ETC: Mike Moritz is Worried about the US

Michael Moritz, a general partner at Sequoia Capital, and one of the most famous venture capitalists in the world, is chatting with Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, an anchor at CNBC, about the dynamism of China and India. He is smitten with the entrepreneurial vigor of East and South Asian technologists. By contrast, he likens the United States to the sclerotic Great Britain of his youth (Moritz is Welsh) - that is, a country that is simultaneously lazy, complacent, over-extended, and poorly structured to create new technologies and businesses. He is alarming the audience here at ETC: I just heard him talk about "inevitable decline."

ETC: Ed Zander Loves Devices

This morning I introduced Dr. Susan Hockfield, the President of MIT, who kindly said a few words to our audience, before introducing Ed Zander, this morning's keynote speaker, and the CEO of Motorola. Zander loves devices, and he is keen to show off Motorola's new offerings as examples of important trends. At the moment, rather ludicrously, he is wearing a pair of dark glasses, one of whose lenses has a small screen and which also has a built-in cell phone. He looks like a Blues Brother. He has also shown us a phone that can receive music videos (although the demo was of Gloria Estefan, which left the audience a little cold). When he couldn't end the Demo, Zander began making retching noises. He finally threw the phone to a minder, barking, "Where's my guy? Where's my guy? Turn this thing off! Get rid of it!"--which I, at least, found charming, in a Dr-Evil-sort-of-way. The speech itself was a fairly conventional, although entirely convincing defense, of the importance of the "mobility revolution." Zander seems an old-world kind of technology CEO--intelligent, astute, informed, but probably very stern with his subordinates.

Live from the Emerging Technologies Conference

Every year, Technology Review hosts the Emerging Technologies Conference at MIT. I sometimes say: I would love ETC even if it were not our own. I love it for its unembarrassed geekiness, I love it for the celebrity and interest of its speakers and panelists, and I love it for its mission: explaining the impact of the year's most fascinating new technologies. This year, Bob Buderi, our Editor at Large, and my predecessor as Editor in Chief, organized a particularly compelling show. Yesterday, we heard Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of MIT's media lab, defend his hundred dollar computer for the poor world, and we listened to Jeff Hawkins, the founder of Palm Computing, talk about his real passion: neuroscience. I hosted a panel on social computing, and another panel on nuclear energy became, by all accounts, almost too spirited.

Today, I will be live-blogging from ETC. Stay tuned!

The SENS Challenge

The most widely read story in Technology Review in 2005 so far was "Do You Want to Live Forever?," a profile of Dr. Aubrey de Grey, a British theoretical biologist and computer scientist at the University of Cambridge’s Department of Genetics.

De Grey believes that aging, like a disease, can in principle be treated and defeated. He proposes approaching aging as a problem in engineering through something he calls "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence." SENS claims to identify the 7 causes of human aging and describes how each cause might be circumvented. De Grey is also the guiding genius behind The Methuselah Foundation, an organization which offers monetary awards to biologists who make significant advances towards reversing aging in mice.

The profile, written by Sherwin Nuland, a professor of clinical surgery at Yale and the author of How We Die, was mildly critical of de Grey. My column in the same issue, “Against Transcendence” was much more so. SENS, Nuland and I argued, didn’t make sense — it was best understood as a provoking challenge to biogerontologists. De Grey, we said, was possibly brilliant - but also obviously a psychological curiosity.

But de Grey is not just a provocateur. He is a mass movement: many technologists who cannot believe in a supernatural afterlife want to believe in the possibility of indefinite life through science. Thus, thousands of people wrote to our print magazine letters and electronic fora — and in many cases, they were very angry indeed. The more reasonable pointed out that Nuland did not directly criticize the biology behind SENS. (In fairness to Dr. Nuland, he was not asked to: I commissioned what I called a "profile in the style of The New Yorker.") In my reply to our readers, whilst conceding nothing, I promised to find a working biogerontologist who would take on de Grey’s ideas. But while a number of biologists have criticized SENS to me privately, none have been willing to do so in public.

This silence is puzzling (de Grey, less charitably, calls it "catatonia"). If de Grey is so wrong, why won't any biogerontologists say why he is wrong? If he is totally nuts, it shouldn't be so hard to explain the faults in his science, surely?

One possible explanation for the silence of biogerontologists is that criticizing SENS would require time and effort—and that working scientists are too busy to waste time on something so silly. Another explanation (one obviously preferred by de Grey) is that biogerontologists reject SENS out of hand without examining its details.

Technology Review thinks it would be useful to determine which of the two explanations is correct. If SENS has some validity, then we should take it seriously. Because if we can significantly extend healthy human life, we will have to ask--should we? And at a purely practical level, if we can extend life, and we want to do so, then governments and research institutions will want to invest a lot more money in biogerontology

Regardless of which explanation is correct, biogerontologists apparently need an incentive to consider SENS. To that end, Technology Review is announcing a prize for any molecular biologist working in the field of aging who is willing to take up the challenge: submit an intellectually serious argument that SENS is so wrong that it is unworthy of learned debate, and you will be paid $20,000 if it convinces independent referees. In the case that even $20,000 is insufficient to motivate the relevant experts, we also invite contributions to the fund; anyone wishing to pledge should contact me at jason.pontin@technologyreview.com.

The Terms of the SENS Challenge

1. The Challenge is open to any molecular biologist with a Ph.D. from a recognized academic institution who is now associated with a recognized research institution and who has published on biogerontology in peer-reviewed journals. Technology Review will rule on whether a given individual can enter the Challenge.
2. The purpose of the Challenge is to establish whether SENS is worthy of serious consideration. Submissions are sought that attempt to demonstrate that it is not.
3. Submissions will be judged by a review panel, entirely independent of Technology Review and the Methuselah Foundation, composed of recognized molecular biologists, clinicians, and engineers. The members of panel are to be announced.
4. De Grey will reply to all submissions. The biologist may respond. All three documents will be considered by the panel.
5. The initial Challenge prize fund of $20,000 will be paid by matching funds from Technology Review and the Methuselah Foundation.
6. Anyone who wishes to pledge to the Challenge prize fund may do so; they should contact jason.pontin@technologyreview.com, the Editor of Technology Review.
7. The form of the submission must be a core document of no more than 750 words, although additional footnotes, citations, and references can be of any length.
8. If the prize is won, the winning submission will be published as the “By Invitation” column in a forthcoming issue of Technology Review. The magazine will also print de Grey’s response.
9. Submissions should be sent to jason.pontin@technologyreview.com.

Aubrey de Grey, Longevity, Biogerontology, Life extension

Thank You, Meshies!

A big thank-you to all the readers who contributed to my exercise in participatory journalism--that is, helping me write my column on mesh networks. In particular, I owe a great debt to Roger Dennis, who suggested the column in the first place, and who provided so much helpful guidance. I hope you like the final result, which will be published in the September issue of Technology Review.

What Don't I Understand About Meshes?

Here are some initial thoughts about mesh networks. Tell me what I am missing or what I have got wrong. In particular, I would be interested in learning what constitutes a "low-bit" network and what a 'high-bit" network is in the context of meshes. Also, who knows about packet radio? Tell me if my description in the "History" section is accurate. Finally, vote for your favorite mesh networking companies (you're not allowed to nominate your own).

1. HYPERBOLE VS. REALITY. The benefits of any truly disruptive technology are at first exaggerated, but their long-term effects surprise everyone. At the moment, mesh networks are experiencing such a misvaluation. Their promoters cannot describe them without hyperbole; but they will be the mechanism by which information becomes like electricity—invisible and ubiquitous.

2. HISTORY. Mesh networks are not very new: their conceptual lineage dates back to the 1970s and packet radio, a kind of digital data transmission used by amateur radio hackers. But investments by the Department of Defense in more reliable and intelligent networks in the 1990s created a renaissance in interest in meshes; and by 2000, a variety of academic institutions (including MIT’s Media Lab) and associated startups believed that mesh networks would overthrow traditional networking and permit a number of exciting new applications.

3. DEFINITIONS. To see why this is so requires a little effort for anyone unfamiliar with networking. At first acquaintance, a definition seems dry. Mesh networks (sometimes called Mobile Ad Hoc Networks or, even less winningly, MANETs) are local area networks all of whose nodes are mobile and communicate directly with each other through wireless connections. Any device with a radio connection can be part of a mesh (although the phrase is most commonly associated with high bit-rate networks like Wi-Fi). Meshes possess no fixed infrastructure; they have no central control. Meshes have no designated routers: instead, all nodes serve as routers for each other. Data packets are forwarded from node to node in a process that network technologists call “hopping.”

4. BENEFITS. Before dismissing meshes as being mainly of interest to specialists, consider their advantages over existing networks with their hubs and spokes. Meshes are self-healing: if any node fails, another will take its place. They are anonymous: nodes can come and go as they will. They are pervasive: a single node will never encounter dead spots without network coverage because there is always another nearby node. Meshes are cheap, efficient, and simple.

5. DISADVANTAGES. Mesh networks are still developing and therefore are not without faults. At the moment, a mesh will support only a dozen nodes and no more than 3 to 4 wireless hops: they are not very big. Low-bit rate mesh networking has a standard called ZigBee that is supported by around 100 companies, including Motorola, Mitsubishi, Phillips, and Samsung; but high-bit rate communications as yet have no such standard. Most notably, mobile nodes cannot communicate with other nodes “seamlessly” (to use the jargon of the trade): therefore, voice, video, and pervasive gaming are unhappy on meshes.

6. APPLICATIONS. But some of the technologies that meshes will make possible are already emerging. Meshes will allow municipalities to create cheap or free city Wi-Fi networks (dozens of cities are at work in this area; we will be writing about how Philadelphia is building its own mesh in TR’s November issue). Meshes have obvious advantages for police officers and soldiers who want networks that are unbreakable and “horizontal” (see “Instant Networks,” TR, June 2005, and “Communicating in Crisis,” TR, May 2004). Environmental scientists like meshes because they can be used to create low-bit networks of sensors that use little or no power; such sensors can offer researchers continuous environmental data from large geographical areas (see “Casting the Wireless Sensor Net,” TR, July/August 2003). But the most important application of mesh networks will be in what used to be called "pervasive computing": that is, embedding machine intelligence into ordinary human objects like clothes, consumer electronics, and buildings, and connecting those embedded systems into smart networks.

7. ECONOMICS. The economic impact of mesh networks will be profound. There will be 16.4 billion wireless devices by 2008, according to International Corporation. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency estimates that around 8 billion embedded processors are built every year. The only likely way such systems will be connected is through meshes. But their most shocking business implication is this: telecommunications companies do not own them. Meshes diminish the importance of enterprises and organizations who own and manage voice communications backbones.

8. BIOLOGY. But for me, the most intriguing characteristic of mesh networks is their cybernetic quality (see “Cybernought,” TR, June 2005): meshes are self-correcting mechanical systems that possess many of the qualities of biological systems like insect societies. In “AntHocNet: An Adaptive Nature-Inspired Algorithm for Routing in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks,” a report published by the Dalle Molle Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Manno, Switzerland, Gianni Di Caro et al. describe how Ant colonies can converge to discover the shortest path from their nest to a source of food; just so, they say, mesh networks are adaptive and can display apparently intelligent behavior without awareness. Does this mean that intelligence is an emergent property that does not require consciousness? Write and tell me at jason.pontin@technologyreview.com.

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