheeswaran pointed out, can end up undermining democracy.
We’ll also need to walk the line between privacy and utility very carefully. As Dan Wagner, founder of Civis Analytics put it, “We want to ensure privacy as much as possible, but open access to information helps us achieve important social good.” Medicine in the US has been hampered by privacy laws; if, for example, we had more data about biomarkers around cancer, we could provide more accurate predictions and ultimately better healthcare.
But going the Chinese way—a total lack of privacy—is likely not the answer, either. “We have to be very careful about the way we bake rights and freedom into our technology,” said Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at Human Rights Foundation.
Technology’s risks are clearly as fraught as its potential is promising. As Gary Shapiro, chief executive of the Consumer Technology Association, put it, “Everything we’ve talked about today is simply a tool, and can be used for good or bad.”
The decisions we’re making now, at every level—from the engineers writing algorithms, to the legislators writing laws, to the teenagers writing clever Instagram captions—will determine where on the spectrum we end up.
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Posted in Human Robots
#434637 AI Is Rapidly Augmenting Healthcare and ...
When it comes to the future of healthcare, perhaps the only technology more powerful than CRISPR is artificial intelligence.
Over the past five years, healthcare AI startups around the globe raised over $4.3 billion across 576 deals, topping all other industries in AI deal activity.
During this same period, the FDA has given 70 AI healthcare tools and devices ‘fast-tracked approval’ because of their ability to save both lives and money.
The pace of AI-augmented healthcare innovation is only accelerating.
In Part 3 of this blog series on longevity and vitality, I cover the different ways in which AI is augmenting our healthcare system, enabling us to live longer and healthier lives.
In this blog, I’ll expand on:
Machine learning and drug design
Artificial intelligence and big data in medicine
Healthcare, AI & China
Let’s dive in.
Machine Learning in Drug Design
What if AI systems, specifically neural networks, could predict the design of novel molecules (i.e. medicines) capable of targeting and curing any disease?
Imagine leveraging cutting-edge artificial intelligence to accomplish with 50 people what the pharmaceutical industry can barely do with an army of 5,000.
And what if these molecules, accurately engineered by AIs, always worked? Such a feat would revolutionize our $1.3 trillion global pharmaceutical industry, which currently holds a dismal record of 1 in 10 target drugs ever reaching human trials.
It’s no wonder that drug development is massively expensive and slow. It takes over 10 years to bring a new drug to market, with costs ranging from $2.5 billion to $12 billion.
This inefficient, slow-to-innovate, and risk-averse industry is a sitting duck for disruption in the years ahead.
One of the hottest startups in digital drug discovery today is Insilico Medicine. Leveraging AI in its end-to-end drug discovery pipeline, Insilico Medicine aims to extend healthy longevity through drug discovery and aging research.
Their comprehensive drug discovery engine uses millions of samples and multiple data types to discover signatures of disease, identify the most promising protein targets, and generate perfect molecules for these targets. These molecules either already exist or can be generated de novo with the desired set of parameters.
In late 2018, Insilico’s CEO Dr. Alex Zhavoronkov announced the groundbreaking result of generating novel molecules for a challenging protein target with an unprecedented hit rate in under 46 days. This included both synthesis of the molecules and experimental validation in a biological test system—an impressive feat made possible by converging exponential technologies.
Underpinning Insilico’s drug discovery pipeline is a novel machine learning technique called Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), used in combination with deep reinforcement learning.
Generating novel molecular structures for diseases both with and without known targets, Insilico is now pursuing drug discovery in aging, cancer, fibrosis, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, diabetes, and many others. Once rolled out, the implications will be profound.
Dr. Zhavoronkov’s ultimate goal is to develop a fully-automated Health-as-a-Service (HaaS) and Longevity-as-a-Service (LaaS) engine.
Once plugged into the services of companies from Alibaba to Alphabet, such an engine would enable personalized solutions for online users, helping them prevent diseases and maintain optimal health.
Insilico, alongside other companies tackling AI-powered drug discovery, truly represents the application of the 6 D’s. What was once a prohibitively expensive and human-intensive process is now rapidly becoming digitized, dematerialized, demonetized and, perhaps most importantly, democratized.
Companies like Insilico can now do with a fraction of the cost and personnel what the pharmaceutical industry can barely accomplish with thousands of employees and a hefty bill to foot.
As I discussed in my blog on ‘The Next Hundred-Billion-Dollar Opportunity,’ Google’s DeepMind has now turned its neural networks to healthcare, entering the digitized drug discovery arena.
In 2017, DeepMind achieved a phenomenal feat by matching the fidelity of medical experts in correctly diagnosing over 50 eye disorders.
And just a year later, DeepMind announced a new deep learning tool called AlphaFold. By predicting the elusive ways in which various proteins fold on the basis of their amino acid sequences, AlphaFold may soon have a tremendous impact in aiding drug discovery and fighting some of today’s most intractable diseases.
Artificial Intelligence and Data Crunching
AI is especially powerful in analyzing massive quantities of data to uncover patterns and insights that can save lives. Take WAVE, for instance. Every year, over 400,000 patients die prematurely in US hospitals as a result of heart attack or respiratory failure.
Yet these patients don’t die without leaving plenty of clues. Given information overload, however, human physicians and nurses alone have no way of processing and analyzing all necessary data in time to save these patients’ lives.
Enter WAVE, an algorithm that can process enough data to offer a six-hour early warning of patient deterioration.
Just last year, the FDA approved WAVE as an AI-based predictive patient surveillance system to predict and thereby prevent sudden death.
Another highly valuable yet difficult-to-parse mountain of medical data comprises the 2.5 million medical papers published each year.
For some time, it has become physically impossible for a human physician to read—let alone remember—all of the relevant published data.
To counter this compounding conundrum, Johnson & Johnson is teaching IBM Watson to read and understand scientific papers that detail clinical trial outcomes.
Enriching Watson’s data sources, Apple is also partnering with IBM to provide access to health data from mobile apps.
One such Watson system contains 40 million documents, ingesting an average of 27,000 new documents per day, and providing insights for thousands of users.
After only one year, Watson’s successful diagnosis rate of lung cancer has reached 90 percent, compared to the 50 percent success rate of human doctors.
But what about the vast amount of unstructured medical patient data that populates today’s ancient medical system? This includes medical notes, prescriptions, audio interview transcripts, and pathology and radiology reports.
In late 2018, Amazon announced a new HIPAA-eligible machine learning service that digests and parses unstructured data into categories, such as patient diagnoses, treatments, dosages, symptoms and signs.
Taha Kass-Hout, Amazon’s senior leader in health care and artificial intelligence, told the Wall Street Journal that internal tests demonstrated that the software even performs as well as or better than other published efforts.
On the heels of this announcement, Amazon confirmed it was teaming up with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to evaluate “millions of clinical notes to extract and index medical conditions.”
Having already driven extraordinary algorithmic success rates in other fields, data is the healthcare industry’s goldmine for future innovation.
Healthcare, AI & China
In 2017, the Chinese government published its ambitious national plan to become a global leader in AI research by 2030, with healthcare listed as one of four core research areas during the first wave of the plan.
Just a year earlier, China began centralizing healthcare data, tackling a major roadblock to developing longevity and healthcare technologies (particularly AI systems): scattered, dispersed, and unlabeled patient data.
Backed by the Chinese government, China’s largest tech companies—particularly Tencent—have now made strong entrances into healthcare.
Just recently, Tencent participated in a $154 million megaround for China-based healthcare AI unicorn iCarbonX.
Hoping to develop a complete digital representation of your biological self, iCarbonX has acquired numerous US personalized medicine startups.
Considering Tencent’s own Miying healthcare AI platform—aimed at assisting healthcare institutions in AI-driven cancer diagnostics—Tencent is quickly expanding into the drug discovery space, participating in two multimillion-dollar, US-based AI drug discovery deals just this year.
China’s biggest, second-order move into the healthtech space comes through Tencent’s WeChat. In the course of a mere few years, already 60 percent of the 38,000 medical institutions registered on WeChat allow patients to digitally book appointments through Tencent’s mobile platform. At the same time, 2,000 Chinese hospitals accept WeChat payments.
Tencent has additionally partnered with the U.K.’s Babylon Health, a virtual healthcare assistant startup whose app now allows Chinese WeChat users to message their symptoms and receive immediate medical feedback.
Similarly, Alibaba’s healthtech focus started in 2016 when it released its cloud-based AI medical platform, ET Medical Brain, to augment healthcare processes through everything from diagnostics to intelligent scheduling.
Conclusion
As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stated, “Software ate the world, but AI is going to eat software.” Extrapolating this statement to a more immediate implication, AI will first eat healthcare, resulting in dramatic acceleration of longevity research and an amplification of the human healthspan.
Next week, I’ll continue to explore this concept of AI systems in healthcare.
Particularly, I’ll expand on how we’re acquiring and using the data for these doctor-augmenting AI systems: from ubiquitous biosensors, to the mobile healthcare revolution, and finally, to the transformative power of the health nucleus.
As AI and other exponential technologies increase our healthspan by 30 to 40 years, how will you leverage these same exponential technologies to take on your moonshots and live out your massively transformative purpose?
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