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#439095 DARPA Prepares for the Subterranean ...

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Final Event is scheduled to take place at the Louisville Mega Cavern in Louisville, Kentucky, from September 21 to 23. We’ve followed SubT teams as they’ve explored their way through abandoned mines, unfinished nuclear reactors, and a variety of caves, and now everything comes together in one final course where the winner of the Systems Track will take home the $2 million first prize.

It’s a fitting reward for teams that have been solving some of the hardest problems in robotics, but winning isn’t going to be easy, and we’ll talk with SubT Program Manager Tim Chung about what we have to look forward to.

Since we haven’t talked about SubT in a little while (what with the unfortunate covid-related cancellation of the Systems Track Cave Circuit), here’s a quick refresher of where we are: the teams have made it through the Tunnel Circuit, the Urban Circuit, and a virtual version of the Cave Circuit, and some of them have been testing in caves of their own. The Final Event will include all of these environments, and the teams of robots will have 60 minutes to autonomously map the course, locating artifacts to score points. Since I’m not sure where on Earth there’s an underground location that combines tunnels and caves with urban structures, DARPA is going to have to get creative, and the location in which they’ve chosen to do that is Louisville, Kentucky.

The Louisville Mega Cavern is a former limestone mine, most of which is under the Louisville Zoo. It’s not all that deep, mostly less than 30 meters under the surface, but it’s enormous: with 370,000 square meters of rooms and passages, the cavern currently hosts (among other things) a business park, a zipline course, and mountain bike trails, because why not. While DARPA is keeping pretty quiet on the details, I’m guessing that they’ll be taking over a chunk of the cavern and filling it with features representing as many of the environmental challenges as they can.

To learn more about how the SubT Final Event is going to go, we spoke with SubT Program Manager Tim Chung. But first, we talked about Tim’s perspective on the success of the Urban Circuit, and how teams have been managing without an in-person Cave Circuit.

IEEE Spectrum: How did the SubT Urban Circuit go?

Tim Chung: On a couple fronts, Urban Circuit was really exciting. We were in this unfinished nuclear power plant—I’d be surprised if any of the competitors had prior experience in such a facility, or anything like it. I think that was illuminating both from an experiential point of view for the competitors, but also from a technology point of view, too.

One thing that I thought was really interesting was that we, DARPA, didn't need to make the venue more challenging. The real world is really that hard. There are places that were just really heinous for these robots to have to navigate through in order to look in every nook and cranny for artifacts. There were corners and doorways and small corridors and all these kind of things that really forced the teams to have to work hard, and the feedback was, why did DARPA have to make it so hard? But we didn’t, and in fact there were places that for the safety of the robots and personnel, we had to ensure the robots couldn’t go.

It sounds like some teams thought this course was on the more difficult side—do you think you tuned it to just the right amount of DARPA-hard?

Our calibration worked quite well. We were able to tease out and help refine and better understand what technologies are both useful and critical and also those technologies that might not necessarily get you the leap ahead capability. So as an example, the Urban Circuit really emphasized verticality, where you have to be able to sense, understand, and maneuver in three dimensions. Being able to capitalize on their robot technologies to address that verticality really stratified the teams, and showed how critical those capabilities are.

We saw teams that brought a lot of those capabilities do very well, and teams that brought baseline capabilities do what they could on the single floor that they were able to operate on. And so I think we got the Goldilocks solution for Urban Circuit that combined both difficulty and ambition.

Photos: Evan Ackerman/IEEE Spectrum

Two SubT Teams embedded networking equipment in balls that they could throw onto the course.

One of the things that I found interesting was that two teams independently came up with throwable network nodes. What was DARPA’s reaction to this? Is any solution a good solution, or was it more like the teams were trying to game the system?

You mean, do we want teams to game the rules in any way so as to get a competitive advantage? I don't think that's what the teams were doing. I think they were operating not only within the bounds of the rules, which permitted such a thing as throwable sensors where you could stand at the line and see how far you could chuck these things—not only was that acceptable by the rules, but anticipated. Behind the scenes, we tried to do exactly what these teams are doing and think through different approaches, so we explicitly didn't forbid such things in our rules because we thought it's important to have as wide an aperture as possible.

With these comms nodes specifically, I think they’re pretty clever. They were in some cases hacked together with a variety of different sports paraphernalia to see what would provide the best cushioning. You know, a lot of that happens in the field, and what it captured was that sometimes you just need to be up at two in the morning and thinking about things in a slightly different way, and that's when some nuggets of innovation can arise, and we see this all the time with operators in the field as well. They might only have duct tape or Styrofoam or whatever the case may be and that's when they come up with different ways to solve these problems. I think from DARPA’s perspective, and certainly from my perspective, wherever innovation can strike, we want to try to encourage and inspire those opportunities. I thought it was great, and it’s all part of the challenge.

Is there anything you can tell us about what your original plan had been for the Cave Circuit?

I can say that we’ve had the opportunity to go through a number of these caves scattered all throughout the country, and engage with caving communities—cavers clubs, speleologists that conduct research, and then of course the cave rescue community. The single biggest takeaway
is that every cave, and there are tens of thousands of them in the US alone, every cave has its own personality, and a lot of that personality is quite hidden from humans, because we can’t explore or access all of the cave. This led us to a number of different caves that were intriguing from a DARPA perspective but also inspirational for our Cave Circuit Virtual Competition.

How do you feel like the tuning was for the Virtual Cave Circuit?

The Virtual Competition, as you well know, was exciting in the sense that we could basically combine eight worlds into one competition, whereas the systems track competition really didn’t give us that opportunity. Even if we were able have held the Cave Circuit Systems Competition in person, it would have been at one site, and it would have been challenging to represent the level of diversity that we could with the Virtual Competition. So I think from that perspective, it’s clearly an advantage in terms of calibration—diversity gets you the ability to aggregate results to capture those that excel across all worlds as well as those that do well in one world or some worlds and not the others. I think the calibration was great in the sense that we were able to see the gamut of performance. Those that did well, did quite well, and those that have room to grow showed where those opportunities are for them as well.

We had to find ways to capture that diversity and that representativeness, and I think one of the fun ways we did that was with the different cave world tiles that we were able to combine in a variety of different ways. We also made use of a real world data set that we were able to take from a laser scan. Across the board, we had a really great chance to illustrate why virtual testing and simulation still plays such a dominant role in robotics technology development, and why I think it will continue to play an increasing role for developing these types of autonomy solutions.

Photo: Team CSIRO Data 61

How can systems track teams learn from their testing in whatever cave is local to them and effectively apply that to whatever cave environment is part of the final considering what the diversity of caves is?

I think that hits the nail on the head for what we as technologists are trying to discover—what are the transferable generalizable insights and how does that inform our technology development? As roboticists we want to optimize our systems to perform well at the tasks that they were designed to do, and oftentimes that means specialization because we get increased performance at the expense of being a generalist robot. I think in the case of SubT, we want to have our cake and eat it too—we want robots that perform well and reliably, but we want them to do so not just in one environment, which is how we tend to think about robot performance, but we want them to operate well in many environments, many of which have yet to be faced.

And I think that's kind of the nuance here, that we want robot systems to be generalists for the sake of being able to handle the unknown, namely the real world, but still achieve a high level of performance and perhaps they do that to their combined use of different technologies or advances in autonomy or perception approaches or novel mechanisms or mobility, but somehow they're still able, at least in aggregate, to achieve high performance.

We know these teams eagerly await any type of clue that DARPA can provide like about the SubT environments. From the environment previews for Tunnel, Urban, and even Cave, the teams were pivoting around and thinking a little bit differently. The takeaway, however, was that they didn't go to a clean sheet design—their systems were flexible enough that they could incorporate some of those specialist trends while still maintaining the notion of a generalist framework.

Looking ahead to the SubT Final, what can you tell us about the Louisville Mega Cavern?

As always, I’ll keep you in suspense until we get you there, but I can say that from the beginning of the SubT Challenge we had always envisioned teams of robots that are able to address not only the uncertainty of what's right in front of them, but also the uncertainty of what comes next. So I think the teams will be advantaged by thinking through subdomain awareness, or domain awareness if you want to generalize it, whether that means tuning multi-purpose robots, or deploying different robots, or employing your team of robots differently. Knowing which subdomain you are in is likely to be helpful, because then you can take advantage of those unique lessons learned through all those previous experiences then capitalize on that.

As far as specifics, I think the Mega Cavern offers many of the features important to what it means to be underground, while giving DARPA a pretty blank canvas to realize our vision of the SubT Challenge.

The SubT Final will be different from the earlier circuits in that there’s just one 60-minute run, rather than two. This is going to make things a lot more stressful for teams who have experienced bad robot days—why do it this way?

The preliminary round has two 30-minute runs, and those two runs are very similar to how we have done it during the circuits, of a single run per configuration per course. Teams will have the opportunity to show that their systems can face the obstacles in the final course, and it's the sum of those scores much like we did during the circuits, to help mitigate some of the concerns that you mentioned of having one robot somehow ruin their chances at a prize.

The prize round does give DARPA as well as the community a chance to focus on the top six teams from the preliminary round, and allows us to understand how they came to be at the top of the pack while emphasizing their technological contributions. The prize round will be one and done, but all of these teams we anticipate will be putting their best robot forward and will show the world why they deserve to win the SubT Challenge.

We’ve always thought that when called upon these robots need to operate in really challenging environments, and in the context of real world operations, there is no second chance. I don't think it's actually that much of a departure from our interests and insistence on bringing reliable technologies to the field, and those teams that might have something break here and there, that's all part of the challenge, of being resilient. Many teams struggled with robots that were debilitated on the course, and they still found ways to succeed and overcome that in the field, so maybe the rules emphasize that desire for showing up and working on game day which is consistent, I think, with how we've always envisioned it. This isn’t to say that these systems have to work perfectly, they just have to work in a way such that the team is resilient enough to tackle anything that they face.

It’s not too late for teams to enter for both the Virtual Track and the Systems Track to compete in the SubT Final, right?

Yes, that's absolutely right. Qualifications are still open, we are eager to welcome new teams to join in along with our existing competitors. I think any dark horse competitors coming into the Finals may be able to bring something that we haven't seen before, and that would be really exciting. I think it'll really make for an incredibly vibrant and illuminating final event.

The final event qualification deadline for the Systems Competition is April 21, and the qualification deadline for the Virtual Competition is June 29. More details here. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437791 Is the Pandemic Spurring a Robot ...

“Are robots really destined to take over restaurant kitchens?” This was the headline of an article published by Eater four years ago. One of the experts interviewed was Siddhartha Srinivasa, at the time professor of the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and currently director of Robotics and AI for Amazon. He said, “I’d love to make robots unsexy. It’s weird to say this, but when something becomes unsexy, it means that it works so well that you don’t have to think about it. You don’t stare at your dishwasher as it washes your dishes in fascination, because you know it’s gonna work every time… I want to get robots to that stage of reliability.”

Have we managed to get there over the last four years? Are robots unsexy yet? And how has the pandemic changed the trajectory of automation across industries?

The Covid Effect
The pandemic has had a massive economic impact all over the world, and one of the problems faced by many companies has been keeping their businesses running without putting employees at risk of infection. Many organizations are seeking to remain operational in the short term by automating tasks that would otherwise be carried out by humans. According to Digital Trends, since the start of the pandemic we have seen a significant increase in automation efforts in manufacturing, meat packing, grocery stores and more. In a June survey, 44 percent of corporate financial officers said they were considering more automation in response to coronavirus.

MIT economist David Autor described the economic crisis and the Covid-19 pandemic as “an event that forces automation.” But he added that Covid-19 created a kind of disruption that has forced automation in sectors and activities with a shortage of workers, while at the same time there has been no reduction in demand. This hasn’t taken place in hospitality, where demand has practically disappeared, but it is still present in agriculture and distribution. The latter is being altered by the rapid growth of e-commerce, with more efficient and automated warehouses that can provide better service.

China Leads the Way
China is currently in a unique position to lead the world’s automation economy. Although the country boasts a huge workforce, labor costs have multiplied by 10 over the past 20 years. As the world’s factory, China has a strong incentive to automate its manufacturing sector, which enjoys a solid leadership in high quality products. China is currently the largest and fastest-growing market in the world for industrial robotics, with a 21 percent increase up to $5.4 billion in 2019. This represents one third of global sales. As a result, Chinese companies are developing a significant advantage in terms of learning to work with metallic colleagues.

The reasons behind this Asian dominance are evident: the population has a greater capacity and need for tech adoption. A large percentage of the population will soon be of retirement age, without an equivalent younger demographic to replace it, leading to a pressing need to adopt automation in the short term.

China is well ahead of other countries in restaurant automation. As reported in Bloomberg, in early 2020 UBS Group AG conducted a survey of over 13,000 consumers in different countries and found that 64 percent of Chinese participants had ordered meals through their phones at least once a week, compared to a mere 17 percent in the US. As digital ordering gains ground, robot waiters and chefs are likely not far behind. The West harbors a mistrust towards non-humans that the East does not.

The Robot Evolution
The pandemic was a perfect excuse for robots to replace us. But despite the hype around this idea, robots have mostly disappointed during the pandemic.

Just over 66 different kinds of “social” robots have been piloted in hospitals, health centers, airports, office buildings, and other public and private spaces in response to the pandemic, according to a study from researchers at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona, Spain). Their survey looked at 195 robot deployments across 35 countries including China, the US, Thailand, and Hong Kong.

But if the “robot revolution” is a movement in which automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence proliferate through the value chain of various industries, bringing a paradigm shift in how we produce, consume, and distribute products—it hasn’t happened yet.

But there’s a more nuanced answer: rather than a revolution, we’re seeing an incremental robot evolution. It’s a trend that will likely accelerate over the next five years, particularly when 5G takes center stage and robotics as a field leaves behind imitation and evolves independently.

Automation Anxiety
Why don’t we finally welcome the long-promised robotic takeover? Despite progress in AI and increased adoption of industrial robots, consumer-facing robotic products are not nearly as ubiquitous as popular culture predicted decades ago. As Amara’s Law says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” It seems we are living through the Gartner hype cycle.

People have a complicated relationship with robots, torn between admiring them, fearing them, rejecting them, and even boycotting them, as has happened in the automobile industry.

Retail robot in a Walmart store. Credit: Bossa Nova Robotics
Walmart terminated its contract with Bossa Nova and withdrew its 1,000 inventory robots from its stores because the company was concerned about how shoppers were reacting to seeing the six-foot robots in the aisles.

With road blocks like this, will the World Economic Forum’s prediction of almost half of tasks being carried out by machines by 2025 come to pass?

At the rate we’re going, it seems unlikely, even with the boost in automation caused by the pandemic. Robotics will continue to advance its capabilities, and will take over more human jobs as it does so, but it’s unlikely we’ll hit a dramatic inflection point that could be described as a “revolution.” Instead, the robot evolution will happen the way most societal change does: incrementally, with time for people to adapt both practically and psychologically.

For now though, robots are still pretty sexy.

Image Credit: charles taylor / Shutterstock.com Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437789 Video Friday: Robotic Glove Features ...

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):

RSS 2020 – July 12-16, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
CLAWAR 2020 – August 24-26, 2020 – [Virtual Conference]
ICUAS 2020 – September 1-4, 2020 – Athens, Greece
ICRES 2020 – September 28-29, 2020 – Taipei, Taiwan
IROS 2020 – October 25-29, 2020 – Las Vegas, Nevada
ICSR 2020 – November 14-16, 2020 – Golden, Colorado
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.

Evidently, the folks at Unitree were paying attention to last week’s Video Friday.

[ Unitree ]

RoboSoft 2020 was a virtual conference this year (along with everything else), but they still held a soft robots contest, and here are four short vids—you can watch the rest of them here.

[ RoboSoft 2020 ]

If you were wondering why SoftBank bought Aldebaran Robotics and Boston Dynamics, here’s the answer.

I am now a Hawks fan. GO HAWKS!

[ Softbank Hawks ] via [ RobotStart ]

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have developed a fully autonomous mobile robot to assist them in their research. Using a type of AI, the robot has been designed to work uninterrupted for weeks at a time, allowing it to analyse data and make decisions on what to do next. Using a flexible arm with customised gripper it can be calibrated to interact with most standard lab equipment and machinery as well as navigate safely around human co-workers and obstacles.

[ Nature ]

Oregon State’s Cassie has been on break for a couple of months, but it’s back in the lab and moving alarmingly quickly.

[ DRL ]

The current situation linked to COVID-19 sadly led to the postponing of this year RoboCup 2020 at Bordeaux. As an official sponsor of The RoboCup, SoftBank Robotics wanted to take this opportunity to thank all RoboCupers and The RoboCup Federation for their support these past 13 years. We invite you to take a look at NAO’s adventure at The RoboCup as the official robot of the Standard Platform League. See you in Bordeaux 2021!

[ RoboCup 2021 ]

Miniature SAW robot crawling inside the intestines of a pig. You’re welcome.

[ Zarrouk Lab ]

The video demonstrates fast autonomous flight experiments in cluttered unknown environments, with the support of a robust and perception-aware replanning framework called RAPTOR. The associated paper is submitted to TRO.

[ HKUST ]

Since we haven’t gotten autonomy quite right yet, there’s a lot of telepresence going on for robots that operate in public spaces. Usually, you’ve got one remote human managing multiple robots, so it would be nice to make that interface a little more friendly, right?

[ HCI Lab ]

Arguable whether or not this is a robot, but it’s cool enough to spend a minute watching.

[ Ishikawa Lab ]

Communication is critical to collaboration; however, too much of it can degrade performance. Motivated by the need for effective use of a robot’s communication modalities, in this work, we present a computational framework that decides if, when, and what to communicate during human-robot collaboration.

[ Interactive Robotics ]

Robotiq has released the next generation of the grippers for collaborative robots: the 2F-85 and 2F-140. Both models gain greater robustness, safety, and customizability while retaining the same key benefits that have inspired thousands of manufacturers to choose them since their launch 6 years ago.

[ Robotiq ]

ANYmal C, the autonomous legged robot designed for industrial challenging environments, provides the mobility, autonomy and inspection intelligence to enable safe and efficient inspection operations. In this virtual showcase, discover how ANYmal climbs stairs, recovers from a fall, performs an autonomous mission and avoids obstacles, docks to charge by itself, digitizes analogue sensors and monitors the environment.

[ ANYbotics ]

At Waymo, we are committed to addressing inequality, and we believe listening is a critical first step toward driving positive change. Earlier this year, five Waymonauts sat down to share their thoughts on equity at work, challenging the status quo, and more. This is what they had to say.

[ Waymo ]

Nice of ABB to take in old robots and upgrade them to turn them into new robots again. Robots forever!

[ ABB ]

It’s nice seeing the progress being made by GITAI, one of the teams competing in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Challenge, and also meet the humans behind the robots.

[ GITAI ] via [ XPRIZE ]

One more talk from the ICRA Legged Robotics Workshop: Jingyu Liu from DeepRobotics and Qiuguo Zhu from Zhejiang University.

[ Deep Robotics ] Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437261 How AI Will Make Drug Discovery ...

If you had to guess how long it takes for a drug to go from an idea to your pharmacy, what would you guess? Three years? Five years? How about the cost? $30 million? $100 million?

Well, here’s the sobering truth: 90 percent of all drug possibilities fail. The few that do succeed take an average of 10 years to reach the market and cost anywhere from $2.5 billion to $12 billion to get there.

But what if we could generate novel molecules to target any disease, overnight, ready for clinical trials? Imagine leveraging machine learning to accomplish with 50 people what the pharmaceutical industry can barely do with an army of 5,000.

Welcome to the future of AI and low-cost, ultra-fast, and personalized drug discovery. Let’s dive in.

GANs & Drugs
Around 2012, computer scientist-turned-biophysicist Alex Zhavoronkov started to notice that artificial intelligence was getting increasingly good at image, voice, and text recognition. He knew that all three tasks shared a critical commonality. In each, massive datasets were available, making it easy to train up an AI.

But similar datasets were present in pharmacology. So, back in 2014, Zhavoronkov started wondering if he could use these datasets and AI to significantly speed up the drug discovery process. He’d heard about a new technique in artificial intelligence known as generative adversarial networks (or GANs). By pitting two neural nets against one another (adversarial), the system can start with minimal instructions and produce novel outcomes (generative). At the time, researchers had been using GANs to do things like design new objects or create one-of-a-kind, fake human faces, but Zhavoronkov wanted to apply them to pharmacology.

He figured GANs would allow researchers to verbally describe drug attributes: “The compound should inhibit protein X at concentration Y with minimal side effects in humans,” and then the AI could construct the molecule from scratch. To turn his idea into reality, Zhavoronkov set up Insilico Medicine on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and rolled up his sleeves.

Instead of beginning their process in some exotic locale, Insilico’s “drug discovery engine” sifts millions of data samples to determine the signature biological characteristics of specific diseases. The engine then identifies the most promising treatment targets and—using GANs—generates molecules (that is, baby drugs) perfectly suited for them. “The result is an explosion in potential drug targets and a much more efficient testing process,” says Zhavoronkov. “AI allows us to do with fifty people what a typical drug company does with five thousand.”

The results have turned what was once a decade-long war into a month-long skirmish.

In late 2018, for example, Insilico was generating novel molecules in fewer than 46 days, and this included not just the initial discovery, but also the synthesis of the drug and its experimental validation in computer simulations.

Right now, they’re using the system to hunt down new drugs for cancer, aging, fibrosis, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, diabetes, and many others. The first drug to result from this work, a treatment for hair loss, is slated to start Phase I trials by the end of 2020.

They’re also in the early stages of using AI to predict the outcomes of clinical trials in advance of the trial. If successful, this technique will enable researchers to strip a bundle of time and money out of the traditional testing process.

Protein Folding
Beyond inventing new drugs, AI is also being used by other scientists to identify new drug targets—that is, the place to which a drug binds in the body and another key part of the drug discovery process.

Between 1980 and 2006, despite an annual investment of $30 billion, researchers only managed to find about five new drug targets a year. The trouble is complexity. Most potential drug targets are proteins, and a protein’s structure—meaning the way a 2D sequence of amino acids folds into a 3D protein—determines its function.

But a protein with merely a hundred amino acids (a rather small protein) can produce a googol-cubed worth of potential shapes—that’s a one followed by three hundred zeroes. This is also why protein-folding has long been considered an intractably hard problem for even the most powerful of supercomputers.

Back in 1994, to monitor supercomputers’ progress in protein-folding, a biannual competition was created. Until 2018, success was fairly rare. But then the creators of DeepMind turned their neural networks loose on the problem. They created an AI that mines enormous datasets to determine the most likely distance between a protein’s base pairs and the angles of their chemical bonds—aka, the basics of protein-folding. They called it AlphaFold.

On its first foray into the competition, contestant AIs were given 43 protein-folding problems to solve. AlphaFold got 25 right. The second-place team managed a meager three. 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.

Drug Delivery
Another theater of war for improved drugs is the realm of drug delivery. Even here, converging exponential technologies are paving the way for massive implications in both human health and industry shifts.

One key contender is CRISPR, the fast-advancing gene-editing technology that stands to revolutionize synthetic biology and treatment of genetically linked diseases. And researchers have now demonstrated how this tool can be applied to create materials that shape-shift on command. Think: materials that dissolve instantaneously when faced with a programmed stimulus, releasing a specified drug at a highly targeted location.

Yet another potential boon for targeted drug delivery is nanotechnology, whereby medical nanorobots have now been used to fight incidences of cancer. In a recent review of medical micro- and nanorobotics, lead authors (from the University of Texas at Austin and University of California, San Diego) found numerous successful tests of in vivo operation of medical micro- and nanorobots.

Drugs From the Future
Covid-19 is uniting the global scientific community with its urgency, prompting scientists to cast aside nation-specific territorialism, research secrecy, and academic publishing politics in favor of expedited therapeutic and vaccine development efforts. And in the wake of rapid acceleration across healthcare technologies, Big Pharma is an area worth watching right now, no matter your industry. Converging technologies will soon enable extraordinary strides in longevity and disease prevention, with companies like Insilico leading the charge.

Riding the convergence of massive datasets, skyrocketing computational power, quantum computing, cognitive surplus capabilities, and remarkable innovations in AI, we are not far from a world in which personalized drugs, delivered directly to specified targets, will graduate from science fiction to the standard of care.

Rejuvenational biotechnology will be commercially available sooner than you think. When I asked Alex for his own projection, he set the timeline at “maybe 20 years—that’s a reasonable horizon for tangible rejuvenational biotechnology.”

How might you use an extra 20 or more healthy years in your life? What impact would you be able to make?

Join Me
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(Both A360 and Abundance-Digital are part of Singularity University—your participation opens you to a global community.)

This article originally appeared on diamandis.com. Read the original article here.

Image Credit: andreas160578 from Pixabay Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots

#437126 ‘I’m cheering for ...

Coronavirus quarantine can be lonely, but at one Tokyo hotel converted to accept patients with mild symptoms, a humanoid robot will be there to offer support and encouragement—as well as admonishments and warnings. Continue reading

Posted in Human Robots