Netizen

Saturday, May 23, 2015

Lab Grown Meat, Vertical Farms

Painter of the burial chamber of Sennedjem (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For me the number one concern is cost. It has to cost less than how they do it now, much less. Or why bother?

Feeding Tomorrow’s Billions: Lab-Grown Meat Products, Vertical Farms, AI-Designed Recipes, and More

Food and agriculture accounts for about 5.9% of the global GDP. Global food retail sales alone account for about $4 trillion/year, and food accounts for 15% of what American households spend each year. .... In 1790, farm jobs accounted for 90% of US jobs, compared to less than 2% today. ...... they won't be meats in the conventional sense, but something altogether new. ...... In 2012, it took 60 billion land animals to feed 7 billion humans. If successful, cultured animal products have huge advantages: 99% less land, 96% less water, 96% fewer greenhouse gases, and 45% less energy. ........ We will increasingly rely on genetically engineered crops. In 1996, there were 1.7 million hectares of biotech crops in the world; by 2010, the number had jumped to 148 million hectares. ..... More than a trillion GE meals have been served, and not a single case of GE-induced illness has turned up. ...... Vertical farms will be immune to weather, so crops can be grown year-round under optimal conditions. One acre of skyscraper floor produces the equivalent of 10 to 20 traditional soil-based acres....... Employing clean-room technologies means no pesticides or herbicides, so there's no agricultural runoff. The fossil fuels now used for plowing, fertilizing, seeding, weeding, harvesting, and delivery are gone as well. On top of all that, we could reforest the old farmland as parkland and slow the loss of biodiversity. ....... The average American foodstuff travels 1,500 miles before it's consumed. As 70% of food's final retail price is from transportation, storage, and handling, these miles add up quickly. With vertical farming and genetic engineering, production will become decentralized and distributed, allowing food to be produced nearer the location of consumption,

and food's price to plummet
....... companies turning plants into foods that look and taste just like meat and eggs.... data scientists are actively weeding out billions of proteins from hundreds of thousands of plants to learn what could form the equivalent of a chicken's egg. ....... IBM's Watson uses machine learning to construct new recipes and cocktails that no human chef would come up with....... As technology converges, the future will be a tasty, and abundant, one.

The Laundry List From The Future

A $1,000 Brain
A Trillion Sensor Economy ("the Internet Of Things will create $19 trillion of newly created value")
Perfect Knowledge
8 Billion Hyper Connected People ("We will grow from three to eight billion connected humans, adding five billion new consumers into the global economy. They represent tens of trillions of new dollars flowing into the global economy.")
Disruption of Health Care ("$3.8 trillion healthcare industry with new business models that dematerialize, demonetize and democratize today's bureaucratic and inefficient system.....Robotic surgeons can carry out an autonomous surgical procedure perfectly (every time) for pennies on the dollar. Each of us will be able to regrow a heart, liver, lung or kidney when we need it, instead of waiting for the donor to die.")
Augmented and Virtual Reality ("a new generation of displays and user interfaces....a massive disruption in a number of industries ranging from consumer retail, to real estate, education, travel, entertainment, and the fundamental ways we operate as humans.")
Early Days Of JARVIS ("next-generation AI systems. In a decade, it will be normal for you to give your AI access to listen to all of your conversations, read your emails and scan your biometric data because the upside and convenience will be so immense.")
Blockchain

Friday, May 22, 2015

Reverse Brain Drain?

Best viewed large. The main terminal of the brand new Bangalore International Airport. I was one of the first few people at the airport. My mother arrived on the third flight into this new airport. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Top Indian talent in Silicon Valley moves back home to join star startups

Top Indian talent is moving from globally iconic American technology companies to India's star startups. And homes are being shifted from Bay Area to Bangalore. ...... from Google to Flipkart, from Disney and Facebook to Zomato, from Symantec to Snapdeal ..... Matching dollar salaries and the sheer range of future career opportunities are the hooks India's tech blue chips are offering to Indian talent in Silicon Valley. ...... "The smart entrepreneurs have already returned, tens of thousands more will return over the next 2-3 years" ...... being wooed by at least half-adozen Indian startups valued anywhere between $1 billion and $15 billion. ...... All salaries look handsome and Silicon Valley-competitive in dollar terms, and most assignments involve complex technology solutions for the mobile platform...... startups such as Zomato, whose restaurant discovery app is now present in 22 countries, are articulating their ambitions on a global scale. For Silicon Valley's top talent, nothing attracts more than a mission to dominate the world. "The idea is always world domination, if you speak anything less than that, you are not ambitious enough. ......... Both are being paid Valley salaries too — $5-6 million annual packages. ...... but it's just a whole new level of intensity here ..... "India is at the forefront of the mobile innovation" ...... "I made the decision to move here in less than 30 seconds," said Mani. "Hundreds of millions of Indians will experience the Internet for the first time on a smartphone in the next few years" ........ "India will see a technology boom over the next 5 years that will make the US dotcom boom look lame. There will be dozens of billion-dollar companies emerging from India's ecosystem which will transform business, industry and society." ......... "History is witness to the savviest, smartest and most entrepreneurial people usually going off to crazy places at regular intervals. This is relatively reasonable"

Monday, May 18, 2015

Green New York

buildings could be repurposed to include vertical farms, with internal greenhouses, exterior scaffolding for hardier plants, and terraces for free-range animals. Rooftops could be covered with growing space, and solar panels could help offset the costs of keeping greenhouses warm year-round. If all of New York’s food were grown within its political limits, the city’s traffic would flow through an ocean of green. ....... discovered, unfortunately, that it would take some thirty nuclear power plants to provide enough heat and light for all those urban farms. (You need a lot of agriculture to feed eight and a half million people.) ...... how thirty per cent of New York’s consumables might be produced within a hundred-mile radius of the city ...... “Trees sequester carbon, they provide ventilation, they give shade,” he said. “We could easily lower the summer temperatures here by five degrees with more trees.”......... people fare much better, emotionally and cognitively, in greener environments than in purely urban landscapes. ....... In New York City, developments such as the High Line, the greening of Broadway, and Citi Bike are extensions of Mumford’s vision. ........ green-roofed buildings connected by tree-lined walkways.

A better idea than 30 nuclear power plants would be a city that is in tune with the Caribbean islands. Let them grow the food. It is only hours away. They do solar. Not solar heaters. Simply solar: direct Sun. More trees in the city, on the other hand, are a great idea.

The Brain

Singularity is NOT near! Stop complaining about overpopulation. Why try to mimic brains when there are so many brains out there, undernourished, underutilized?

Your brain has roughly 100 billion neurons and 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses. An iPhone 6’s A8 chip has 2 billion transistors. (Though, let’s be clear, a transistor is not anywhere near the complexity of a single synapse in the brain.) .... The highest bandwidth neural interface ever placed into a human brain, on the other hand, had just 256 electrodes. Most don’t even have that. ..... The second barrier to brain interfaces is that getting even 256 channels in generally requires invasive brain surgery, with its costs, healing time, and the very real risk that something will go wrong. .............. the former editor of the journal Neuron has pointed out that carbon nanotubes are so slender that a bundle of a million of them could be inserted into the blood stream and steered into the brain, giving us a nearly 10,000-fold increase in neural bandwidth, without any brain surgery at all.