🚀 Exclusive interview ; humanity's first space battle ; impressive bionic hand ; flying car in 2024 ; AI you can wear & more
Lasers to build roads on the moon & more
Hi,
This is Thomas, Cofounder and CEO of digital agency KRDS (more about me at the end).
You're receiving Future Weekly, my personal selection of news about some of the most exciting (and sometimes scary) developments in technology 🤖 summarized as bullet points to help you save time and anticipate the future 🔮.
First, you'll find small bites about many different news, and then further down these summaries:
Tens of Thousands of People Can Now Order a Waymo Robotaxi Anywhere in that city.
A flying car that anyone can use will go on sale in 2024, guess the price.
Woman's Experimental Bionic Hand Passes Major Test with Flying Colors, see what it can do.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief explains why they’ve reached a stalemate (it’s about technology)
Will people wear Humane’s Ai Pin, a $700 Smartphone Alternative You Wear All Day? See how its laser projector works.
Small Bites
No comment on the OpenAI mess yet as it’s still developing and well discussed everywhere…
Please check my latest conversation on the Abundance Makers podcast with Casey Handmer, the founder of Terraform Industries. (youtube, spotify, apple)
Two years ago, Casey Handmer quit working on GPS science at NASA JPL to start Terraform Industries, a wild idea backed by visionary investors (including Stripe co-founder and CEO Patrick Collison)
His plan? To make the world's cheapest green hydrogen, the world's cheapest direct air capture CO2, and cheap carbon neutral natural gas at scale.
Make sure to check the description of the video/podcast for the timestamps to jump to the questions you’re the most interested in, we covered a lot, was a fascinating conversation! For instance:
- How does Terraform industries work? Link
- So counterintuitive: Why does Terraform Industries want low-efficiency systems? Link
- Why does Casey Handmer think that ultimately most of solar PV electricity will be used to synthesize green hydrocarbons for aviation (which will hence boom to whole new levels) as opposed to every other uses combined. Link
- Casey Handmer's spiciest takes on energy (why batteries will ultimately bankrupt most long power lines, and also why it won't make sense to build more fission reactors) Link
Great news: First malaria vaccine slashes early childhood mortality (Science.org)
Huge analysis in Africa shows it decreased toddler deaths by 13%
Humanity Just Witnessed Its First Space Battle (source)
In what may be the first known instance of combat occurring in space, an Israeli defense system destroyed a ballistic missile above Earth’s atmosphere likely sent from Yemen.
Amazon is investing millions in training a massive LLM codenamed 'Olympus' to rival OpenAI.
Olympus is reported to have 2 trillion parameters, which could make it one of the world's largest AI models (GPT-4 = 1 trillion).
Amazon also plans to integrate Olympus into Alexa.
3 Main take-aways of the AI safety summit in the UK:
AI companies agree to government tests on their technology to assess national security risks.
Yoshua Bengio (one of the 3 original godfathers of modern AI) will chair the “State of the Science” report on the capabilities and risks of frontier AI.
28 nations sign the 'Bletchley Declaration' agreeing upon the risks posed by AI. (including European Union, China and the US)
dont “We are especially concerned by such risks in domains such as cybersecurity and biotechnology, as well as where frontier AI systems may amplify risks such as disinformation.”
What?? "The biggest challenge I’m still thinking of: what are LLMs truly useful for, in terms of helpfulness?"
...said Cathy Pearl, a Google user experience lead who works on the company's Bard AI. (source)
Deepmind co-founder: There’s a 50% Chance We’ll Hit Artificial General Intelligence in Just 5 Years (source)
OpenAI
exnew CEO Sam Altman on Twitter: “I expect AI to be capable of superhuman persuasion well before it is superhuman at general intelligence”OpenAI Chief AI Architect Ilya sutskever: “One possibility is that many people will choose to become part AI.” Sutskever is saying this could be how humans try to keep up. “At first, only the most daring, adventurous people will try to do it. Maybe others will follow. Or not.” (source)
Elon Musk announces Grok AI (a name that means “to understand” in tech circles) (x.ai)
"A unique and fundamental advantage of Grok is that it has real-time knowledge of the world via the 𝕏 platform. It will also answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems." (euhhh…what can go wrong?)
On some benchmarks, "Grok-1 displayed strong results, surpassing all other models in its compute class, including ChatGPT-3.5. It is only surpassed by models that were trained with a significantly larger amount of training data and compute resources like GPT-4."
Not yet available for all though
Someone used AI voice cloning to create a cover of the late Johnny Cash singing Taylor Swift's "Blank Space", quite impressive, listen to it here
Amazing: A new Beatles song, "Now and Then", has just been released after 45 years — with help from AI (source, official music video, The Last Beatles Song - Short Film)
John Lennon recorded a demo of the song with piano and vocals in 1978.
AI software was used to clean up Lennon’s vocals and feature them on the track.
Marc Andreessen in his latest Techno-Optimist Manifesto (a must-read even if quite a bit to disagree on)
“We believe that if we make both intelligence and energy “too cheap to meter”, the ultimate result will be that all physical goods become as cheap as pencils. Pencils are actually quite technologically complex and difficult to manufacture, and yet nobody gets mad if you borrow a pencil and fail to return it. We should make the same true of all physical goods.”
Another example of AI use in hospitals (source)
Use recorded discussions between doctors and interns as they make their hospital rounds, combined with a given patient’s charts and the updates to them—to identify missing actions or overlooked questions.
The AI component could then produce a summary of its findings for review by the medical staff. According to some estimates, doctors currently spend 33% of their time writing up reports and the decisions made; such a system could reduce that time by up to 80%.
Scientists reveal plan to use lasers to build roads and landing pads on the moon by melting the lunar soil into a more solid, layered substance (source)
The Moon’s surface is a tough place to land and live. The dust of the soil tends to get kicked up by landers – and the low gravity means that it floats around after it is disturbed, potentially finding its way into equipment.
The idea is to use a laser beam to make hollow (creux) triangular shapes that could be locked together to create solid surfaces.
May be possible as well to use a big lens of more than 2m2, which would have to be transported from Earth, to concentrate sunlight, rather than using a laser, and so allow the material to be created with relatively small equipment.
Company founded by Frenchman François Dubrulle and with offices in Singapore, Houston and France raises $100M to to develop tech for the moon (Techcrunch)
The company aims to send its ZeusX spacecraft to the moon in just four years, with a second mission in 2029.
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More to chew!
Tens of Thousands of People Can Now Order a Waymo Robotaxi Anywhere in San Francisco (source)
Now, the full San Francisco service area will be available to all current Waymo One users—amounting to tens of thousands of people, according to TechCrunch.
San Francisco has proven a challenging environment, with aggressive urban drivers, steep hills, and at-times narrow, winding streets.
In early September, Waymo released a report coauthored with insurance giant Swiss Re claiming its cars are safer than human drivers.
after several million miles driven by both Cruise and Waymo, most documented collisions were low-speed and and often the fault of another driver. This was especially true for Waymo, which he found had a comparatively cleaner safety record.
A flying car that anyone can use will go on sale in 2024, priced at $190,000 (The Economist)
Helix is a single-seat vehicle, so “flying motorbike” might be a more accurate appellation.
It has been crafted by its maker, Pivotal, based in Silicon Valley, to be within America’s rules for microlight aircraft. That means anyone, pilot’s licence or not, can fly it over non-built-up areas.
Fitted with a parachute
Top speed of 100km/h, its range is only 30km. Takes 4h30min to charge
Woman's Experimental Bionic Hand Passes Major Test With Flying Colors (source)
The Mia Hand prosthetic, fused with bone and connected to the nervous system, has given its owner a new lease on life and much less phantom pain.
The woman suffered an injury that took much of her right arm over 20 years ago.
The bionic limb can perform about 80% of a typical hand’s functions
It’s outfitted with state-of-art technology, including AI.
Much like a real flesh-and-blood hand, it’s controlled by Karin’s nervous system and provides sensory feedback.
Ukraine’s commander-in-chief, General Valery Zaluzhny: “Just like in the first world war we have reached the level of technology that puts us into a stalemate” he says. (The Economist)
The general concludes that it would take a massive technological leap to break the deadlock. “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”
General Zaluzhny’s assessment is sobering: there is no sign that a revolutionary technological breakthrough, whether in drones or in electronic warfare, is around the corner.
The implication is that Ukraine is stuck in a long positional war
"Russia should not be underestimated. It has suffered heavy losses and expended a lot of ammunition. But it will have superiority in weapons, equipment, missiles and ammunition for a considerable time." he says
"If Ukraine is to escape from that trap, we will need all these things: air superiority, much-improved electronic-warfare and counter-artillery capabilities, new mine-breaching technology and the ability to mobilise and train more reserves. We also need to focus on modern command and control—so we can visualise the battlefield more effectively than Russia and make decisions more quickly—and on rationalising our logistics while disrupting Russia’s with longer-range missiles."
Humane’s Ai Pin is a $700 Smartphone Alternative You Wear All Day (Wired)
If you’re willing to clip the Ai Pin to your chest, you can talk, gesture, and tap to take photos or summon a powerful virtual assistant.
Humane’s device, called the Ai Pin, can take photos and send texts, uses a laser to project a visual interface onto a person’s palm, and comes with a virtual assistant that can be as sharp as ChatGPT. By always being ready to search the web and communicate, it is supposed to quash dependency on smartphones.
Mmmm:To put on the Ai Pin involves placing a magnetic battery pack on the inside of a shirt or other piece of clothing, and letting a magnet on the Pin itself hold the system in place. It’s altogether about 55 grams, nearly the weight of a tennis ball.
The Ai Pin’s most distinctive features reside in the curved top of the device, which houses an ultrawide camera, light and depth detectors, and a laser projector.
Like Clips and Meta’s smart glasses, Humane’s Pin has a "trust light" that indicates to people nearby when the microphone or camera is activated.
Tapping the Pin and then moving a palm into its field of view activates its laser, which projects images and text onto a user’s hand. Tilting the hand navigates between displayed options and a swatting gesture swipes to a different menu. Users “click” on an option by tapping their thumb and index finger together and close their hand briefly to return to a home screen.
Ken Kocienda, Humane’s head of product engineering, who worked on touchscreen typing and autocorrect for Apple’s first iPhone, says he often talks to Ai Mic over breakfast with his wife and at red lights on his drive home as questions pop into mind. “It keeps you in the moment with the people you are with and it feels really lightweight and fun,” he says. About 100 of Humane's 260 or so employees worked at Apple at some point, according to LinkedIn profiles.
Chaudhri says while the Pin supports Bluetooth headphones, its built-in speakers are designed to create a bubble of sound around the user that provides an intimate experience when turned down low. “People in the office use it and we can’t really tell,” he says.
Previous newsletters:
Essay: Green, On-Demand, Abundant Energy by 2050 is Definitely Possible: Here's the Plan
How a missing gene in our DNA affected the Battle of Trafalgar and gave birth to the Mafia
Superhuman: see how much work a professor did in 30 minutes with AI, + more gems about the future
That's it for this week :)
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More about me
I cofounded KRDS right after college back in 2008 in Paris, we now also have offices in Singapore, HK, Shanghai, Dubai and India, we're one of the largest independent digital agencies in Asia. More here.
Watch our latest game showreel: At KRDS, we take pride in designing and developing games from scratch for brands and organizations, big and small! Gamification has always been part of our DNA, since our early days creating viral apps on Facebook back in Paris as the very first Facebook marketing partner outside of the USA!
I launched 2 sister agencies:
OhMyBot.net, dedicated to designing and building chatbots (watch the video case study for a chatbot campaign we ideated and developed for Clean & Clear: The Teen Skin Expert)
The WeChat Agency for the Chinese market (the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation is a client)
I also write op-eds and do podcasts at times. Here are my latest articles and podcasts
For the French speakers:
I’ve written more than 50 articles on the future of technology over the past years, all can be found listed here.
This newsletter has a French version with slightly different content: Parlons Futur
Have a great weekend :)
Thomas