Robots are ushering in a Great Automation. This new DAO wants to encode a bitcoin into the DNA of a mouse. Plus more news and analysis from this week.
Welcome to the mid-week update from New World Same Humans, a newsletter on trends, technology, and society by David Mattin.
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To Begin
This week, robotics company Boston Dynamics strike a major new deal with delivery giant DHL.
The CEO of Impossible Foods lays out a 15 year plan to end all animal agriculture; he says it’s our best chance to save the planet.
Meanwhile, DAOs are proliferating. And some of them are pretty weird.
Let’s go!
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🤖 Machines of loving grace
This week, a raft of robot news.
Boston Dynamics announced that their warehouse robot, Stretch, is to start work at DHL. The global delivery giant will pay $15 million to install a fleet of the devices across a number of warehouses in north America; that deal marks the first commercial deployment of Stretch.
As a reminder, this is how Boston Dynamics introduced Stretch last year:
Meanwhile, the South China Morning Post reported that a robot will be mixing and serving drinks to journalists inside the media centre at the Beijing Winter Games.
And Miso Robotics, which came to prominence during the pandemic with its fast food kitchen robot Flippy, opened a series E funding round. Miso wants to invest $40 million to satisfy ‘rapidly increasing demand’. In November Miso launched the Flippy 2, which can work an entire fry station – handling burgers, fries, onion rings and more – without the need for human intervention.
⚡ NWSH Take: The unique conditions created by the pandemic – including labour shortages and acute concerns around hygiene – look set to produce a Great Automation in this decade. According to a leading industry body, more robots than ever joined the US workforce in 2021, and that record is forecast to be broken again this year. // Fast food restaurants employ around 5 million people in the US alone, many in the kitchen. What happens when those jobs disappear? In the long term, automation will accelerate structural shifts towards new modes of activity, many of which would have been incomprehensible as work even 20 years ago. As discussed in New Week #65, we can already glimpse something of that shift in the ongoing Great Resignation; workers across the US and Europe are quitting in record numbers, and some of them aren’t reentering traditional employment. // But it’s absurd to believe that older fast food staff, warehouse workers and truck drivers displaced in this decade will seamlessly embark on new lives as Twitch streamers. And even in the long term, new modes of work won’t provide for everyone. There’s simply going to be less need for human labour. How do we manage that? No one has the answer yet. But it’s ever more clear that universal basic income is an idea whose time has come.
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🌱 Animal farm?
A new report this week offers an atypical look at the politics of climate change.
Published in the journal PLoS Climate, the study says that if we were to end meat and diary production across the next 15 years, we could ‘substantially alter the trajectory of global warming’.
The move, say the authors, would allow us to cancel the methane emissions associated with livestock, and also to rewild land – a full 30% of the planet’s surface – dedicated to raising farm animals or growing food for them. This would, they say, reduce greenhouse gas emissions by enough to offset the growth in emissions across all other industries for the next 30 to 50 years.
Sounds great, right? It’s worth noting, though, that the report was co-authored by Pat Brown, professor emeritus of biochemistry at Stanford University and founder of vegan meat company Impossible Foods.
Brown says the scenario outlined in the report is feasible; other scientists aren’t so sure.
⚡ NWSH Take: Pat Brown is a formidable person; a former Stanford professor, and the inventor of the DNA microarray, who turned entrepreneur in his mid-50s. Even scientists who are sceptical when it comes to this new report say the underlying model is coherent; they just think the scenario Brown outlines would prove near-impossible to achieve in practice. // But there’s another fascinating angle here. We’re all accustomed to the reality that corporations – including Big Oil – lobbied first to obscure the truth on climate change, and then to impair steps to tackle it. Now that climate consensus is established, though, we’ll see the emergence of a new Scientific Industrial Complex: one dedicated to proving that method X is definitely the best chance we have to limit warming. Electric vehicles, zero-methane cows, chalk dust in the atmosphere — a host of startups will queue to persuade us that they are The One. Pat Brown’s research is solid. But I suspect the industry-funded climate science is about, once again, to get murky.
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🌐 A field of DAOs
The emergence of DAOs into mainstream consciousness is so complete that even the New Yorker took notice this week.
DAOs are decentralised autonomous organisations. That is, communities built on blockchains that allow for new forms of decentralised transaction and collaboration.
Another signal that 2022 will prove the year of the DAO? US-based platform SuperDAO, which wants to make starting one of these communities as easy as, say, establishing a Twitter profile, raised $10.5 million this week in a round led by VC firm SignalFire.
Given the wild proliferation of DAOs in the first weeks of 2022, it’s easy to see why VCs are pouring in to the space.
There’s HeritageDAO, a community set up to bid for two South Korean national treasures set to be auctioned by the Kansong Art Museum. Or FriesDAO, which wants to transform the fast food industry by raising $10 million and investing it in the holders of franchises from the giant burger chains. Or BlockbusterDAO, who want to buy the iconic but near extinct video rental brand.
Yes, BlockbusterDAO is as much a 90s nostalgia-fest as it is a serious proposition.
Think that’s weird? Check out BitMouseDAO, a project to encode a bitcoin into the DNA of a mouse, so that the value of the mouse and its offspring rises and falls with the changing value of the currency.
⚡ NWSH Take: Proponents of web3 cringed when the New Yorker called DAOs ‘the latest craze’. Sure, it feels that way right now. But DAOs didn’t arrive out of nowhere last year, and they aren’t just a meaningless fidget spinner. Underlying the hype is an authentically new form of collective governance that really could transform banking and finance, distributed collaboration, and even democracy. // Right now, critics point to high-profile failures; when ConstitutionDAO failed last year in its $40 million bid to buy a 1787 copy of the US constitution, refunding its 17,000 members turned into a nightmare. But we are, as crypto-bros love to say, so early in all this; governance of DAOs will improve. // The deeper philosophical challenge? It’s that web3’s promise of a decentralised internet will be exposed as false by the rise to dominance of a handful of platforms – think NFT trading platform OpenSea, and SuperDao if they have their way – that aim to make a complex ecosystem easy and accessible. Ten thousand web years ago, in the early 2000s, easy was the USP that drove millions to Facebook: anyone can have their own web page! Are the same centralising mechanics about to whir into life again, and reshape the next evolution of the internet?
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🗓️ Also this week
👩🚀 China has announced an ambitious Five Year Plan for space exploration. According to a new white paper the country intends to send people to the Moon, build its own space station, send a probe to Jupiter, and kickstart a space tourism industry.
😱 A Parisian surgeon has apologised after trying to sell a patient’s X-ray as an NFT. The patient was a victim of the 2015 terrorist attack on the Bataclan theatre. Yes, seriously.
🚗 Autonomous vehicle startup Cruise has launched driverless rides in San Francisco. Access to the rides is currently controlled via a waitlist. Cruise, which is backed by General Motors, says that when an open driverless service launches it will be limited to between 11pm and 5am.
🦾 The British army is experimenting with the use of robots in conflict zones. The Ministry Of Defence say Project Theseus will explore how robots could help deliver ammunition, fuel, and other supplies to soldiers on the front line.
⚛ Sweden has become the second country, after Finland, to finalise a plan for permanent storage of its nuclear waste. The plan will see the waste stored in copper containers placed 500 metres underground and intended to be secure for at least 100,000 years. Worldwide, over a quarter of a million metric tons of highly radioactive nuclear waste sits in interim storage awaiting permanent disposal.
✈️ Elon Musk asked a teen to take down a tool that tracks his private jet, and the teen came back with a request of his own. Jack Sweeney, who says Musk is his idol, asked for $50,000 or an internship at Tesla in return for taking down his flight tracker bot. Musk blocked Sweeney on Twitter.
🔌 Ford says it will spend a further $20 billion to transition to electric vehicles. The auto giant had already committed to spending $30 billion. Former Apple and Tesla executive Doug Field will now lead a comprehensive reorganisation around EVs.
👶 Chinese scientists say they’ve created an AI nanny that can care for a human fetus while it grows in an artificial womb. The system is reportedly already caring for mouse embryos as they develop in containers filled with fluids that provide nutrients.
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🌍 Humans of Earth
Key metrics to help you keep track of Project Human.
🙋 Global population: 7,924,555,367
🌊 Earths currently needed: 1.8022575307
💉 Global population vaccinated: 52.9%
🗓️ 2022 progress bar: 9% complete
📖 On this day: On 2 February 1653 New Amsterdam is incorporated. It is later renamed The City of New York.
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Automatic by Degrees
Thanks for reading this week.
The rise of automation technologies, and the attendant shifts in our relationship with work and leisure, is a classic case of new world, same humans.
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I’ll be back on Thursday with news and analysis in New Week Same Humans. Until then, be well,
David.