The Singularity is Here!

One of the best books on the future of technology to come out over the last decade was 'The Singularity is Near' by Ray Kurzweil.

Kurzweil forecasts how quickly key technologies such a Nanotechnology, Robotics and high level general Machine Intelligence will come about; and how it might impact on ordinary people's lives.

What is so good about the book is that it is written for the layman technologist, with little or some technical knowledge in computing, chemistry, mechanics and software, yet seems to hit home the main points about the future of these key technologies.

Take some time to absorb this epic classic!

Link to free copy of 'The Singularity is Near.'

Two Ways to Create a Billion Dollar Empire While Having a Bad  Day!

The first way is to solve a meaningful 100 billion dollar problem (eg; Effective Semantic Internet Search Engine; Cure for Asthma; Low Cost Autopilot Flying Car; Abundant Zero Carbon Emission Energy Source).

Or

The second is to find out what crap the general public can't get enough of (egs; Coke; X-Factor; Cricket; Sports Cars; Tabloid News).

Better?

Jobs that don’t yet exist

Future Jobs R Us.

What kinds of jobs will be created in 10-20 years time through advances in science and technology? On initial research I've identified and defined 10 new job roles that could become reality within a decade or 2. 

1. Personal Entertainment Programmers: Designers of in-person or electronic activities that meet the needs of individualised services. 

2. Genomics Baby Designer: With the unravelling of the human genome, new roles emerge to design personalised enhancements and select the genetic make-up of unborn children. 

3. Resource Use Consultant: As environmental awareness rises, roles emerge for advisors who help citizens grade the impact of every action / purchase / item and manage down the ecological footprint of our lifestyles and purchases. 

4. Personal Enhancement Advisors: Advances in hypermaterials, productive nanotechnologies, cognitive science, natural therapies and pharmaceuticals will offer an increasingly broad range of legal (and illegal) personal enhancements. These could be used to give sports people a competitive edge, enhance our memory capacity when studying for exams or increase the strength and endurance of soldiers in the field. Roles emerge professionals who take a holistic approach advising across a full range of possible enhancements. 

5. Psycho-Customiser: Future generations of mobile phones could offer a range of applications to help monitor and manage stress levels and counsel us on key decisions. Tomorrow's retail assistant could perform behavioural assessments to help customise our devises to match our personality type.

6. Nano-Medic: Advances in nanotechnology offer the potential for a range of sub-atomic 'nanoscale' device inserts and procedures that could transform personal healthcare. A new range of nano medicine specialists will be required to administer these treatments.

7. Vertical Farmers: There is growing interest in the concept of city based vertical farms, with hydroponically-fed food being grown in multi-storey buildings. These offer the potential to dramatically increase farm yield and reduce environmental degradation. The managers of such entities will require expertise in a range of wide scientific disciplines, engineering and commerce. 

8. Spaceline Pilots: With Virgin Galactic and others pioneering space tourism the need for space trained pilots will arise. 

9. Climate Change Reversal Specialist: As the threats and impacts of climate change increase, a new breed of engineer-scientists will be required to help reduce or reverse the effects of climate change on particular locations. They will need to apply multi-disciplinary solutions ranging from filling the oceans with iron filings to erecting giant umbrellas that deflect the sun's rays. 

10. Hydrogen Fuel Station Manager: Hydrogen will be cost-competitive with gasoline if refuelling stations were mass-produced. The hydrogen would be produced on-site, so managers would need an entirely different set of skills than those required in today's gas stations. 

In addition to the jobs described above, I've also identified a further 20 possibilities:

1. Professional VR Citizen 

2. Second Life Lawyer 

3. Nano Design Engineer

4. Machine Linguist 

5. Complexity Manager / Gaiantologist

6. Robot Mechanic 

7. Chief Health Officer 

8. Telemedicine Technician 

9. Pharmer of Genetically Engineered Crops and Livestock

10. Spaceport Designer

11. Space Tour Guide

12. Terraformer of the Moon and Other Planets

13. In-Company Gene Screener 

14. Drowned City Specialist 

15. Quarantine Enforcer 

16. Biorefinery Operative 

17. Holographer 

18. Virtual Reality Actor 

19. Narrowcaster 

20. Dirigible Pilot

Lots a Tooth? No Matter!

I thought this Mousey was chewing some gum, but turns out that green lump in its mouth is a fully-functional, bioengineered tooth, the result of "tooth regenerative therapy" research at Tokyo University .

Basically that little mouse (Jerry) lost a tooth and grew a new one in its place with the help of some scientists:

To create the new tooth, the researchers took epithelial cells and mesenchymal cells from a mouse embryo and cultivated them together in a collagen-based medium to create a tiny tooth bud. A mass of tissue that has the potential to develop into a tooth.

This mass of tissues was implanted in the spot where Jerry's old tooth used to be and after fifty days that mouse could nibble on cheese properly again. The new tooth grew to the same height as the surrounding ones, is just as hard, and has all the same blood vessels and nerves.

Researchers are hoping that this bioengineering process will one day make dentures and false teeth obsolete.

But when one considers the future of Bioethics in this context, the picture the late Rod Hull's'Emu' says a lot:

I don't know about you, but the potential here gives me the creeps.

Click here for quick up date.

Deep up date.

Deeper up date with video.

(Please leave a comment (scary or not!))

Hyperlanguage

Human language, in a most rudimentary plan, first emerged around one million years ago. 

Of course, since then language has continued to advance and diverge into many distinct lingua. But it is the rate and interconnection of change in language today that captures our attention here.

Knowledge of the fact that at least three-thousand distinct tongues have disappeared over a period of three generations, among with the cultures they represent, is perhaps softened by the associate fact that at least one-third of the words in any modern full volume English dictionary are less than twenty years old!

The reasons? In part due to the amazing pace of scientific progress and technological advance (bosson, toxinal, cynoacrolate, C++, hyperlinks, simplexity: new science simply need new words). Lately, global media and brands have spurred novel vernacular (Digerati, VIVA, Google, Nike, Nokia). 

SMS textlife brings new gist (CU@10...!). Mass-mood changes due to shifts in social dynamics and habit require new words (Nanostalgia, the yearning desire to see a repeat of Star Trek that was only shown the day before.Ampathy, the ultra-intense feeling of unity people experience at a rave. And Edutainment, meshing of fun with learning. 

Languages have also evolved because of mass migration (Brazilian-Portuguese is quite different to native Portuguese...why?...Neo-tribes means new ideas; new ideas needs new language). 

Fundamentally, and most of all, languages have come and gone as a consequence of the multidimensional interconnection of words. For example, as English language flows across cultural boundaries it can not help but eat-up the colloquial phrases of say Hindi to produce a new language now known as 'Hinglish,' often seamlessly combining two different tongues in mid-sentence, even mid-word. 

English, the king of predatory lingua, preys on inflections and phrases from literally every known and available language on the surface of this planet. One hundred years or so from now there will dozens of version of English, each seen as a separate language in their own right. 

As English interconnects and gobbles up more and more words, it changes and diverges, but will remain a ravenous predator. The result? From street slang to the edge of the arts, media, science and technology the diversity of languages and never been so multidimensional.

Peter Senge - a real mentor of mine - is director of the Centre for Organizational Learning at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is known as author of the book The Fifth Discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization.

Senge says humanity is currently stuck in a dire era of fatalism. We live with the assumption that the deep problems our societies are faced with will never be solved. 

Paradoxically, ending this mentality will be the only way to move forward with development. 

In the following video he gives examples of how we can begin to believe we can affect the future and break the cycle.

Link to video.

Emerging Hypergovernment

Government ideology, once obstinate and biased in the extreme. Idealism; them and us; you are wrong, I am right. The left verses the right, the middle takes on all. It was outright war. 

But nowadays?.... Political dogma is all but dead. The potency of idealism is old and grey. So the absolute left steal ideas from the far right. The far right sits comfortably with the L-word. Ideas and all cells alike, have lost their sense of loyalty it seems. So communism adopts capitalist concepts to oil its wheels. Capitalism embraces socialism to soften its tone. 

In a transdimensional reality, dogged political pragmatism pinches from wherever, whoever and whatever it must to achieve its ultimate aim - Hypergovernment.

The Power of Hyperscience

Science, since its early origins, was held in separate, often totally isolated schools. The intellectual wars amid the disparate schools of thought that raged for hundreds of years, have at the very least slowed scientific discovery and innovation; at worst, stopped advance dead. 

Now a sea change; a seed change even. At last the intellectual turf guarding is falling sway to the interconnection of ideas. 

Ponder this: 

To construct a new theory today, a hypothesis must stand with an astronomical number of findings, with many contradicting ideas. The reason? For a scientific discipline to reach maximum evolvability the number of idea interconnections needs to be very rich. As the number of connections goes up, so the possibilities for new discoveries increase.

And now think of this if you will: 

To comprehend how life on earth emerged, you have to understand the complexity and systems theories; understand phase transition and thermodynamics; comprehend computational and information theory; grasp quantum and molecular mechanics; interpret microgeology, electro-magnetism and radioisotope decay physics. 

You have to interconnect and interrelated each of these discrete science to begin to see how life may have emerged. Neglect or miss any of these disciplines and the answer to life remains a mystery.

The lesson: 

Many of the most significant scientific breakthroughs, now and in future, will be a consequence of the interconnection of diverse and often unrelated scientific discoveries and innovation.

First to the World 3D Micro Scale Multiplicative Printer.

Fuji's world’s first MEMS-based piezo cartridge printer enables low-cost high-precision jetting of complex organic, inorganic and metallic fluids.

Micron-scale products and sub-assemblies such as flexible multilayer PCBs or flexible flat screen displays can now be produced in one hit, layer-by-layer at a significantly lower cost and higher quality.

Link to Fuji

The Power of Piracy and Viral Marketing.

Do you like dance music? What about today’s electronic sounds? What about the current wave of highly technical rhythm Drum & Bass the kids can’t get enough of?

Not to every ones taste I suspect. But the fact remains, it is a billion dollar market worldwide today.

So how did it start?

It began in the ghettos of South London at the end of the 1980s. In neighbourhoods of Brixton, Peckham, Camberwell, with DJ names like Dr S Gachet, Jumping Jack Frost, Danny Ramplin, et al.  They begun to plagiarise and mix American East Coast ‘elecro’ with London R&B and Dub Reggie on pirate radio.

They put on all night free parties in old lock-up warehouses and dens. By about 1988 the illegal venues were chock-a-block with punters. In the greater London area more people where listening to the now dozens of pirate radio stations than the BBC’s and commercial stations.

The commercial DJs caught on to it and next thing you know obscure underground tunes were being played on prime air time, eventually making it into the official music charts.

Would this have happened without the clandestine world of Piracy? Arrr, Jim Lad! I doubt it!

‘Go the Fuck to Sleep!’

E-Piracy! 

A Bad Thing for Authors, Artists and Publishers?

A couple of years ago ‘Go the Fuck to Sleep!’ by Adam Mansbach, hit the No.1 spot on Amazon.com's best-seller list. Thing is, it did so a month before the book was billed for launch. If it wasn’t due out for four weeks, how did it swipe a film option with Fox 2000 and reach the pinnacle of the online publishing world?

Basically, the book idea came about as a result of the trials and tribulations of getting the author’s 2 year old into bed and to sleep. After the predictable 7 o’clock shrills and tit-for-tat, Mansbach up-dated his friends with the episode on Facebook. However, the response was overwhelming ‘You have to turn this story into a book!’

There are many ‘known’ factors that just ‘don't’ explain why this book has reached the heights that it did, and as soon as it did.

What seems to set this book apart is the ‘free-to-friends’ PDF copy of the book went absolutely viral as a result of acquaintances passing it on; then in an exponential way the copy-of-copies began to spread like runner way train. Hence, the power of ‘e-piracy’ ignited an explosive ‘Viral’ growth in the market.

But Piracy is bad!..... Isn’t it?

It's the scourge of the music industry. With the rise of e-reading, booksellers now fear it to a similar degree. But in the ‘Go the Fuck the Sleep’ case, fighting piracy would not have done a service to the book. Piracy, it seems, is what has driven the book's real-world, money-making, flying-off-the-shelves success. The bootleg copy hasn't replaced the actual artefact. It has only served as a sort of free advertising. Piracy can hurt publishers, but it can also help them.

The question is: when does piracy work to a author’s, artist’s, and publisher's benefit; and when does it work to its detriment? If ‘Go the Fuck to Sleep’ weren't a children's book of sorts, would parents be so eager for hard-copy versions?

This is fertile ground for research. Would-be author’s, music artists and publishers need to scrutinize the mechanics of e-piracy, replaying success stories like this one over and over again in slow motion, in an effort to see just what combination of variables caused the pirate's cutlass to land directly into a giant sack of doubloons.

I will be posting more examples on viral e-piracy over the comming months, with an emphysis on what's current and what the e-piracy community see as coming next!

Link to story.

Link to viral marketing.

'Go the Fuck the Sleep' snipit.

Rapid Innovation

Posted by Michael Belfiore on Feb 15, 2013 | 1 comment

I’ve posted a new, free paper on my website, called “Rapid Innovation on the Cheap: Lessons from DARPA and the Commercial Space Age.”

This distills lessons learned from my reporting (ten years this year!) on some of the most extraordinary technology breakthroughs on the planet. As I’ve written about commercial space travel, the Defense Advanced Projects Agency, robotics, nanotech, and more for publications including National Geographic, the “Popular” magazines (Science and Mechanics), Reuters, and many others, I’ve found certain commonalities that make these programs and projects fly.

I’ve listed and I elaborate on seven of these commonalities driving the disruptive innovation I’ve been covering, and these are the focus of “Rapid Innovation on the Cheap.”

Along the way, I’ve teased out some answers that should be applicable to just about anyone seeking to do extraordinary things relatively quickly with relatively limited resources. These include:

• How having  limited resources actually helps the process of creating disruptive innovation;
• How to keep fresh ideas coming into an organization that seeks to create positive change in the world;
• Why passion, not dollars, drives truly great research and development;
• Why risk-taking doesn’t have to mean betting the farm, and more.

Sign up here to get your free copy of “Rapid Innovation on the Cheap: Lessons from DARPA and the Commercial Space Age.” And let me know what you think. See some room for improvement? Something I’ve missed? Think I’m on to something here? Drop me a line!

Click here to see the big picture!

Space for all coming soon?

Recall the much loved story 'Charley and the Great Glass Elevator?' It may be a metaphor for the shape of space-flight to come!

Not to worry, I'm not going to try to convince you that we are all about to attach large silicon boxes to space anchored sky-hooks.

But from serious fact to fascinating fiction Space Elevators have been called space bridges, space ladders, beanstalks, skyhooks, and the great glass elevator.

So, now down to earth (and maybe up again).... What is actually happening?

Believe it or not the original idea goes back to 1895 to Konstantin Tsioikovsky. Back then he proposed a free standing Tower stretching to a level where obits can take place. That's where earth's atmosphere and its gravitational pull relinquishes to a point where masses can hover or can circle the earth. And that happens at about 170 kilometers up.

Most space Elevators ideas hang on tether and sheet like cables, where the structure is in tension on earth and counter weighted in space like a guitar string held taut. Problems is, a tether material made, for example, of Carbide Steel (CS) with a diameter of a mere 1mm would snap under its own weight. In fact the total mass of CS needed to construct such a structure would be so great that the cable would break in less than 2000 meters down.

News is that the much much famed CarbonNanoTube (CNT) is around 20 times the strength of CS in its natural from. Even better news is the kinds of molecular bonds obtainable from CNTs. They give an extraordinary number of creative interconnections, resulting in ultra-strength multidimensional geometric weaves. This Hypermaterial offers not just linear strength (20x steel), but 1000x the strength of steel, with at least 1000x less the weight.

But how strong does a Space Elevator tether have to be?

Many numbers are bandied about, and usually with a designation of GPa (Giga-Pascals) as their unit of measure. However, a GPa figure is meaningless without a density figure to go with it. The metric at question is GPa/(g/cc), or specific strength - strength-per-density.

The textile industry, which often deals with specific strength of materials, uses the unit of N/Tex. If you work out the units, a N/Tex turns out to be exactly equivalent to a GPa/(g/cc). In the metric system, we define 1 Yuri = 1 Pa/(kg/m3), and so a GPa/(g/cc) or a N/tex are equal to 1 MYuri (Mega Yuri).

Think about it this way: if you pull on a garden hose and it breaks at 100 lb, and if the diameter of the hose is such that its area is 2 square inches, can you say that the rubber failed at 50 PSI? Of course not - the hose is mostly air, only the wall of the hose is holding the force. you should use the area of the wall, not the hose.

In exactly the same way, if 12 inches of the garden hose weighs a pound, can you say that the density of the rubber is 1/24 [lbs/in3]? Of course not - only the wall of the hose has weight.

BUT!!! You can safely say that the *specific strength* of the rubber is 50/(1/24)=1200 PSI/(lb/in3) and you don’t have to even measure the diameter of the hose - just divide the breaking force (100) by the linear mass density (1/12), and you get the same exact number (1200). The cross-sectional area canceled out, and the only two things we need to measure is the breaking *force* (in lbs) and the weigh-per-linear-inch. Hence N/Tex.

So back to the Space Elevator: computer simulations of CNTs cap the specific strength of individual tubes at between 40 and 50 MYuri. Practical measurements seem to converge on that number as well. The density of Carbon Nanotubes is 2.2 g/cc, so using this density the proper strength figure is 88-110 GPa. 

Remember though, it’s the 40-50 MYuri figure that’s the deal maker. We can build a Space Elevator using a 40 MYuri material. Even 30. It’s just that the lower the specific strength, the heavier the ribbon, and the more powerful our motors have to be. 

So when will this all happen? 

I'll come to that in later blog postings. But for now I would urge you to spend sometime watching the video. 

Click here to see the big picture!

These type of 3D printer will be in UK shops soon!

(Need some

new Skateboard Wheels??)

Hyperinnovation by Chris Harris

Chris Harris' thesis in Hyperinnovation is that the business world is interconnecting in every conceivable dimension from ideas to technology to markets and even entire industries. As a result, the boundaries between once disparate business concepts are increasingly multi-dimensional.

This demands a complete rethink in terms of strategies, cultures, organisations and methodologies to bring about innovation. He goes on to discuss how uncertainty is not just an occasional deviation from predictability. It has become a common feature of the business environment.

Complexity is an underlying theme of the book and the definition of complexity science is given as the understanding of how a collective of large numbers of interrelated agents behave as a whole.

In Hyperinnovation, he has put forward three principles of hyperinnovation. The first principle is that the potential for hyperinnovation is proportional to the number of the meaningful interconnections between agents. He explains this with an equation that says that the number of possible (meaningful or otherwise) interconnections is half of the square of the sum of agents in a network so that 10 agents in a network would have 45 possible interconnections. Chris Harris describes the payoff as being the increase in the number of innovation possibilities.

Review and buy!

Testimonials for: Hyperinnovation.

Rudi Ruggles, Cap Gemini Ernst & Young: 

‘Wonderful… combining cutting edge science and management practices to produce a new management model, one that not only take advantage of, but celebrates the richness of connectivity.’

John Mans, Fellow, Chartered Management Institute: 

'Organisational structures developed to meet the stable environmental conditions of the past may well not be able to cope fully with the demands now being made....a clear warning to both individuals and organisations to the complexities of the moder business world....the mix of approaches is well tailored to today’s new circumstances and provide an excellent starting point for managers needing to develop strategies in an interconnected world.’

New 3D Print Design, Make and Retail Firm that Manufactures Sun Glasses

'Protos is an eyewear company based in San Francisco that was founded in 2011. Marc Levinson, John Mauriello, Doug Ponciano and Richart Ruddie partnered up and formed Protos with the intention of developing a line of consumer grade 3D printed sun glasses. 

Protos uses a process known as 3D printing to manufacture their frames. This intricate layering process results in bold and striking designs that are impossible to make through standard manufacturing methods. Protos eyewear is lightweight and durable, and the material provides a unique look and feel. 

Finding a pair of glasses that fit properly and look good is a painstaking process, which usually ends in a compromise on the customer’s part. We will soon be offering custom eyewear with a tailored fit based on an individual’s facial measurements and dimensions. This cannot be done efficiently through any other means of manufacturing.'

Link

Eradicating the Bottom of the Pyramid: ‘Open Source Ecology’ True Frugal Hyperinnovators

If you don’t know about ‘Frugal Innovation and the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP)’ here’s a quick précis.

Basically, there 4 billion people on the planet living in a spectrum of relative-to-absolute poverty. That within that BoP 4-billion, sits approximately 1 billion people living on under 2 dollars a day ($730 per year).

So just over a decade ago the late Prof. C.K Prahalad proclaimed that the best way to tackle poverty at the $2 dollars a day BoP, is to fight it by turning it into a profit centred market-space. A worldwide market worth 7.3 trillion dollars!

Prahalad Hyperlogic is this: if you innovate life subsistence and enabling products and sell them at a price the BoP can afford and still make a return, then you set off a virtuous circle. People at the BoP begin you climb the wall of the Pyramid and out of crisis.

Well that is the first step in the BoP innovation equation.

A further step is slightly – or fantastically - more ambitious: to innovate systems of technologies and tools that build basic infrastructure development that supplies clean water and foods, habitats and agriculture systems, etc, that the BoP can invest in through micro-loans and community pooling investures.

Well, it never ceases to amaze me on my research into Innovating to enable the BOP, and I recently came across these guys: ‘Open Source Ecology (OSE).’

OSE explain:

‘Open Source Ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that for the last two years has been creating the Global Village Construction Set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform that allows for the easy, DIY fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. The GVCS lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, andmanufacturing and can be seen as a life-size Lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies, whether in rural Missouri, where the project was founded, in urban redevelopment, or in the developing world.’

OSE was founded by Marcin JAKUBOWSKI in 2003 and trueHyperinnovator. His ambition is ‘closed-loop manufacturing a reality.’ His main focus is ‘evolving to freedom by eliminating resource scarcity as the main force behind human relations - with the wise use of modern technology adapted for human service.’

And this is OSE strategy.

‘The Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) is an open technological platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different Industrial Machines that it takes to build a small civilization with modern comforts. Key Features of the GVCS:Open Source – Low Cost Modular – user Service able – DIY – Closed-Loop Manufacturing – Heirloom Design – Flexible Fabrication.’

OSE say:

‘A modern, comfortable lifestyle relies on a variety of efficient Industrial Machines. If you eat bread, you rely on an Agricultural Combine. If you live in a wood house, you rely on a Sawmill. Each of these machines relies on other machines in order for it to exist.If you distill this complex web of interdependent machines [Hyperinnovation] into a reproduceable, simple, closed-loop system, you get these:’

‘The GVCS 50’ in development; 50 tools to realise their goals.

3 examples:

3D Printer: an additive manufacturing technology where a three dimensional object is printed by laying down successive layers of material, just like a printer except in 3D.

3D Scanner A device that can generate a 3D digital scan from a real-life object, where the file can be used to reproduce the object in 3D with a device such as the 3D printer or CNC Precision Multimachine.

Linear Solar Concentrator an infinitely-scalable, linear device which concentrates solar radiation onto a linear target for generating heat or steam to produce electricity.

Click here to see full list. 

Also:

‘Download the CAD data here and the entire set of CEB Press documentation can be found here, in addition to the assembly videos. Please watch and download them and drop us a line to let us know what you thought. Were the videos easy to follow along? Think the instructions fell short? Were they useful? Do you have suggestions for how to make them better? We look forward to your feedback.

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Metatags: radical innovation, revolutionary innovation breakthrough innovation, disruptive innovation, Hyperinnovation, strategic innovation, future studies, new industrial revolution, Chris Harris, Building Innovative Teams, ecology, bioecology, business ecology, Giga Markets, Market Leadership, big data, GDP, The World Bank, World Health Organization, International Monetary Fund, Barns & Noble, Bank of America, Exponential Technological Evolution.

OSE Guys, I am truly humbled. 

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