Longevity Escape Velocity
Commentary and curation on our technology-driven society. Did your amazing friend send you this email? You can sign up at boxofamazing.com - it's free!
Editor's Note
Hello from London!
Where the money is going will define the next twenty years. From my very small pedestal, peaking past the long grass, I believe that that the bulk of money is going into two areas - NFTs, the future of tech and Web3 - plus a heap of health and biotech.
Based on what I have been reading and listening to recently, it feels like we are at a weird time where longevity - ie length of human life- is at a tipping point. Both Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis talk of the concept of Longevity Escape Velocity to describe that point in time that, once reached, will define the ability of science to indefinitely prolong life. That means that we are coming close to a point where science is leading us to a place where every year we got older, our lifespan increases by one year. And so, that means you need to prepare for a life that is longer, more preventative and embraces constant change. There is, of course, a biological limit to life, but life expectancy has almost doubled over the last 100 years. As you'll read later in todays's compilation of amazing links, mRNA is offering a potential cure for heart attacks, and so, if you are an optimist, there is much more exciting breakthroughs to come over the next decade. If we were able to "solve" Covid, I'm sure the combo of technology and brains will solve the toughest of our medical problems.
But with longevity of life comes the need to acknowledge the technological world ahead, being cryproliterate, understanding NFTs and figuring out whether AI can generate ever more useful technologies than Dall-E2 - we have rocky ride ahead my friends - and - I speak for myself - we're gonna need some serious brain cells to keep up.
Stay Curious,
Onward! - Rahim
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Refind – Get smarter every day — refind.com Every day we pick 7 links from around the web for you, tailored to your interests. Loved by 50k+ curious minds.
Now
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control: Inside Shein’s Sudden Rise — www.wired.com Last fall, in the stagnation of pandemic life, I became fascinated with videos of influencers standing in their bedrooms and trying on clothes from a company called Shein.
Pity the Billionaire, Marc Andreessen Edition Silicon Valley’s oligarch class can’t stop feeling sorry for itself. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, has launched a social-media campaign to convince people that elite tech titans are being persecuted.
Inside Elon Musk’s Big Plans for Twitter Here’s what Mr. Musk is projecting for Twitter’s finances over the next few years, according to a pitch deck he presented to investors. Elon Musk has never been accused of dreaming small.
A visit to the human factory — www.theverge.com
Will Jackson, CEO of robotics company Engineered Arts, says he isn’t sure what’s worse: the angry emails that accuse him of building machines that will one-day overthrow humanity or the speculative ones enquiring if the sender can have their naughty way with the robots.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft want to kill the password with “Passkey” standard — arstechnica.com The first Thursday of May is apparently "World Password Day," and to celebrate Apple, Google, and Microsoft are launching a "joint effort" to kill the password.
Influencer culture is everywhere — even in academia — www.salon.com The number of prefixes one can affix to "-fluencer" knows no bounds. Among the "side hustle" hyphenates making headlines in recent weeks: pharma-influencers, ag-influencers, doctor-TikTokers, and fin-fluencers (a portmanteau of financial advisor and influencer).
Near
DALL-E 2 Creates Incredible Images—and Biased Ones You Don’t See — www.wired.com Marcelo Rinesi remembers what it was like to watch Jurassic Park for the first time in a theater. The dinosaurs looked so convincing that they felt like the real thing, a special effects breakthrough that permanently shifted people’s perception of what’s possible.
mRNA breakthrough offers a potential heart attack cure — www.freethink.com King’s College London researchers are turning to the same technology behind the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines to develop the first damage-reversing heart attack cure.
What Is Happening to the People Falling for Crypto and NFTs — www.nytimes.com To understand the latest incarnation of the colossal crypto grifts that continue to engulf the internet, I suppose we should start with all those bored apes, because how could we not?
7 Essential Ingredients of a Metaverse
1. Decentralization
2. Property rights
3. Self-sovereign identity
4. Composability
5. Openness/open source
6. Community ownership
7. Social Immersion
Drone swarms can now fly autonomously through thick forest — techxplore.com
"This is the first time there's a swarm of drones successfully flying outside in an unstructured environment, in the wild"
End Note
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