Cognitive Easing: Human Identity Crisis in a World of Technology

Cognitive Easing is the aim of much of our endeavor, whether explicit or implicit. We have never wavered from trying to create a life of ease, enjoyment, and fulfillment. The definition of Cognitive Easing is spending less mental effort to achieve a result.

A contemporary problem seems to be technology’s controlling presence in the world. Jobs are disappearing due to technological unemployment. News is fed to us that does not correspond to reality. Mysterious big data algorithms direct from the background. We no longer seem able to think for ourselves with “the cloud” automatically piloting our lives. What happened to caprice and serendipity, to our very humanness?

However, I argue the opposite. It is not the infantilization of humans by technology that is happening, but rather the opportunity for cognitive easing. We are not always accustomed to using our brains in the most creative and productive ways. Therefore we feel dumbed-down by technology when cognitive easing is actually freeing us from mental drudgery. Consider the amount of effort spent on “last-mile cognition problems” such as planning and coordination. Instead, cognitive load could be increasingly outsourced to algorithms. This has been the promise of technology from the beginning, easier lives.

A pushback is that lower-level cognitive tasks might seem like part of the definition of what it is to be human. However, while we have had to occupy our time this way, it does not have to be who we are. We need to challenge the false and nostalgic notion of defining our humanness by the tasks we do, and this might not be easy. Even scarier than how we will spend our time after technological automation is the question of who we are – our very identity.

Technology is forcing us to question what it is to be human. We have defined ourselves by physical labor and lower-level mental tasks, and it is abrupt to have to change this, especially because we do not know who we are. Worse, there is a timing lag with technology replacing what we think our humanness consists of before we have had a chance to redefine what it could be. We feel out of step with technology, and that we are regressing instead of greatly progressing. We think paradoxically that technology robs us of our humanity when in fact it is doing what we wanted all along, providing physical and cognitive easing.

Technology, automation, and cognitive easing are requiring us to redefine what it is to be human based on the higher-level capacities we have. These higher-level faculties include creative problem solving, artistic expression, storytelling, and quirky ingenuity. Only humans have the ability to perceive the world and react with unique and inventive solutions. We can now contemplate a new class of problems that we did not have the luxury of addressing before, deploying our creative problem-solving capability to a greater extent. The vision for the future is engaging with more of our unique humanness, increasingly freed from both physical and mental drudgery, to be more of who we really are, creative, serendipitous, problem-solving beings exploring and enacting our world in new and ingenious ways.

Defining the Blockchain Economy: What is Decentralized Finance?

The aim of this article is to explore the intersection of blockchain technology and finance from a practical, theoretical, and conceptual standpoint.

1. Practical Blockchain Finance
Financial services is one of the last sectors of the economy to become modernized by the Internet and the possibilities of digitalization. Broadly, the first main phase of the Internet can be seen as enabling the transfer of information. However, additional features are necessary in economics and finance for the secure transfer of value, and to avoid the double-spend problem. Whereas it is possible to make an arbitrary number of copies of a digital file sent in email for example, money should only be spent once. Now in what could be the second major phase of the Internet, blockchains have arisen as a crucial enabling technology to allow the secure transfer of value, and thus for economics and finance to uplift into the modern Internet era. This could be a rapid move given the computational and infrastructural network resources already in place.

Blockchains allow the digital payments layer the Internet never had, and more broadly contemplate an era whereby all forms of secure value transfer could take place via the Internet. This could include all monetary assets (the cash or spot market), and all assets and liabilities over any future time frame (the futures and options market, mortgages, debt and equity securities, treasury issuance, and public debt). The implication is that there could be a digital future of cryptographically-activated assets and actions, where 1) all physical and intellectual property might be registered and transacted via blockchains as smart property, and 2) all agreements, contractual relationships, societal record-keeping, and governance might be enacted through code-based smart contracts. For maximum resiliency and adoption accustomation, the two systems would likely run in parallel until there was gradually enough comfort in the digital system to drop the analog system.

Global financial institutions are rapidly adopting the single-ledger technology of blockchains, which is essentially, having one database of securities transactions instead of many proprietary versions that need to be reconciled. The benefit is that the time to clear securities transactions may be reduced significantly from days to hours, which confers a tremendous decrease in risk and cost from the time savings. These cost savings could be passed on to the customers of securities trades. The need for independent custody functions and other costly aspects of the securities value chain could also be greatly reduced in having a single asset registry of securities, including because ownership can exist in an open and readily-confirmable mode as opposed to having to be researched and verified in every transaction.

Crypto-synecdoche
A valuable property of blockchains for the digital automation economy is synecdoche (where a part represents a whole). Blockchains simultaneously connect many layers or levels of detail in that in the connected database tree, any one items calls or refers to all other levels, so it is easily possible to drill up and down levels of detail. For example, with a hard-currency dollar bill, there may be twenty levels of aggregation upstream from the actual unit of the bill, all of which could be rolled up at the click of a mouse. Another case of the crypto-synecdoche property in action is in the idea of hospital inventories (including controlled-substance pharmaceuticals) instantiated as blockchain-based smart property, where a hospital, county, state, or nation’s inventory could be viewed at any instant. The crypto-synecdoche property could be used to roll up the whole of an economy for an on-demand real-time assessment (essentially automating NBER). As in all industries, in finance too, blockchains are a next-generation technology that enables the secure, trackable, automated coordination of large-scale projects with arbitrarily-many detailed items.

Blockchains, HFT, and Smartnetwork Automatic Markets
Beyond digitalizing money, payments, economics, and finance, blockchains are a next-generation information technology and a new form of general computational substrate. Blockchains solve a long-standing computing challenge called the Byzantine General’s Problem, which entails how to securely update far-flung nodes in a distributed computing network. The issue is knowing whether Byzantine generals out in the field are defecting and colluding, or remaining loyal and fighting; i.e.; how to determine if network nodes have become befouled. By enforcing integrity and security in distributed computing, blockchains dramatically extend the scale and scope of what might be possible in networks into a whole new tier. HFT (high-frequency trading) is already one of the most automated computational network activities, and could become even more so if instantiated in blockchain-based smart contract DACs (distributed autonomous corporations (i.e.; packages of smart contracts)). A heightened speed-up in concentration, processing power, and returns in HFT might be available in the short-term (until extirpated). The bigger point is that more of our human activity and patterns might be instantiated in smart contract DACs that look like HFT financial instruments (not in the sense of securities requiring regulation, but in the sense of automated pricing and execution behavior). Real-time bidding networks for advertising are already a kind of financial instrument in this sense, and more human-intervened processes could be implemented in the automatic markets format. Energy, logistics, fulfillment, and transportation (autonomous driving Uber-nets) could all be automatically orchestrated by tradenets and smart contract DACs, unobtrusive and backgrounded to the consumer. Pricing as an external heuristic (currently assessed and imposed by human agents) is no longer needed to price the resource in smartnetworks because the most effective pricing is when the resource prices itself. In this fit-ordered model, the underlying resource determines its own real-time minute-to-minute value, prices itself as a smart resource on a smartnetwork, and might enter into future contracts for its availability too.

2. Theoretical Blockchain Finance
As economics has been traditionally conceived with scarcity as its basis (the production and consumption of scarce resources), so too has finance been conceived as the control or prediction of the future value of assets and liabilities. However, the scarcity view of economics no longer holds in an era of digital services, non-rival goods, and complementarity. Likewise, the controlled future value of assets view of finance also no longer holds in an era where all of the variables concerning assets, capital, and investment might be changing. In economics, three crucial mindset shifts are moving from scarcity to abundance, labor to fulfillment, and hierarchy to decentralization. In finance, three similar mindset shifts could be moving from ownership to access, point values to topological ranges, and insufficiency to assurity (cognitive easing). Already there are indications that a significant transformation to autonomous driving might be underway, turning transportation into a fungible on-demand resource with a focus on access as opposed to ownership. Cars could become like air, a resource that one does not generally (on terrestrial Earth) have to think about owning, or expounding cognitive effort towards its ongoing attainment. Other examples in the emergence of the blockchain economy include the centralized version moving to the decentralized alternative: OpenBazaar to eBay, datt.co to Reddit, and LaZooz to Uber. Many decentralized versions have been conceptualized, even if they are not yet fully available.

Kickstarter, Crowdfunding, and Ambient Finance
One of the most rooted assumptions in economics is that any large-scale project requires financing, which would necessarily be in the form of debt capital. There is really just one mode of undertaking large-scale projects now, and that is to raise a chunk of capital that is spent down over time. This is a tremendously inefficient process at every step of the value chain, but there has been no viable alternative so far. The inefficiency of capital is highly visible in the case of startups (in the recent failures of Clinkle and Color). Institutional capital in public and corporate projects likely has greater inefficiency, and much less transparency, particularly regarding the degree of corrupt appropriations.

Now available: Configurable Smartmoney 
The immediate benefit of blockchains is that they have the capacity to bring greater transparency, accountability, and monitoring to the effective use of capital. The more profound contribution of blockchains is that they invite a new class of thinking about all financial matters including capital. Currently, there is just one mode of capital-raising for projects and it is narrowband; the “big chunk of capital” method. Other methods such as pledged capital calls have traditionally failed because monies are not escrowed and thus unavailable when needed. Blockchain-based smart contracts can change all of this, and vastly open up the range and type of financing choices that might be available. At minimum, pledges can be confirmed and escrowed. At a higher level of resolution, a whole new mode of finance might be implemented whereby capital is an available on-demand resource disbursed continuously in real-time per the assessed level needed. This more ambient version of capital as a resource can fluctuate with greater correspondence to objectively-determined and objectively-monitored underlying project needs.

Capital budgeting becomes an on-demand resource assignation process like just-in-time inventories or Uber rides. 

As smart resources automatically price themselves on smartnetworks, so too could smart contracts automatically call from escrowed pledges and “drip” capital into projects as needed. Some of the technical modes of effectuating this are Ricardian contracts and Hash Time-Locked Contracts (such as on the Lightning payment network); essentially ways to escrow-pledge capital and secure bi-directional payment channels without cheating.

Long-tail Economics and Ambient Capital
Kickstarter and the legalization of crowdfunding have already been a shift towards alternative more resilient network models of ambient finance. The greater effect of blockchains is that we might now have additional trustable cryptographic methods to administer capital commitment calls in greater correspondence, ambience, and monitoring with the underlying project needs. Most essentially, finance concerns credit, and credit concerns trust. With the creation of algorithmic trust and other blockchain-type mechanisms, the possibility is that the long-tail of economics and finance can meet. Like eBay for investors and projects, any two long-tail parties can meet and transact in a secure blockchain-based environment without having to know each other. The effect could be that many more projects and micro-starter projects might be able to receive the funding needed to advance. In the abundance economy of the future, credit to explore one's project ideas could come to be seen as a basic human right, in a sort of singularity-class financial inclusion operation of blockchains.

3. Conceptual Blockchain Finance
There may be two nodes in the adoption of any new technology. Initially the innovative idea, such as blockchains, might be grasped in its capacity as a “better horse;” as an improved version of something familiar. Most simply, blockchains are merely a modernizing information technology. Blockchains might help to do everything that we are already doing better. Blockchains streamline and modernize the operations of the financial services enterprise. In the second moment, after having implemented a new technology in its “better horse” applications, a new tier of possibilities, perhaps anticipated at the outset, can come into view more strongly, with the new technology now being conceived as a “car;” as a transformative and novel paradigm that completely reconfigures the former operation. At present, “better horse” implementations of blockchain technology are underway, modernizing the existing financial services industry with single-ledger technology, private ledgers (known confirmed identity of transaction-submitting parties) that are still centralized. In the second moment, “car” implementations might be the longer-term future. Digitalizing money, payments, economics, and finance renders all of these factors infinitely more composable, malleable, fungible, distributable, automatable, and configurable in a plurality of ways and novel applications that has not been possible before. With blockchains, the implication is not just that all modes of financial activity could be modernized, but that the very foundations of the concept of finance could be rethought.

Raising a Trust Bond: Using financial structures to expand into the economy of the future
In one potential near-future world of having transitioned to an automation economy, successful economies may be attending to the production and consumption of intangible social goods like autonomy and recognition, in addition to materials goods (where all needs might be met via GBIs (guaranteed basic income initiatives) or other measures). The same financial system could be used to deploy the new intangible social goods economy, for example, for community initiative X, there could be a trust bond. For example, the government might need to raise trust (as an intangible currency) to launch a certain program, such as a digital identity system. The same financial structure can be used, but instead of raising capital, trust is the commodity required to be raised or amassed for this particular initiative. Another example is raising the intangible social good of agency for personal health and fitness care-taking. These were two examples using the familiar financial structure with the alternative currencies of trust and agency. Another example using familiar financial structures for alternative “future finance” purposes could be simply the decentralized version. This would be the same capital-raising supply chain for example, but now populated by Kickstarter-like crowdfunding sources. In another example of similar concepts in a decentralized structure, Medici has been envisioned as a decentralized public capital market for stock and bond offerings.

4. Conclusion: The new finance – Cognitive Easing
Blockchains are a new form of cryptographic information technology that allows the digitalization of money, payments, economics, and finance. The stakes are high – blockchains could be instrumental in orchestrating an orderly transition to the automation economy (the outsourcing of unelected labor to technology). There could be two core objectives to such an orderly transition to the automation economy. One is material easing (less efforting required to attain material sustenance requirements), and the other is cognitive easing (less mental efforting required to attain tangible material goods and intangible social goods such as autonomy, recognition, and trust). Beyond the modernization of economics and finance, successful implementations of blockchain technology could point themselves towards the broader societal goal of cognitive easing over cognitive efforting for resource attainment in both the present (economics) and the future (finance).

Melanie Swan is a philosopher and economic theorist at the New School for Social Research in New York, has an MBA in Finance from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and is the author of the best-selling book: Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy.

This post is dedicated to Lee Corbin, a reader of this blog and always-thoughtful interlocutor.

Blockchains as an Equality Technology

The advent of blockchain technology has prompted the questioning of many concepts that have been taken for granted for years such as money, currency, markets, economics, politics, citizenship, governance, authority, and self-determination.

We have become accustomed to the hierarchical structures of the contemporary world. These structures and models were nice advances at the time of their derivation, hundreds of years ago, to facilitate the large-scale orchestration of different operations of society so that life could be conducted in a safe and productive manner.

While serving as a significant node in the overall progress of humanity, the imperfect value proposition of hierarchical models has been waning, and especially rapidly so in the current era of science and technology. Now contemporary information technology is facilitating not just a more efficient life through technology (off-loading both physical and mental drudgery), but also allowing the models for large-scale societal coordination to be rethought.

Large-scale decentralized (e.g.; non-hierarchical) orchestration models like blockchain technology are starting to be available, and this could configure a completely new era in human progress. This is because decentralized models are equality technologies: technologies that allow more possibility for individual liberties, freedoms, rights, actualization, expression, and self-determination than has been possible in hierarchical models. Further, equality technologies imply not just more liberties for individuals and an eradication of illiberty, but a better equalization or calibration of liberties amongst individuals and societies.

It is not that a complete revolution to decentralized models would be underfoot, it is that decentralized models are a striking new entrant in the possibility space of the models for large-scale coordination. The longer-term future could likely be a space where there are many different centralized, decentralized, and hybrid models, and other new forms of models, where the important dynamic becomes tuning the orchestration system to the requirements of the underlying situation.

Connected World Wearables Free Cognitive Surplus

The immediate reaction to the Connected World (26 billion devices by 2020 as predicted by Gartner; more than four connected devices per human; or really 1 for some and 20 for others) is the notion that man is becoming infantilized: over-tracked, over-surveilled, and over-directed by technology, and certainly over-dependent upon technology. We no longer seem able to think for ourselves with the cloud automatically piloting all aspects of day-to-day life with reminders, notifications, and ambiently-updating data. Worse, our lives seem automated and automatonish; where is the caprice and serendipity, the humanness?

What is the Connected World?
Increasingly we are living in a seamlessly connected world of multi-device computing that includes wearable computing, Internet-of-Things (IOT) sensors, smartphones, tablets, laptops, Quantified Self-Tracking devices (i.e.; Fitbit), smarthome, smartcar, and smartcity. We enjoy the benefits of the automation that comes with this: cloud linkage of quantified-self wearable sensor data, online social profiles, calendaring, email, smart home controls, and smart transport connected to smart city data feeds. Google automatically wakes us up in the morning (knowing our schedule (Google calendar) and our biorhythms (sleep monitor)). Google contacts continuously monitor our glucose level, and in cahoots with MyBasis (number of steps walked) and Vessyl (drink detection), recommend food and drink choices during the day, and give us our fitness profile, calories consumed, and health biostatus reports at the end of the day. Apple HealthKit (iOS 8) automatically records and uploads 200 different biometrics to the cloud. Apply Pay automates payment. Amazon Fresh quadcopter drones could circle our homes with replenishment supplies within one hour of detecting an empty milk bottle. NFC/iBeacon proximity marketing could push-notify us at the aisle level when we are in the store. TrackR alerts us if we have lost our wallet or keys, and loved ones track our geo-presence and send us haptic hugs through our MyTJacket.

Cognitive Surplus Unleashed
The easy knee-jerk reaction is that this is bad news - the Connected World means the infantilization of man by technology. However, going beyond this, it must be asked what is really happening at the higher level with the connected world, and how this could be beneficial. In fact, what is happening at the higher level is that huge classes of human time-occupying planning and coordination activities are being removed from human purview and pushed onto technology. Currently we spend exorbitant amounts of time and energy on coordination, planning, and organizing our activity, and dynamically updating and re-organizing it on demand; all the while also engaged in the subordinate activity of seeking and obtaining information related to planning and coordination. Planning and coordination constitutes 100% of our time sometimes. What Connected World cloud technologies do at the higher level is automate all of this. 

The Connected World relocates planning as a whole class of human cognitive activity, it is outsourced to technology. 

While many people might enjoy relinquishing planning and coordination as a class of human cognitive activity, others might regard it as a humanness that should be preserved, that is some how unnatural to discard. However, the more relevant question is what we will do with all of the time saved once technology has automated our planning and coordination activities. The Connected World as automated life-planning could free up over 50% of our time and allow us to more fully cogitate higher-level problems and develop new learning and interest areas. The Connected World is the automation and outsourcing of lower-level cognitive tasks that currently consume prodigious amount of our time and effort. In the newly-freed cognitive expansiveness, we could become engaged in new classes of problems, and more fully actualize our potential as humans.

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.

Identity Authentication and Security Access 2.0

Identity needs to be authenticated in more granular, flexible, real-time ways as digital venues expand and the physical world becomes more digitalized. Technology is now making it possible to rethink and provide a 2.0 update to the whole area of identity authentication and security access services.

The ubiquity of cell phones, and increasingly smartphones, means that many forms of identity authentication can be moved from costly and easy-to-lose physical ID cards to mobile access platforms. QR codes, NFC, and other wireless-based technologies are already starting to be used for security authentication and single-use sign-on for website access.

Work identity badges, hospital access badges, and government and school IDs are examples of physical-world ID cards that can be moved to smartphone ID cards. Likewise many services linking identity authentication to resource-access and mobile payment can be automated, for example, event tickets, work conference room reservation and access, medical equipment and pharmaceutical inventory access, and rental car and hotel check-in and resource access. Digital ID cards can incorporate multi-factor authentication: for example, the visual look, a custom sound or image elicited upon being tapped, or information returned from an external server as the QR code is read.

Robotic benefits could accelerate into the service and software industries

An animated discussion about the future of robotics occurred at the September 24, 2011 Boulder Colorado Future Salon. One claim is that the last few decades in robotics might be analogous to the status of the computing industry in the 1950-1970s, growing slowly but surely, and suggesting that the pervasiveness and impact of robotics could start to accelerate. There has been significant progress in agricultural automation and factory automation, and this could spread rapidly to service industries and information technology industries.

On the one hand this is the next logical step in fulfilling the ongoing human dream of using technology to provide more free time. On the other hand, while so far robotics has not had a big negative impact on jobs, a more rapid move to automation in more sectors could result in a more significant displacement of human capital.

Industries of the future
There is a tremendous opportunity to identify the industries of the future and start them. Future industries could be clustered by areas such as sustenance (food, energy, and clean resources), health, productive activity, entertainment, and well-being. One obvious group of future technologies will focus on food, for example, vertical farming and lab-grown meat. Mental well-being and enhancement is virtually untapped, although there is some preliminary activity in applying behavioral change and happiness research, and calming technologies. Some key dynamics that govern human behavior will not be going away in the short-term such as the demand for status-garnering and reputation-building (why gaming has been so successful), so industries providing opportunities for this would be well-pitched.

Automated nourishment

An interesting question arose from discussions at the recent IFTF annual forecast presentation - Would people be more or less healthy in a possible future era of 3-D food-printing on-demand?

Both sides of the case can be seen. The immediate conclusion might be that if anyone could print any food item on-demand any time, people would over-consume and be less healthy.

However, one of the biggest mistakes that can occur when considering a potential future advance is thinking of it in isolation and not bringing forward all other aspects of technology and society to this point too. In an era with on-demand 3-D food printing, other changes are also likely to have occurred. The first and most obvious is that perhaps food content or accompanying supplements, drugs, and nutraceuticals have changed to mean that food that tastes good is not necessarily unhealthy, even when consumed in large quantities. Non-fat non-sugar substitutes may have become seamless matches in the quality of taste but not in caloric consumption. Today’s unhealthy foods could go the way of cigarettes. Automated calorie consumption data collection might finally be possible.

A second argument for why people would be more rather than less healthy in an era of on-demand 3-D food printing is the massively granular physical tracking and biofeedback tools that could exist for each person. Smarthouse and smartclothing data collection through scanning and air, toilet, and unnoticeable blood stick diagnostics could be inputs to a continuously updating personal digital health model (e.g.; the future analog to Entelos's virtual patient or Archimedes's virtual twin). A personal digital health model could be used to assess exactly which real-time nutritional adjustments are needed by an individual. An automated menu plan from the kitchen printer may be preferable for creating meals based on an individual’s known preferences and reactions together with real-time needs. The portable personal digital health model could be permissioned into restaurant settings to similarly allow for customized meal synthesis.

A third argument comes from considering the potential trajectories of social networking and behavior change research. Already peer social networks have a strong influence on individual behavior. One’s whole peer network or interest group could be encouraging healthy behavior via team-based support and/or competition. The advent and widespread adoption of self-tracking and social interaction tools could bring about a new sensibility and personal responsibility for health self-management. Optional financial incentives from insurance companies could further facilitate behavior change.

Conclusion
In any possible future, there could be different technologies and social behavioral norms influencing the process of human nourishment. Food could become healthier over time and unobtrusive self-tracking tools and financial incentives could shift people to automated menu plans. Healthier behavior could be triggered just by making it easy.

Bio-design automation and synbio tools

The ability to write DNA could have an even greater impact than the ability to read it. Synthetic biologists are developing standardized methodologies and tools to engineer biology into new and improved forms, and presented their progress at the first-of-its-kind Bio-Design Automation workshop (agenda, proceedings) in San Francisco, CA on July 27, 2009, co-located with the computing industry’s annual Design Automation Conference. As with many areas of technological advancement, the requisite focus is on tools, tools, tools! (A PDF of this article is available here.)


Experimental evidence has helped to solidify the mindset that biology is an engineering substrate like any other and the work is now centered on creating standardized tools that are useful and reliable in an experimental setting. The metaphor is very much that of computing: just as most contemporary software developers work at high levels of abstraction and need not concern themselves with the 1s and 0s of machine language, in the future, synthetic biology programmers would not need to work directly with the Ac, Cs, Gs and Ts of DNA or understand the architecture of promoters, terminators, open reading frames and such. However, with synthetic biology being in its early stages, the groundwork to define and assemble these abstraction layers is currently at task.

Status of DNA synthesis
At present, the DNA synthesis process is relatively unautomated, unstandardized and expensive ($0.50-$1.00 per base pair (bp)); it would cost $1.5-3 billion to synthesize a full human genome. Synthesized DNA, which can be ordered from numerous contract labs such as DNA 2.0 in Menlo Park, CA and Tech Dragon in Hong Kong, has been following Moore’s Law (actually faster than Moore’s Law Carlson Curves doubling at 2x/yr vs. 1.5x/yr), but is still slow compared to what is needed. Right now short oligos, oligonucleotide sequences up to 200 bp, can be reliably synthesized but a low-cost repeatable basis for genes and genomes extending into the millions of bp is needed. Further, design capability lags synthesis capability, being about 400-800-fold less capable and allowing only 10,000-20,000 bp systems to be fully forward-engineered at present.

So far, practitioners have organized the design and construction of DNA into four hierarchical tiers: DNA, parts, devices and systems. The status is that the first two tiers, DNA and parts (simple modules such as toggle switches and oscillators), are starting to be consistently identified, characterized and produced. This is allowing more of an upstream focus on the next two tiers, complex devices and systems, and the methodologies that are needed to assemble components together into large-scale structures, for example those containing 10 million bp of DNA.

Standardizing the manipulation of biology
A variety of applied research techniques for standardizing, simulating, predicting, modulating and controlling biology with computational chemistry, quantitative modeling, languages and software tools are under development and were presented at the workshop.

Models and algorithms
In the models and algorithms session, there were some examples of the use of biochemical reactions for computation and optimization, performing arithmetic computation essentially the same way a digital computer would. Basic mathematical models such as the CME (Chemical Master Equation) and SSA (Stochastic Simulation Algorithm) were applied and extended to model, predict and optimize pathways and describe and design networks of reactions.

Experimental biology
The experimental biology session considered some potential applications of synthetic biology, first the automated design of synthetic ribosome binding sites to make protein production faster or slower (finding that the translation rate can be predicted if the Gibbs free energy (delta G) can be predicted). Second, an in-cell disease protection mechanism was presented where synthetic genetic controllers were used to prevent the lysis normally occurring in the lysis-lysogeny switch turned on in the disease process (lysogeny is the no-harm state and lysis is the death state).

Tools and parts
In the tools and parts session, several software-based frameworks and design tools were presented, many of which are listed in the software tools section below.

Languages and standardization
The languages and standardization session had discussions of language standardization projects such as the BioStream language, PoBol (Provisional BioBrick Language) and the BioBrick Open Language (BOL).

Software tools: a SynBio CrunchUp
Several rigorous computer-aided design and validation software tools and platforms are emerging for applied synthetic biology, many of which are freely available and open-source.

• Clotho: An interoperable design framework supporting symbol, data model and data structure standardization; a toolset designed in a platform-based paradigm to consolidate existing synthetic biology tools into one working, integrated toolbox
• SynBioSS - Synthetic Biology Software Suite: A computer-aided synthetic biology tool for the design of synthetic gene regulatory networks; computational synthetic biology
• RBS Calculator: A biological engineering tool that predicts the translation initiation rate of a protein in bacteria; it may be used in Reverse Engineering or Forward Engineering modes
• SeEd - Sequence Editor (work in progress): A tool for designing coding sequence alterations, a system conceptually built around constraints instead of sequences
• Cellucidate: A web-based workspace for investigating the causal and dynamic properties of biological systems; a framework for modeling modular DNA parts for the predictable design of synthetic systems
• iBioSim: A design automation software for analyzing biochemical reaction network models including genetic circuits, models representing metabolic networks, cell-signaling pathways, and other biological and chemical systems
• GenoCAD: An experimental tool for building and verifying complex genetic constructs derived from a library of standard genetic parts
• TinkerCell: A computer-aided design software for synthetic biology

Future of BioCAD
One of the most encouraging aspects in the current evolution of synthetic biology is the integrations the field is forging with other disciplines, particularly electronics design and manufacture, DNA nanotechnology and bioinformatics.

Scientists are meticulously applying engineering principles to synthetic biology and realize that novel innovations are also required since there are issues specific to engineering biological systems. Some of these technical issues include device characterization, impedance, matching, rules of composition, noise, cellular context, environmental conditions, rational design vs. directed evolution, persistence, mutations, crosstalk, cell death, chemical diffusion, motility and incomplete biological models.

As it happened in computing, and is happening now in biology, the broader benefit of humanity having the ability to develop and standardize abstraction layers in any field can be envisioned.

Clearly there will be ongoing efforts to more granularly manipulate and create all manner of biology and matter. Some of the subsequent areas where standards and abstraction hierarchies could be useful, though not immediate, are the next generations of computing and communications, molecular nanotechnology (atomically precise matter construction from the bottom up), climate, weather and atmosphere management, planet terraforming and space colony construction.

(Image credits: www.3dscience.com, www.biodesignautomation.org)

Is it moral to kick a robot?

As long as robots are non-sentient, non-feeling beings, it would only be immoral to kick a robot in the sense of potential property damage to others. It would be like kicking a couch or a car.

If robots were sentient, emotional beings, it would certainly be immoral to kick one. It would be like kicking a human.

If a robot were sentient but non-emotional, non-feeling, would it be immoral to kick it? Yes, for both the potential physical damage and an as yet undefined area of implied morality amongst sentient beings. Even if the robot did not ‘feel’ a kick as physical pain in the same way a human or animal would, the robot would have some sort of sensor network awareness that perceived and coded the action as inappropriate and possibly dangerous and illegal. A sentient robot would likely be able to take some action against the mistreatment.

How sentient or feeling does a robot need to become for it to be immoral to kick it? There will be early stages as robots are in the beginnings of sentience and emotion. If the kicker knows that the robot is or could be sentient or emotion-feeling, then it would be immoral to kick the robot. This would be similar to situations between adults and children, the former are assumed to have an uneven control and influence advantage over the latter who may not be consciously aware and able enough to perceive damage and protect themselves.