Top Six from the Hello Tomorrow Summit
The Hello Tomorrow Summit is a technology conference focused on bringing together selected technology thought leaders and 50 cutting edge startups from more than 3000 applications to Paris. The 50 startups from ten different categories all compete for the grand prize of 100,000 Euro. Vertical Strategy was invited to attend the summit as innovators and we’d like to share what we noticed at the summit — here are our top 6 take aways.
DNA is the next silicon
Since the dawn of time, humans have shaped nature by carefully selecting grains and mammals based on their characteristics. Because of this selection we’re able to enjoy the company of dogs, a special breed of wolves, and fruits and vegetables designed for our consumption. This development relied on nature’s own mutations and hence took several iterations before perfected.
Today, we’re able to bypass the reliance on random mutations and redefine everything organic. Thanks to a technology called CRISPR, it is now possible to modify DNA inside living organism. This is a huge step forward, as it allows us to A/B test and separate between causation and correlation.
At Hello Tomorrow, several companies were working on CRISPR technology: Eligo Bioscience who applies CRISPR to develop antibiotics to kill specific bacteria and Twist who works on developing DNA from scratch — not only for scientific applications, but also for use cases like information storage. In theory, a thumb-sized DNA strand would be able to contain the entire internet.
A vegan future for everybody
Agriculture is the single most polluting industry today. The entire transportation industry generates 14% of all pollution while, in comparison, raising cows, chicken and other farm animals generates 18% of all pollution. Further, not only is todays’ form of agriculture threatening our environment, it also keeps millions of animals imprisoned and suffering.
While limiting our consumption of meat seems sensible, it has historically proven difficult to change human preferences. So what about meat without animals?
The company NewHarvest presented the world’s first open-source ”agriculture” platform with the purpose of propelling the future of synthetic beef, egg, fish, etc. forward. The industry has already seen some early successes as companies such as Perfect Day has begun selling the animal free milk. Yet, the founders behind NewHarvest argued that we’re still many years away from a commercial synthetic meat product.
In a different discussion, Kaleb Harper, director of the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT, argued that the debate whether GMO is good or bad is not the right question to ask. Instead, we should ask how we can create a more sustainable planet. One of the uplifting examples of modified foods was ‘Golden Rice’. Due to poverty, 2.7 million children die because of vitamin A deficiency, a situation from living on a rice diet only. To combat this, researchers have developed ‘Golden Rice’, which unlike all other types of rice contain the vital vitamin A.
Preventing the death of oceans
Due to overfishing, the journal science predicted that our oceans will collapse by 2048. While illegal fishing remains the largest issue, well-intended fishermen are also challenged to protect our ocean. The massive fish nets are not able to filter between different species of fish and so close-to-extinct species are caught in the process. To prevent this from happening, SafetyNet Technologies have developed a light emitting device, which can be attached to fisher nets. It turns out that certain light waves repel specific fish, while others are attracted to it. By programming the light, fishermen can target certain fish and thereby also optimize based on their quotas.
Artificial intelligence: Ethics and responsibility
In a future in which artificial intelligence (AI) will make more decisions, how do integrate ethics into the underlying software? Although ethics often is used in a positive perspective, it is also possible to have bad ethics. Computers are fundamentally different from us, in the sense that it is not capable of either selfish or selfless decisions. In a software system it all comes down to how ones and zeros are organized. However, the future we’re racing towards will require computers to make decisions that we as humans categorize as ethical dilemmas.
In anticipation of such a future, some researchers have suggested to crowdsource ethics. This would generate a blueprint of how an AI should value decisions. Another option would be to mold the ethics of an AI after it’s creator or owner. The challenge in this case, is that there will be a very small data sample to build upon and what if the owner is a racist, destructive psycho? The panelist at Hello Tomorrow all agreed that we need to create some safety parameters. Among the suggestions were that the AI should be able to explain why certain decisions were made in human understandable logic. This is something that is very difficult to accomplish with neural networks, the AI foundation that has showed to be most promising. Another suggestion with strong support was to ensure that the creators of different AI’s will be held responsible. This will require changes within our court systems. If a Tesla in self-drivning mode causes an accident, should we then summon Tesla to court?
Aspirations to fly
The winner of the finals was a Lilium Aviation, a company building the world’s first electric vertical take-off and landing personal jet. Personally, I’m sceptic of the feasibility given the energy requirement for flying and the weight energy capacity of electric batteries. However, if material science breakthroughs in graphene, a super strong and light material made of carbon that also has energy capacity attributes, are made then it could be possible. Lillium was not the only company interested in making man fly. A virtual reality simulator called Icarus allowed participants to fly for the first time in their life. Although the graphics was pixelated and certain senses were missing, the experience was still breathtaking. A startup called Emerge presented their solution to integrate the feeling of touch with virtual reality using ultrasound waves.
Augmented reality is arriving
The company Meta live demo’ed their upcoming Meta 2 development kit for the first time. Similar to Microsoft’s HoloLens, the Meta 2 allows you to merge a digital world on top of your surrounding world.
In the live demo, Raymond Lo, showcased how the Meta 2 allowed the bearer to observe the entire audience while also examining the neural network of a brain, virtually displayed in front of him. According to Raymond, we’re at the end of the mobile era. The future belongs to headset devices, which in time, will be in a formfactor of just a strip.
To get a peak into Raymond’s vision, this video shows how he envisions the future of augmented reality. It’s worth a look (the device in the video is the Meta 1):
If you’re curios about the startup winners from each of the ten categories, we’ve listed them below:
- Aeronautics: Lilium Jet (Germany)
- Air Quality: White Lab (UK)
- Beauty & Wellbeing: Blitab (Austria)
- Data & AI: Koniku (USA)
- Energy: H2GO Power (UK)
- Food & Agriculture: SafetyNet Technologies (UK)
- Healthcare: NovaGray (France)
- Industry 4.0: Re:3D (UK)
- Transportation & Mobility: Canard Drones (Netherlands)
- Waste & Water: CocoPallet (Netherlands)
