This Week in New Age Technology: 7_26_2021
Bite sized news on disruptive technology, every week!
Word of the Week - Metaverse đ
What is a Metaverse? Where did it come from? And why does it feel like Iâm seeing it more often?
Coined by the writer Neal Stephenson in his 1992 novel, âSnow Crash,â then reimagined as the Oasis in the Ernest Cline novel âReady Player One,â it refers to a fully realized digital world that exists beyond the physical world.
Check out how the Oasis Metaverse is portrayed in the Ready Player One trailer:
In short, as sensory immersion continues to bring us deeper into virtual environments, itâs likely the time spent exploring and creating in a digital world, -and the full scope of that world, will continue to increase.
The most widely agreed core attributes of a Metaverse include always being live and persistent â with both planned and spontaneous events always occurring â while at the same time providing an experience that spans and operates across platforms and the real world.
A Metaverse must also have no real cap on audience, and have its own fully functioning economy. Everything from learning, working, and socializing will take place in the Metaverse as we continually push the boundaries of virtual experience.
Companies like Roblox, Fortnite, and Animal Crossing have already incorporated Metaverse like elements into their platforms with persistent language around the intention.
I know for myself anyway, Iâm excited to fly a spaceship to the moon, be in the cockpit of a virtual Rocket League match, and try out new gamified story based ways of learning.
Artificial Intelligence đ©âđ»
Google DeepMind's AlphaFold Unveils Protein Folding Breakthrough
Proteins are essential building blocks of living organisms; every cell we have in us is packed with them.
Understanding the shapes of proteins is critical for advancing medicine, but until now, only a fraction of these have been worked out.
Previously, after decades of work, only 17% of the proteins in the human body have had their structures identified in the lab. If AlphaFoldâs predictions are as accurate as DeepMind says, the tool has more than doubled this number in just a few weeks.
Commenting on the results from AlphaFold, Dr Demis Hassabis, chief executive and co-founder of artificial intelligence company Deep Mind, said:
"We believe this work represents the most significant contribution AI has made to advancing the state of scientific knowledge to date."
The 350,000 protein structures predicted by AlphaFold include not only the 20,000 contained in the human proteome, but also those of so-called model organisms used in scientific research, such as E. coli, yeast, the fruit fly and the mouse.
Commenting on the predictions from AlphaFold, Prof McGeehan, a structural biologist at the University of Portsmouth, said: "It's just the speed - the fact that it was taking us six months per structure and now it takes a couple of minutes. We couldn't really have predicted that would happen so fast."
The development could help supercharge the discovery of new drugs to treat disease, alongside other applications.
Check out the database for yourself here: dpmd.ai/alphafolddb
Robotics đ€
Alphabet Launches New Robotics Software Company Intrinsic
Alphabet announced its latest venture Friday, a robotics software company called Intrinsic. The segment comes out of X, its moonshots division.
âWhat if robots could be as easy to use as computers are today?â
Intrinsic said itâs developing software tools to make industrial robots easier to use, cheaper and more flexible, so they can expand the reach of consumers using them. This question helps to demonstrate the companyâs core intention.
From their website, https://x.company/projects/intrinsic:
âToday, industrial robots perform a limited set of tasks in a limited set of industries.
Thatâs because they are typically expensive to purchase, set up, and operate, and require specialized knowledge to program and use. Teaching robots to perform new tasks, like welding the body of a car together, can take hundreds of manual programming hours.
The investment of time and expertise required to use industrial robots, along with the fact that they can perform a limited number of tasks in just a few environments like factory floors, make them impractical and out of reach for most businesses.â
The Intrinsic team has been developing software and AI tools that use sensor data from a robotâs environment so that it can sense, learn from, and quickly adapt to the real world.
The hope is that by making industrial robots easier to use, they can enable people to make products and build businesses that we can only just begin to imagine.
Internet of Things đ»
Armâs New Flexible Plastic Chip Could Enable an âInternet of Everythingâ
The ultimate goal of the Internet of Things (IoT) is to build computing capabilities into every object in the world, but thatâs a pipe dream with todayâs chips.
British chip designer Arm thinks it might have the solution after unveiling the most powerful plastic microprocessor to date.
In a paper published last week in Nature, researchers from the company detailed a 32-bit microprocessor built directly onto a plastic substrate that promises to be both flexible and dramatically cheaper than todayâs chips.
âWe envisage that PlasticARM will pioneer the development of low-cost, fully flexible smart integrated systems to enable an âinternet of everythingâ consisting of the integration of more than a trillion inanimate objects over the next decade into the digital world,â they wrote.
While flexible electronics aren't new, a practical microprocessor capable of "meaningful computations" is.
The new chip designed by Arm squeezed 50,000 transistors into a little under one square inch. This allowed them to create 18,000 logic gates, roughly 12 times as many as any previous flexible integrated circuit.
The chip is essentially a copy of Armâs ultra-low power processor, but with some significant caveats. The chip can only manage speeds more than 30 times slower and it uses 2,000 times as much power, though itâs still not much at 20 milliwatts.
Despite the prominent mentions of the chipâs flexibility, its low cost is probably the more important factor.
These chips might not be nearly as powerful as their silicon cousins, but they will be much, much cheaper. And there are many applications where price is a far bigger factor than processing capabilities, from smart clothing to intelligent packaging.
Blockchain đ
Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, & Cathie Woods Speak at Virtual Bitcoin Conference
It is hard to ignore the fact that we were watching three of the most impressive people in business and finance.
Cathie Wood has taken the finance world by storm leveraging actively managed ETFs, which also benefits from a research heavy approach.
Jack Dorsey is one of the best entrepreneurs ever. He has built two multi-billion dollar companies between Twitter and Square.
Elon Musk needs no introduction. Similar to Dorsey, he runs multiple multi-billion dollar companies. He spent his early career thinking about payments through the creation of PayPal and has recently become interested in bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies.
Each person brought a different perspective. Cathie understands the institutional investment world better than almost anyone. Jack understands the bitcoin ethos, the internet, and potential impact on developing nations from bitcoin. Elon is much more focused on the technical components of the network.
As for big takeaways, Musk noted that the electric-car maker isnât the only company he runs that holds Bitcoinârevealing that SpaceX, his privately owned aerospace and satellite communications company, also owns the crypto.
Musk reiterated that his automaker could begin accepting Bitcoin again if miners were to rely more on cleaner energy sources, and he noted âa positive trendâ in that direction. âIt looks like Bitcoin is shifting a lot more toward renewables,â he said, noting that âa bunch of the heavy-duty coal plants that were being usedâ to mine Bitcoin âhave been shut down, especially in China.â He added that once he could establish that the percentage of Bitcoinâs renewable energy usage âis most likely at or above 50%, and that there is a trend toward increasing that number,â then Tesla would resume accepting Bitcoin.
Cathie noted she thinks Bitcoin has much to offer in the âsocialâ and âgovernanceâ aspects of ESGâthe former by providing financially underserved people with âaccess to payment technologyâŠeverywhere around the world without friction,â and the latter by offering transparency âunlike the opaqueness of financial systems and the toll-takers in the traditional financial world.â
And Dorsey said the cryptocurrency could function as the Internetâs ânative currencyâ in a way that would help businesses small and large grow âin a much faster way.â He cited Twitter as an example, expressing his belief that the social media giant âwould certainly not have the dependency we have upon the advertising business model if Bitcoin existed pre-Twitter.â
Jack Dorsey explicitly stated that âmy hope is that [bitcoin] creates world peace.â
All in all the talk was at the very least an expression of support towards the communities infrastructure development.
Virtual Reality đ¶
Facebook is Doubling Down on Becoming "A Metaverse" Company
As June came to an end, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told his employees about an ambitious new initiative. Facebook would strive to build an interconnected set of experiences straight out of sci-fi â a world known as the metaverse.
The Facebook CEO described it as âan embodied internet where instead of just viewing content - you are in itâ.
âWhat I think is most interesting is how these themes will come together into a bigger idea,â Zuckerberg said. âOur overarching goal across all of these initiatives is to help bring the metaverse to life.â
He told The Verge people shouldn't live through âsmall, glowing rectanglesâ.
âThatâs not really how people are made to interact,â he said, speaking of reliance on mobile phones.
âA lot of the meetings that we have today, youâre looking at a grid of faces on a screen. Thatâs not how we process things either.â
âIn the future, instead of just doing this over a phone call, youâll be able to sit as a hologram on my couch, or Iâll be able to sit as a hologram on your couch, and itâll actually feel like weâre in the same place, even if weâre in different states or hundreds of miles apart,â he said. âI think that is really powerful.â
"Part of the reason Facebook is so heavily invested in VR/AR is that the granularity of data available when users interact on these platforms is an order of magnitude higher than on screen-based media," Verity McIntosh, a VR expert at the University of the West of England, told the BBC.
"Now it's not just about where I click and what I choose to share, it's about where I choose to go, how I stand, what I look at for longest, the subtle ways that I physically move my body and react to certain stimuli. It's a direct route to my subconscious and that is gold to a data capitalist.
"It seems unlikely that Facebook will have an interest in changing a business model that has served them so well to prioritize user privacy or to give users any meaningful say in how their behavioral data in the 'metaverse' will be used."
Tech giants like Facebook defining and colonizing the space, while traditional governance structures struggle to keep up with the technological change could cause further issues, she added.