Synthetic Biology Leads to New Forms of Life

Futurist and engineer Nell Watson from Faculty AI & Robotics at Singularity University spoke about “Nanomachines and Internal Computing” in her keynote at the Biohacker Summit 2015.

Nell predicts that recent developments in nano-computing and synthetic biology are leading us to the explosion of new life forms. Already today neurosynaptic IBM chip has roughly the same amount of neurons as a bumble bee, which enables us to simulate animal cognition. Bioprinters are able to print biological material like bones or collagen. Nanobots crated by DNA origami technique, when placed in the blood stream can indicate leukemia cells and destroy them.

“Watson believes computing power will increasingly merge with our innate functioning in the coming decades.” – says VICE.com

According to Nell, not only the machines become a part of us, but machines and life have very similar structures.

“AI can classify the world and make sense of it in the similar way that we do.”

As an example Nell brings up successful experiment on cyborgization of a cockroach. By connecting electrodes from circuit board to the cockroach antennas one is able to control with the mobile app. In nature similar behavior control effect occurs in ants infected with cordyceps mushroom.

“Life imitates machines, and machine imitates life.” – Nell Watson

Nell points out that primo-vascular system, a network that connects different organs in our body, in its structure is very similar to optical fiber.

Nell Watson is an engineer, entrepreneur, and futurist thinker. Nell lectures globally on Machine Intelligence, AI philosophy, Human-Machine relations, and the Future of Human Society. She is a faculty member of the Singularity University, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics track and the founder & CEO of Poikos, “Instagram for body measurement”. Nell has taught post-grad Computer Science at the age of 24, advised a number of startups, accelerators, and venture capital funds and serves as an advisory futurist to The Lifeboat Foundation, which has a mission to protect humanity from existential risks that could end civilization as we know it, such as asteroid collisions, or rogue artificial intelligence.

If you are interested in the topic, listen to previous Biohacker’s Podcast Episode 3 on AI & internal computing with Nell Watson.

#4 Ari Meisel on the Art of Less Doing

In the fourth episode of Biohacker’s Podcast, Biohacker Teemu Arina interviews Ari Meisel. Ari Meisel is author, speaker, coach and the creator of Less Doing, More Living, a set of practices and principles designed to help the overwhelmed become more effective. Ari is a Crohn’s disease survivor that almost cost his career. Less Doing, More Living is the result of Ari’s journey back to health by optimizing, automating and outsourcing everything in his life. Ari currently lives with his wife and three boys in New York City and spends his days helping others master the life-changing principles of Less Doing. Ari has written the book Less Doing, More Living: Make Everything in Life Easier.

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Watch on video:

“What would you do, if you could only work an hour a day?”

Ari Meisel knows like no other what can happen if you do more than your body can take:

“I put my body into a state of fragility and it broke…I was diagnosed with crohn’s disease. I got really, really sick. I have gone from working literally 18 hours a day into a state where I sometimes barely could do an hour of work a day…Very quickly I began to figure out other ways to get work done in that literally hour a day.”

“Less doing” concept that Ari came up with is all about optimization, automation and outsourcing all the things in your life you should not be doing.

“You really need to optimize first and for me optimization really is tracking. It is about quantified self.”

“You need to stop and look at the processes you are going though on a regular basis: the way you are spending your money, amount of sleep you are getting, the amount of time you spend on the phone, the length of emails… everything we do can be quantified.”

When it comes to automation, modern technology offer a lot of possibilities:

“You can take entire processes and automate them with free tools”.

“When you go through optimization and automation, that’s when we only look at outsourcing. And with outsourcing it’s straightforward But once you’ve gone through that process you reduce the ability for the errors and you get it so it can be replicated by anyone else without training.”

Check out the full podcast for incredible insights on how you can actually be more productive by doing less.

Biohacker Podcast guest are always asked to share their most important life lessons. Here’s something from Ari Meisel:

“You have to recognize that 70% of the things that you do  can be done by other people and other things and should be. We need to be in a mindset as we grow that you need to be offloading that stuff every year in order to improve.”

Ari Meisel will be speaking at Biohacker Summit on 24 September 2015.

Tags: Less Doing, Evernote, IFTTT, Zapier, Zirtual, Fancy Hands, Less Doing Virtual Assistants, Boomerang, Yesware

Ari Meisel will be speaking at Biohacker Summit on 24 September 2015.

Virtual Assistants Get Things Done

Have you ever wondered what your work week would be like if you only had to focus on the essential things, and you could outsource the rest?

Sure, all of us would like to find a balance between work and play, and get our work done as efficiently as possible. In reality the work week of an ordinary knowledge worker is anything but efficient: on average we spend two hours per day on interruptions. Clearly, being in the office 9-to-5 doesn’t mean getting things done 9-to-5.

It’s time for a change and Mikko Ikola, entrepreneur and virtual assistant specialist, knows exactly how to upgrade from being an ordinary knowledge to worker to becoming a high-performing individual, with the help of outsourcing and virtual assistants. Check out the whole presentation to learn more!

Stay tuned for more interesting videos from Biohacker Summit ’14 and remember to get your Biohacker Summit ’15 tickets here.

#3 Nell Watson On Artificial Intelligence

In the third episode of Biohacker’s Podcast, Biohacker Teemu Arina interviews Nell Watson. Nell Watson is an engineer, entrepreneur, and futurist thinker. Nell lectures globally on Machine Intelligence, AI philosophy, Human-Machine relations, and the Future of Human Society. She is a faculty member of the Singularity University, Artificial Intelligence & Robotics track and the founder & CEO of Poikos, “Instagram for body measurement”. Nell has taught post-grad Computer Science at the age of 24, advised a number of startups, accelerators, and venture capital funds and serves as an advisory futurist to The Lifeboat Foundation, which has a mission to protect humanity from existential risks that could end civilization as we know it, such as asteroid collisions, or rogue artificial intelligence.

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Check out some of the highlights of the interview with Nell Watson:

“It’s been a strange journey. From the very young age I was inculcated with the love of engineering and technology and computer science from my engineer father. I was the only child so I kind of ended up getting all of his love of engineering and science. Unfortunately he killed himself when I was 11 and that altered my path and I ended up leaving school at a young age. I was very lucky, I managed to get access to the internet, the critical period in my early teens that meant that I was able to teach myself, I was able to go out and learn subjects that I needed to explore and to get that information. I probably would have gone down a different path if I didn’t have the access to the net just at that critical point. But that enabled me to teach myself.”

“We are long way away from having truly conscious machines or from having truly empathic machines. However, we already have machines that are able make some sort of ethical decisions, for example in the medical world, and we are gonna see a lot more machines making medical decisions. The interesting thing is that we don’t necessarily need to teach machines empathy in order for them to be able to function well within our society. Even if the machine simply has an appearance of empathy that might be enough.”

“We are definitely going to see a lot of personal service robots. But I think most of them will be probably not so physical as in the cloud. Most of our assistants will be in the cloud, most of the machines making important decisions about our lives and the lives of others around us will probably be cloud-based for some time to come. But I do see a need not just for giving an appearance of being friendly but true computational ethics. I believe the first company to crack computational ethics is going to be a very wealthy and powerful company indeed because it’s such a pressing problem on humanity in the near future.”

“There’s a lot of bugs and a lot of glitches within human computation and I think that machines hopefully will be able to guide us to be able to make better decisions about our own lives over time.”

But the ultimate question when it comes to machine intelligence — will human labour be ever entirely substituted by machines?

“There’s always going to be a need for creativity, for emotions, for things that make us feel alive. Machines are very good at emulating those capabilities of humans but I doubt that they will ever be able to master them.”

Lessons from Nell Watson:

  • Having good people around you— friends, family, peers and colleagues that you can rely on and respect.
  • Doing something meaningful in one’s work. Meaningful work is doing something that one has control over to a degree, one has a certain amount of autonomy and it involves skills that one can work towards and master.

Check out Nell’s blog for more great stuff!

Nell Watson will be speaking at Biohacker Summit on 24 September 2015.

#2 Dr Cathal Gurrin on Lifelogging and Quantified Self

In the second episode of Biohacker’s Podcast, Biohacker Teemu Arina interviews Dr Cathal Gurrin. Cathal Gurrin is a lecturer at the School of Computing, at Dublin City University, Ireland and he is an investigator at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics where he leads a research group of 10 people. He is also a visiting scientist at the University of Tromsø in Norway.

Cathal Gurrin’s research interest is personal analytics and lifelogging (a search engine for the self). He is especially interested in how wearable sensors can be used to infer knowledge about the real-world activities of the individual and how such sensor data can be used to enhance the performance and health of the individual.

Cathal has developed WWW search algorithms, multimedia content mining tools and he has gathered a digital memory since 2006 (incl. over 15 million wearable camera images) and hundreds of millions of other sensor readings. He regularly speaks at Quantified Self events and is the author of Lifelogging: Personal Big Data (PDF available), published in 2014 in the FNTIR series.

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Watch on video:

Check out some of the highlights of the interview with Dr. Cathal Gurrin:

“What happens if you want to find a bottle of wine you drank at Biohacker Summit last year? How do you find that?”

Lifelogging might be the answer. Imagine using wearable cameras and recording your life as you live it.

“The use case is about reflection, and understanding yourself, and self-improvement. You don’t often need to go back and find what was that make of that bottle of wine, or who was the person I was talking to at the party last summer, but you need to understand your life better for self-improvement and that’s where summarization and visualization tools come in.”

But lifelogging is more than just remembering a particular aspect from your memories. Even more so — imagine being able to keep the valuable things that usually are lost.

“I would love to have every word I’ve ever heard indexed into a search engine, to go back in any point of time and play back the last conversation with your grandmother and things that are valuable and that are lost and gone forever… But there’s no reason for them anymore to be lost and gone forever, they can be there.”

But there’s a very different approach to lifelogging vs quantified self.

“In quantified self the key questions you always get asked about the value of the data: what did you learn? How did you change? And that’s very vital, that tends to focus it on personal performance and health care that’s the key use case of quantified self. In lifelogging we started off this process without knowing what we are doing. We started off by gathering data to build a search engine. Why? Because it’s cool as a scientific challenge — wouldn’t it be great to search through your whole life? And from that we are starting to find use cases. We are not limiting use cases and data gathering to solve a particular problem like my heart rate or my stress levels or the food I’m eating — we are gathering as much as we can. And we are building tools over that to generate new opportunities and challenges.”

Lessons from Dr Cathal Gurrin:

  • Get up early. I think getting up early in the morning is the most important change I’ve made to my life in the last ten years in terms of productivity.
  • Schedule deliverables, not tasks. It’s easy to allocate two hours a day to write a document, it’s not easy to allocate get the document done by four o’clock.

Dr Cathal Gurrin will be speaking at Biohacker Summit on 24 September 2015.

Upgrade Your 9-to-5 with Saku Tuominen

Did you know that completing tasks on your to-do list leads to excitement and endorphin increase in your body?

The interesting part is that this happens even when the things on your lists are not valuable. Saku Tuominen, author and creative director from 925 Design, knows all about key problems in the office, and that the quality of our work is based on the quality of our thoughts. Check out the full presentation to see another take on how to upgrade 9-to-5 work as well as some interesting thoughts about Biohacking and Quantified Self as a concept.

Biohacker Summit ’15 tickets for 23-24 September are still available! Buy tickets here before they’re sold out!

Biohacker’s Handbook Presents Biohacking the Work Week

If you are busy at work, every day, every week, it might be easy to neglect the core areas of our life such as nutrition, sleep and understanding what is going on in your body and your mind. Luckily, you can upgrade yourself and your performance with the latest biological and technological tools — the Biohacker’s Handbook is a must-have resource to do that successfully.

In their presentation, technology specialist Teemu Arina, medical doctor Olli Sovijärvi, and nutrition specialist Jaakko Halmetoja will introduce how you can learn to understand your nutrition, sleep and mind and how you can affect and upgrade them using various methods and technologies. Check out the full video with plenty of practical tips and you can start upgrading yourself today!

There are still a few Biohacker Summit ’15 early bird tickets available, but if you want to get something really special, VIP tickets are available here. With VIP tickets you will not just get the best out of the two-day event, you will also attend Upgraded Dinner and learn the latest biohacking techniques while preparing a 6-course dinner. Get your tickets today!

Top Tips for Lifehacking for Executives

At the age of fifteen, Martijn Aslander — Lifehacking veteran, Co-founder at SHIFT and Lifehacking.nl — discovered that you can make money by doing the same stuff that he was doing at Scouts. By the age of seventeen Martijn was running a company of 60 people from the back of his classroom. At the age of 21 he was managing 140 people. Martijn has always had a fascination with being able to do more in less time, with less stress, lower cost and more impact. Over the years of his career, Martijn has mastered the art of lifehacking, which is all about leveraging your talents and your time to accomplish more in less time.

At Biohacker Summit ’14 Martijn Aslander shared some of the life hacks he uses himself in work space and work life, as well as interesting approaches to working with people, information, failure and ideas. Check out the full presentation for the great lifehacking tips and inspirational story of Martijn Aslander.

Biohacker Summit ’15, to be held 23-24 September, is all about becoming better, faster, stronger! More lifehackers will be on stage including Ari Meisel from Less Doing and Ben Greenfield from Ben Greenfield Fitness Systems. Join the event and get your early bird ticket here.

Tech Implant Installation Live on Stage (Biohacker Summit 2014)

One of the most exciting parts of the 2014 event was the on-stage installation of implants into two volunteers.

Before the installation, technologist, author, and double RFID implantee Amal Graafstra explains how he ended up having a chip in his hand and all the things it can be used for, such as: access control, mobile payments, loyalty programs, in-store marketing, location-based services, targeted marketing, information exchange and social networks.

The idea of moving RFID chips from your pocket to your hand is pretty straightforward, but fundamentally it transforms the concept of interacting with and experiencing the world. This is exactly what Amal and others have observed ever since they got the implants.

Pekko Vehviläinen, who had given his presentation earlier, was one of the brave volunteers to get his implant live on stage. To make the procedure even more interesting, Pekko’s heart rate and stress level were measured while having the chip implanted. Check out the full video to learn more about the story behind RFID implants and see for yourself how easy and painless it is to get them installed!

Are implants the real future of biohacking? Join Biohacker Summit ’15 and see for yourself what the future of biohacking holds — get your tickets here!

Get ready for a better, faster, stronger Biohacker Summit!

Last year’s event gathered leading pioneers in biohacking, lifestyle designers, health and wellness experts, and successful entrepreneurs. Biohacker Summit ‘14 was all about upgrading your work week and featured a number of impressive tools, practical techniques and technologies to upgrade your day. We have some excellent videos from last year’s event that we will post weekly, so stay tuned and keep your eye on our newsletter.

summit

Last event was so successful that we ran out of seats, so now it is time for an upgrade. This year Biohacker Summit will take place at the Cable Factory in Helsinki, Finland. Experience a grander event, inspirational speakers to learn from, an amazing crowd to hang around with, upgraded food, and a solid ending party with DJs and art performances in an industrial setting.

Dislike sitting? Not a problem! Biohacker Summit ‘15 takes conference experience to a brand new level and offers the “Playground”, where you can try out new wearables, fiddle with biohacking equipment, and exercise while you watch the inspiring presentations. If you prefer sitting, then you can make sure you get a seat in the front row with the VIP ticket. The VIP ticket also includes a place at the Upgraded Dinner, held at Teurastamo (the “Butchery”), where you will learn the latest biohacking techniques while preparing a 6-course dinner with a master chef. Let’s take food, preparation, cooking, and eating to the next level with the latest science and kitchen chemistry.

This year we are expecting more brilliant speakers, guests, companies and hand-picked technologies. Step into the future with Biohacker Summit ‘15 and experience cool products that change the way we live and work. Get your early bird ticket now and prepare to get better, faster and stronger!