Cracking the Code

Understand and Profit from the Biotech Revolution That Will Transform Our Lives and Generate Fortunes

Jim Mellon, Al Chalabi

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781119969372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Everything you need to know about the most important trend in the history of the world

Within most people's lifetimes, the developments in the biotechnology sector will allow us to live increasingly long and healthy lives, as well as provide us with technological innovations that will transform the way we live. But these innovations offer more than just hope for a better life, but hope for better returns too. Financial returns of incredible magnitude await savvy investors and businesspeople who can see the massive changes on the horizon. This book details these fast-moving trends and innovations and offers extensive advice on how to profit from them in business and investing.

Chapter One

Transformational Technologies

Futurists and Scientists Look into the Future

Futurists tend to be rather unusual folk whose chosen career, to study trends and factors they believe will influence and shape our future, must leave them with a sense of anticipation and, possibly, frustration. From their perch above time, futurists make deductive predictions on what lies ahead for humankind – sometimes right, most often wrong.

We do confess to have studied the work of some of these futurists, particularly those who write about the convergence of technology and biology and how it will dramatically enhance and transform our lives. This is largely because we have been seeking validation for our own strong opinion that this convergence is real and that its impact is under-appreciated. The disruptive effects of the fusion of raw computing power and biology are going to be considerable, and are a key feature of this book.

We have also, perhaps less exotically, studied the works of leading scientists in various fields of technology, physics and bioscience to develop a deeper understanding of what is really going on in science generally, and what lies in store for us humans in the next 10 to 30 years.

Some truly breath-taking innovations are just about to be commercialized, and the effect of these will allow us to live longer, healthier and happier lives. Although we will begin to see some of these new technologies within five years, we will have to wait up to 20 years for others, but of course we are all going to live longer, so that’s not such a stretch.

As we share our findings, we hope that the technologies we highlight will blow you away, as they have us, and convince you that “the future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed”.¹

We cannot state often enough how fortunate and privileged we are to be living in the most incredible period of humankind’s existence on earth. Already, many things once confined to the realms of science fiction have become fact. Things that did not exist at all not long ago, such as mobile phones and the Internet, are now indispensable (sometimes addictively so) to our way of life.

You might reasonably ask why the biological revolution we are forecasting did not take place earlier, say 5, 10 or 20 years ago. The short answer is that it has taken this long for computer processors to be able to handle the complex work required to study molecular biology and nanotechnology in a productive way.

Allow us to elaborate: one of the futurists whose work we studied is Ray Kurzweil. Mr Kurzweil published a book entitled The Singularity is Near (2006). In this book he uses historical data to build a solid case that technological development is growing at an exponential rate. Many people are familiar with “Moore’s Law”, a trend first proposed by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of chip maker Intel, which states that computer processing power doubles every 2 years, and the price halves.

Moore first came up with his statement in a paper he wrote some 40 years ago, and it still holds true today. The logarithmic chart in Figure 1 displays the number of transistors in a chip since the early 1970s. This has been remarkably consistent with Moore’s Law and there is no reason why it will not continue for the foreseeable future, especially as quantum physics and other technologies work their way into computing.

Figure 1: Microprocessor transistor counts 1971–2011 and Moore’s Law.

Source: Wgsimon for Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transistor_Count_and_Moore%27s_Law_-_2008.svg)

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MATHEMATICS FOR BEGINNERS

If you are not too big on mathematics, the vertical scale in Figure 1 is a logarithmic scale, that is, the values are increasing by an order of magnitude, from 100 to 1,000 to 10,000, rather than linearly, such as 100, 200, 300. That is why the line on the graph appears straight. If we were to plot the same points on a linear scale (100, 200, 300 and so on) the line would be exponential and virtually vertical within a few years and we would not be able to fit the plot on a page.

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Sceptics argue that we are within a decade of hitting the physical limitations of Moore’s Law – that is, it will be impossible to etch transistors smaller than about 30 atoms across and so at that point Moore’s Law will cease to hold true. Forecasters estimate that we will reach this limitation by 2020. Technically, they are correct; there will probably be a wall by around 2020 in terms of flat wafer silicon transistors. But Moore’s Law is not limited to the current technology of manufacturing silicon chips; it is about the doubling of processing power every 2 years and in that respect we will see new innovations that will allow us to sustain the advances posited under Moore’s Law well beyond 2020.

In fact, this is already happening today: in May 2011, Intel announced that it will start mass producing its Tri-Gate transistor chips in early 2012. These chips will contain the world’s first three-dimensional transistors, which allow them to be packed closer together and Intel claims that they will run 37 per cent faster and use up to 50 per cent less power. These new chips alone will allow Moore’s Law to be sustained for at least another couple of years.

In addition, in March 2010 IBM embarked on a four-year project with two Swiss universities to develop three-dimensional microprocessors (different to Intel’s three-dimensional transistors). By stacking the processors on top of each other, the distances that information needs to travel fall to 1/1000th of the existing two-dimensional chips, while allowing up to 100 times more pathways for information to flow. The biggest challenge has been developing an effective way to cool the stack of red-hot chips, which they have successfully done using a complex water-cooled system. In the same way that big cities tend to start building upwards when they run out of space, chips will also be layered in a multi-storey fashion.

In 2008 Professor Eby Friedman led a team at the University of Rochester that successfully created the world’s first three-dimensional chip. When asked if we will get to a point where we can no longer make integrated circuits any smaller, Professor Friedman’s response was: “Horizontally, yes. But we’re going to start scaling vertically, and that will never end. At least not in my lifetime. Talk to my grandchildren about that.” ²

Then there are other developments underway outside the silicon world: an entirely new generation of computers applying an altogether new technology. These are called quantum computers and they potentially have orders of magnitude more processing power than the very best of their silicon versions. Although quantum computers are still in their infancy, a significant milestone took place in May 2011 when it was announced that Lockheed Martin Corporation was purchasing the world’s first commercial quantum computing system to be installed at the University of Southern California. The computer maker is D-Wave Systems, a privately held firm based in British Columbia, Canada. In November, the company’s co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Dr Geordie Rose, was named Innovator of the Year by the Canadian Innovation Exchange. This research is worth keeping an eye on because it may just leapfrog the remaining years of the silicon era and jump-start the quantum one.

By 2020, computer processing power is expected to reach that of the human brain, according to Kurzweil (2006). This is not to be confused with equal intelligence – he predicts this to happen by 2045, an event often referred to as the singularity. Futurists define this as being the point in time when Artificial Intelligence (AI) surpasses that of human intelligence, making AI computers/machines the smartest and most capable “life forms” on earth.

The term singularity is borrowed from physics and means a point of infinite gravity where nothing can escape, not even light. Black holes are singularities. The concept of a technological singularity dates back to 1958 during a conversation between two renowned mathematicians, Stanislaw Ulam and John von Neumann (both worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb).

The thought of a singularity hypothesis coming true is overwhelming on many levels, especially as it is likely to happen within some of our younger readers’ lifetimes. The most significant inference of this event is that it marks the point in human existence beyond which we no longer need to invent or make anything else ever again. Think about that: if AI is smarter than the smartest human on the planet, why would we need to use traditional brain power to do “work” anymore?

Another futurist, Dave Evans, is employed by Cisco Systems, the American giant technology firm, to gaze into the future and advise the firm on the threats and opportunities ahead. Mr Evans has had this job of Chief Futurist since 1990 – certainly forward-thinking and unusual on Cisco’s part!

One of the oft-cited salutary lessons in the tech sector of what happens if you do not anticipate the future correctly is the case of Microsoft; it dropped the proverbial ball by underestimating the rapid adoption and impact of the Internet. This opened the door for Google to step in and take centre stage. Microsoft remains on the back foot and has yet to re-establish the dominant market position it once had. Its share price has not changed much in 10 years, having increased over 100-fold over the 10 years preceding the dot-com bubble crash in 2000.

In 2010 Cisco’s Evans published a list of his top 25 technology predictions. Here are the four that we believe to be the most significant:

• In the next 10 years, we will see a 20-fold increase in home networking speeds.
• By 2050 (assuming a global population of 9 billion), US$1,000 worth of computing power will equal the processing power of all human brains on earth.
• Within two years, information on the Internet will double every 11 hours.
• By 2030, artificial implants for the brain will be possible.

There’s no doubt that humankind has achieved some incredible things even in the last 50 years, but to put into perspective the era of rapid change that we have entered, we paraphrase Mr Evans who said in an interview about the future that “In the next 50 years, 95 per cent of everything we know as a species will be discovered”.³

So the exciting stuff is only just beginning. …

In a post-singularity world, we would be able to utilize AI to make further technological advancements at a far greater pace than humans would ever be capable of. After all, machines can work non-stop, needing no lunch breaks, coffee breaks or sleep and so on, they can communicate far more efficiently than us and they can build smarter, purpose-built machines to tackle each new challenge they are tasked with.

Most importantly, AI machines would work for free, apart from their energy consumption. Their prevalence would usher in a new post-capitalist era; a golden time in which our standard of living will be dramatically improved and one in which money would slowly cease to have the same meaning or value as we put on it today.

But all that is many years beyond the singularity, and too far into the future to try and understand the consequences of just yet. In fact, as we have said earlier, we think Kurzweil (2006) and his ilk are somewhat too optimistic – and that’s coming from us, who are bursting with excitement!

Sure, there are those who call the singularity the beginning of the end of humankind (giving rise to apocalyptic scenarios as portrayed in films such as The Terminator and The Matrix), but we and others hold a more optimistic view.

Most likely, by the time the singularity occurs, humans will already be heavily imbedded with bioscience enhancements, and so we will not be “pure” humans anyway. These enhancements could be in the form of brain boosting implants (for instance, for augmenting language or mathematical capabilities), or they could be injections of nanobots into the bloodstream to repair damaged tissue, or they could even be biomechanical enhancements and prosthetics to replace damaged or amputated limbs.

So humans are probably going to be cyborg hybrids by some distant date in the future, and there will be no clear divide between “them” and “us”, that is, pure organic humans versus AI computers.

The previous paragraph may generate scary images of robots patrolling the streets and intimidating “basic” humans, but we need not picture these bionic enhancements to humans as clunky, robot-like limbs; think more of Steve Austin⁴ rather than Robocop. In all probability, we will still look and feel human, just enhanced versions of ourselves – smarter, healthier, stronger and self-repairing. Who can object to that?

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