But there’s another story, a story the news doesn’t often report. This story is backed by data, and it says we’re actually living in the most peaceful, abundant time in history, and things are likely to continue getting better.

The News vs. the Data

The reality that’s often clouded by a constant stream of bad news is we’re actually seeing a massive drop in poverty, fewer deaths from violent crime and preventable diseases. On top of that, we’re the most educated populace to ever walk the planet.

“Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceful era in the existence of our species.” –Steven Pinker

In the last hundred years, we’ve seen the average human life expectancy nearly double, the global GDP per capita rise exponentially, and childhood mortality drop 10-fold.

That’s pretty good progress! Maybe the world isn’t all gloom and doom.

If you’re still not convinced the world is getting better, check out the charts in this article from Vox and on Peter Diamandis’ website for a lot more data.

Abundance for All Is Possible

So now that you know the world isn’t so bad after all, here’s another thing to think about: it can get much better, very soon.

In their book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis suggest it may be possible for us to meet and even exceed the basic needs of all the people living on the planet today.

“In the hands of smart and driven innovators, science and technology take things which were once scarce and make them abundant and accessible to all.”

This means making sure every single person in the world has adequate food, water and shelter, as well as a good education, access to healthcare, and personal freedom.

This might seem unimaginable, especially if you tend to think the world is only getting worse. But given how much progress we’ve already made in the last few hundred years, coupled with the recent explosion of information sharing and new, powerful technologies, abundance for all is not as out of reach as you might believe.

Throughout history, we’ve seen that in the hands of smart and driven innovators, science and technology take things which were once scarce and make them abundant and accessible to all.

In Abundance, Diamandis and Kotler tell the story of how aluminum went from being one of the rarest metals on the planet to being one of the most abundant…

In the 1800s, aluminum was more valuable than silver and gold because it was rarer. So when Napoleon III entertained the King of Siam, the king and his guests were honored by being given aluminum utensils, while the rest of the dinner party ate with gold.

But aluminum is not really rare.

In fact, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3% of the weight of our planet. But it wasn’t until chemists Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult discovered how to use electrolysis to cheaply separate aluminum from surrounding materials that the element became suddenly abundant.

The problems keeping us from achieving a world where everyone’s basic needs are met may seem like resource problems — when in reality, many are accessibility problems.

The Engine Driving Us Toward Abundance: Exponential Technology

History is full of examples like the aluminum story.  The most powerful one of the last few decades is information technology. Think about all the things that computers and the internet made abundant that were previously far less accessible because of cost or availability …

Here are just a few examples:

• Easy access to the world’s information
• Ability to share information freely with anyone and everyone
• Free/cheap long-distance communication
• Buying and selling goods/services regardless of location

Less than two decades ago, when someone reached a certain level of economic stability, they could spend somewhere around $10K on stereos, cameras, entertainment systems, etc — today, we have all that equipment in the palm of our hand.

Now, there is a new generation of technologies heavily dependant on information technology and, therefore, similarly riding the wave of exponential growth. When put to the right use, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing, nano-materials and digital biology make it possible for us to drastically raise the standard of living for every person on the planet.

These are just some of the innovations which are unlocking currently scarce resources:

• IBM’s Watson Health is being trained and used in medical facilities like the Cleveland Clinic to help doctors diagnose disease. In the future, it’s likely we’ll trust AI just as much, if not more than humans to diagnose disease, allowing people all over the world to have access to great diagnostic tools regardless of whether there is a well-trained doctor near them.

• Solar power is now cheaper than fossil fuels in some parts of the world, and with advances in new materials and storage, the cost may decrease further. This could eventually lead to nearly-free, clean energy for people across the world.

• Google’s GMNT network can now translate languages as well as a human, unlocking the ability for people to communicate globally as we never have before.

• Self-driving cars are already on the roads of several American cities and will be coming to a road near you in the next couple years. Considering the average American spends nearly two hours driving every day, not having to drive would free up an increasingly scarce resource: time.

The Change-Makers

Today’s innovators can create enormous change because they have these incredible tools—which would have once been available only to big organizations—at their fingertips. And, as a result of our hyper-connected world, there is an unprecedented ability for people across the planet to work together to create solutions to some of our most pressing problems today.

“In today’s hyperlinked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.” –Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance

According to Diamandis and Kotler, there are three groups of people accelerating positive change.

1. DIY Innovators

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Homebrew Computer Club was a meeting place of “do-it-yourself” computer enthusiasts who shared ideas and spare parts. By the 1990s and 2000s, that little club became known as an inception point for the personal computer industry — dozens of companies, including Apple Computer, can directly trace their origins back to Homebrew.

Since then, we’ve seen the rise of the social entrepreneur, the Maker Movement and the DIY Bio movement, which have similar ambitions to democratize social reform, manufacturing, and biology, the way Homebrew democratized computers. These are the people who look for new opportunities and aren’t afraid to take risks to create something new that will change the status-quo.

2. Techno-Philanthropists

Unlike the robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries, today’s “techno-philanthropists” are not just giving away some of their wealth for a new museum, they are using their wealth to solve global problems and investing in social entrepreneurs aiming to do the same.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given away at least $28 billion, with a strong focus on ending diseases like polio, malaria, and measles for good. Jeff Skoll, after cashing out of eBay with $2 billion in 1998, went on to create the Skoll Foundation, which funds social entrepreneurs across the world. And last year, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan pledged to give away 99% of their $46 billion in Facebook stock during their lifetimes.

3. The Rising Billion

Cisco estimates that by 2020, there will be 4.1 billion people connected to the internet, up from 3 billion in 2015. This number might even be higher, given the efforts of companies like Facebook, Google, Virgin Group, and SpaceX to bring internet access to the world. That’s a billion new people in the next several years who will be connected to the global conversation, looking to learn, create and better their own lives and communities.In his book, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C.K. Pahalad writes that finding co-creative ways to serve this rising market can help lift people out of poverty while creating viable businesses for inventive companies.

The Path to Abundance

Eager to create change, innovators armed with powerful technologies can accomplish incredible feats. Kotler and Diamandis imagine that the path to abundance occurs in three tiers:

• Basic Needs (food, water, shelter)
• Tools of Growth (energy, education, access to information)
• Ideal Health and Freedom

Of course, progress doesn’t always happen in a straight, logical way, but having a framework to visualize the needs is helpful.

Many people don’t believe it’s possible to end the persistent global problems we’re facing. However, looking at history, we can see many examples where technological tools have unlocked resources that previously seemed scarce.

Technological solutions are not always the answer, and we need social change and policy solutions as much as we need technology solutions. But we have seen time and time again, that powerful tools in the hands of innovative, driven change-makers can make the seemingly impossible happen.

You can download the full “Path to Abundance” infographic here. It was created under a CC BY-NC-ND license. If you share, please attribute to Singularity University.

Image Credit: janez volmajer / Shutterstock.com

Something big is happening in design and engineering.

For all of human history, we have created tools that help us do what we want to do—faster, better, cheaper. But we have always had to direct those tools; tell them exactly what to do for us to achieve our goals. This hasn’t changed from the time of stone tools (which we had to wield with our hands) to modern digital design tools (which we wield with the click of the mouse).

If an architect designing a house wants to move a wall, she has to first imagine all the possible alternatives of that wall’s placement that will serve her design. Once she has parsed through the possibilities in her mind, she will make a decision and manually move that wall in her CAD drawing. Naturally, she can only imagine a certain number of possibilities, and many alternatives might be completely lost because she didn’t imagine them.

This is how we’ve been designing things for most of history: first, you have an idea in your mind, then you draw it. But in recent years a new era of design has been creeping into the picture: generative design.

Not long ago, I heard Jeff Kowalski, CTO of Autodesk, give a great talk about generative design at the e.g. conference. He argued that generative design will evolve the roles of designers and engineers from direct operators, to curators and eventually, mentors.  

Let’s dig into some of the ideas presented by Kowalski on how our roles as creators change with these emerging tools…

A New Era in Design

Generative design uses algorithms to explore entire solution sets. You state your goals and constraints and allow the computer to generate designs and iterations for you that you might never have thought of — a kind of accelerated artificial evolution, as some have called it.

Bike frame designs created by Autodesk’s Dreamcatcher software.

As exciting as this new field of design is, it can also seem frightening. What happens to the role of designer when a computer program like Autodesk’s Dreamcatcher can generate hundreds of unique designs in hours—when it takes a human days or more just to create one iteration?

We are so often worried by the thought we might lose jobs to computers and robots that we fail to imagine how our changing roles and relationships to machines can change in a way that brings much greater creativity and freedom to humans.

Evolving From ‘Operator’ to ‘Curator’ to ‘Mentor’

No longer required to be the operator of the tool in generative design, the human being is freed to become the curator; choosing the best possible solution and working alongside the computer to co-create the most ideal design. Given various possibilities, we can now choose which design suits our needs the best in terms of structure, weight, shape, etc.

While the concept of generative design alone is fascinating, we live in a world of convergence, and the most incredible innovations stem from the combination of several emerging trends. For example, the marriage of machine learning and generative design opens a flood of new possibilities.

Generative design, even in its early stages, has seen some interesting successes already. But once the design process is complete, the program doesn’t store anything it has learned. Now, imagine that the generative design software learns with every design it creates based on the human designer or engineer’s feedback.

As Kowalski wrote in this article, “How many times have you ever talked about learning a new design tool? I think it’s about time there was a design tool that learned you!”

So what happens to the role of designer and engineer when the computer starts having opinions and making creative decisions based on what it has learned through experience and feedback? 

Humans don’t get replaced when the machine begins to design creatively, instead we step into the newly evolved phase of the mentor.

Both generative design and machine learning require input from humans in the form of goals, values and parameters. Which goals and values do we want to see our machines achieve? What do we want them to create, once they are able to make creative decisions?

Well, that’s still up to us. 

We must decide whether we want to create a world of isolation or connectedness, a world of rigidity or fluidity, a world that is constructed or grown — as Jeff Kowalski argued in his talk.

The Evolution of Our Relationship With Machines (Beyond Design)

If you use gmail, you might have noticed there are suggested replies included that you can use to quickly reply to an email. Here are some I’ve seen recently in my emails: “I’m so glad you liked it,” “Thanks for sharing,” “Have a good trip,” “Yes, I got your email.”

Interestingly, when I use these computer-generated replies, I’m acting in the role of curator. However, the people who programmed this bot to auto-generate answers act as mentors. The reply options in gmail are polite, sweet even — and that’s a reflection not only on the machine generating the messages but also on the people behind the scenes.

We will see many more examples of these new roles of curator and mentor in increasing domains in the years to come. 

The big question stands: which goals and values will we choose to pass on to our machines?

Image Credit: Autodesk and Shutterstock

Today, we have the ability to turn any human cell into a stem cell and grow tissues in a lab. We’re getting closer to bio-printing full organs, as well using DNA as a viable information storage method. You can get your entire genome sequenced for $1000, and that price is only going down. Genetic editing with tools such as CRISPR/Cas9 is a revolution in and of itself. And scientists are creating global collaborations on incredible new projects like Genome Project – Write.

While many of these breakthroughs have been confined to academic labs or large companies, we’ve also seen the rise of the citizen scientist. Kids and adults want to get their hands on wetware and make things wherever they can, whether in their kitchen or a community biolab. Biohacker labs have sprung up all over the world. iGEM, the international bioengineering competition, is only growing, and there are countless meetups and clubs where you can learn “do-it-yourself biology.”

These early adopters are recognizing something really important: biology is a powerful technology, and if we can harness it, we can use it to create and build things we need in a completely novel and much smarter way. But as important and powerful as these new tools and breakthroughs are, they are still pretty inaccessible to those without a background in biological science.

Amino Labs

This is why I was so excited when I met Julie Legault, founder and CEO of Amino Labs, earlier this year at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine conference.

Julie is a huge inspiration to me, and her story of starting Amino Labs can be an inspiration to anyone interested in synthetic biology and bioengineering.

“[I]n the same way that anyone can now experiment with software and electronics, we should be able to experiment with plug-and-play biotechnology.”
–Julie Legault

Amino Labs is a lab-in-a-box that allows anyone (read: non-biologists) to learn how DNA can be used to program living systems to create things. Amino Labs is the best tool I’ve seen yet for allowing someone who doesn’t have any background in biology to create something (like a glowing bacteria night light) that teaches basic bioengineering techniques while also sparking the imagination of what’s possible.

Amino Labs started as Julie’s thesis project at MIT Media Lab. She had been focused on wearables and from there became interested in chemical reactions in clothing, which led her to research what was happening in synthetic biology. When she participated in a workshop to grow banana-scented bacteria, she was hooked.

With no background in biology, Julie began attending more of these workshops, trying out basic synthetic biology experiments. In the workshops, she was able to engineer a living organism that produced an anti-cancer compound. Not a bad start! Joichi Ito, MIT Media Lab’s director, wrote this, describing that same workshop:

“In two half days of work, we were able to do in our kitchen what would have been Nobel Prize-winning work a decade ago. We designed a sequence of genes, actually assembled the genes and then injected them into a bacteria and rebooted the bacteria.”

But heading into the MIT Bio Lab was overwhelming. In front of autoclaves, centrifuges and pipettes, Julie realized she wasn’t quite a seasoned synthetic biologist yet. She was doing alright in a workshop setting, but as soon as she was on her own, it wasn’t as simple.

“It’s like there was a level of simplification that was missing both in terms of using the equipment and knowing what order to do things in. I kept bugging Justin [founder of Synbiota], but it was still over my head… That’s when I got the idea of building a kit that would allow people to get the basic experience of engineering bacteria — and having their lives change in the process, or at least appreciate bioengineering,”  Julie explained to me.

She spent the next year developing a working kit, now called Amino Lab, which led to a successful Kickstarter campaign and seed funding from MIT’s E14 Fund, then an invitation to join Indie Bio’s Accelerator program.

“It was really about sharing that basic experience with others, but then also developing tools that would allow me to go further.”

Julie has described the Amino Lab as “the Tamagotchi for synthetic biology” and a “bento-box lab.”  Today, it’s a beautifully designed, playful, easy-to-use platform for learning bioengineering.

When asked about her big, audacious goal, Julie says: an Amino lab in every home.

But that’s a ways off. She doesn’t think society is ready to start prototyping their own engineered bacteria just yet, and there’s still that icky factor of bacteria to get over. That’s why she and her team are focused on education at the moment.

In terms of how to bridge the gap, Julie believes that developing a robust ecosystem of tools that work together will help show people that “this is a wave of the future. It’s not just a trend, it’s actually something that will matter in their lives and there’s something essential about learning how to bioengineer. There is something essential about accepting bioengineering and GMOs as part of our lives.”

Images courtesy Amino Labs

Bacteria tend to get a bad rap, but now, armed with new research on the bacterial world (or microbiome) in our bodies, we are starting to understand how important a role microorganisms play in our health (good as well as bad).

And beyond merely understanding the relationship between our bodies and the microorganisms inhabiting it, we’re on the cusp of significantly altering that relationship.

For the last decade or so, synthetic biologists have been reprogramming bacterial strains to serve new functions — a well-known experiment added bioluminescence genes to bacteria to make them glow, for example. Today, this is an experiment a child could carry out with a little instruction.

While making a glowing bacterium is a fun trick, it also represents a larger shift in how we think about living organisms. With synthetic biology, we can develop organisms to provide many useful functions nature never created.

In one of the first medical applications of this concept, Synlogic has patented a version of E. coli engineered to develop “an unquenchable appetite for ammonia” and turn it into the amino acid arginine, which, unlike ammonia, is harmless to the human body.

Ammonia forms as the body breaks down protein, but the liver works to convert ammonia into urea, which is flushed away in urine. However, some people are unable to rid their bodies of ammonia fast enough, which can lead to serious health problems.

Synlogic’s new “synthetic biotic” pill, which could be tested by volunteers next year, contains 100 billion of these reprogrammed bacteria.

In theory, it’s possible this reprogrammed bacteria could swap DNA with another strain, but these engineered genomes are expected to die off quickly before being able to share any genetic information. Additionally, the bacteria will only begin feeding on ammonia in a low-oxygen environment like the gut (not the digestive tract).

Whether this particular product fails or succeeds, it’s clearer than ever that we have entered a fascinating new phase of human development where we can deliberately control our own biology and that of the organisms living in our bodies.

Image credit: Shutterstock

But there’s another story, a story the news doesn’t often report. This story is backed by data, and it says we’re actually living in the most peaceful, abundant time in history, and things are likely to continue getting better.

The News vs. the Data

The reality that’s often clouded by a constant stream of bad news is we’re actually seeing a massive drop in poverty, fewer deaths from violent crime and preventable diseases. On top of that, we’re the most educated populace to ever walk the planet.

“Violence has been in decline for thousands of years, and today we may be living in the most peaceful era in the existence of our species.” –Steven Pinker

In the last hundred years, we’ve seen the average human life expectancy nearly double, the global GDP per capita rise exponentially, and childhood mortality drop 10-fold.

That’s pretty good progress! Maybe the world isn’t all gloom and doom.

If you’re still not convinced the world is getting better, check out the charts in this article from Vox and on Peter Diamandis’ website for a lot more data.

Abundance for All Is Possible

So now that you know the world isn’t so bad after all, here’s another thing to think about: it can get much better, very soon.

In their book Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think, Steven Kotler and Peter Diamandis suggest it may be possible for us to meet and even exceed the basic needs of all the people living on the planet today.

“In the hands of smart and driven innovators, science and technology take things which were once scarce and make them abundant and accessible to all.”

This means making sure every single person in the world has adequate food, water and shelter, as well as a good education, access to healthcare, and personal freedom.

This might seem unimaginable, especially if you tend to think the world is only getting worse. But given how much progress we’ve already made in the last few hundred years, coupled with the recent explosion of information sharing and new, powerful technologies, abundance for all is not as out of reach as you might believe.

Throughout history, we’ve seen that in the hands of smart and driven innovators, science and technology take things which were once scarce and make them abundant and accessible to all.

In Abundance, Diamandis and Kotler tell the story of how aluminum went from being one of the rarest metals on the planet to being one of the most abundant…

In the 1800s, aluminum was more valuable than silver and gold because it was rarer. So when Napoleon III entertained the King of Siam, the king and his guests were honored by being given aluminum utensils, while the rest of the dinner party ate with gold.

But aluminum is not really rare.

In fact, aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, making up 8.3% of the weight of our planet. But it wasn’t until chemists Charles Martin Hall and Paul Héroult discovered how to use electrolysis to cheaply separate aluminum from surrounding materials that the element became suddenly abundant.

The problems keeping us from achieving a world where everyone’s basic needs are met may seem like resource problems — when in reality, many are accessibility problems.

The Engine Driving Us Toward Abundance: Exponential Technology

History is full of examples like the aluminum story.  The most powerful one of the last few decades is information technology. Think about all the things that computers and the internet made abundant that were previously far less accessible because of cost or availability …

Here are just a few examples:

• Easy access to the world’s information
• Ability to share information freely with anyone and everyone
• Free/cheap long-distance communication
• Buying and selling goods/services regardless of location

Less than two decades ago, when someone reached a certain level of economic stability, they could spend somewhere around $10K on stereos, cameras, entertainment systems, etc — today, we have all that equipment in the palm of our hand.

Now, there is a new generation of technologies heavily dependant on information technology and, therefore, similarly riding the wave of exponential growth. When put to the right use, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing, nano-materials and digital biology make it possible for us to drastically raise the standard of living for every person on the planet.

These are just some of the innovations which are unlocking currently scarce resources:

• IBM’s Watson Health is being trained and used in medical facilities like the Cleveland Clinic to help doctors diagnose disease. In the future, it’s likely we’ll trust AI just as much, if not more than humans to diagnose disease, allowing people all over the world to have access to great diagnostic tools regardless of whether there is a well-trained doctor near them.

• Solar power is now cheaper than fossil fuels in some parts of the world, and with advances in new materials and storage, the cost may decrease further. This could eventually lead to nearly-free, clean energy for people across the world.

• Google’s GMNT network can now translate languages as well as a human, unlocking the ability for people to communicate globally as we never have before.

• Self-driving cars are already on the roads of several American cities and will be coming to a road near you in the next couple years. Considering the average American spends nearly two hours driving every day, not having to drive would free up an increasingly scarce resource: time.

The Change-Makers

Today’s innovators can create enormous change because they have these incredible tools—which would have once been available only to big organizations—at their fingertips. And, as a result of our hyper-connected world, there is an unprecedented ability for people across the planet to work together to create solutions to some of our most pressing problems today.

“In today’s hyperlinked world, solving problems anywhere, solves problems everywhere.” –Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance

According to Diamandis and Kotler, there are three groups of people accelerating positive change.

1. DIY Innovators

In the 1970s and 1980s, the Homebrew Computer Club was a meeting place of “do-it-yourself” computer enthusiasts who shared ideas and spare parts. By the 1990s and 2000s, that little club became known as an inception point for the personal computer industry — dozens of companies, including Apple Computer, can directly trace their origins back to Homebrew.

Since then, we’ve seen the rise of the social entrepreneur, the Maker Movement and the DIY Bio movement, which have similar ambitions to democratize social reform, manufacturing, and biology, the way Homebrew democratized computers. These are the people who look for new opportunities and aren’t afraid to take risks to create something new that will change the status-quo.

2. Techno-Philanthropists

Unlike the robber barons of the 19th and early 20th centuries, today’s “techno-philanthropists” are not just giving away some of their wealth for a new museum, they are using their wealth to solve global problems and investing in social entrepreneurs aiming to do the same.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given away at least $28 billion, with a strong focus on ending diseases like polio, malaria, and measles for good. Jeff Skoll, after cashing out of eBay with $2 billion in 1998, went on to create the Skoll Foundation, which funds social entrepreneurs across the world. And last year, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan pledged to give away 99% of their $46 billion in Facebook stock during their lifetimes.

3. The Rising Billion

Cisco estimates that by 2020, there will be 4.1 billion people connected to the internet, up from 3 billion in 2015. This number might even be higher, given the efforts of companies like Facebook, Google, Virgin Group, and SpaceX to bring internet access to the world. That’s a billion new people in the next several years who will be connected to the global conversation, looking to learn, create and better their own lives and communities.In his book, Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C.K. Pahalad writes that finding co-creative ways to serve this rising market can help lift people out of poverty while creating viable businesses for inventive companies.

The Path to Abundance

Eager to create change, innovators armed with powerful technologies can accomplish incredible feats. Kotler and Diamandis imagine that the path to abundance occurs in three tiers:

• Basic Needs (food, water, shelter)
• Tools of Growth (energy, education, access to information)
• Ideal Health and Freedom

Of course, progress doesn’t always happen in a straight, logical way, but having a framework to visualize the needs is helpful.

Many people don’t believe it’s possible to end the persistent global problems we’re facing. However, looking at history, we can see many examples where technological tools have unlocked resources that previously seemed scarce.

Technological solutions are not always the answer, and we need social change and policy solutions as much as we need technology solutions. But we have seen time and time again, that powerful tools in the hands of innovative, driven change-makers can make the seemingly impossible happen.

You can download the full “Path to Abundance” infographic here. It was created under a CC BY-NC-ND license. If you share, please attribute to Singularity University.

Image Credit: janez volmajer / Shutterstock.com

Although it’s approaching fast, that future is still in the works. In the meantime, there is a real need to train surgeons in a more scalable way, according to Dr. Shafi Ahmed, a surgeon at the Royal London and St. Bartholomew’s hospitals and cofounder of Medical Realities, a company developing a new virtual reality platform for surgical training.

Hundreds of years ago, training happened in an “operating theater,” where many would-be surgeons peered over each other’s shoulders to try to get a glimpse of the action and learn as best they could. The reality is, this method of training still hasn’t changed much to this day.

At the same time, two thirds of the global population still doesn’t have access to safe and affordable surgery.

According to the Lancet commission on global surgery, the surgical workforce would have to double to meet the needs of basic surgical care for the developing world by 2030.

Dr. Ahmed is working to solve this problem. He imagines being able to train thousands of surgeons simultaneously in virtual reality.

Speaking at this year’s Exponential Medicine conference, Ahmed painted a vivid picture of the need for a scalable surgical education.

“Imagine that you’re a surgical trainee in Tanzania. You’re restrained by geography, you’re in a rural setting, but you want some training. You want to improve the standards of your health care system, as every doctor does… Imagine you’re a surgeon, maybe an attending in Bangladesh, a population of 150 million with a very poor infrastructure of training and teaching….Imagine you’re a school kid in a inner city area, a poor district. But then you want to be a surgeon, you want to train to be a medic, you want to access information. You’d like to know what it’s like and immerse yourself.”

Ahmed believes that education is a basic, fundamental right for everyone and that with virtual reality, he can train surgeons across the world in a way that has not been possible before today.

Dr. Ahmed has already made some steps towards this reality. In May of 2014, he streamed a training session through Google Glass, reaching 14,000 surgeons across the world.  

In April of 2016, he live-streamed a cancer surgery in virtual reality. The procedure, a low-risk removal of a colon tumor in a man in his 70s, was filmed in 360 video and streamed live across the world. The high-def 4K camera captured the doctors’ every movement, and those watching could see everything that was happening in immersive detail.

[Note: This video shows a live surgery. Content may be too graphic for some viewers]

So today, we already have the technology to allow medical students to stand in the shoes of an experienced surgeon. What’s next for surgical education?

“In time, we [will be] wearing gloves or body suits [so] we can touch and feel things in the virtual world. Then ultimately, imagine being a virtual surgeon, where you pop into a virtual theater [with] virtual patient [and] virtual instruments and do a virtual operation,” says Ahmed.

Want to keep up with coverage from Exponential Medicine? Get the latest insights here.

Image credit: Shutterstock

When it came out about 15 years ago, Intuitive Surgical’s da Vinci surgical robot was a major innovation. The da Vinci robot helps surgeons be more precise and dexterous and to remove natural hand tremors during surgery.

In the years since da Vinci first came out, many other surgical robots have arrived. And today there’s a new generation coming online, like the Verb robot, a joint venture between Google and Johnson and Johnson. This means surgery is about to get even more interesting. Surgical robotics will be able to do more than just improve dexterity and reduce incision size…

“We’re on the verge of what we might call the second wave in surgical robotics,” said Catherine Mohr, vice president of strategy at Intuitive Surgical, while speaking at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine conference this week.

Mohr believes this new wave of innovation will be characterized by the convergence of surgical robotics with AI and data gathered from robotic systems.

Surgery is about to get “digitized.” We’ll start collecting and analyzing data passing through these robotic systems, like motion tracking. “Once we can turn something into data, then we can start making exponential changes,” Mohr said.

A problem “calling out for robotics”

China is currently on track to have a million lung cancer deaths a year. Lung cancer is surgically treatable, but only if it is found fast enough. And too often we’re not finding it fast enough. Mohr says the problem of lung cancer detection is just calling out for robotics.

Currently, surgeons use a pre-operative image to search for cancer to remove, but the lungs are a moving target. So, to get to the cancer, surgeons deform the lungs on the way in and again on the way out because they are taking a different path. With surgical robotics, you can track the path in and use that same motion tracking data on the way out.

3 types of AI for surgery

We’re also on the cusp of starting to incorporate various AI systems into surgical simulations and procedures. Mohr listed three types of AI she’s personally interested in incorporating into surgical procedures.

• IBM Watson: Watson is an expert-system type of AI. Watson can store more medical information than any single human can store and and give responses to natural language queries from surgeons. Watson (or AI like it) will become an intelligent surgical assistant.
• Machine learning algorithms: Unsupervised pattern matching algorithms would aid doctors in recognizing when a sequence of symptoms results in a particular disease. Mohr says, “After all, what is medicine but really good pattern matching?”
• AlphaGO: During its training, AlphaGo played itself over and over again until new patterns emerged. Mohr imagines we can bring these type of AI into surgical simulations to observe how people learn and to test new learning strategies to answer the question of “how do we take a novice to an expert?”

In closing, Mohr sketched out this next wave of AI and robotics in surgery as a tight partnership between humans and machines, with one making up for the weaknesses of the other.

“I tend to think of robotics as a platform. It’s a platform which we have really advanced very far in terms of being able to reduce the invasiveness of the interventions,” she said. “These next phases are all going to be about integrating a lot of these new technologies onto this platform and being able to potentiate them.”

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Speaking at this year’s Exponential Medicine conference, Raymond McCauley talked about how our expanded abilities to read, write and hack DNA are opening up entirely new possibilities.

Here are three innovations in DNA technologies that could transform our home lives in the near future:

1. Networked household objects that track and report on health

Sequencing the first human genome was a Herculean task that took over a decade to complete at a cost of nearly 3 billion U.S. dollars. Today, anyone can have their entire genome sequenced in 12 hours for $1000, and companies are racing towards a future where sequencing a complete human genome costs just $100.

McCauley predicts that in 2018, the cost of sequencing a human genome will be under $20, or the cost of a delivery pizza. By 2022, it’ll be the same cost as flushing a toilet. More than that, he imagines we’ll likely have gene sequencers inside toilets.

In fact, McCauley believes that toilets will be the most networked appliance in the home of the future. One day, not only will toilets sense how healthy our bodies and diets are, they’ll provide tips, such as, “You’ve really got to stop eating chorizo.”

Currently, the limiting factor for DNA reading to become more commercialized is developing the right software to interpret all the data, so that we can gain meaningful insights from the long lines of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs.

2. Cellular agriculture that generates animal products without the animals

McCauley sees huge potential in “cellular agriculture,” as in making eggs without chickens and beef without cows. We will soon see a day when our favorite animal products will be animal free.

As I’ve written about before, scientists have discovered animals are conscious in similar ways to humans. Yet the habit of eating animals and using their bodies as commodities is likely not going to disappear soon.

However, new companies are providing means to move away from these practices by creating materials, foods and products in the lab that don’t harm animals in the process. For example:

• Memphis Meats grows beef, pork and poultry tissue in the lab by feeding animal stem cells a mixture of oxygen, sugar and minerals, which over several weeks develop into skeletal muscle in a bioreactor.
• MycoWorks grows a new kind of leather from mycelium (mushrooms), and other byproducts in a “carbon-negative process.”
• New Wave Foods creates a shrimp (the most consumed seafood in the U.S.) substitute grown from plant proteins and algae.  

• Geltor uses microbes to produce an animal-free gelatin for use in foods, cosmetics and medicines.

3. Affordable household bio-labs that generate bacteria to produce everything from perfumes to medicines

Animo Labs is a tabletop mini-lab that allows kids (and adults) to quickly and easily start engineering biology. It can grow bacteria that adopts various colors or glows in the dark.

But the team has a bigger vision for their “bento box” lab. Julie Legault, CEO of Animo Labs, told me, “Our goal for the long term it to create a distributed process for bio-production. If you can manufacture in the same way that large companies do today, but in smaller quantities, you can make anything from personalized perfume to insulin in the home.”

Today, we can now read, write and hack DNA with an ease and precision that’s never been possible before. As the cost of using these new tools continues to fall, we’ll see more products and innovative startups push the limits of what’s possible with DNA.

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But eventually, we have to stop looking through those texts and photos, because after a while, it’s like listening to a song on repeat for too long. The memories are static, they will never change, shift, and grow like the real person, and you just have to move on.

When Eugenia Kuyda lost her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, she wanted to memorialize him in a different way. As the cofounder of Luka, an artificial intelligence startup which recommends books and restaurants through a chat interface, Kuyda worked with her engineering team to collect thousands of Mazurenko’s texts and create a chatbot based on his personality.

The chatbot became informed by a collection of Roman’s interactions with various friends and family — no longer bound by just one person’s memories, it became a collection of the different facets of his personality.

The result was moving, uncanny — not like Roman and just like him all at once. Some of Roman’s friends appreciated the ability to interact with the Roman-like bot, while others were disturbed by it. His mother, in particular, felt she was getting to know her son in new ways through the bot.

The striking part of the story is how Roman’s friends and family ended up using the bot…

“It turned out that the primary purpose of the bot had not been to talk but to listen. ‘All those messages were about love, or telling him something they never had time to tell him,’ Kuyda said. ‘Even if it’s not a real person, there was a place where they could say it. They can say it when they feel lonely. And they come back still.’ ”

One of the greatest wishes and needs we have when we lose someone is to have a few more moments to tell them all the things we wish we had while they were still alive. Maybe, in the end, it helps just to feel that we have a safe place to say those things, even if it’s only a digital re-creation of the person listening.

You can read the full story here. It’s beautiful and poignant and well worth the read.

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But our current agricultural process is one of the biggest contributors to global warming. It emits more greenhouses gases than all the world’s cars combined and is a major consumer and polluter of our precious water resources.

How can we sustainably feed everyone without overextending our planet’s resources?

Speaking at Singularity University’s Global Summit, Geoffrey von Maltzahn, a biological engineer and entrepreneur, argued that we are at an important junction in our history: our biological engineering abilities are maturing so fast that we now have the opportunity to create a healthy, thriving planet and fulfill humanity’s growing needs as well.

Until now, our bioengineering abilities have been the equivalent of banging stone tools together, Von Maltzahn says. He believes “this will be the century where we actually get to make cathedrals in biology.”

The plummeting cost of genome sequencing, new genetic engineering tools like CRISPR and a growing understanding of microbiomes means that today we have an opportunity to reinvent agriculture in a way that was impossible even just a few years ago.

And Von Maltzahn believes microbes, of all things, have a very important part to play in that revolution.

Singularity University Global Summit is the culmination of the Exponential Conference Series and the definitive place to witness converging exponential technologies and understand how they’ll impact the world.

They’re Everywhere  

Microbes are literally everywhere. They are on the surface of your body, your clothes, in the foods you eat and in every breath you take.

They were living on this planet for two billion years before more complex life forms came about and have become quite good at cooperating with and supporting other life forms like humans and plants.

In fact, what’s fascinating is that microbes don’t just live on the surface of plants, they live inside plant tissues — just like they live in the inside of the human gut. This means we can find microbes on every leaf of wheat, every stalk of corn and every root of soy.

Like any organism, these microbes have an incentive to take care of their habitat — whether that’s the inside of a plant, a human or any other living organism.

Better Living Through Microbes

Here’s Von Maltzahn’s big hypothesis: What if plant microbes have evolved a means to influence the very biology of plants to protect themselves and their environment (the plant) against everything from drought stress, heat, cold, salt, various insects, fungal, bacterial and viral invasions? Von Maltzahn explains:

“You could think about the whole world as just a big petri dish of plants under different stresses, surrounded by microbes, filtering those microbes and taking a subset of them into its interior and then co-evolving with those microbes in order to influence the stresses that that plant is under….One of the things that we have now realized is that, in fact, many of the technologies we’ve been using over the course of the past 100 years in agriculture, inadvertently can drive enormous decreases in diversity in these systems and, in fact, drive an extinction or a loss of functions that we’ve observed can be quite important to the fitness of plants.”

If this is the case, perhaps working with the plant microbiome might be a more powerful and natural way to influence and improve the important traits of agricultural crops.

How? Von Maltzahn sees two opportunities. One is to rebuild some of the ecological health we’ve lost accidentally as a result of modern farming techniques. The second is to better understand the gene pool of microbes and create tailored microbes for any type of plant fitness profile across the world.

Need a crop to survive extreme heat or drought? Soon there might be just the right cocktail of microbes to aid that crop’s survival. Harnessing the power of microbes, we could improve our crops’ stress tolerance and reduce pesticide, fertilizer and water use across the planet.

In fact, this is already starting to happen today: a Massachusetts-based startup called  Indigo recently launched their first product, a cotton seed, which aims to reduce water consumption by the cotton plant through the use of microbes.

The science of the microbiome is an incredibly young one, and there is much we still have to learn. But it’s inspiring to imagine a more natural agriculture, created with new tools and knowledge of the microbes that play such an integral part in plant health — and our own.

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