Dominic Basulto

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“It’s Still A Work In Progress”

October 5, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Initially, heart pacemakers were as big as ovens and external. Soon enough, they shrunk and found a home inside our bodies. Right now, most non-drug performance-enhancement methods are similarly external hardware, but they too will have their day to move within.

One example of that exterior computing power now being used to help athletes train smarter and perform better is IBM’s Watson, in one of its many post-Trebek roles. From Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post:

ORRECO, which has been working with the Oregon Track Club for more than six years and which recently joined the growing IBM Watson ecosystem, will teach Watson how to combine physiological test data, biomarker data, and data on nutrition and sleep into an individualized training program that the Oregon Track Club can use to optimize the schedules and performance of its runners. In addition, Coach Watson will be able to analyze the latest research findings from medical journals.

In doing so, Coach Watson will help to answer questions like “how hard” or “how long” a workout should be, whether an athlete experiencing fatigue should lower the intensity of workouts or take a few days off to recover, and how to optimize sleep schedules around travel. Coach Watson might also be able to spot signs of an upcoming injury weeks in advance through the continuous monitoring of biomarker data (e.g. an iron deficiency in the blood).

It’s still a work in progress — ORRECO chief executive Brian Moore told me that Watson is still a “junior coach coming up through the ranks” — but based on Watson’s previous success at extracting unexpected relationships from the data and proven ability to do trade-off analysis – there’s definitely potential for Coach Watson to provide an extra layer of knowledge for coaches.•

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“[It’s] Focused On Biology As A Radically New Type Of Manufacturing Platform”

May 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Washington Post article, Dominic Basulto reports on significant changes in synthetic biology, one of which is DARPA deciding to move forward in earnest into the field. “Engineering biology is emerging as a powerful technology with the potential for significant impact,” as the Defense agency asserts, in a statement marked by both potential and peril. One positive would be the work being applied to the manufacture of cities both on Earth and in space. On the other hand, the creation of synthetic life will pose ethical issues and risks, though it likewise could be a boon to medicine. In the long run, I feel it’s inevitable.

An excerpt:

After announcing the launch of its new Biological Technologies Office in April 2014, DARPA is finally moving off the sidelines and getting into the game. If DARPA brings the same innovation know-how to synthetic biology that it has brought to fields such as robotics, the Internet and autonomous vehicles, this could be big. At the Biology is Technology (BiT) event hosted by DARPA in San Francisco in mid-February, the agency sought to outline all the innovative ways that it hoped to use biology for defense technology, such as through its Living Foundries program.

At the BiT event, which included a keynote from Craig Venter and a fireside chat with George Church, DARPA Deputy Program Director Alicia Jackson laid out a compelling new vision for “Programming the Living World” that focused on biology as a radically new type of manufacturing platform. The goal, said Jackson, is to take everything researchers know from electronics, physics and engineering and migrate that over to the world of genomics and biology, making it possible to mass-produce engineered organisms. Jackson called synthetic biology a “new technology vector” that is more exciting and more scalable than anything that exists today.•

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“The Real Audacity Is What Happens Next”

March 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Someday we’ll be playing golf on the moon, hitting our balls in space.

I can’t say if Moon Express will successfully soft-land on the moon next year, but I think at some point in this century we’ll begin mining other spheres beyond our own. What body will be regulating such endeavors I do not know. From Dominic Basulto at the Washington Post:

Sometime in late 2016, a small robotic spacecraft the size of a coffee table will attempt to soft land on the surface of the moon. If it does so successfully, the new MX-1 lunar lander spacecraft from Moon Express would not only win the $30 million Google Lunar X PRIZE – it would also help to usher in a new era of commercial space exploration.

Soft-landing on the moon is a feat that has only been accomplished before by three superpowers – the United States, Russia and China. The notion that a team of approximately 40 employees at a Silicon Valley start-up that was founded only in August 2010 could pull off the same feat is audacious in and of itself. Thanks to a unique public-private partnership with NASA, though, Moon Express has access to NASA engineering expertise as well as access to launch facilities at the Kennedy Space Center.

But the real audacity is what happens next – and that’s the strategy that Moon Express has for mining the surface of the moon. As Naveen Jain, co-founder and chairman of Moon Express, told me in a phone interview, thanks to initiatives such as NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper mission, “We have mapped every inch of the moon, both topographically and mineralogically.” As a result, Moon Express has already outlined four categories of resources that might be mined in the future – platinum group metals, rare earth elements, helium-3, and, yes, moon rocks.•

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“Artificial Intelligence Is One Industry That Could Give Rise To The First $1 Trillion Company”

March 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

While it might make for an interesting bull session to predict what industry, nascent or developed, could create the first trillion-dollar company, such a development wouldn’t really be a good barometer of how well off we truly are. Is this company helping or hurting the environment? Is it a sign of greater wealth inequality? Are there other unintended consequences? In a Washington Post opinion piece, futurist Dominic Basulto mainly concerns himself with just the central question. An excerpt:

Artificial intelligence is one industry that could give rise to the first $1 trillion company – provided, of course, that sentient AI life doesn’t kill off humanity before it reaches that target. The promise of AI is that almost anything can be made more valuable by making it smarter. It’s no wonder that we’ve started to see an initial land grab of smart “machine learning” companies and talent. Google, for example, has spent more than $400 million to acquire DeepMind Technologies to ramp up its deep learning capabilities. For AI ever to produce a trillion-dollar company, though, machines will need to do more than just recognize patterns and crunch a lot of data. AI start-ups will need to create a fundamentally new way for humans to interact with machines, perhaps even a new way of learning or acquiring knowledge.

Another potential trillion-dollar industry is 3D printing, which promises a “second industrial revolution.” 3D printing has the potential to upend the way we buy, sell and make everything, turning every garage into a personal fabrication unit. If the first industrial revolution was all about mass production, the second industrial revolution will be all about mass customization. There are any number of companies today that hope to use 3D printing for rapid prototyping, design and small-batch manufacturing, but the real boost will come when there is a 3D printer on every desk and in every home. Think of a mega-ecosystem even bigger than the one Apple is building.

But that’s really just scratching the surface. Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler in their new book Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World highlight a handful of technologies — including the Internet of Things, AI, robotics and synthetic biology — that have the potential to fundamentally change the way we live. Add to this list other futuristic tech favorites such as drones, asteroid mining, augmented reality, and nanotechnology and you have other prospects for the first $1 trillion company.•

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