That brought a lot of media attention, and Giorgio got skittish. “They didn’t want to have the perception from customers that their company was developing genetically modified organisms,” says Yang. Yang is still working to perfect the anti-browning in his academic lab, but he has no immediate plans to commercialize it.
The anti-browning trait might also just be a tough sell to customers: When a Canadian apple wanted to sell a GM apple that doesn’t brown—genetically altered through conventional means—it had to battle assumptions that growers just wanted to hide bruised produce. Which is, well, true. Produce that doesn’t brown when handled does also mean less waste for stores and growers.
In Sweden, Jansson is no stranger to unease over genetic engineering. His colleagues recently returned from a conference where activists flung cow dung and eggs at scientists. The CRISPR-edited cabbage he grew he actually got from researchers outside Sweden, who did not want their names or even their country revealed, fearing backlash from environmental activists. Jansson did his cabbage stunt because he wanted people to start thinking about what CRISPR could mean for food.
Given the demands of the modern world, many people find solace and relaxation when they disconnect from their smart phones, computers and email. But what if you could improve your overall happiness simply by playing games on your phone? In a recent interview, tech entrepreneur and co-founder of Happify Ofer Leidner said gamification can make people “happier”, and that the development of technology that improves well-being is only just getting beginning.
It should be noted that not just any game on your phone can help one live a happier, healthier life. Instead, Happify and other comparable platforms use science-based games to drive behavior and to help people learn skills for generally improving their outlook on life. It’s still gaming and gamification, but gaming done with a meaningful purpose.
“After telling us a little bit about themselves, we recommend a certain track, which is a topic around which (Happify users) want to build those skills for greater emotional fitness. We then prescribe for them a set of activities and interventions that have been transformed into an interactive app,” Leidner said. “You can do them on your phone, when you’re commuting, or you can do it at night. What we’re doing, in terms of the measurement of improved outcome, is we’re actually measuring them based on scientific event reports.”
Leidner said that Happify and other apps like it aren’t inventing the science, but rather translating existing interventions, studies, and research; this data suggests that an overall happiness index is determined by one’s ability to experience positive emotions and overall life satisfaction. While that may seem like a nebulous target, he said there’s plenty of research to back it up.
In addition to the behavioral science aspect of gamification technology, Leidner also cites evidence of its efficacy in a neuroscientific approach. Seeing the notable changes in functional MRI brain scans as a result of gamification-driven behavior is what led him to make applications that could engage and benefit society on a grander scale.
Leidner acknowledges that happiness is a charged term that can mean many things to different people. But in a world with both objective and self-reported measurements, it’s what the user does with the feedback from those gaming measurements that will make the difference. “To give you a simple example, you will not be able to be happy if you’re sleep deprived. It doesn’t matter. Sleep deprivation is the number one technique to make you unhappy,” Leidner said. “I think the important thing is not just to measure, but what do you do with the measurements.”
Looking to the future, Leidner sees more gamification-driven applications and hardware on the horizon that will help people learn to live happier, healthier lives, including existing health applications like HealthKeep. Future app technologies will likely also collaborate with sensors in your body to help calibrate self-reported information (like mental state) with objective physical measurements, in turn improving recommended activities and better tailoring apps to enhance an individual user’s happiness and well-being.
“There is a theme that says technology is not the way. If you want to live well and live happier lives, disconnect from technology, shut down your devices,” Leidner said. “We’re basically saying, ‘We’re not gonna’ shut down our devices. We’re just gonna’ turn the focus to apps and technology and services that help us create more meaningful lives. Augmented reality can play a very important role (in that) I think.” As with anything else, our new apps are a tool, one that can be used for ill or for good; eliminating this technology from our lives may not be realistic, but choosing how we use these technologies is within every free person’s realm of personal choice.
However, he tweeted the name of his new megaspaceship will not be the Mars Colonial Transport it will be the interplanetary transport system. Elon plans to go beyond Mars to the entire solar system.
Mars isn’t the solar system’s only marginally habitable world for would-be new world colonists. The Moon, Venus, the asteroid Ceres, Titan and Callisto all have some advantages that could allow for colonies to subsist. Musk now seems to be suggesting that some of these more distant destinations, especially moons around Jupiter and Saturn, might be reachable with the Interplanetary Transport System.
The interesting- they talk about hopes, dreams, ideas.”
I recently finished a summer at the Global Solutions Program at Singularity University. Now, having digested the joy of reconnecting with friends and family, I’m constantly faced with the question;
This is wild: a team of Israeli scientists developed a contraption that uses a person’s brain waves to remotely control DNA-based nanorobots — while the nanobots were inside a living cockroach. When prompted by a human thought, the clam shell-like robots opened up, revealing a drug-like molecule that tweaked the physiology of the cockroach’s cells.
Though “merely a demonstration and proof of concept,” the technology represents a new era of brain-nanomachine interfaces that links a person’s mental state to bioactive payloads such as drugs. Future techniques that build upon this prototype could be helpful for schizophrenia, depression or other mental disorders, in that the drugs only activate when a patient’s brain waves show signs of abnormality.
Among the AI pieces it is including in the platform are advanced machine learning, deep learning, predictive analytics, natural language processing and smart data discovery.
Ultimately, it’s not very different from exposing any other parts of the platform to customers, but it’s focused on making a smarter CRM tool, one that surfaces the information that matters. Sometimes this information may seem apparent, signals any reasonably good sales person would be looking for. Salesforce’s goal here is to put this key data front and center, and it believes even the most skilled sales pros will benefit from this approach.
For inside sales teams making cold phone calls all day long, the system can surface the most likely candidate as the next call automatically. For sales people working territories, it can keep them apprised of key information such as when a competitor’s interest shows up in the news. While you could argue that an astute sales person would be tracking this information, the Salesforce Einstein approach is designed to leave nothing to chance.
