Second Renaissance/ mRNA Vaccines More Potent and Stable/ Software² / From Michelangelo to Robots/ De-extinction
Massimo Portincaso
Founder & CEO at Arsenale Bioyards, Industrial Romantic and Antidisciplinarian Stoic
Second Renaissance. While putting together this week’s Antidisciplinarian, the article below on robots, AI, and sculpture, brought my mind back (again) to a piece I had written back in 2016 about how AI will radically reshape the development and management of a brand.
While I had featured that very same piece already in October, re-reading it and re-reading the October post made me realize how much has happened since October and how that 2016 piece is even more actual now than it was back then.
The article finishes with this sentence:
„The second Renaissance is upon us. We have the opportunity to embrace it as brand owners and make visual languages more meaningful and more beautiful. We just need to embrace the brushes and chisels of this new age of discovery“
The comparison between the Renaissance (The Age of Enlightenment) and a possible second Renaissance (The Age of AI) is certainly legit. But there are fundamental differences, as pointed out by Schmidt, Kissinger, and Huttenlocher. For them, “The Age of Enlightenment” and “The Age of AI” are comparable but distinct periods marked by different approaches to knowledge and understanding.
During the Enlightenment, knowledge was acquired progressively, with each step testable and teachable. In contrast, AI-enabled systems like ChatGPT can store and distill vast amounts of information beyond human capacity, while the precise sources and reasons for its representations remain unknown. This mystery challenges human cognition indefinitely.
While Enlightenment science accumulated certainties, AI generates cumulative ambiguities. AI solves riddles through unknown processes, creating a disorienting paradox. Highly complex AI furthers human knowledge without necessarily advancing human understanding, a phenomenon contrary to post-Enlightenment modernity. Despite this, AI coupled with human reason can potentially lead to more powerful discoveries.
In the end, the essential difference between the two ages lies in the cognitive realm. After the Enlightenment, philosophy accompanied science, providing comprehensive explanations for human experiences. Generative AI has the potential to create a new form of human consciousness but currently exists without a guiding political or philosophical framework. This leaves society relatively unmoored, facing an unprecedented element of mystery, risk, and surprise as AI technology continues to advance exponentially.
To go back to my 2016 piece, based on the above, re-reading it I felt that one could easily substitute the “look-and-feel” and the aesthetics of the brand, paired with the idea of art movement, with a new form of consciousness for companies. If done properly, i.e. through a thorough “grounding” of the models and proper training to stimulate and nudge the relevant emergent properties of the generative AI models, these can become an essential element to master the ever-growing complexity of the environment we operate within and an invaluable compass to navigate the radical optionality I spoke about a few weeks ago. Here is the 2016 text:
„Brands in the 21st century need to rethink themselves and move away from the branding design trinity of “logo, typography, and color” and the classical “command and control” approach. The world – in particular, the business world – has become too complex and too fast-paced for a brand to rely simply on guidelines and manuals to thrive. It is time for brand owners to leverage the changes happening right now and transform their brands into new forms of visual expression, making them much closer to art movements than to an expression of the company ethos. When it comes to the look-and-feel equation of a brand, it’s time to put much more emphasis on the feel and turn the look into a dependent variable. This is where technology will play a key role.
As Ian Goldin and Chris Kutarna have pointed out in their book Age of Discovery, the world is entering into a second Renaissance – a period, like the first Renaissance, when the conditions are optimal for creating something new and amazing.
But instead of the brushes of Botticelli and the chisels of Michelangelo, we now have technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning, among many others. Just as the new masters need to learn how to use these new tools to produce new masterpieces, brand owners must embrace these important tools in the quest to turn a brand into a new form of visual expression, a new kind of art movement.
In this new world, the key task of the brand owner is to define the core aesthetics – the feel that he or she wants to transmit. It is not anymore about (only) creating strong (de)signs and making simple consistent execution possible; rather, it is about subtleties, finesse, and variation. In the constant tradeoff between complex, sophisticated design and ease of execution, complexity, and sophistication are the way forward.
This major, somewhat Copernican, shift is made possible by the new brushes and chisels of this second Renaissance. Artificial intelligence and machine learning provide brand owners with the scale and reach they never had, allowing them to focus on the feel and disseminate it within and outside the company, while the rest of the organization produces the look, leveraging creativity within the frame posed by the brand owners.
What is important to note here is that the new tools are an extension and not a replacement of the brand owner. They allow augmented branding as they open new possibilities for the creation of new visual elements…”
Scientists at Baidu Research have developed a new AI tool that “borrows techniques from computational linguistics” to improve the mRNA sequences found in current vaccines. The breakthrough - “known as LinearDesign” - can run on a desktop computer and could enhance the efficacy and shelf life of mRNA vaccines like those used against Covid 19.
Computational RNA Biologist Dave Mauger, Director and Head of Data Science at Arrakis Therapeutics, says, “The computational efficiency is really impressive and more sophisticated than anything that has come before.”
News items:
Bill Gates-backed Terrapower is developing “a next-generation nuclear power station” called Natrium which Gates hopes will be up and running by 2030. "The world needs to make a big bet on nuclear," Gates said. "None of the other clean sources are as reliable, and none of the other reliable sources are as clean.”
AI is running out of “high quality data on the web” and may outgrow its “training datasets” by 2025. A crucial step towards developing AGI may lie in embedding artificial curiosity in ML models and enabling them to create their “own training tasks.”
The idea of AI-generating AI isn’t new. But given recent advances, a Software² paradigm that “recasts data as software that searches and models the world to produce its own, potentially unlimited, training tasks and data” is becoming more feasible.
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News items:
A recent IPCC climate report “bluntly” lays out the steps we must take “’to secure a livable future.’ Not a good future.” Finding “sustainable” ways to continue burning fossil fuels is not one of them. Synthetic gas wears “a carbon neutral badge,” but it “probably isn’t a workable solution.”
A recently leaked Google document reveals how one employee feels about Alphabet’s pursuit of AI dominance and why neither OpenAI nor his current employer will achieve it. “The uncomfortable truth is, we aren’t positioned to win this arms race and neither is OpenAI,” the anonymous researcher wrote*. “*While we’ve been squabbling, a third faction has been quietly eating our lunch.”
That “third faction” is open source and, “plainly put, they are lapping us.” Whatever advantages Google and OpenAI currently enjoy, “the gap” between both companies’ tech and open source “is closing astonishingly quickly.” Thanks toMeta’s LLaMA leak: “The barrier to entry for training and experimentation has dropped from the total output of a major research organization to one person, an evening, and a beefy laptop.”
News items:
Alexa is about to get a whole lot “smarter.” Leaked documents show that Amazon intends to “reanimate” its voice assistant with an “internally developed LLM” similar to ChatGPT. Despite laying off nearly 2,000 people from its Alexa and hardware division, Amazon still believes it can “reinvigorate” the voice assistant using its own LLM and GenAI.
Thanks to Italian startup Robotor, “we don’t need another Michelangelo.” Using robotics and AI, founders Filippo Tincolini and Giacomo Massari seek to make sculpting in stone “faster, easier, and more sustainable” while freeing artists from the traditional constraints of sculpture “to create works that would otherwise be inconceivable.”
Robotor has already created replicas of legendary sculptures like the Parthenon horse and a 1:3 scale Arch of Palmyra - the original destroyed by ISIS) - in addition to working with “world-renowned artists” like Quayola and Barry X Ball.
“Our robots are born from sculptors for sculpture,” Massari said, but added that “the robot will never replace the artist.” According to Massari: “It is not a creative, but a mere executor.” Throughout the history of sculpture, artists have rarely done all the chiseling themselves. Whether with robots or skilled stoneworkers, “this was how Michelangelo operated, and it is how artists operate today.”
News items:
GenAI is a heterotopia for creatives and knowledge workers: “There’s good news and there’s bad news” for people who “exchange value based on the currency of [their] ideas.” Rather than focusing on “AI [as] a doomsday bell ringing loudly in our ears,” take a “growth mindset.” Here are four actionable ways to leverage GenAI “as a cocreator.”
Colossal founder Ben Lamm “is the commercial face of de-extinction.” He claims that by 2028, his startup will produce the first live woolly mammoth the world has seen in about 4,000 years. Colossal has raised $75M from investors like Paris Hilton, the Winklevoss twins, and Thomas Tull, Tulco founder and former CEO of “the company that created the Jurassic Park franchise.”
Lamm recently sat down for an interview to discuss why de-extinction is “an opportunity” to develop new technologies and how it can support biodiversity in becoming a “combatant against climate change.” Given one of his investor’s Jurassic past, can we expect to see dinosaurs any time soon? “You cannot de-extinct a dinosaur like in Jurassic Park,” Lamm laughs. “There are amino acids, but there’s no DNA. Bringing back mammoths is possible; bringing back dinosaurs is not.”
News items:
Are we ready for the imminent arrival of AI-constructed “digital versions of dead human beings?” MIT is already working on Augmented Eternity and Swappable Identities. Is this the dawn of the “UndeadGPT?”