The Path to Nature Co-Design/ Eternal Change for No Energy/ Forget Smart Cities, “Stupid Infrastructure” Is The Solution/ Can Silicon Valley Find God?

The path to nature co-design. In case you missed it, this week one of the stars of the current synthetic biology wave “imploded”. I am talking of Zymergen, which just had its IPO in May with a valuation of around $4B, 75% of which was lost on Tuesday.

Over the past years I have been highlighting Zymergen as one of the synthetic biology “poster children”, and I was not the only one in doing so. They were considered one of the two synbio lighthouses (together with Ginkgo Bioworks), so, what happened? This is an important question, as this has implications way beyond Zymergen, and understanding what has happened is going to also shed light on the future of nature co-design. 

I am not close to the situation and don’t have any specific information, but here are my thoughts looking at it from the outside (and also leveraging the pretty detailed SEC filing for the IPO):

• Let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater: while the implosion of Zymergen is pretty spectacular and unexpected, the technology developed by Zymergen is extremely strong and still represents a great starting point. Biomanufacturing is here to stay, and they have done many things right, it would be wrong, in my view, to write off both synthetic biology, biomanufacturing, and Zymergen because of this. Superstar investor Cathie Wood (ARK Invest) seems to think along these lines. Ultimately, I very much agree with Jenny Rooke, one of the early investors “A vision this large and potentially impactful will take time to achieve, and not without challenges along the way. This delay does not affect my belief in Zymergen’s enormous long-term value creation potential, and I am excited to track the company’s progress in the years ahead.” 
• Strategy matters, also in synbio: Hyaline, their main product, was, in theory, a good proof of concept, but the categories (materials and electronic) are probably the most adverse to synbio, for multiple reasons. If you add that the market potential was overestimated, then building the future on it made everything strategically more complicated than it could have been. Different verticals would have probably been a much better choice.
• No shortcuts: It is important to notice that the product idea behind Hyaline didn’t fail, what failed, dramatically, was its execution. The quality was simply not there. I don’t know if this was the case, but the surfacing of the problems so shortly after the IPO let one wonder if the IPO pressure was such that the one or the other corner were cut. As I wrote in the nature co-design report, scaling up is one of the biggest challenges in synbio. Zymergen has reminded us of it in a spectacular way.
• The path to nature co-design is still long: for all the potential of synthetic biology and nature codesign, it will require time for us to get it right. As I wrote in the report, the whole economics are fundamentally different, and the challenges that come with them require the right approach and the right tools to be successfully overcome.

A final consideration, I suspect this is not going to be that last “implosion” of a deep tech start-up, focused on bits and atoms. Investing in these startups requires a very different approach, and the classical ICT or biotech blueprints simply do not work. Scaling up and economics are very different, and I fear that the wrong path to an exit might push people to revert to the known (and wrong for this) blueprints. The role of boards will be crucial, let’s hope for the best…

Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real

Google's quantum supremacy milestone in 2019 made headlines, and for good reason. As quantum computing theorist Scott Aaronson (and author of the impenetrable Quantum Computing Since Democritus) noted in his surprisingly optimistic New York Times op-ed, Google was able to achieve a task in hundreds of seconds that a traditional supercomputer would theoretically need 10,000 years to do - a breakthrough, even if the task itself was "special" and "useless". (Rival IBM had retorted around the time, providing evidence that "the world’s most powerful supercomputer can nearly keep pace with Google's new quantum machine," according to Quanta.)

In a recent paper, researchers wrote how Google's quantum computer achieved another milestone - demonstrating a genuine time crystal. While time crystals are certainly special, are they useful? "Time crystals are... the first objects to spontaneously break 'time-translation symmetry,' the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time."

A time crystal isn't a perpetual-motion machine though (like John Galt's fictional motor in Atlas Shrugged), as it still needs to be "periodically driven by an external energy source... But the system doesn’t heat up either, despite being pumped by a laser or other driver. Instead, it cycles back and forth indefinitely between localized states." As for practicality, Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, says a time crystal's stability seems promising: "Something that's as stable as this is unusual, and special things become useful."

News items:

How to Redesign Our Cities to Make Them Heatwave-Proof

Heat continues to be a killer. The World Health Organization estimates that, between 1998 and 2017, 166,000 people died owing to heatwaves, a total that eclipses many more photogenic natural disasters. FT's Tim Harford suggests ways cities can cool things down.

Hundreds of AI Tools Have Been Built to Catch Covid. None of Them Helped.

Throughout the pandemic, hundreds of predictive tools were developed to help diagnose or triage patients faster. Apparently, none of them were very helpful, and some were even potentially harmful, according to MIT Technology Review - "that's the damning conclusion of multiple studies published in the last few months," including a Turing Institute report that AI tools had made little, if any, impact in the fight against Covid.

The amount of tools that were tested and deemed unfit for clinical use is a bit scary. In Prediction models for diagnosis and prognosis of covid-19, researchers looked at 232 algorithms for diagnosing patients, finding none to be useful; a similar conclusion was reached in this Nature study, which explored 415 deep learning tools. So what went wrong?

"Many of the problems that were uncovered are linked to the poor quality of the data that researchers used to develop their tools. Information about covid patients, including medical scans, was collected and shared in the middle of a global pandemic, often by the doctors struggling to treat those patients. Researchers wanted to help quickly, and these were the only public data sets available. But this meant that many tools were built using mislabeled data or data from unknown sources."

News items:

Cars That Learn How to Drive Themselves by Watching Other Cars

If self-driving cars could learn to drive in the same way that babies learn to walk - by watching others around them and trying to mimic certain movements - they would require far less data, believes Hariri Institute Junior Faculty Fellow Eshed Ohn-Bar.

Arm’s Cheap and Flexible Plastic Microchip Could Create an ‘Internet of Everything’

If you think microchips are ubiquitous now, appearing in everything from washing machines to lampposts, just wait until circuits can be printed onto plastic, paper, and fabric for the price of pennies - that's what chip designer Arm is promising, with the company this week unveiling a new prototype plastic-based microchip named PlasticARM.

Forget Smart Cities, 'Stupid' Infrastructure Is The Solution For Future Transportation

"The rise of the internet teaches vital lessons for how to prepare what you do, particularly in infrastructure, to make it ready for the future." - Brad Templeton

When discussing the future of city infrastructure, Chairman Emeritus at the Electronic Frontier Foundation Brad Templeton prefers simpler today rather than broken tomorrow: "Infrastructure changes at the pace of decades, while digital technology changes daily. You can’t plan for 2030s digital cars with the knowledge of 2021." The internet itself took over the world by being as simple as possible, as David Isenberg wrote in his 1997 essay, Rise of the Stupid Network. "You can't plan for 2030 in 2021 so you don't. Instead, you keep what you must build simple and put as much as possible into software. That's because you can change all your software in 2030," says Templeton. He applies the same logic to infrastructure:

"A virtue of stupid infrastructure is you don't define functionality like lanes and stations in advance. Contrast that with typical rail lines, which make two limiting decisions. The first is to use rails. While pavement carries pedestrians, scooters, cars, bicycles, trucks, vans, buses, robots and vehicles yet to be invented, rails are designed to handle trains, trains, trains or trains. In addition, because it’s harder for trains to change paths at will and go around other trains, we often see rail built with 'online' stations, where the train in the station blocks the line. This forces long headways between vehicles, measured in minutes, compared to the 2 seconds used by human driven buses and the 1 second possible with robots."

News items:

NYC Brain Computer Startup Announces FDA Trial Before Elon Musk

New York-based Synchron said it received permission from the Food and Drug Administration to test its device in human patients. The trial, known as an early feasibility study, is essential to proving the implants work safely and could one day be sold in the US.

A Painting or an NFT of It: Which Will Be More Valuable?

Damien Hirst - the contemporary artist best known for his 1991 shark-in-formaldehyde artwork, The Physical Impossibility of Death, is introducing a new meta-experiment via his project, The Currency. 

The Currency consists of 10,000 dot paintings, each embedded with a watermark, signature, unique title, and other differentiating characteristics. Buyers of each $2,000 print get the physical piece and an NFT - but after a year they have to decide which they'll keep, and which to burn (physically or digitally). That's a gamble, as no one is certain if NFTs will continue to fetch high prices in the coming decade. The uncertainty stretches to the tax situation too:

"One issue that has not caught up with the technology is how NFTs will be taxed. Cryptocurrency is taxed at the capital gains rate, and many experts say they believe that NFTs will be considered collectibles, which are taxed at a 28 percent rate. But the tax issue gets more complicated because many NFTs are bought using cryptocurrency. So any transaction would be considered a realization of the gains in that cryptocurrency."

News items:

Artificial Intelligence May Have Cracked the Code to Creating Low-Priced Works on Canvas

Inspired by Christie's sale of AI art, a new company is using the technology to generate personalized paintings for affordable prices.

Can Silicon Valley Find God?

Religion and AI definitely feel like an oil-and-water mix, inherently incompatible (as Silicon Valley brilliantly poked fun at). But AI researcher Shanen Boettcher sees the two as inextricably linked; the former Microsoft general manager is even getting a PhD in AI and spirituality. We've covered ethics in tech a lot in this newsletter (this section is dedicated to it), but until now we haven't touched on religion. Boettcher and his peers are facing an uphill battle, with many technologists and tech communities being blatantly secular. Underneath the skirting around are deeper questions: about being human and our place in the universe, and how tech affects our spiritual views, questions we should be asking more. We'll leave you with this quote from article author Linda Kinstler.

"Over the course of my reporting, I often thought back to the experience of Rob Barrett, who worked as a researcher at IBM in the '90s. One day, he was outlining the default privacy settings for an early web browser feature. His boss, he said, gave him only one instruction: 'Do the right thing.' It was up to Mr. Barrett to decide what the 'right thing' was. That was when it dawned on him: 'I don’t know enough theology to be a good engineer,' he told his boss. He requested a leave of absence so he could study the Old Testament, and eventually he left the industry."

News items:

The Pentagon Is Experimenting With Using Artificial Intelligence to "See Days in Advance"

The Pentagon aims to use cutting-edge cloud networks and AI systems to anticipate adversaries' moves before they make them.