Microbots: Automation Revolution Continues with Miniaturized Electronics

Ratcheting down technology’s price-performance improvement curve, we have seen the evolution of computers from the size of a room to a PC to a smartphone to a credit-card-sized micro-controller to a smartwatch to now finally the point where they are almost invisible (Figure 1).

It is not likely to be the big robots of automotive factories that ‘take over the world’ or at least continue to take over labor, but rather microbots.

A recent trend in scientific advance has been microbots such as termite robots that build houses, nanomotors being controlled for the first time in living cells, Google’s electronic contact lenses, blood tests 2.0 (finally! more immediate and orders of magnitude cheaper, though still via physician hegemony), and personalized drone delivery services.

This all points to the ongoing miniaturization of computing, including new use cases and interesting philosophical and ethical problems that could arise when technology is invisible. We are generally aware of technology in our environment now, think of the UK’s ubiquitous surveillance cameras, or the trackability of web-surfing history, but a new conceptual adjustment may be required when technology is more pervasively integrated and invisible.

Figure 1:  Miniaturization Trend, Next Node: Microbots (Source)

Personalized Drone Delivery: the new Personal Computer?

Miniaturization, robotics, and the hastening automation economy are coming together in interesting new ways. Personal drone delivery services could be a fast-arriving concept. Amazon announced PrimeAir in November 2013, to possibly be ready for launch in 2015 pending US FAA regulations of personal drone airspace. In the ideal case, the service would deliver ordered items within 30-60 minutes. Similarly, Dubai and the UAE announced a personalized drone delivery service including eye-scanning verification for government documents. Personalized or at least targeted micro-delivery via drones is not a new idea. One obvious use is delivering aid, medicine, and other supplies to remote, war-torn, economically-strapped, crisis-based, or other remote or sensitive geographic areas (Singularity University example: Matternet). As is the case with many newtech ideas, a modern version of personal remote delivery was conceptualized in Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End (2006).

The potential cost savings, convenience, and efficiency gains make a strong argument in favor of personalized drone delivery. Immediately many human-based delivery and courier services could be put out of business. Supply chains could be reinvented to support services that still need both a human and drone aspect (such as court filings and within office building deliveries), although amphibious drones could be just around the corner: robotic-on-land and flying-in-air for urban office and apartment building deliveries. Hiro Protagonist is out of a job not due to landing in a swimming pool but due to personalized drone pizza delivery services!

Longer-term implications could include a redesign of how space is used. Personal drone delivery services could become like the pneumatic tubes or dumbwaiters of the past, including the secure vestibule area already envisioned for delivery at home and office entry areas. Downtown traffic and congestion could be significantly reduced. An obvious challenge is quality of life degradation due to noise and the visual detritus of drones. Are human civilizations relegated to becoming the hive substrate for the incessant and pervasive buzzing of personal drones circling as they conduct their business? Hopefully the 'Prius drone' (e.g.; quiet) and pleasing visual design will be part of the modernization. Personal drone delivery could be an important intermediary step on the way to the 3D home printing of all desired objects.

Figure 1: Let them Eat Drones (photography drone at Versailles). Image Credit

MOOCs The Platform: Education, Vocational Training, and More

MOOCs (massive online open courses) reinvented education in the mode of global accessibility, even faster than blogs and ebooks reshaped the publishing industry. Now in place as a concept and an infrastructure, ‘MOOCs as a platform’ can be used for other purposes, most proximately vocation and training. Already much of MOOC content is an educational-vocational hybrid of learning new things like knowledge and skills for the digital economy in the form of bootcamps and code academies for software programming, web services, mobile applications, and big data science.

MOOCs are a resilience tool for being able to quickly retrain large numbers of individuals that may be displaced in economic shifts such as the increasing automation of the economy (i.e.; self-driving vehicles, machine intelligence supplanting knowledge-worker jobs). More generally MOOCS as a concept category are concerned with ‘in-habbing’ - habilitating anyone into any situation - and ultimately the next-generation of the Internet that facilitates massive online collaboration and social connectivity.

A fun science fiction idea could be artificial intelligence waking up grâce à contemporary digital environments like MOOCs, YouTube (image recognition), and high-frequency trading networks. As a MOOC instructor, the new Turing Test would be determining if your online student is a machine or a person; that is to the degree this question still matters.

Turning Big Data into Smart Data

A key contemporary trend is big data - the creation and manipulation of large complex data sets that must be stored and managed in the cloud as they are too unwieldy for local computers. Big data creation is currently on the order of zettabytes (10007 bytes) per year, in roughly equal amounts by four segments: individuals (photos, video), companies (transaction monitoring), governments (surveillance (e.g.; the new Utah Data Center)), and scientific research (astronomical observations).

Big data fanfare abounds, we continuously hear announcements like more data was created last year than in the entire history of humanity, and that data creation is on a two year-doubling cycle. Better cheap fast storage has been the historical answer to supporting the ever-growing capacity to generate data, however this is not necessarily the best solution. Already much collected data is thrown away (e.g.; CCTV footage, real-time surgery video, and genome sequencing data) without saving anything. Much of stored data remains unused, and not cleaned up into a form that is human-usable since this is costly and challenging (de-duplication a primary example).

Turning big data into smart data means moving away from data fundamentalism, the idea that data must be collected, and that data collection in itself is an ends rather than a means. Advancement comes from smart data, not more data; being able to cleanly extract and use salient aspects of data (e.g.; the ‘diffs,’ for example identifying relevant genomic polymorphisms from the whole genome sequence), not just generate and discard or mindlessly store.

Antifragile: Build Open Resilient Systems

Nicholas Taleb Nassim’s latest book, Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (2012) is a nice continuation and development of his oeuvre. The main point in his first mainstream book, Fooled by Randomness (2001), was that humans are not good at thinking statistically, and therefore to improve our lives and ability to act in the world, we need stories or heuristics that package accurate underlying statistical information. Black Swan (2007) made us aware that black swans (seemingly rare events (if you have never seen a black swan, you incorrectly think that they do not exist)) can happen much more frequently than we can estimate. Therefore, we should organize our lives to minimize exposure to negative black swans (events with unlimited downside risk like stock market crashes) and maximize our exposure to positive black swans (events with unlimited upside like investing in startups (with a small portion of total assets)). In the future, there could be a Black Swan App to help us respond to life’s events in real-time with bias correction, heightened rationality, and statistical accuracy.

In Antifragile, Taleb continues to articulate his unique world view and winds it into a proposal for how to better lead our lives as individuals and societies. Fragility is organic systems that aim for stability and avoid change, thereby becoming brittle, weak, and breakable as a result. Antifragility (like Derrida’s autoimmunity) on the other hand, describes systems that are open to mistakes and quickly learn from and incorporate errors, thus becoming resilient and vibrant with the ability to adapt and survive (like Silicon Valley’s mantra to ‘fail early and learn fast’). For better vigor and survival, organic systems (like living organisms, humans, and societies) should develop their antifragility.

Another way of understanding antifragility is that when you have a capability, it means that you are able to handle new situations that arise in the same domain, effectively handling situations that arise that are up to 10% outside the bounds of situations you have seen before in that domain. For Taleb, success is determined more by tinkering and harnessing the disorder and chaos in a system (the variance or antifragility) than applying pure intellect. This is how the industrial revolution happened, and how technologies develop that drive science. Antifragile systems are those that gain from randomness or uncertainty (statistically, pulling a probability distribution’s mean higher with more upside long-tail instances).

Fragility/antifragility applies only in the case of organic systems, not inorganic systems (like our computers (at present)). Organic systems need stressors to grow, thrive, and survive. Taleb’s colorful example distinguishes between a cat and a washing machine.

Systems-level Thinking Helps to Address Protein Folding

Deciphering protein folding is critical to a fundamental understanding of biology as proteins conduct most cellular operations, and since misfolded proteins are often causally implicated in disease.

The status of protein folding (describing proteins as folded into their final 3D shape) is that as of January 2014, the main resource, the Protein Data Bank, has 96,000 listed known protein structures. There has been much technological advance in determining the static and dynamic features of protein structures, including in X-ray crystallography, NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy), cryo-electron microscopy, small-angle X-ray scattering, and other spectroscopic techniques.

This sounds like good progress, however, taking the human example, only 24,000 of the Protein Data Bank's 96,000 listed proteins are human, and this is of an estimated total of 2 million human proteins. Further, all of the protein conformations have been determined empirically (e.g.; manually) rather than with prediction (e.g.; digitally). It was proposed that given the amino acid string, it should be possible to predict the 3D conformation of the protein as finally folded, but this has proved elusive. Both scientific and crowdsourced efforts are looking at the problem. Crowdsourced projects include games like fold.it, community projects like Protein Folding@Home, and prediction contests like CASP (Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction), a community-wide, worldwide experiment for protein structure prediction, the next one taking place May – August 2014. All of these projects focus on the unitary folding of one target, such as TM019, as opposed to more universal system dynamics.

Complexity scientist Sandra D. Mitchell presented work at Stanford on January 15, 2014 suggesting that we need a plurality of conceptual representations and models (any model is only partial in some way), and that any complex problem should be addressed with an integrated multiplicity of approaches. Many (and possibly most) complex biological issues such as cancer and aging are now understood as deeply dynamic and systemic phenomena. Similarly, proteins do not fold in isolation, the local environment is highly involved with protein chaperones and other signaling processes (one example is the intricate behavior of toxic amyloid HSPs (heat shock proteins)).

Integrated Information as a Measure of Consciousness

The fourth FQXi international conference was held in Vieques Puerto Rico January 6-10, 2014 on the Physics of Information.

The first and primary focus was on information in the quantitative physical sense, as opposed to the epistemic sense, particularly as information is used in quantum mechanics. There are several objective measurable definitions of information such as Shannon information. Objective information and other mathematical and physics theories were also used to formalize definitions and distinctions between determinism, free will, and predictability, and intelligence versus consciousness.

Many talks and debates helped to sharpen thinking regarding consciousness, where we have been stuck with crude explanatory heuristics like ‘consciousness may be an emergent property of any sufficiently complex system.’ Interesting and provocative research was presented by Giulio Tononi and Larissa Albantakis from the Center for Sleep and Consciousness at the University of Wisconsin. They have an objective measure called ‘integrated information’ which is meant as the compositional character of experience (including subjective experience), and represents the causality amongst macro-level elements within a system. There could be systems that are complex at the macro level but have low integrated information if there are not extensive mechanisms with causal relations within the system. In other words, complexity does not necessarily confer consciousness, and the relevant factors to look for could be causality and experience. 

2014 Top 10 Technology Trends

2014 promises to be another exciting year for technology development! Technology more than any other endeavor has the potential to most quickly improve people's lives.  

Some prominent multi-year trends currently in development include:

1. Worldwide Internet-connected (2 billion in 2013 growing to 5 billion in 2020) and growing Southern hemisphere megacities
2. Big data (doubling to 8 zettabytes 2013-2015)
3. Smartphone (>1 billion)
4. Smartwatch 
5. Wearables, Glass 
6. Quantified self-tracking (QS) gadgetry
7. Self-driving vehicles
8. eLearning and MOOCs 
9. 3D printing 
10. New economic models: bitcoin/cryptocurrencies, crowdfunding, crowdsourced labor marketplaces 

On the Horizon:

• Lab-produced synthetically-engineered food 
• Smart home 
• 3D bioprinting / DNA computing / synbio

Predictions for 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 

Synbio Reformulates the Traditional Scientific Method

Synthetic biology continues to be one of the most wide-spread trends reshaping the conduct of science.

Lauded as the potential ‘transistor of the 21st century’ given its transformative possibilities, synthetic biology is the design and construction of biological devices and systems. It is highly multi-disciplinary, linking biology, engineering, functional design, and computation.

One of the key application areas is metabolic engineering, working with cells to greatly expand their usual production of substances that can then be used for energy, agricultural, and pharmaceutical purposes.

Since the nature of synthetic biology is pro-actively creating de novo biological systems, organisms, and capacities (the opposite of the esprit of the passive characterization of phenomena for which the original scientific method was developed), synbio is reformulating the traditional scientific method.

While it is true that optimizing genetic and regulatory processes within cells can be partially construed under the scientific method, the overall scope of activity and methods are much broader.

Innovating de novo organisms and functionality requires a significantly different scientific methodology than that supported by the traditional scientific method. This includes computational modeling and simulation, engineering practices, feedback loops, automated bio-printing, and a re-conceptualization of science as an endeavor of characterizing and creating.

Biodesign: a Prevalent Cultural Trope

A new science or technology field really starts to capture the imagination and become mainstream when it seeps into art and culture. This is increasingly evident with bioart, bioprinting, and synthetic biology.

In bioart (using biological materials to make art), there have already been several phases starting with bacteria drawings in petri dishes and more recently culminating in DNA manipulation, live cells growing into cultured shapes in galleries, and the Algae Opera (an opera singer’s CO2 producing algae in real-time for audience consumption).

Bioprinting is an emerging field which marries the 3D printing revolution with biohacking and DIYlabs in the 3D printing of designed human materials for aesthetic and functional purposes.  

Synthetic biology (the design and construction of biological devices and systems) is being featured in art shows alongside industry conferences and in film festivals, including in its own Bio-Fiction, an international synthetic biology science, art, and film festival series.

Not only are we making art with biology as an artistic material, culture is being made in new ways through biology. 

The theme of biodesign is becoming prevalent as a cultural trope through the rapid expansion of designed biology into the arts, culture, collective human consciousness, and science and technology. These ideas are becoming quite normal, which can only mean that their demise through kitschification and cliché could be coming soon in a subsequent era of anti-bioart, post-bioprinting, post-synbio!