Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview Documentary

*Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview* is a documentary exploring the depths of the current human condition and the emergence of a worldview that is recreating our world from the inside out.

Weaving together insights and findings from biology, psychology, network science, systems science, business, culture and media, the film reveals the inner workings of the human experience in the 21st century, urging viewers to step out of the box and challenge their own assumptions about who we really are, and why we do what we do.

*Crossroads* places evolutionary context to today's escalating social unrest, natural disasters, and economic failures. It illuminates the footsteps of an integrated worldview, penetrating its way through the power of social networks to the forefront of our personal and collective awareness.

A refreshing reality check for all viewers and a clarion call for those who carry the seeds of the emerging worldview.

Scientists and thinkers featured in *Crossroads* include: Amit Goswami, Neale Donald Walsch, Elisabet Sahtouris, Bruce Lipton, Peter Joseph, Caroline A. Miller, Nicholas Christakis, James Fowler, Michael Laitman, Ervin Laszlo, Dean Radin, Dave Sherman, Annie Leonard, Jairon G. Cuesta, and John St. Augustine.

Crossroads: Labor Pains of a New Worldview

Singularity Summit 2012 - Create the Future

Check out the full videos, here.
Singularity Summit 2012 - Create the Future

The Singularity Summit will draw over 800 thought leaders to San Francisco for discussions on the most revolutionary technological advancements on the horizon.

The annual conference was founded in 2006 by Ray Kurzweil, Peter Thiel, and the Singularity Institute as the first academic symposium for dialogue on the Technological Singularity. The "Singularity" is a term defined by Vernor Vinge meaning greater-than-human intelligence in computers or augmented humans.

Past speakers at Singularity Summit have included Doug Hofstadter (author of Godel, Escher, Bach), Peter Norvig (Google Director of Research), Sebastian Thrun (Stanford AI Lab Director), Rodney Brooks (MIT Professor of Robotics), Justin Rattner (CTO of Intel), and Stephen Wolfram (CEO and Founder of Wolfram Research).

A New Class of Industrial Robot | Rodney Brooks

Abstract

At Rethink Robotics we have been developing a new class of industrial robot. The transition from mainframes to PCs completely transformed office work, and then transformed how we access information in our daily lives. With mainframes only specialists had direct access to computation. With the PC ordinary people were empowered to control computation and to use if for their own purposes. The Baxter robot is aimed at an analogous transformation from current industrial robots which are installed, integrated, and controlled by specialists, to a situation where anybody who can work on a factory floor can install a robot and have it doing useful work within an hour. The important metrics for this new class of robot are adaptability, flexibility, and ease of use. And low cost. This talk will show how we defined and drove the design of the robot and its own manufacture to these metrics.

Speaker Biography

Rodney Brooks is the Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus) at MIT.

He is a robotics entrepreneur and Founder, Chairman and CTO of Rethink Robotics (formerly Heartland Robotics). He is also a Founder, former Board Member (1990 - 2011) and former CTO (1990 - 2008) of iRobot Corp (Nasdaq: IRBT). Dr. Brooks is the former Director (1997 - 2007) of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and then the MIT Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). He received degrees in pure mathematics from the Flinders University of South Australia and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1981. He held research positions at Carnegie Mellon University and MIT, and a faculty position at Stanford before joining the faculty of MIT in 1984. He has published many papers in computer vision, artificial intelligence, robotics, and artificial life.

Dr. Brooks served for many years as a member of the International Scientific Advisory Group (ISAG) of National Information and Communication Technology Australia (NICTA), and on the Global Innovation and Technology Advisory Council of John Deere & Co. He is an currently Xconomist at Xconomy and a regular contributor to the Edge.

Dr. Brooks is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a Founding Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (AAAS), a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the other AAAS), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a Corresponding Member of the Australian Academy of Science (AAS) and a Foreign Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering (ATSE). He won the Computers and Thought Award at the 1991 IJCAI (International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence). He has been the Cray lecturer at the University of Minnesota, the Mellon lecturer at Dartmouth College, and the Forsythe lecturer at Stanford University. He was co-founding editor of the International Journal of Computer Vision and is a member of the editorial boards of various journals including Adaptive Behavior, Artificial Life, Applied Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Robots and New Generation Computing. He starred as himself in the 1997 Errol Morris movie "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" named for one of his scientific papers, a Sony Classics picture, available on DVD.

RI Seminar: Rodney Brooks : A New Class of Industrial Robot

MUST READ! What Is Life? A 21st Century Perspective | J. Craig Venter

I was asked earlier whether the goal is to dissect what Schrödinger had spoken and written, or to present the new summary, and I always like to be forward-looking, so I won't give you a history lesson except for very briefly. I will present our findings on first on reading the genetic code, and then learning to synthesize and write the genetic code, and as many of you know, we synthesized an entire genome, booted it up to create an entirely new synthetic cell where every protein in the cell was based on the synthetic DNA code.

As you all know, Schrödinger's book was published in 1944 and it was based on a series of three lectures here, starting in February of 1943. And he had to repeat the lectures, I read, on the following Monday because the room on the other side of campus was too small, and I understand people were turned away tonight, but we're grateful for Internet streaming, so I don't have to do this twice.

Also, due clearly to his historical role, and it's interesting to be sharing this event with Jim Watson, who I've known and had multiple interactions with over the last 25 years, including most recently sharing the Double Helix Prize for Human Genome Sequencing with him from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory a few years ago.

Schrödinger started his lecture with a key question and an interesting insight on it. The question was "How can the events in space and time, which take place within the boundaries of a living organism be accounted for by physics and chemistry?" It's a pretty straightforward, simple question. Then he answered what he could at the time, "The obvious inability of present-day physics and chemistry to account for such events is no reason at all for doubting that they will be accounted for by those sciences." While I only have around 40 minutes, not three lectures, I hope to convince you that there has been substantial progress in the last nearly 70 years since Schrödinger initially asked that question, to the point where the answer is at least nearly at hand, if not in hand.

I view that we're now in what I'm calling "The Digital Age of Biology". My teams work on synthesizing genomes based on digital code in the computer, and four bottles of chemicals illustrates the ultimate link between the computer code and the digital code.

Life is code, as you heard in the introduction, was very clearly articulated by Schrodinger as code script. Perhaps even more importantly, and something I missed on the first few readings of his book earlier in my career, was as far as I could tell, it's the first mention that this code could be as simple as a binary code. And he used the example of how the Morse code with just dots and dashes, could be sufficient to give 34 different specifications. I've searched and I have not found any earlier references to the Morse code, although an historian that I know wrote Crick a letter asking about that, and Crick's response was, "It was a metaphor that was obvious to everybody." I don't know if it was obvious to everybody after Schrodinger's book, or some time before.

One of the things, though, Schrodinger was right about a lot of things, which is why, in fact, we celebrate what he talked about and what he wrote about, but some things he was clearly wrong about, like most scientists in his time, he relied on the biologist of the day. They thought that protein, not DNA was the genetic information. It's really quite extraordinary because just in 1944 in the same year that he published his book is when the famous experiment by Oswald Avery, who was 65 and about ready to retire, along with this colleagues, Colin MacLeod and Maclyn McCarty, published their key paper demonstrating that DNA was the substance that causes bacterial transformation, and therefore was the genetic material.

This experiment was remarkably simple, and I wonder why it wasn't done 50 years earlier with all the wonderful genetics work going on with drosophila, and chromosomes. Avery simply used proteolytic enzymes to destroy all the proteins associated with the DNA, and showed that the DNA, the naked DNA was, in fact, a transforming factor. The impact of this paper was far from instantaneous, as has happened in this field, in part because there was so much bias against DNA and for its proteins that it took a long time for them to sink in.

Continue reading (Long Read) - What Is Life? A 21st Century Perspective

The Biological-Digital Converter —Or— Biology At The Speed Of Light

These are exciting and challenging times for science and society. If you look at the practical side of things, in the next 11 years we're going to add a billion people to the planet, so basically the equivalent of China being added in 11 years, and 12 years after that we're going to add another billion people. Last October we just passed the 7 billion mark, and that took 12 years to happen from 6 billion. In the 1800s it took well over 100 years to go from 1 to 2 billion people. We're in a unique time in history where there are more people alive than have ever existed in human history, and we keep expanding tremendously, and exhausting the resources of the planet.

There are a number of things that come into play here. We've been doing everything from trying to understand the human genome, and human genetic inheritance, and we have teams that are doing some of the first genomes of early populations in Africa and have traced down actually the oldest populations in Southern Africa that we all have evolved from, from groups that migrated out of Africa. It turns out I have a Northern European ancestry primarily, and so we probably all share this. My ancestors, and probably most of yours found Neanderthals attractive and mated with them. And so what was thought to not be any coexistence, we now ... 3 to 4 percent of my genome is Neanderthal-derived. My friend, Bill Clinton, when we shared an honor a couple of years ago, told me he learned that he was 3 percent Neanderthal, and that explained all his problems while in office.

We're learning about our own history, our own migrations, but we have to do something different for the future. A major producer once argued that we have two hopes for humanity, one is to be able to populate distant planets, and the other is to alter our genetic code so we can survive in a very deteriorated environment here on the planet.

We're working on both, and there are some exciting changes. Science is changing things very quickly. Think about how the Internet has changed all of our lives in the last decade or so. I assume most people here have an iPad, and that's three years old, barely? And it's hard to imagine life without an iPad in our culture. But very soon we're going to be able to send something else across the Internet. We can now send biology at the speed of light, and this is one of the implications of our work, which we recorded two years ago making the first synthetic life form. We completely synthesized the genetic code of a cell starting with a digital code in the computer—it's the ultimate interface between computers and biology. The digital code and the genetic code have a lot in common; something Schrodinger pointed out in 1943, saying it could be something as simple as the Morse code.

Digital code, as you know, is a binary code, and ones and zeroes, and your genetic code is literally four-base code with ACGs and Ts. We can now readily convert in between the two, and we can define life at its most basic level. Things that were a mystery fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, we now understand completely.

We know what a cell is, know that all the components, all the proteins in the cell are miniature robots. They don't have a brain, they don't have a soul, they have a structure that defines their function, and their structure is determined by the genetic code, which defines the linear code of the protein, which determines how it folds, how it functions, and how stable it is. You don't feel it sitting there, but every one of your 100 trillion cells is rapidly metabolizing proteins. Your proteins have a half-life between a few seconds and ten or twenty hours. You don't know that you're sloughing 500 billion skin cells a day. All that dust you find around your houses, in your apartments? That's you, little bits of you. You turn over your entire skin every two to three weeks. Biology is a constant state of renewal, and it's a software-driven state of renewal. Take the DNA out of the cell, and the cell dies. In fact, that's why radiation kills people. It disrupts the genetic code, breaks it up, and people die because all the proteins degrade very quickly.

But imagine if you could e-mail yourself to Mars or some distant planet. We can actually do that now, because with our synthetic cell, we start with the digital code in the computer, and there's no difference between digital code and genetic code. Because digital code can move as an electromagnetic wave, basically close to the speed of light, we can now move biology at the speed of light. This has some practical applications.

The recent movie Contagion portrayed how everybody died from flu pandemic, while awaiting the vaccine. Real life is much better than science fiction. We can now make a new flu vaccine in less than twelve hours using synthetic DNA. Instead of having to deal with a major pandemic where you can't travel out of your home or your city, imagine that you had a little box next to your computer, and you got an e-mail, and that gave you a chance to actually make a vaccine instantly, sort of like 3D printers. What we do with information now, we will be doing with information and biology together.

Obviously the downside is you could instead of giving your partner a genetic disease or an infection, you can e-mail it. So people could use this to do harm, as we see with computer viruses all the time. You would, of course, want good computer and biological virus protection on your DNA decoder.

Continue reading (Long Read) - The Biological-Digital Converter —Or— Biology At The Speed Of Light

'What is Life? A 21st Century Perspective' by Dr Craig Venter

The Future of Computing - Reuniting Bits and Atoms | Neil Gershenfeld

The Future of Computing -- Reuniting Bits and Atoms by Neil Gershenfeld, Director, The Center for Bits and Atoms, MIT

The Future of Computing -- Reuniting Bits and Atoms

Programming the Universe | Seth Lloyd

Seth Llyod is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). His talk, "Programming the Universe", is about the computational power of atoms, electrons, and elementary particles.

Seth Lloyd on Programming the Universe

The Technological Singularity | Vernor Vinge | Singularity University

Science Fiction: it has been a muse of geeks, techies and scientists for decades. Many of the technologies we explore on Singularity Hub were first imagined and explored in SF (star trek tricorders, the WWW, robot cars, etc), driving technologists to make them real, which in turn inspires a new round of SF. In thinking about predicting and solving global grand challenges, the storytelling and worldbuilding of SF has much to contribute. Singularity University’s (SU) 1st ever Science Fiction panel took place on July 17th. As a prelude, here’s an interview with Vernor Vinge below, as well as the full footage of his talk about groupminds at SU on June 25, 2012.

Hugo Award-winning science fiction writer Vernor Vinge maintains science fiction is merely a form of scenario based planning about the future of mankind. Vinge, a retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, coined the term “the Singularity” roughly 30 years ago in reference to a time of vastly accelerating technological change. I had a chance to sit down with Vinge and ask him about the Singularity, accelerating technology, and more. Check out the video below:

In outlining various paths to a technological Singularity, Vinge believes scenario based planning is incredibly important when outcomes are uncertain. It gives you a system of symptoms to watch for, so you can plan responses for different sets of symptoms. If you are doing scenario based planning, having a science fiction writer as a loose canon in your next meeting may shake up the committee in a positive way.

Vinge’s scenarios for how humanity could get to a tech singularity are as follows:

1. Pure Artificial Intelligence: The advent of an intelligent superhuman computer.

2. Intelligence Amplification: Take a natural mind, interface it with a computer and make it smarter (popular science fiction author David Brin calls the computer a neo-neo cortex; the machine part allows us to be smart, and the human part provides us with the component we’re good at: wanting things).

3. Computer Networks + Humanity: A phenomenon he calls “groupmind” or social networking, where we achieve superhuman intelligence (at least a functional sort – proceeding at a more robust rate than the others) through coordinated group efforts. An example of this would be Wikipedia.

4. Digital Gaia: A world with ubiquitous microprocessors able to communicate with their neighbors: if every physical object knew what it was, where it was, and could communicate with any other device, the result could be one where the world itself wakes up and becomes its own database.

5. Biomedical improvements in human intelligence lead to better memory and other changes.

Vinge spends the majority of his lecture at Singularity University detailing the taxonomy of groupminds – their qualities in size, origin, focus, hardware/software, longevity, interaction, sociology, design, and implications for his other paths to the singularity. He also talks about outliers – societal makers vs. breakers.

Vinge advises large institutions to understand that when they look at participants in groupminds they are looking at an intellectual resource that dwarfs anything we’d seen in the 20th century. There’s a real chance groupminds will prove worthy competitors, adversaries, and counterparts to social organizations and corporations in many situations . The downsides are that a groupmind may suppress slow thoughtful thinking about problems and may outsource morality. Vinge’s lecture also veers into the philosophical with his thoughts on identity and an individual’s desire for global self-awareness.

Vinge ends his talk on an optimistic note by saying “a post-scarcity economy is not a post-singularity idea: the reach of the mind will always exceed its grasp.” He predicts that even if we continue to experience technological unemployment, “bright sparks of human level intuition, creativity, and insight” will remain. “We’ll always be able to think of projects that are beyond what we can presently do.” Vinge believes with technology it’s possible to become or create creatures that surpass humans in every aspect of intelligence – and perhaps only an extreme physical catastrophe can stop this change.

If science fiction is essentially a scenario, its enormous advantage over other types of scenario based planning is that it can inspire action in its readers, especially when those readers are specialists. If the story emotionally engages the reader, the credentials of the writer do not matter. The specialist (reader) is the one who does the heavy lifting, turning the author’s broad brushstrokes into something that exists in the real world. This is the underappreciated characteristic of science fiction – its ability to move the scientific community to reach across the parameters of possibility.

Source: SH Interviews Vernor Vinge – How Will We Get To The Technological Singularity?

Vernor Vinge - a techno-optimist.


Vernor Vinge on Technological Singularity

Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life and New Worlds | Jeremy Bailenson | Stanford University

Jeremy Bailenson shares his research on virtual reality, avatars, transformed social interaction, and related communication and psychological theories, as well as implications for citizens living in the digital age.

Infinite Reality: Avatars, Eternal Life and New Worlds

Venter says 'synthetic life coming'

The world may soon see the first examples of synthetic life, artificial organisms constructed in a laboratory. These will be unique organisms, not close copies of existing cells, said their creator Dr Craig Venter.

The controversial geneticist last night delivered a keynote address at Trinity College Dublin, part of the programme taking place in Dublin during the EuroScience Open Forum. Aptly, the title of his talks was “What is Life?”

Speaking before the actual lecture Dr Venter described his latest efforts to create synthetic life. He also talked about the “What is Life?” lectures which were originally given in 1943.

He and his laboratory in California were well on the way towards assembling a unique living organism, one unknown to exist anywhere else on the planet.

Two years ago he reported having built a living organism. “This was a proof of concept,” Dr Venter said. “It wasn’t identical to any existing cell but we wanted it to live.” For that reason it was modelled on another cell.

Things had progressed significantly however. His team are currently designing three different organisms, adding blocks of DNA that have been seen to be essential for sustaining life, he said. They do not know what design will produce a living organism so they decided to produce several.

Once designed these would then be built using DNA sequencing machines and the genetic package would then be popped into a hollowed out cell.

The work was made particularly difficult because geneticists still do not know the function of many of the genes seen in living organisms. “We don’t know all the first principles,” he said.

He had no doubt however that they would achive their goal. “Iam hoping it will happen this year.”

The research would deliver benefits for society, he said. World population was set to grow by two billion over the next decade. That was like adding an extra India to the world population, he said. “We are a species that are 100 per cent dependent on science.” Advances in technology could increase food production 10 to 100 fold.

Dr Venter’s use of the title What is Life? was not his own. It was originally used for a series of lectures given at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies by Nobel laureate Erwin Schrödinger in 1943. They were later published as a book.

Schrödinger was a physicist so it seemed unlikely that he would deliver a talk which looked at the nature of inheritance and how our genetic make-up was transferred from generation to generation.

The lectures went on however to inspire a generation of biologist, ultimately leading to the discovery of DNA and how it works.

Pauric Dempsey at the Royal Irish Academy proposed that Dr Venter be asked to reprise the talk, bringing it into the 21st Century. Dr Venter readily agreed and last night brought the themes raised by Schrödinger up to the very latest discoveries being made using genetic technologies.

“Schrödinger asked can life be defined using physics and chemistry and his answer was ’absolutely’,” Dr Venter said.

“The remarkable thing about what he did was he predicted what he called the code script before DNA was identified as the genetic material...before the genetic code had been revealed,” he said.

“It is an honour to be asked to update a wonderful inspiring book,” he said. It would have been “fantastic” to be able to sit down and discuss it with Schrödinger.

Source: Venter says 'synthetic life coming'

RADICAL OPENNESS | Jason Silva

RADICAL OPENNESS - An anthem on the power of IDEAS created by Jason Silva at Therapy Studios and premiered at TEDGlobal 2012 Main Stage.

RADICAL OPENNESS for TEDGlobal by @Jason_Silva

Amazing Google Glasses Demonstration at Google I/O 2012 | Project Glass

Google Glasses Live Demonstration - During the Google I/O 2012 keynote, the audience was about to experience an amazing demonstration of Google Glasses.

Amazing Google Glasses Demonstration at Google I/O 2012

MUST WATCH! Medicine's Future? There's An App For That | Daniel Kraft [TEDx]

At TEDxMaastricht, Daniel Kraft offers a fast-paced look at the next few years of innovations in medicine, powered by new tools, tests and apps that bring diagnostic information right to the patient's bedside.

Daniel Kraft: Medicine's future? There's an app for that

Labor’s Paradise Lost | Robert Skidelsky | Technological Unemployment

As people in the developed world wonder how their countries will return to full employment after the global recession, it might benefit us to take a look at a visionary essay that John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1930, called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, published in 1936, equipped governments with the intellectual tools to counter the unemployment caused by slumps. In this earlier essay, however, Keynes distinguished between unemployment caused by temporary economic breakdowns and what he called "technological unemployment" – that is, "unemployment due to the discovery of means of economising the use of labour outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour".

Keynes reckoned that we would hear much more about this kind of unemployment in the future. But its emergence, he thought, was a cause for hope, rather than despair. For it showed that the developed world, at least, was on track to solving the "economic problem" – the problem of scarcity that kept mankind tethered to a burdensome life of toil.

Machines were rapidly replacing human labour, holding out the prospect of vastly increased production at a fraction of the existing human effort. In fact, Keynes thought that by about now (the early 21st century) most people would have to work only 15 hours a week to produce all that they needed for subsistence and comfort.

Developed countries are now about as rich as Keynes thought they would be, but most of us work much longer than 15 hours a week, although we do take longer holidays, and work has become less physically demanding, so we also live longer. But, in broad terms, the prophecy of vastly increased leisure for all has not been fulfilled. Automation has been proceeding apace, but most of us who work still put in an average of 40 hours a week. In fact, working hours have not fallen since the early 1980s.

At the same time, "technological unemployment" has risen. Since the 1980s, we have never regained the full employment levels of the 1950s and 1960s. If most people still work a 40-hour week, a substantial and growing minority have had unwanted leisure thrust upon them in the form of unemployment, under-employment and forced withdrawal from the labour market. And, as we recover from the current recession, most experts expect this group to grow even larger.

What this means is that we have largely failed to convert growing technological unemployment into increased voluntary leisure. The main reason for this is that the lion's share of the productivity gains achieved over the last 30 years has been seized by the well-off.

Particularly in the United States and Britain since the 1980s, we have witnessed a return to the capitalism "red in tooth and claw" depicted by Karl Marx. The rich and very rich have become very much richer, while everyone else's incomes have stagnated. So most people are not, in fact, four or five times better off than they were in 1930. It is not surprising that they are working longer than Keynes thought they would.

But there is something else. Modern capitalism inflames, through every sense and pore, the hunger for consumption. Satisfying that hunger has become the great palliative of modern society, our counterfeit reward for working irrational hours. Advertisers proclaim a single message: your soul is to be discovered in your shopping.

Aristotle knew of insatiability only as a personal vice; he had no inkling of the collective, politically orchestrated insatiability that we call economic growth. The civilization of "always more" would have struck him as moral and political madness.

And, beyond a certain point, it is also economic madness. This is not just or mainly because we will soon enough run up against the natural limits to growth. It is because we cannot go on for much longer economising on labour faster than we can find new uses for it. That road leads to a division of society into a minority of producers, professionals, supervisors, and financial speculators on one side, and a majority of drones and unemployables on the other.

Apart from its moral implications, such a society would face a classic dilemma: how to reconcile the relentless pressure to consume with stagnant earnings. So far, the answer has been to borrow, leading to today's massive debt overhangs in advanced economies. Obviously, this is unsustainable, and thus is no answer at all, for it implies periodic collapse of the wealth-producing machine.

The truth is that we cannot go on successfully automating our production without rethinking our attitudes toward consumption, work, leisure, and the distribution of income. Without such efforts of social imagination, recovery from the current crisis will simply be a prelude to more shattering calamities in the future.

Source: Guardian - Return to capitalism 'red in tooth and claw' spells economic madness

The Sensory Effect | Ray Kurzweil

Ray Kurzweil delivers "The Sensory Effect" keynote speech at the NY Tech Meetup. Ray talks about exponential growth, the role that information systems will play in the future of healthcare, artificial intelligence and additional topics.

Ray Kurzweil - "The Sensory Effect"

Organisms as Applications | Andrew Hessel | Synthetic Biology

Presentación de Andrew Hessel en el seminario "Tecnologías exponenciales para resolver los grandes problemas de la humanidad" desarrollado por el Centro de Innovación TECHO y Movistar Innova en Marzo de 2012.

Presentación de Andrew Hessel en Seminario CI-Movistar Innova

Incredibly Young and Smart Entrepreneurs Aiming for the Moonshot | 20 Under 20 | Thiel Fellowship

The dropouts, the misfits and wunkerkinds. The young and the fearless. They come every year to Silicon Valley. And mostly, they have come on their own.

It wasn’t until last year there that was a dedicated program for them. The famously contrarian and libertarian investor Peter Thiel created a fellowship for twenty people under the age of 20. The mission was to find uncommonly brilliant young people and get them to forgo the traditional path of college. The first class went on to start companies, raise several million dollars in venture capital or work on complex technical problems in biology.

Now Thiel’s foundation is on its second year. What the foundation looks for actually hasn’t changed all that much, the foundation’s co-founder Jim O’Neill tells us. The application form still has Thiel’s very famous interview question, which probes for a person’s capacity to think independently. He asks, “Tell us something about the world that you think is true that most people think is not true.”

There is also another variant of this question later on, which asks: “What is one thing that exists today that you would like to make absurd in 20 years?”

“We’re looking for intellectual independence and a determination to make something new and to make it work,” O’Neill says.

Some of fellows are exactly what you would expect — if anything predictable could ever come out of this program. There is the youngest person to have ever created nuclear fusion, Taylor Wilson. (An excellent story about him from Popular Science is right here.)

There is also a pair that’s working on biomedical imaging with the vision that it could one day be precise enough to spot as few as 10 cancer cells.

“Doctors often use mainly qualitative information in diagnosing disease,” Anand Gupta said in a presentation at the San Francisco Palace of the Fine Arts earlier this year. “Biomedical imaging has the density, structure and information to provide more rational tools to find disease.”

Yet another fellow, Harvard student Connor Zwick, has an iPhone app that makes enough to bring him a livable income. It’s a Flashcards app, which seems simple at the surface level. But he thinks about it as a learning network that responds and adapts to how people progress with intaking new material.

Another fellow Chris Olah got hooked on 3D printing when he was a teenager spending time at Toronto’s Hack Lab. He had already dropped out of college.

“The time obligations of university made it difficult to work on projects that I wanted to pursue,” he said in an interview. “There are only so many hours in a day.”

Some of the projects can easily be turned into consumer web startups, while others are more research-oriented. Some problems the fellows are attacking can be solved by brute technical force, while others are far more political like health care. Ilya Vakhutinsky, for example, is trying to automate home care after working on data visualization at a plasma physics laboratory.

Even though Thiel believes that we may be in a “higher education bubble,” there aren’t any plans to scale the fellowship beyond 20 people a year. O’Neill says it should inspire others to take the same leap in thinking critically about whether they need a university degree or not.

Here are the fellows:

Clay Allsopp (20, Raleigh, NC) thinks people should be able to forget about technology and simply focus on being creative. His start-up, Apptory, helps individuals and businesses create and distribute content for touch-screen devices, using an intuitive, easy-to-understand interface.

Dylan Field (20, Penngrove, CA) envisions a world where people define themselves by what they create rather than what they consume. Currently stopped out of Brown University, Field is working with his former classmate Evan Wallace on making better creative tools.

Kettner Griswold (19, Bethesda, MD) and Paul Sebexen (19, Staten Island, NY) are stopping out of school to work on a benchtop genome synthesis device, which will allow individual laboratories and medical practices to synthesize large genetic constructs in-house for an unprecedented low recurring cost. This product would massively disrupt the fields of biotechnology and health care, fueling innovation and stimulating interest and research sector-wide.

Anand Gupta (20, Palo Alto, CA) and Tony Ho (19, San Jose, CA) are using their expertise in biology and computer science to transform the way doctors diagnose patients. Their service will enable doctors and researchers to receive quantitative analysis of biomedical images, allowing for faster, more accurate diagnoses of complex diseases – and more lives saved.

Spencer Hewett (20, Bryan Mawr, PA) has an insatiable passion for inventing that extends far beyond the confines of one particular industry. As a Thiel fellow, he will focus on No-Q, a fusion of radio-frequency identification (RFID) and mobile payment technology that will eliminate both checkout lines and shoplifting.

Yoonseo Kang (18, Mississauga, ON, Canada) recognizes that society’s potential for innovation and abundance can only be achieved if knowledge and the factors of production are accessible for everyone. With that in mind, Yoonseo sees open-source hardware as the key for enabling communities around the world to vastly increase their productive potential and together engage in strategic economic collaboration. To that end, he is working with Open Source Ecology to develop the Global Village Construction Set, the 50 industrial machines that it takes to build a civilization with modern comforts.

Jimmy Koppel (20, St. Louis, MO) has a passion for software engineering – and a plan to make it much more efficient. Modifying software today often involves hundreds of thousands of small, similar adjustments that require a great deal of time and money. James will fix that problem by developing new tools to automate the process.

Ryan Lelek (19, Schererville, IN) developed a passion for entrepreneurship at the age of 15, when he established his first “instant streaming” start-up. Now he’s dedicated to disrupting the computer industry, using new advances in hardware, software, and network technology. As a Thiel Fellow, he’ll continue to change the world by creating simple technology tools that empower people.

Ritik Malhotra (19, San Jose, CA) Ritik began programming at age 8; started a popular web forum at the age of 12 that grew to over 32,000 members; and ran a web hosting and software consultancy business at the age of 13, garnering over a 600x return on his initial investment. Now he wants to provide a streamlined way of discovering, sharing, and distributing content over Facebook, Twitter, and other social media services. As a Thiel Fellow, he’ll first work to build a service that allows users to share interesting media, scraped from all around the web, focusing primarily on user growth in order to build a thriving community.

Chris Olah (19, Toronto, ON, Canada) wants to use 3D printing to reduce the scope of scarcity. His goal: empower anyone with a 3D printer to make educational aids, basic scientific equipment, and tools that improve their quality of life. He is currently working on a project called ImplicitCAD, which is a math-based attempt to reinvent computer-aided design and make it more affordable.

Semon Rezchikov (18, Hillsborough, NJ) is eager to explore how synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and social network dynamics intersect. As a Thiel Fellow, he wants to develop more flexible bioautomation technologies to improve the design cycle speed, and then use those technologies to create a library of truly reliable parts – making synthetic biology more like engineering and less like science.

Omar Rizwan (18, East Hanover, NJ) wants to change the world through the control and analysis of information. Specifically, he plans to speed up progress in the field of artificial intelligence by working on the analysis of big data sets. He will aggregate large sets of data from many different Internet sources and use them to tease out trends and draw conclusions.

Tara Seshan (19, New Fairfield, CT) is dedicated to improving public health worldwide, using technology, simple solutions, and community-based change. To that end, she is developing a tool that influences analysis of data, monitoring and evaluation, and public health decision making. As a Thiel Fellow, Tara will explore developing tools that enhance public health programs that can be implemented in low-resource settings.

Noor Siddiqui (17, Clifton, VA) is inspired to galvanize people for the good of others. As a Thiel Fellow, she will work to give students across the globe access to upward mobility – and industries access to an untapped work force – with the goal of mobilizing one billion people in the next decade.

Charlie Stigler (19, Pacific Palisades, CA) has years of experience as an entrepreneur and engineer, having written the popular open-source study application, SelfControl, and founded two Web start-ups. Now he’s working on Zaption, an application that improves the usual workflow for educators and collaborators by allowing video to be integrated into interactive Web experiences and studies. He believes this technology can help solve fundamental problems, starting with that of the U.S. education system.

Ilya Vakhutinsky (20, Fair Lawn, NJ) wants to revolutionize the way the technology and health care communities work together. He is working to create a more open and transparent health care system, drastically lowering the cost of care and empowering patients to make better decisions.

Taylor Wilson (18, Texarkana, AR) became the youngest person in history to create nuclear fusion. Since then, he has produced the lowest-cost and lowest-dose active interrogation system for the detection of enriched uranium ever developed. As a Thiel Fellow, Taylor will focus on both counter-terrorism and the production of medical isotopes for use in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Connor Zwick (18, Waukesha, WI) is passionate about education – which is why he has set out to revolutionize our country’s antiquated system using technology. As a Thiel Fellow, he will focus on Flashcards+, a mobile educational platform with a base of over 1.5 million downloads that allows anyone to learn anything using crowd sourced generated content from a database of more than 400 million flashcards.

Source: Nuclear Fusion, 3D Printing, Biomedical Imaging: What Thiel’s New 20 Under 20 Fellows Are Attacking

Read also: What Happened to the Future? by Bruce Gibney | Founders Fund

The Integrated Circuit of Biology | Stephen Quake [TEDx]

Stephen Quake studied physics (BS '91) and mathematics (MS '91) at Stanford University before earning his doctorate in physics from Oxford University as a Marshall scholar ('94). Thereafter, as a postdoc in Nobel Laureate Steven Chu's group at Stanford, he developed techniques to manipulate single DNA molecules with optical tweezers. In 1996 Steve joined the faculty of Caltech, where he was ultimately appointed Thomas and Doris Everhart Professor of Applied Physics and Physics. In 2004 he returned to Stanford to help launch a new Department of Bioengineering, where he is the Lee Otterson Professor and co-chair. Steve has received "Career" and "First" awards from the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health (NIH), was a Packard Fellow, was awarded an NIH Director's Pioneer Award, and is an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is a founder and scientific advisory board chair of Fluidigm, Inc. and Helicos Biosciences, Inc.

TEDxCaltech - Stephen Quake - The Integrated Circuit of Biology

The Quantified Self: Within 20 Years No Doctors Needed | Yuri van Geest [TEDx]

More openness, more measurement, more technology! Yuri van Geest believes we are approaching a singularity where we will switch from a local, linear, world of scarce resources to a global, exponential world of abundance. We can already measure many aspects of ourselves from our heart rate to our DNA profile. This quantified self is the interface between the external world and our internal self and could lead to everything from personalized services based on our genomes to the end of healthcare as we know it.

Yuri van Geest specializes in mobile Internet, biotech, singularity and visions of the future. His key themes are Innovation and Inspiration and he's experienced as an international speaker on these subjects. Recent examples are his speeches at Mobilize in San Francisco, Innovation Platform and Nijenrode MBA.
Yuri van Geest is considered to be one of the 100 best marketers of the Netherlands. He also is the exclusive ambassador of Netherlands for the Singularity University (Silicon Valley) driven by NASA and Google and CO-founder of TEDxAmsterdam.

TEDxBrainport 2012 - Yuri van Geest - The quantified self: within 20 years no doctors needed

Making the Food of the Future | Kjeld van Bommel [TEDx]

Kjeld van Bommel obtained his master's degree in Chemical Technology (1995) and subsequently his PhD in Supramolecular Chemistry (2000) from the University of Twente. After a postdoc in Japan he returned to the Netherlands and joined the Biomade Technology Foundation where he worked for 5 years on the development of gels for drug delivery and other applications. Since 2006 he has been working for TNO where he currently focuses on the development of various innovative food processing technologies, among which a food printer.

TEDxBrainport 2012 - Kjeld van Bommel - Making the food of the future

MUST WATCH! Will Our Kids Be A Different Species? | Juan Enriquez [TEDx]

Throughout human evolution, multiple versions of humans co-existed. Could we be mid-upgrade now? At TEDxSummit, Juan Enriquez sweeps across time and space to bring us to the present moment -- and shows how technology is revealing evidence that suggests rapid evolution may be under way.

Juan Enriquez: Will our kids be a different species?