DRKE

IT CAN'T BE UNSEEN -- The best reframings will unlock static & stuck scenarios. Thereby creating alternate pathways, fresh territories for exploration. •Move the camera to a new angle, for a different/better view. •Make the invisible visible, what was background becomes foreground. •Challenge existing assertions, what was gospel becomes flexible. For example: The below meme challenges our shared hallucination that food ought to have a private taxi ride to our front door, and that we shouldn't need to pay a premium for that elevated level of personal service. Once it has been seen, it can't be unseen. And now the landscape has a new topography to navigate. Go! 🚀

DO LESS TO GET MORE -- Technology and modern agricultural techniques are mowing, fertilizing, tilling, and pruning land all over the world. One family of farmers puts forward the case for doing nothing. Japanese people have by and large adopted the outlook that “nature cannot be controlled.” Natural phenomena will happen on their own (Earthquake! Tsunami!), and human intervention is both futile and conceited. Agronomist Masanobu Fukuoka, like so many others around him, shared this mindset. But unlike his peers, he turned the philosophy into a farming method. This mindset, which is today known as natural farming or do-nothing farming, was proposed by Fukuoka in his seminal 1978 book, 'The One-Straw Revolution', and follows five principles: • No tillage • No fertilizer • No pesticides or herbicides • No weeding • No pruning The basis of natural farming is based on the idea that fruit is BORN, not MADE. And, contrary to popular belief, do-nothing farming does not leave things unattended. Rather, it creates a natural environment that produces fruit. In this environment, pests can be beneficial insects, and weeds can till the soil. If we understand nature this way, there is no superior or inferior element in any ecosystem. Humans are simply there to help keep nature’s cycle going. We are one. 🚀 🌱

AS YOU AGE, YOU SHOULD WANT THE THINGS YOU NEED -- Products designed for the aging person, like a walking cane, pill containers and shower grab bars, are finally being refined by an architect-founded company called Remsen. Remsen is a newly launched design company focused on turning common everyday elder products into luxury home goods. Founded by two architects, the company is applying a high-design approach to items more commonly associated with chain drugstores and nursing homes with new in-home accessories, stability devices, and self-care furniture. “Geriatric products are thought of as medical devices. So they are designed for patients, not people,” says cofounder Sam Zeif. “When you understand that, you understand why they look the way they do. And then you understand why people feel so bad about using them—because they make you feel like something’s wrong with you.” Age is the one unifying 'disability' that every single person on earth (if they're lucky enough to live long enough) will experience. Given that it's such a shared characteristic of the human experience, it's a shame it's taken so long for the design community to look this experience straight in the eye 👁️ and to design into it with dignity, desire, and elevation. So many uncharted territories for design to flourish within. So may unmet needs and desires that design has yet to properly serve. Click the link below to view their first portfolio of beautiful offerings... (🫡 Natasha Jakubowski for the hot tip)

SUN COUNTRY -- Australia is one of the sunniest continents in the world, and has the best access to solar energy. • In the summer, Australia's orbit brings it closer to the sun, which increases the intensity of solar UV rays by 7%. • Australia also has clearer atmospheric conditions, which means that Australians are exposed to up to 15% more UV rays than Europeans. (Also why the skin cancer rate in Australia is higher than Europe.) • As of the end of 2021, Australia had over 25 GW of solar installed, which puts it in the top ten countries in the world for total capacity. IN CONTRAST -- when our family moved to Australia in 2012, it was COAL that was driving the energy sector, and fueling the national economy -- not sunshine. Australia was mining coal for domestic use, but more importantly, for sale to China as it swiftly developed it's next wave of massive growth. Coal was a incredibly powerful financial engine at the time, driving up housing costs across the country, cashing up working-class families on the west coast, and essentially putting a big black boot on the neck of a cautiously emerging solar opportunity. Even today -- coal is still used in 64% of domestic energy production, 32% of total energy supply, and 53% of electricity generation. Australia's power generation system is the second most coal-dependent in the OECD, behind Poland. 🌞 But that is changing... • The world's largest renewable energy and storage project was just approved. The Sun Cable Australia Power Link is a massive infrastructure project planning to generate solar and wind energy in Australia's Northern Territory, store it in batteries, and transmit it via a high-voltage transmission line to Darwin and potentially export it to Singapore through a sub-sea cable. • Federal Environment Minster, Tanya Plibersek says the project will be economically and socially transformational for the Northern Territory, and will enable green manufacturing sector to emerge in Darwin, produce renewable solar power for potential export to Singapore, and provide a long-term source of ongoing employment in remote areas. • “This massive project is a generation-defining piece of infrastructure. It will be the largest solar precinct in the world – and heralds Australia as the world leader in green energy,” Plibersek said in a statement. • The Sun Cable Australia Power Link project was kicked off by Mike Cannon-Brookes back in 2018. Cannon-Brookes is the co-founder/co-CEO of the Australian project management software darling Atlassian. • Over the last 6 years, he’s reinvested some of his estimated $10B net worth back into the SunCable project. Add Mike to list of tech folks who made billions of dollars in the 2010s/early 2020s that are now taking on ambitious, societal scale challenges. Good on ya, mate! 🦘🌞 🚀

HEALTHCARE FUTURES -- The average global citizen born today will live almost 30 years longer than one of their forebears born in 1950, one of humanity’s most astonishing achievements. But the global healthcare system’s vital signs have deteriorated recently. Life expectancy in many western countries has stalled over the past 15 years, worsening through the pandemic. • A shocking rise in population obesity and an expected rapid increase in dementia is storing up future pain. • A rapidly aging population is already driving healthcare system costs to potentially unsustainable levels. • In many advanced economies the cost of healthcare as a proportion of GDP has more than doubled in the past 30 years. 'The Oxford Prescription' draws on the insights and expertise of 17 leading Oxford University professors, looking at ways in which global healthcare can be improved, examining population health, the balance between primary and secondary care, and how new data and technologies could revolutionize the delivery of healthcare. The full report available in the link below👇 .

AN ERROR HAS OCCURRED -- A "personal tutor for every student" is one of the rosy scenarios AI optimists paint, but AI-driven learning still has many hurdles in its way. • Driving the news: A new report from the Wharton School found that access to genAI tutors can improve student performance on practice math problems. • Yes, but: Students who used these tools performed significantly worse on exams, where they can't use AI. This, and more, in the link below...🤖

👁️ 900 Voices From Gen Z, America’s Most Diverse Generation 👁️ "I wish I grew up without the internet." -- Sarah, born 2000 "I am a gay Chinese-American cis man raised in Xian, China, and Boone, N.C. with the ability to immerse in white Southern culture as well as the communist society of China." -- Andrew, born 1997 "I have never been on a date." -- Alexa, born 1998 "I'm a musician and an observer. I worry abut the commodity culture we're being brought up in where all our original cultural contributions are profited on by social tech companies." -- Luis, 2001 "Many people look at me and think I'm white but I'm black and Jewish. It can be stressful not to be recognized as part of the racial group you belong to." -- Viviana, born 2006 "I'm not as straight as I thought I was." -- Caitlin, born 1996 "I've almost completely abandoned social media. It's too intrusive and time consuming. I want to live my life on my own terms not some illusory pageantry." -- Alex, born 1995 "I have a love affair with email newsletters. I love the intimacy of email because I never really grew up in an era where mail was intimate." -- Amelia, born 2001 "I pace around my room and overthink everything." -- Peter, born 1997 "Even though I grew up in suburbia, I'm obsessed with sustainable agriculture. People don't understand why I want to become a farmer." -- Lauren, born 1998 "I am a stateless person." -- Chris, born 1995 "I deleted my Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram accounts with Facebook soon to come because I became addicted and I didn't like it. Life is more than social media to me." -- Jeremy, born 1996

THE THREE LAWS OF ROBOTICS -- Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT, where he was director of the AI Lab and then CSAIL. He has been cofounder of iRobot, Rethink Robotics, and Robust AI, where he is currently CTO. In honor of Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Rodney's two boyhood go-to science fiction writers, he's names the central pillars of his learning his 'Three Laws of Robotics': 1: The visual appearance of a robot makes a promise about what it can do and how smart it is. It needs to deliver or slightly overdeliver on that promise or it will not be accepted. 2: When robots and people coexist in the same spaces, the robots must not take away from people’s agency, particularly when the robots are failing, as inevitably they will at times. 3: Technologies for robots need 10+ years of steady improvement beyond lab demos of the target tasks to mature to low cost and to have their limitations characterized well enough that they can deliver 99.9 percent of the time. Every 10 more years gets another 9 in reliability. (Note: that these laws are written from the point of view of making robots work in the real world, where people pay for them, and where people want return on their investment. Which is very different from demonstrating robots or robot technologies in the laboratory.) 🚀

THE GREAT WALL OF SOLAR -- Some 500 miles west of Beijing, in the desert of the Chinese region of Inner Mongolia, a solar-power project is underway that is — even by China’s standards — audacious in scale and, most remarkably, in ambition. Officials in Ordos are over the next several years going to install 100 gigawatts of solar panels — more than 3x as much capacity as the United States is currently building nationwide — along a stretch of land 250 miles (400 kilometers) long and 3 miles (5 km) wide. The goal isn’t just to generate huge amounts of clean power. It is also to restore a no man’s land, bringing greenery and even livestock to an area roughly the size of Puerto Rico. In doing so, the local authorities are doubling down on two of China’s most successful efforts of recent years: An epic expansion of solar power, and major progress in combating desertification. China’s central role in the expansion of global solar power capacity is well understood: Its dominance of the industrial chain from the production to installation to repair of panels globally is such that Western trade bodies have pressed policymakers to slap tariffs on Chinese solar companies. Some analysts fret that Chinese “overcapacity” in the country’s solar production will lead to ruin (though experts at the energy think tank Ember say that, with climate challenges pressing globally, “underutilization” is a more appropriate term than “overcapacity”). 🚀

POST MONOPOLY PATHWAYS -- While Google has been ruled as an illegal monopoly, the Department of Justice has yet to announce what remedies it will seek. It has previously indicated that any remedies would be structural, meaning break-ups rather than mandates to change certain behaviors. Google rivals have suggested changes such as choice screens that pop up periodically, a ban on dark pattern popups that push people back to the default, and barring Google from buying default status or pre-installation and self-preferencing its own content in serve results. The final decision will be at least as consequential as the Microsoft antitrust case 23 years ago, which spurred an era of unprecedented innovation that allowed promising startups to flourish -- including <ahem!> Google. 🚀