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How to Think Like a Futurist | MIT Technology Review
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Some technological trends fizzle out while others overturn everything. Author Amy Webb explains how she discerns which ones will go in which direction.
Futurist and business consultant Amy Webb says that by asking the right questions, just about anyone can do what she does: separate real trends from hype and glean the paths that technologies will take. In her recently released book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Webb shares some of her methods for analyzing the impact of innovations. She spoke to MIT Technology Review’s executive editor, Brian Bergstein, in an interview that Insider Premium subscribers can listen to here. Highlights condensed for clarity follow.
Why did you write this book? People pay you and your consulting firm for insights into the future. Aren’t you giving away some secrets?
My goal is to democratize the skills of a futurist, so that more and more people have the ability to see around corners. I just think it’s so important. Because I’m concerned about the direction that we’re headed in.
I’m not concerned in the conventional way; I’m not one of those people who believes that artificially intelligent robots are going to take all our jobs and destroy humanity. The concern that I have is that technology is becoming more and more fantastical and politicized. And in the process, we fetishize the future rather than [having] the more boring conversations that are just as important.
What do you mean when you say we fetishize the future?
I’ve gone back and looked at spikes in innovation. There’s a cycle that follows each one of those innovation spikes. If you track all the way back to the invention of the light bulb, you have this sudden introduction in newspapers and people get very excited. The story goes in a weird direction from there. That was the birth of modern science fiction. There’s this sudden interest in what is fantastical versus what is realistic. We’ve seen that happen with the introduction of [artificial] light, with cars, with the Internet. Now as we stand on the precipice of AI, the same thing’s happening again. I see the word “futurist” in many more Twitter bios than I ever have before. We’re all really excited about it, but I don’t see very many people working in a diligent, methodical way on thinking through the implications.
Let’s talk about how you sort through the implications of technologies. In your book you say you look at trends in seemingly unrelated fields that could converge.
I was just at IBM’s T.J. Watson Center, where all the research scientists are based, talking to them about artificial intelligence. They live, breathe, eat, sleep AI. One of the challenges with working in such a rarified field is that at some point, in order to do your job well, you have to block out all of the distraction and noise from other spaces. You sort of acclimate yourself to not paying attention to how the work that you’re doing may impact other fields. You’re just trying to get the next part of your experiment or the next part of your research pushed forward. Therefore, you don’t want to waste any time thinking about how this line of code or this outcome may impact health or geopolitics or whatever it might be.
[But] it is that kind of thinking that’s so imperative because in the absence of [it], you wind up with what we saw in March when Microsoft took a research project that it had from China, which was a chatbot, introduced that same chatbot here in the United States on Twitter, and within 24 hours it went on a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic rampage. That was Tay.AI.
Amy Webb
It’s not like no one could’ve seen that coming.
Yes. They should’ve seen that coming.
To find trends that might converge, you say you look for signals on the fringe, beyond the usual things that get covered in the technology press. Fair enough, but how can all of us look on the fringes?
It’s not like there’s a singular source where you would go to find the unusual suspects at the fringe. Instead, it’s a series of guiding questions. Pick a topic and then say, “Okay. Who do I know of that’s been working directly and indirectly in this space?” Maybe try to figure out, “Well, who’s funding this work? Who’s encouraging experimentation?” I always find it fascinating to go on Iarpa’s website. They publicly post their RFPs. That’ll give you a window into the kinds of things that they’re thinking about. “Who might be directly impacted if this technology succeeds one way or the other? Who could be incentivized to work against any change? Because they stand to gain something, they stand to lose something, who might see this technology as just the starting-off point for something else?” Start asking those questions.
One of the chapters in the book goes through bio-hackers. There are these bio-hacking communities all over the place, and they’re doing all kinds of experimentation, whether that’s injecting RFID tags under their skin or any other number of things. A lot of people would look at those folks and laugh at them or think they’re ridiculous, but again we’re looking through the lens of our own present reality without thinking about, “Where are we headed?”
What’s one of your favorite predictions right now?
I think some of my favorite things that are on the horizon are interesting, promising, and also scary. One of them is smart dust. You’ve actually covered this in Tech Review. Smart dust are these tiny computers that are no bigger than a grain of salt or a speck of dust. Theoretically you could, in your hand at any given time, hold 5,000 sensors. Let’s say that you’re holding this handful of dust and you blew it into the wind. We are going to soon be in an era when it’s going to be really difficult to tell if you as a person have been hacked in some way, which is breathtaking and terrifying and fantastically interesting.
While reading your book, I was thinking of Future Shock by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, published in 1970. The book argued that the modern world stresses and disorients people by creating more change than we can handle in a short period of time. Is that right?
Unfortunately, I think that’s still very true in the year 2016. My goal with the book and my goal in general is to break that cycle of continual surprise and shock.
If there’s a way to make the future a little less exciting and a little bit more boring, that’s good for everybody because that means that we’re not continually shocked by new ideas, that we’re not continually discounting people on the fringe.
Big online stores are based around vast automated warehouses. Smaller and cheaper versions of this tech will be key if smaller stores are to survive through a series of lockdowns.
[
The pandemic is emptying call centers. AI chatbots are swooping in
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two of the most hyped drugs being studied as treatments for covid-19, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump’s repeated promotion during his public appearances. Trump told reporters this week he had been taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure. But a new study published Friday in The Lancet suggests not…
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two of the most hyped drugs being studied as treatments for covid-19, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump’s repeated promotion during his public appearances. Trump told reporters this week he had been taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure. But a new study published Friday in The Lancet suggests not just that the drugs don’t offer any real benefit to infected patients, but that they can increase the risk of heart problems or even death.
What are these drugs again? Chloroquine and its less toxic alternative, hydroxychloroquine, are widely used antimalarial drugs Since chloroquine was discovered over 85 years ago, it’s been studied pretty extensively. It’s now very cheap to manufacture, and we know its side effects. Some previous research indicates that it can prevent a virus from replicating inside a host cell. We still don’t know exactly how effective these drugs are when it comes to treating covid-19.
The new study: A team of American researchers looked at the records of 14,888 hospitalized covid-19 patients who received one of four treatments: chloroquine alone, chloroquine with a macrolide (a class of antibiotics), hydroxychloroquine alone, or hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide. Those records were compared with those of another 81,144 patients who did not receive any of these drug regimens.
After controlling for confounding factors (including underlying health conditions), the authors were “unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine” when used alone or in one of the other regimens. Moreover, treatment with any of the four drug regimens was actually associated with a higher risk of death and heart ailments. The biggest risk increase was observed in the group treated with hydroxychloroquine and a macrolide—8% of those patients developed a heart arrhythmia, compared with just with 0.3% in the group who received none of the drug treatments.
Caveats: The study is solely an observational look at previous medical records—it’s not a clinical study that can really prove anything about the drugs’ safety or efficacy. You cannot draw any strong conclusions from it. It's another notch in a larger body of research looking at chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.
Many reopening businesses will be asking workers to take coronavirus tests, report symptoms, don masks, wear dongles, and work under the gaze of new sensors and cameras.
[
Machine learning could check if you’re social distancing properly at work
The news: North Dakota was one of the first American states to launch a coronavirus contact tracing app, in April. Now, several weeks into the process of reopening the state, the government in Bismarck says it will take advantage of the newly released Apple-Google exposure notification system—but that doing so will require it to run…
That even one of the lowest-population states in the US isn't able to definitively zero in on a single solution illustrates just how difficult it is for governments to figure out what to do next—even months into the pandemic.
First mover: Before North Dakota began to reopen some services on May 1, the state released an app called Care19.
“This is an opportunity for North Dakotans to be leaders in the worldwide response to covid-19,” Governor Doug Burgum said at the time of release. “Our goal is for at least 50,000 North Dakotans to download the app.”
Six weeks later, 33,000 North Dakotans had done so. It tracks location data for residents to help contact tracing efforts.
A data dilemma: When Apple and Google teamed up to build automatic contact tracing or exposure notification systems across Android and iOS operating systems, they introduced a set of privacy-protecting rules that health authorities must follow in order to use their tech. These include forbidding location tracking, instead forcing health authorities to rely on Bluetooth.
That placed North Dakota's location-based service in a bind. Now, after lengthy discussions with Apple and Google, North Dakota will release two coronavirus tracing apps—one using location tracking, one using Bluetooth—in a move that is designed to give citizens a choice but could end up splitting the overall effort.
There's a deluge of apps that detect your covid-19 exposure, often with little transparency. Our Covid Tracing Tracker project will document them.
The suite of two state-backed apps will include Care19 Diary, which will track a person’s location history, and Care19 Exposure, which will use the Apple-Google API to track risky contact events using Bluetooth. The two apps won’t communicate with each other or share data. North Dakota wants way more downloads, and officials are banking on the Apple-Google joint effort to drive awareness in a way they’re simply not capable of doing.
“It’s a little clunky this way,” says Vern Dosch, the leader of the state’s contact tracing team. “But we’re going to do what we have to do to protect the citizens of North Dakota.”
Studies on macaques suggest that infection with the coronavirus grants some immunity to catching it again—and that vaccines also seem to offer some protection. The questions: Does getting infected by the coronavirus make you immune? And can a vaccine do the same job? In two studies published today in Science, a group led by researchers at Harvard…
Studies on macaques suggest that infection with the coronavirus grants some immunity to catching it again—and that vaccines also seem to offer some protection.
**The questions: **Does getting infected by the coronavirus make you immune? And can a vaccine do the same job? In two studies published today in Science, a group led by researchers at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is answering those questions using monkeys called macaques.
Becoming immune: First, the team infected nine monkeys with the coronavirus; they developed pneumonia, just as people do. Then, after five weeks, the researchers tried infecting them again, but this time the virus didn’t take hold. That means monkeys (and possibly people) are probably immune to the virus after they catch it, although how long immunity lasts remains an open question
Creating immunity: The group then tried out four different DNA vaccines on monkeys. These are a quick-to-design type that involve an injection into the muscle of genetic instructions to make a part of the virus called the spike protein. They found that the vaccines gave the 35 monkeys some protection from the virus—the ones that got a shot had much lower levels of virus in their respiratory tracts.
**Growing evidence: **Previously, two other vaccines, one from SinoVac in China and another developed by Oxford University, were also shown to protect monkeys. All told, it’s a strong signal a human vaccine could work.
Next questions: In the race to find a vaccine for billions of people, scientists need to learn more about what a correct immune response looks like, including the type and amount of antibodies that need to get generated. The team at Harvard says the results in monkeys are a step toward defining what these “correlates” of immunity are.
How to Think Like a Futurist | MIT Technology Review
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Humans and technology
How to Think Like a Futurist
Some technological trends fizzle out while others overturn everything. Author Amy Webb explains how she discerns which ones will go in which direction.
by
December 28, 2016
Futurist and business consultant Amy Webb says that by asking the right questions, just about anyone can do what she does: separate real trends from hype and glean the paths that technologies will take. In her recently released book, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Webb shares some of her methods for analyzing the impact of innovations. She spoke to MIT Technology Review’s executive editor, Brian Bergstein, in an interview that Insider Premium subscribers can listen to here. Highlights condensed for clarity follow.
Why did you write this book? People pay you and your consulting firm for insights into the future. Aren’t you giving away some secrets?
My goal is to democratize the skills of a futurist, so that more and more people have the ability to see around corners. I just think it’s so important. Because I’m concerned about the direction that we’re headed in.
I’m not concerned in the conventional way; I’m not one of those people who believes that artificially intelligent robots are going to take all our jobs and destroy humanity. The concern that I have is that technology is becoming more and more fantastical and politicized. And in the process, we fetishize the future rather than [having] the more boring conversations that are just as important.
What do you mean when you say we fetishize the future?
I’ve gone back and looked at spikes in innovation. There’s a cycle that follows each one of those innovation spikes. If you track all the way back to the invention of the light bulb, you have this sudden introduction in newspapers and people get very excited. The story goes in a weird direction from there. That was the birth of modern science fiction. There’s this sudden interest in what is fantastical versus what is realistic. We’ve seen that happen with the introduction of [artificial] light, with cars, with the Internet. Now as we stand on the precipice of AI, the same thing’s happening again. I see the word “futurist” in many more Twitter bios than I ever have before. We’re all really excited about it, but I don’t see very many people working in a diligent, methodical way on thinking through the implications.
Let’s talk about how you sort through the implications of technologies. In your book you say you look at trends in seemingly unrelated fields that could converge.
I was just at IBM’s T.J. Watson Center, where all the research scientists are based, talking to them about artificial intelligence. They live, breathe, eat, sleep AI. One of the challenges with working in such a rarified field is that at some point, in order to do your job well, you have to block out all of the distraction and noise from other spaces. You sort of acclimate yourself to not paying attention to how the work that you’re doing may impact other fields. You’re just trying to get the next part of your experiment or the next part of your research pushed forward. Therefore, you don’t want to waste any time thinking about how this line of code or this outcome may impact health or geopolitics or whatever it might be.
[But] it is that kind of thinking that’s so imperative because in the absence of [it], you wind up with what we saw in March when Microsoft took a research project that it had from China, which was a chatbot, introduced that same chatbot here in the United States on Twitter, and within 24 hours it went on a racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic rampage. That was Tay.AI.
Amy Webb
It’s not like no one could’ve seen that coming.
Yes. They should’ve seen that coming.
To find trends that might converge, you say you look for signals on the fringe, beyond the usual things that get covered in the technology press. Fair enough, but how can all of us look on the fringes?
It’s not like there’s a singular source where you would go to find the unusual suspects at the fringe. Instead, it’s a series of guiding questions. Pick a topic and then say, “Okay. Who do I know of that’s been working directly and indirectly in this space?” Maybe try to figure out, “Well, who’s funding this work? Who’s encouraging experimentation?” I always find it fascinating to go on Iarpa’s website. They publicly post their RFPs. That’ll give you a window into the kinds of things that they’re thinking about. “Who might be directly impacted if this technology succeeds one way or the other? Who could be incentivized to work against any change? Because they stand to gain something, they stand to lose something, who might see this technology as just the starting-off point for something else?” Start asking those questions.
One of the chapters in the book goes through bio-hackers. There are these bio-hacking communities all over the place, and they’re doing all kinds of experimentation, whether that’s injecting RFID tags under their skin or any other number of things. A lot of people would look at those folks and laugh at them or think they’re ridiculous, but again we’re looking through the lens of our own present reality without thinking about, “Where are we headed?”
What’s one of your favorite predictions right now?
I think some of my favorite things that are on the horizon are interesting, promising, and also scary. One of them is smart dust. You’ve actually covered this in Tech Review. Smart dust are these tiny computers that are no bigger than a grain of salt or a speck of dust. Theoretically you could, in your hand at any given time, hold 5,000 sensors. Let’s say that you’re holding this handful of dust and you blew it into the wind. We are going to soon be in an era when it’s going to be really difficult to tell if you as a person have been hacked in some way, which is breathtaking and terrifying and fantastically interesting.
While reading your book, I was thinking of Future Shock by Alvin and Heidi Toffler, published in 1970. The book argued that the modern world stresses and disorients people by creating more change than we can handle in a short period of time. Is that right?
Unfortunately, I think that’s still very true in the year 2016. My goal with the book and my goal in general is to break that cycle of continual surprise and shock.
If there’s a way to make the future a little less exciting and a little bit more boring, that’s good for everybody because that means that we’re not continually shocked by new ideas, that we’re not continually discounting people on the fringe.
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Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two of the most hyped drugs being studied as treatments for covid-19, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump’s repeated promotion during his public appearances. Trump told reporters this week he had been taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure. But a new study published Friday in The Lancet suggests not…
Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine are two of the most hyped drugs being studied as treatments for covid-19, thanks in large part to President Donald Trump’s repeated promotion during his public appearances. Trump told reporters this week he had been taking hydroxychloroquine as a preventive measure. But a new study published Friday in The Lancet suggests not just that the drugs don’t offer any real benefit to infected patients, but that they can increase the risk of heart problems or even death.
What are these drugs again? Chloroquine and its less toxic alternative, hydroxychloroquine, are widely used antimalarial drugs Since chloroquine was discovered over 85 years ago, it’s been studied pretty extensively. It’s now very cheap to manufacture, and we know its side effects. Some previous research indicates that it can prevent a virus from replicating inside a host cell. We still don’t know exactly how effective these drugs are when it comes to treating covid-19.
The new study: A team of American researchers looked at the records of 14,888 hospitalized covid-19 patients who received one of four treatments: chloroquine alone, chloroquine with a macrolide (a class of antibiotics), hydroxychloroquine alone, or hydroxychloroquine with a macrolide. Those records were compared with those of another 81,144 patients who did not receive any of these drug regimens.
After controlling for confounding factors (including underlying health conditions), the authors were “unable to confirm a benefit of hydroxychloroquine or chloroquine” when used alone or in one of the other regimens. Moreover, treatment with any of the four drug regimens was actually associated with a higher risk of death and heart ailments. The biggest risk increase was observed in the group treated with hydroxychloroquine and a macrolide—8% of those patients developed a heart arrhythmia, compared with just with 0.3% in the group who received none of the drug treatments.
Caveats: The study is solely an observational look at previous medical records—it’s not a clinical study that can really prove anything about the drugs’ safety or efficacy. You cannot draw any strong conclusions from it. It's another notch in a larger body of research looking at chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine.
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Why one US state will have two coronavirus tracing apps
Category:
Tech policy
Posted May 20
The news: North Dakota was one of the first American states to launch a coronavirus contact tracing app, in April. Now, several weeks into the process of reopening the state, the government in Bismarck says it will take advantage of the newly released Apple-Google exposure notification system—but that doing so will require it to run…
The news: North Dakota was one of the first American states to launch a coronavirus contact tracing app, in April. Now, several weeks into the process of reopening the state, the government in Bismarck says it will take advantage of the newly released Apple-Google exposure notification system—but that doing so will require it to run two separate apps.
That even one of the lowest-population states in the US isn't able to definitively zero in on a single solution illustrates just how difficult it is for governments to figure out what to do next—even months into the pandemic.
First mover: Before North Dakota began to reopen some services on May 1, the state released an app called Care19.
“This is an opportunity for North Dakotans to be leaders in the worldwide response to covid-19,” Governor Doug Burgum said at the time of release. “Our goal is for at least 50,000 North Dakotans to download the app.”
Six weeks later, 33,000 North Dakotans had done so. It tracks location data for residents to help contact tracing efforts.
A data dilemma: When Apple and Google teamed up to build automatic contact tracing or exposure notification systems across Android and iOS operating systems, they introduced a set of privacy-protecting rules that health authorities must follow in order to use their tech. These include forbidding location tracking, instead forcing health authorities to rely on Bluetooth.
That placed North Dakota's location-based service in a bind. Now, after lengthy discussions with Apple and Google, North Dakota will release two coronavirus tracing apps—one using location tracking, one using Bluetooth—in a move that is designed to give citizens a choice but could end up splitting the overall effort.
Related Story
A flood of coronavirus apps are tracking us. Now it’s time to keep track of them.
There's a deluge of apps that detect your covid-19 exposure, often with little transparency. Our Covid Tracing Tracker project will document them.
The suite of two state-backed apps will include Care19 Diary, which will track a person’s location history, and Care19 Exposure, which will use the Apple-Google API to track risky contact events using Bluetooth. The two apps won’t communicate with each other or share data. North Dakota wants way more downloads, and officials are banking on the Apple-Google joint effort to drive awareness in a way they’re simply not capable of doing.
“It’s a little clunky this way,” says Vern Dosch, the leader of the state’s contact tracing team. “But we’re going to do what we have to do to protect the citizens of North Dakota.”
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More vaccines have protected monkeys against covid-19, suggesting they might work in people
Category:
Biotechnology
Posted May 20
Studies on macaques suggest that infection with the coronavirus grants some immunity to catching it again—and that vaccines also seem to offer some protection. The questions: Does getting infected by the coronavirus make you immune? And can a vaccine do the same job? In two studies published today in Science, a group led by researchers at Harvard…
Studies on macaques suggest that infection with the coronavirus grants some immunity to catching it again—and that vaccines also seem to offer some protection.
**The questions: **Does getting infected by the coronavirus make you immune? And can a vaccine do the same job? In two studies published today in Science, a group led by researchers at Harvard University’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center is answering those questions using monkeys called macaques.
Becoming immune: First, the team infected nine monkeys with the coronavirus; they developed pneumonia, just as people do. Then, after five weeks, the researchers tried infecting them again, but this time the virus didn’t take hold. That means monkeys (and possibly people) are probably immune to the virus after they catch it, although how long immunity lasts remains an open question
Creating immunity: The group then tried out four different DNA vaccines on monkeys. These are a quick-to-design type that involve an injection into the muscle of genetic instructions to make a part of the virus called the spike protein. They found that the vaccines gave the 35 monkeys some protection from the virus—the ones that got a shot had much lower levels of virus in their respiratory tracts.
**Growing evidence: **Previously, two other vaccines, one from SinoVac in China and another developed by Oxford University, were also shown to protect monkeys. All told, it’s a strong signal a human vaccine could work.
Next questions: In the race to find a vaccine for billions of people, scientists need to learn more about what a correct immune response looks like, including the type and amount of antibodies that need to get generated. The team at Harvard says the results in monkeys are a step toward defining what these “correlates” of immunity are.
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