Kristie Aurora Hendricksen

We cannot have a safe model that doesn’t interact with reality and doesn’t get feedback, because it won’t be coupled with reality. But we can’t trust a model that interacts with reality unless we’re already been convinced its representations are valid and not likely to slip. This is not to conclude that the problem is unsolvable - it is just saying that the ways that model developers are coupling models to reality seems to assume we’ve solved the problem that we’re trying to fix by doing so.

Can digital therapeutics revolutionize medicine? We are just beginning to imagine and design the future of this industry.

The U.S. government claimed that turning American medical charts into electronic records would make health care better, safer, and cheaper. Ten years and $36 billion later, the system is an unholy mess. Inside a digital revolution that took a bad turn.

I feel like this is the year that artificial intelligence becomes more than just a computer science problem. Everybody needs to understand that how AI behaves is important. In the Media Lab we use the term extended intelligence. Because the question is, how do we build societal values into AI?

“NAD replacement is one of the most exciting things happening in the biology of aging,” says Nir Barzilai, director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, who has coauthored scientific papers with Guarente but is not involved in Elysium. “The frustration in our field is that we have shown we can target aging, but the FDA does not [recognize it] as an indication.”

The transistor was invented in 1947. Since then, computing capacity has increased exponentially. We’re improving our tools and creating knowledge at an unprecedented pace, but that trend hasn’t done much for health care. At least, not yet. Right now is the “transistor moment” for the human body. In the coming decades, health care will begin to improve at the same radical pace we’ve seen in computing.

There’s a growing awareness among hospital officials that the hundreds of devices they use — the crash carts, insulin pumps, heart monitors and other machines integral to daily care — are really computers connected to a network, and entirely hackable.

Interdisciplinary work is when people from different disciplines work together. An antidisciplinary project isn't a sum of a bunch of disciplines but something entirely new - the word defies easy definition. But what it means to me is someone or something that doesn't fit within traditional academic discipline­­­-a field of study with its own particular words, frameworks, and methods.

We have a very strong belief that the ledger that nobody owns is going to be the thing that draws all of the developers and the best payment functionality, wire transfer, foreign currency exchange, and all kinds of other functionality that you can't even imagine now just like when people thought of the Internet as like oh, it's the electronic post office or whatever, well, it's not just a post office, right, that metaphor is too weak. Money is too weak a metaphor for bitcoin but we think that having a financial services platform that nobody owns that everybody can benefit from is going to be a very, very big thing as time goes on and I can give you a million, zillion examples of the kinds of things that might be built if something like that existed.

[...] if I was at Stanford, the two things I would probably be working on would be the crypto-currency or biohacking because that seems to be the two most exciting areas that will develop in huge ways over the next 20, 30 years.

Now this is the future I want to live in. This is the future that we must build. This is the future that humanity deserves.

The way some pessimists put it is that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked. I would argue that there was never any low-hanging fruit; it was always of intermediate height and the question was, were people reaching for it or not? I’m frustrated because I think technology is progressing slowly, but I’m optimistic because I think it could be going a lot better.