Yesterday, the Department of Energy issued a major announcement — after decades of research, the team at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) successfully conducted the first controlled fusion experiment. Nuclear fusion has long captured the imagination of science fiction, but with the unfolding climate crisis, the potential for a new, abundant source of clean energy in our grasp feels almost miraculous — the kind of achievement that would alter the course of humanity for the better.
The Digital Revolution
In “The Second Machine Age” by Brynjolfsson and McAfee, the authors discuss some of the major human advancements in the past several centuries. They examine how James Watt’s steam engine in the eighteenth century almost single handedly brought about the rapid advancements that characterized the Industrial Revolution, or “humanity’s first machine age — the first time our progress was driven primarily by technological innovation–and…the most profound time of transformation our world has ever seen.” We are now living in what they describe as the second machine age. Where the first was characterized by “muscle power” — thus enabling the creation of things like factories, railways, and mass transportation, the second is characterized by “mental power–the ability to use our brains to understand and shape our environments” — specifically via computers and other technological advances. They talk about Moore’s Law and how exponential growth in digital progress has catapulted us to where we are today: in a world where, increasingly, science fiction is rapidly becoming reality.
The Future is Bionic (Clothing)
We had an internal poll with the CIONIC team this morning on other recent technological advances that felt like science fiction. Near and dear to our heart (or leg, technically), is bionic clothing. As I type this, I am wearing a Cionic Neural Sleeve. Today, it’s under a pair of joggers because it’s unseasonably cold in the Bay Area. You wouldn’t even notice that I’m wearing it, the design is so sleek. But you don’t need to wear it under clothing — a friend described the design of the Neural Sleeve as “sexy” the other day when she first saw it worn with shorts.
But packed into that sleek, sexy design is our Read+Write Neural Interface, which not only reads the signals sent from the brain to the muscles, but also activates the muscles directly using functional electrical stimulation (FES). Powered by advanced algorithms, the system properly sequences complex muscle firings to help people with mobility differences walk naturally and safely, updating with every step. The Cionic Neural Sleeve is the only system to combine sensing and stimulation of the entire leg into a single, wearable system.
A few years ago the Neural Sleeve would have seemed impossible — the stuff of Star Trek perhaps. Except it’s already very much a reality, and with our extensible open augmentation platform, we are just getting started. We envision a future where ALL clothing is bionic in some capacity. Because why wouldn’t it be?
Sci-Fi to Reality
Beyond nuclear fusion and bionic clothing, other hot topics for our team included electric cars and driverless cars. Did anyone else read this New York Times article in 2010 and find it truly mind-boggling that Google had already clocked over 140,000 miles in a few driverless cars? Now, any time you step out of the CIONIC office in San Francisco you are likely to see a driverless car waiting patiently as you cross the intersection.
3D printing was another topic that came up for the team. Recently, our Chief Product Officer needed a 3D printer. In lieu of buying one, he was able to procure the materials and make it himself in a few days for a few hundred dollars. The use case for Domenico was product development, but there are endless possibilities for the machine.
Also think about your relationship with computers over time. Maybe your first computer was a giant desktop used primarily for playing games and word processing; there was very likely only one computer in the household that everyone shared (or fought over with their sibling, in my case). Per the U.S. Department of Commerce, only 8% of households had a computer in 1984. By 2018, 92% had at least one type of computer, and smartphones “surpassed ownership of all other computing devices,” and were in 84% of households. That number is undoubtedly even higher today. It’s hard not to take for granted that the computer we spend the most time with and that fits snugly in our pocket has “more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.”
And speaking of the moon… who wants to go to space? Because you can now, for fun. And maybe while you’re in flight you can enjoy lab-grown meat, which was recently greenlit by the FDA. For travelers whose itineraries are earthbound, in a few years you’ll be able to make a tight connection via flying electric taxi. Good bye, shuttle bus and getting stuck in traffic.
The world will only continue to get smarter as our digital journey progresses. Remember that scene from Minority Report when all the advertising was personalized via facial recognition? It was captivating and felt like something that could only possibly occur in some distant future. That’s already happening. When I boarded my flight to Japan last month, I never had to show anyone a passport because the computer knew who I was. The pace of technological advancement has been so rapid over the past few decades that it didn’t even strike me as odd at the time — of course they know who I am and don’t need to see some archaic document.
ChatGPT — The Next Frontier of AI
Of all the “science fiction to reality” topics our team raised, one that came up consistently was OpenAI’s recent release of ChatGPT. For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that communicates like a human. To learn more, check out ChatGPT in its own words in this recent interview with IEEE Spectrum. My first foray into the platform was to see if it could solve a hot topic in my household: what to do about my three-year-old son’s recent sleep regression. The answer was not only comprehensive and helpful, it was also, impressively, exactly in line with his pediatrician’s answer yesterday.
This fantastic piece in Harvard Business Review by Ethan Mollick explains why ChatGPT is a “tipping point” for AI:
“ChatGPT, now open to everyone, has made an important transition. Until now, AI has primarily been aimed at problems where failure is expensive, not at tasks where occasional failure is cheap and acceptable — or even ones in which experts can easily separate failed cases from successful ones. A car that occasionally gets into accidents is intolerable. But an AI artist that draws some great pictures, but also some bad ones, is perfectly acceptable. Applying AI to the creative and expressive tasks (writing marketing copy) rather than dangerous and repetitive ones (driving a forklift) opens a new world of applications.”
He goes on to detail how ChatGPT, and similar platforms that follow, have the potential to usher in a new age of human/computer collaboration: “The writer no longer needs to write the articles alone, the programmer to code on their own, or the analyst to approach the data themselves. The work is a new kind of collaboration that did not exist last month. One person can do the work of many, and that is even without the additional capabilities that AI provides…Integrating AI into our work — and our lives — will bring sweeping changes. Right now, we’re just scratching the surface of what those might be.”
What’s Next
So where will the digital revolution take us next? Time will tell. Certainly there are myriad new challenges as the world enters this bold new future: technological, ethical, etc.
What’s exciting to us at CIONIC is that we can harness the power of technology to create meaningful solutions to one of the world’s biggest challenges. I already mentioned the climate crisis, but there is also a looming mobility crisis — per the World Health Organization, 20% of the world’s population is projected to have a mobility difference by 2050. Given the importance of mobility as a measure of human health, and the amazing results we have already seen for many of our early users, we are excited about how far we have come already and what the future has in store. Given the pace of innovation, the sky’s the limit as we think about how bionic clothing can transform mobility, and thus accessibility and equity, for humans everywhere.
