Hey readers,
Happy Friday! Yet another week has come and gone. Earlier this week, I wrote a follow-up on the mask study everyone's been talking about. And as part of a conference for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, editor Bryan Walsh will be moderating a panel in New York on Tuesday morning about how to close the digital divide. Check it out if you're in town!
Don't be afraid to shoot us an email at futureperfect@vox.com to tell us your thoughts, what you've been enjoying, and what you'd like to see more of. —Kelsey Piper, senior writer |
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Q&A: New frontiers need new materials |
From bronze to silicon, one way to define an age is by its materials. Working within the constraints of a particular manufacturing process can deliver important, if incremental, progress on thorny problems. But inventing a new paradigm can render these problems obsolete (though new ones do tend to pop up). For example, rather than relying on carbon offsets to scale back emissions, could we invent entirely new ways of manufacturing that produce no carbon emissions in the first place, like fusion power? According to Benjamin Reinhardt, CEO of the new applied research organization Speculative Technologies, there are significant gaps in today's innovation ecosystem. Academia, startups, and corporate research and development all lack the right mix of incentives to make progress on material transitions.
"When we're able to harness a new material or create better ways of manufacturing things, the downstream effects are so enabling," Reinhardt says. Reinhardt's solution is modeling his organization after the unusually innovative Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), but with a twist: Instead of a government agency focused on defense, what if we applied a similar model to a nonprofit focused on engineering? The model is built around "empowered program managers," experts who receive wide-ranging authority to coordinate multi-year projects toward a single "big-if-true" technological vision. I spoke to Reinhardt about new ways of fabricating microelectronics as simple as printing a document to new ways of binding different molecules into materials, and the battle to, as he puts it, turn "the impossible into the inevitable." —Oshan Jarow You've written that the history of technology is one of second order effects. What do you mean by that? The biggest societal impacts that you see from technologies don't happen in the way that the technology was intended. The Haber-Bosch process [which produces ammonia, a critical component in manufacturing fertilizers] is a great example. Because you look at one of the existential threats to humanity in the 20th century, people would talk about overpopulation and that we were going to run out of food. And the Haber-Bosch process was not created to address overpopulation. It was created to make Germany independent of other nations for fertilizer. But the second order effect was to solve a massive world problem. So why not work on the most pressing issues in the world? My perspective is that we are, just very openly. I'm very optimistic that the way we're going to address things like climate change is by figuring out new manufacturing processes. Because so much carbon emission comes from manufacturing. If we figure out completely new approaches, we can actually address the problem without having to reduce the level of abundance. |
"Startups are really good at getting products out there, but not as good at doing research where you don't know what the end results are going to be" |
What's an example of a new material or manufacturing process that you're working on?
One program we're working on is figuring out a way to make materials out of specifiable, covalently bonded proteins. What that actually means is that right now, we're pretty good at making individual proteins and designing them. But most of the applications of proteins in the body are these multi-protein configurations. Antibodies are several proteins covalently bonded together. So we're figuring out how to be able to engineer those arrays of proteins.
One application in the near term could potentially let us make artificial antibodies with properties that we can't do naturally. But then in the longer term, you could see it as a step along the pathway to start making materials that could do solid-state chemistry, as a more generalizable way of making materials. So if we could do this with proteins, then why not proteins and other materials, like some kind of metal? So then, we can make materials that are heterogeneous mixtures of other building blocks.
You write that today's ecosystem of innovation — startups, academia, and corporate R&D — has big gaps that lead to critical research not getting done, and you see Speculative Technologies as an institutional experiment in filling some of the gaps. Can you expand on that?
They are all important, but like any institution, they have constraints. With academia, the real incentive is toward making something new. When you submit a paper for peer review, it's very much judged on novelty. But to actually build a functioning system, you need to do a lot of work that is not novel. And there's not a lot of incentive to do that in academia.
In startups, your incentive is for growth and return on investment. The thing about [basic] engineering research, though, is that you don't know how long it will take. So doing research under time pressure so that you're keeping investors happy, there's a real tension there. Startups are really good at getting products out there, but not as good at doing research where you don't know what the end results are going to be.
And then with modern corporate R&D, there is a lot of pressure on companies from shareholders to justify the work they're doing, and how it's going to lead to shareholder value. The problem is that with speculative research, you don't know. You can't have that clear justification. A different paradigm of doing something is not part of someone's business plan. |
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We can overcome vaccine hesitancy. Just look at the HPV shot. |
Keith Bedford/The Boston Globe via Getty Images |
Cervical cancer rates among vaccinated girls and young women have decreased by nearly 90 percent since 2006, potentially saving thousands of lives. Speaking to patients with empathy and patience was key to helping anxious parents overcome their hesitations around the shots a decade ago, and it could be key once more, argues fellow Rachel DuRose in her latest piece. "One of the things I enjoyed most about writing this story is that it's positive news," DuRose said. "While reporting this story, I really had to dig into what people's concerns with vaccines were then, in the 2000s, compared to what they are now, and it was truly striking how much these fears have changed. I think that showed me that vaccine hesitancy isn't really rooted in the talking points people use, but in a general distrust of a medical system that's unfortunately let many communities down." More on this topic from Vox: |
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How the first chatbot predicted the dangers of AI more than 50 years ago |
Before there was Bing and ChatGPT, there was ELIZA — the first chatbot, introduced almost 50 years ago. ELIZA built its responses around a single keyword from users, making for a pretty small mirror. Today's chatbots reflect our tendencies drawn from billions of words. Bing might be the largest mirror humankind has ever constructed, and we're on the cusp of installing such generative AI technology everywhere. Fellow Oshan Jarow explores the lessons we could learn from history as we venture down this new path.
"I was mildly relieved to learn why Joseph Weizenbaum, the inventor of the first chatbot turned self-described heretic of technology, believed that machines could never actually understand humans," Jarow said. "Even if there's love to balance things out, building a species of machines consigned to encounter the same loneliness and suffering we humans do strikes me as a moral catastrophe." More on this topic from Vox: |
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A thorough new study on the world food system's climate impact published in the journal Nature Climate Change this week finds that food production alone is enough to put us over 1.5°C of warming — and the vast majority of that is driven by meat, dairy, and rice, all high-methane foods. And even this is a conservative estimate, since it assumes that dietary patterns around the world will remain the same, but, the study acknowledges, global per capita demand for meat and dairy is expected to skyrocket this century. —Marina Bolotnikova, staff editor Like everyone, I've been obsessed with Bing and the rise of generative AI, and recently fell down a rabbit hole examining what these apps mean for copyright law. Bing often straight-up plagiarizes existing websites; conversely, it can create novel paragraphs that Bing users might want to copyright. Is it violating the law? Is copyrighting its outputs allowed? My colleague James Vincent at The Verge has the best treatment of these issues I've seen to date, and is someone you should be following if the topic interests you. —Dylan Matthews, senior correspondent When I was living in Tokyo and reporting on Japan and Korea, I had a motto: "The sun gets here first, and so does the future." In the Cut, Anna Louie Sussman goes inside South Korea's 4B movement, where women in this deeply patriarchal society have responded by cutting themselves off from heterosexuality, childbirth, even dating. In a country with the lowest fertility rate in the world, the growth of the 4Bs is a sign of just how radically different social relations could become. Korea may have reached the future first, but the rest of us will get there. —Bryan Walsh, editor If you're going to read one thing about food this week, make it Elizabeth Kolbert's history of phosphorus's role in agriculture and the coming "phosphogeddon." If you're worried that 3,500 words on a single mineral will be a snoozefest, you're dead wrong. Come for the phosphorus, stay for the rich tales of bat poop in Peru, human "peecycling" in Vermont, a Florida fugitive thwarted by toxic algae, and a small town in the western Sahara that keeps food systems humming around the world. —Kenny Torrella, staff writer |
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