Nov 1 2024

The surprising barrier that keeps us from building the housing we need

Ahead of abortion access, ahead of immigration, and way ahead of climate change, US voters under 30 are most concerned about one issue: housing affordability. And it’s not just young voters who are identifying soaring rents and eye-watering home sale prices as among their top worries. For the first time in recent memory, the cost of housing could be a major factor in the presidential election.

It’s not hard to see why. From the beginning of the pandemic to early 2024, US home prices rose by 47%. In large swaths of the country, buying a home is no longer a possibility even for those with middle-class incomes. For many, that marks the end of an American dream built around owning a house. Over the same time, rents have gone up 26%.

Vice President Kamala Harris has offered an ambitious plan to build more: “Right now, a serious housing shortage is part of what is driving up cost,” she said last month in Las Vegas. “So we will cut the red tape and work with the private sector to build 3 million new homes.” Included in her proposals is a $40 billion innovation fund to support housing construction.

Former president Donald Trump, meanwhile, has also called for cutting regulations but mostly emphasizes a far different way to tackle the housing crunch: mass deportation of the immigrants he says are flooding the country, and whose need for housing he claims is responsible for the huge jump in prices. (While a few studies show some local impact on the cost of housing from immigration in general, the effect is relatively small, and there is no plausible economic scenario in which the number of immigrants over the last few years accounts for the magnitude of the increase in home prices and rents across much of the country.)

The opposing views offered by Trump and Harris have implications not only for how we try to lower home prices but for how we view the importance of building. Moreover, this attention on the housing crisis also reveals a broader issue with the construction industry at large: This sector has been tech-averse for decades, and it has become less productive over the past 50 years.

The reason for the current rise in the cost of housing is clear to most economists: a lack of supply. Simply put, we don’t build enough houses and apartments, and we haven’t for years. Depending on how you count it, the US has a shortage of around 1.2 million to more than 5.5 million single-family houses.

Permitting delays and strict zoning rules create huge obstacles to building more and faster—as do other widely recognized issues, like the political power of NIMBY activists across the country and an ongoing shortage of skilled workers. But there is also another, less talked-about problem that’s plaguing the industry: We’re not very efficient at building, and we seem somehow to be getting worse.

Together these forces have made it more expensive to build houses, leading to increases in prices. Albert Saiz, a professor of urban economics and real estate at MIT, calculates that construction costs account for more than two-thirds of the price of a new house in much of the country, including the Southwest and West, where much of the building is happening. Even in places like California and New England, where land is extremely expensive, construction accounts for 40% to 60% of value of a new home, according to Saiz.

Part of the problem, Saiz says, is that “if you go to any construction site, you’ll see the same methods used 30 years ago.”

The productivity woes are evident across the construction industry, not just in the housing sector. From clean-energy advocates dreaming of renewables and an expanded power grid to tech companies racing to add data centers, everyone seems to agree: We need to build more and do it quickly. The practical reality, though, is that it costs more, and takes more time, to construct anything.

For decades, companies across the industry have largely ignored ways they could improve the efficiency of their operations. They have shunned data science and the kinds of automation that have transformed the other sectors of the economy. According to an estimation by the McKinsey Global Institute, construction, one of the largest parts of the global economy, is the least digitized major sector worldwide—and it isn’t even close.

The reality is that even if we ease the endless permitting delays and begin cutting red tape, we will still be faced with a distressing fact: The construction industry is not very efficient when it comes to building stuff.

The awful truth

Productivity is our best measure of long-term progress in an industry, at least according to economists. Technically, it’s a measure of how much a worker can produce; as companies adopt more efficient practices and new technologies, productivity grows and businesses can make stuff (in this case, homes and buildings) faster and more cheaply. Yet something shocking has happened in the construction industry: Productivity seems to have stalled and even gone into reverse over the last few decades.

In a recent paper called “The Strange and Awful Path of Productivity in the US Construction Sector,” two leading economists at the University of Chicago showed that productivity growth in US construction came to a halt beginning around 1970. Productivity is notoriously difficult to quantify, but the Chicago researchers calculated it in one of the key parts of the construction business: housing. They found that the number of houses or total square footage (houses are getting bigger) built per employee each year was flat or even falling over the last 50 years. And the researchers believe the lack of productivity growth holds true for all different types of construction.

Chad Syverson, one of the authors, admits he is still trying to pinpoint the reason—“It’s probably a few things.” While he says it’s difficult to quantify the specific impact of various factors on productivity, including the effects of regulatory red tape and political fights that often delay construction, “part of the industry’s problem is its own operational inefficiency,” he says. “There’s no doubt about it.” In other words, the industry just isn’t very innovative.

The lack of productivity in construction over the last half-century, at a time when all other sectors grew dramatically, is “really amazing,” he says—and not in a good way.

US manufacturing, in contrast, continued growing at around 2% to 3% annually over the same period. Auto workers, as a result, now produce far more cars than they once did, leading to cheaper vehicles if you adjust for inflation (and, by most measures, safer and better ones).

Productivity in construction is not just a US problem, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, which has tracked the issue for nearly a decade. Not all countries are faring as badly as the US, but worldwide construction productivity has been flat over the last few decades, says Jan Mischke, who heads the McKinsey work.

Beyond adding to the costs and threatening the financial viability of many planned projects, Mischke says, the lack of productivity is “reflected in all the mess, time and cost overruns, concerns about quality, rework, and all the things that everyone who has ever built anything will have seen.”

The nature of construction work can make it difficult to improve longstanding processes and introduce new technologies, he says: “Most other sectors become better over time by doing the same thing twice or three times or 3 million times. They learn and improve. All that is essentially missing in construction, where every single project starts from scratch and reinvents the wheel.”

Mischke also sees another reason for the industry’s lack of productivity: the “misaligned incentives” of the various players, who often make more money the longer a project takes.

Though the challenges are endemic to the business, Mischke adds that builders can take steps to overcome them by moving to digital technologies, implementing more standardized processes, and improving the efficiency of their business practices.

“Most other sectors become better over time by doing the same thing twice or three times or 3 million times. All that is essentially missing in construction.”

It’s an urgent problem to solve as many countries race to build housing, expand clean-energy capabilities, and update infrastructure like roads and airports. In their latest report, the McKinsey researchers warn of the dangers if productivity doesn’t improve: “The net-zero transition may be delayed, growth ambitions may be deferred, and countries may struggle to meet the infrastructure and housing needs for their populations.”

But the report also says there’s a flip side to the lack of progress in much of the industry: Individual companies that begin to improve their efficiency could gain a huge competitive advantage.

Building on the data

When Jit Kee Chin joined Suffolk Construction as its chief data officer in 2017, the title was unique in the industry. But Chin, armed with a PhD in experimental physics from MIT and a 10-year stint at McKinsey, brought to the large Boston-based firm the kind of technical and management expertise often missing from construction companies. And she recognized that large construction projects—including the high-rise apartment buildings and sprawling data centers that Suffolk often builds—generate vast amounts of useful data.

At the time, much of the data was siloed; information on the progress of a project was in one place, scheduling in another, and safety data and reports in yet another. “The systems didn’t talk to each other, and it was very difficult to cross-correlate,” says Chin. Getting all the data together so it could be understood and utilized across the business was an early task.

“Almost all construction companies are talking about how to better use their data now,” says Chin, who is currently Suffolk’s CTO, and since her hiring, “a couple others have even appointed chief data officers.” But despite such encouraging signs, she sees the effort to improve productivity in the industry as still very much a work in progress.

One ongoing and obvious target: the numerous documents that are constantly being revised as they move along from architect to engineers to subcontractors. It’s the lifeblood of any construction project, and Chin says the process “is by no means seamless.” Architects and subcontractors sometimes use different software; meanwhile, the legally binding documents spelling out details of a project are still circulated as printouts. A more frictionless flow of information among the multitude of players is critical to better coordinate the complex building process.

Ultimately, though, building is a physical activity. And while automation has largely been absent from building trades, robots are finally cheap enough to be attractive to builders, especially companies facing a shortage of workers. “The cost of off-the-shelf robotic components has come down to a point where it is feasible to think of simple robots automating a very repetitive task,” says Chin. And advances in robotic image recognition, lidar, AI, and dexterity, she says, mean robots are starting to be able to safely navigate construction sites.

One step in construction where digital designs meet the physical world is the process of laying out blueprints for walls and other structures on the floor of a building. It’s an exacting, time-consuming manual practice, prone to errors.

The Dusty Robotics field printer marks the layout for walls and other structures.

And startups like Dusty Robotics are betting it’s an almost perfect application for a Roomba-like robot. Tessa Lau, its CEO, recalls that when she researched the industry before founding the company in 2018, she was struck by seeing “people on their hands and knees snapping chalk lines.”

Based in Silicon Valley, the company builds a box-shaped machine that scoots about a site on sturdy wheels to mark the layout. Though the company often markets it as a field printer to allay any fears about automation, it’s an AI-powered robot with advanced sensors that plan and guide its travels.

Not only does the robot automate a critical job, but because that task is so central in the construction process, it also helps open a digital window into the overall workflow of a project.

A history lesson

Whatever the outcome of the upcoming election, don’t hold your breath waiting for home prices to fall; even if we do build more (or somehow decrease demand), it will probably take years for the supply to catch up. But the political spotlight on housing affordability could be a rare opportunity to focus on the broad problem of construction productivity.

While some critics have argued that Harris’s plan is too vague and lacks the ambition required to solve the housing crisis, her message that we need to build more and faster is the right one. “It takes too long and it costs too much to build. Whether it’s a new housing development, a new factory, or a new bridge, projects take too long to go from concept to reality,” Harris said in a speech in late September. Then she asked: “You know long it took to build [the Empire State Building]?”

Harris stresses cutting red tape to unleash a building boom. That’s critical, but it’s only part of the long-term answer. The construction of the famous New York City skyscraper took just over a year in 1931—a feat that provides valuable clues to how the industry itself can finally increase its productivity.

The explanation for why it was built so quickly has less to do with new technologies—in fact, the engineers mostly opted for processes and materials that were familiar and well-tested at the time—and more to do with how the project leaders managed every aspect of the design and construction process for speed and efficiency. The activity of the thousands of workers was carefully scheduled and tracked, and the workflow was highly choreographed to minimize delays. Even the look of the 1,250-foot building was largely a result of choosing the fastest and simplest way to build.

To a construction executive like Suffolk’s Chin, who estimates it would take at least four years to construct such a building today, the lessons of the Empire State Building resonate, especially the operational discipline and the urgency to finish the structure as quickly as possible. “It’s a stark difference when you think about how much time it took and how much time it would take to build that building now,” she says.

If we want an affordable future, the construction business needs to recapture that sense of urgency and efficiency. To do so, the industry will need to change the way it operates and alter its incentive structures; it will need to incorporate the right mix of automation and find financial models that will transform outdated business practices. The good news is that advances in data science, automation, and AI are offering companies new opportunities to do just that.

The hope, then, is that capitalism will do capitalism. Innovative firms will (hopefully) build more cheaply and faster, boost their profits, and become more competitive. Such companies will prosper, and others will begin to mimic the early adopters, investing in the new technologies and business models. In other words, the reality of seeing some builders profit by using data and automation will finally help drag the construction industry into the modern digital age.

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Nov 1 2024

Inside a fusion energy facility

This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.

On an overcast day in early October, I picked up a rental car and drove to Devens, Massachusetts, to visit a hole in the ground.

Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised over $2 billion in funding since it spun out of MIT in 2018, all in service of building the first commercial fusion reactor. The company has ambitions to build power plants, but currently the goal is to finish putting together its first demonstration system, the SPARC reactor. The plan is to have it operating by 2026.

I visited the company’s site recently to check in on progress. Things are starting to come together around the hole in the floor where SPARC will eventually be installed. Looking around the site, I found it becoming easier to imagine a future that could actually include fusion energy. But there’s still a lot of work left to do.

Fusion power has been a dream for decades. The idea is simple: Slam atoms together and use the energy that’s released to power the world. The systems would require small amounts of abundant fuel and wouldn’t produce dangerous waste. The problem is, executing this vision has been much slower than many had hoped.

Commonwealth is one of the leaders in commercial fusion. My colleague James Temple wrote a feature story, published in early 2022, about the company’s attempts to bring the technology to reality. At the time, the Devens location was still a muddy construction site, with the steel and concrete just starting to go into the ground.

Things are much more polished now—when I visited earlier this month, I pulled into one of the designated visitor parking spots and checked in at a reception desk in a bustling office building before beginning my tour. There were two main things to see: the working magnet factory and the cluster of buildings that will house and support the SPARC reactor.

We started in the magnet factory. SPARC is a tokamak, a device relying on powerful magnets to contain the plasma where fusion reactions take place. There will be three different types of magnets in SPARC, all arranged to keep the plasma in position and moving around in the right way.

The company is making its own magnets powered with tape made from a high-temperature superconductor, which generates a magnetic field when an electric current runs through it. SPARC will contain thousands of miles’ worth of this tape in its magnets. In the factory, specialized equipment winds up the tape and tucks it into metal cases, which are then stacked together and welded into protective shells.

After our quick loop around the magnet factory, I donned a helmet, neon vest, and safety glasses and got a short safety talk that included a stern warning to not stare directly at any welding. Then we walked across a patio and down a gravel driveway to the main complex of buildings that will house the SPARC reactor.

Except for some remaining plywood stairs and dust, the complex appeared to be nearly completed. There’s a huge wall of glass on the front of the building—a feature intended to show that the company is open with the community about the goings-on inside, as my tour guide, chief marketing officer Joe Paluska, put it.

Four main buildings surround the central tokamak hall. These house support equipment needed to cool down the magnets, heat up the plasma, and measure conditions in the reactor. Most of these big, industrial systems that support SPARC are close to being ready to turn on or are actively being installed, explained Alex Creely, director of tokamak operations, in a call after my tour.

When it was finally time to see the tokamak hall that will house SPARC, we had to take a winding route to get there. A maze of concrete walls funneled us to the entrance, and I lost track of my left and right turns. Called the labyrinth, this is a safety feature, designed to keep stray neutrons from escaping the hall once the reactor is operating. (Neutrons are a form of radiation, and enough exposure can be dangerous to humans.)

Finally, we stepped into a cavernous space. From our elevated vantage point on a metal walkway, we peered down into a room with gleaming white floors and equipment scattered around the perimeter. At the center was a hole, covered with a tarp and surrounded by bright-yellow railings. That empty slot is where the star of the show, SPARC, will eventually be installed.

The tokamak hall at Commonwealth Fusion Systems will house the company’s SPARC reactor.

While there’s still very little tokamak in the tokamak hall right now, Commonwealth has an ambitious timeline planned: The goal is to have SPARC running and the first plasma in the reactor by 2026. The company plans to demonstrate that it can produce more energy in the reactor than is needed to power it (a milestone known as Q>1 in the fusion world) by 2027.

When we published our 2022 story on Commonwealth, the plan was to flip on the reactor and reach the Q>1 milestone by 2025, so the timeline has slipped. It’s not uncommon for big projects in virtually every industry to take longer than expected. But there’s an especially long and fraught history of promises and missed milestones in fusion.

Commonwealth has certainly made progress over the past few years, and it’s getting easier to imagine the company actually turning on a reactor and meeting the milestones the field has been working toward for decades. But there’s still a tokamak-shaped hole in suburban Massachusetts waiting to be filled.

Now read the rest of The Spark

Another thing

Generative AI will add to our growing e-waste problem. A new study estimates that AI could add up to 5 million tons of e-waste by 2030.

It’s a small fraction of the total, but there’s still good reason to think carefully about how we handle discarded servers and high-performance computing equipment, according to experts. Read more in my latest story.

Keeping up with climate

New York City will buy 10,000 induction stoves from a startup called Copper. The stoves will be installed in public housing in the city. (Heatmap)

Demand is growing for electric cabs in India, but experts say there’s not nearly enough supply to meet it. (Rest of World)

Pivot Bio aims to tweak the DNA of bacteria so they can help deliver nutrients to plants. The company is trying to break into an industry dominated by massive agriculture and chemical companies. (New York Times)

→ Check out our profile of Pivot Bio, which was one of our 15 Climate Tech Companies to Watch this year. (MIT Technology Review)

At least 62 people are dead and many more are missing in dangerous flooding across Spain. (Washington Post)

A massive offshore wind lease sale this week offered up eight patches of ocean off the coast of Maine in the US. Four sold, opening the door for up to 6.8 gigawatts of additional offshore wind power. (Canary Media)

Climate change contributed to the deaths of 38,000 people across Europe in the summer of 2022, according to a new study. (The Guardian)

→ The legacy of Europe’s heat waves will be more air-conditioning, and that could be its own problem. (MIT Technology Review)

There are nearly 9,000 public fast-charging sites in the US, and a surprising wave of installations in the Midwest and Southeast. (Bloomberg)

Some proposed legislation aims to ban factory farming, but determining what that category includes is way more complicated than you might think. (Ambrook Research)

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Nov 1 2024

OpenAI brings a new web search tool to ChatGPT

ChatGPT can now search the web for up-to-date answers to a user’s queries, OpenAI announced today.

Until now, ChatGPT was mostly restricted to generating answers from its training data, which is current up to October 2023 for GPT-4o, and had limited web search capabilities. Searches about generalized topics will still draw on this information from the model itself, but now ChatGPT will automatically search the web in response to queries about recent information such as sports, stocks, or news of the day, and can deliver rich multi-media results. Users can also manually trigger a web search, but for the most part, the chatbot will make its own decision about when an answer would benefit from information taken from the web, says Adam Fry, OpenAI’s product lead for search.

“Our goal is to make ChatGPT the smartest assistant, and now we’re really enhancing its capabilities in terms of what it has access to from the web,” Fry tells MIT Technology Review. The feature is available today for the chatbot’s paying users.

ChatGPT triggers a web search when the user asks about local restaurants in this example

While ChatGPT search, as it is known, is initially available to paying customers, OpenAI intends to make it available for free later, even when people are logged out. The company also plans to combine search with its voice features and Canvas, its interactive platform for coding and writing, although these capabilities will not be available in today’s initial launch.

The company unveiled a standalone prototype of web search in July. Those capabilities are now built directly into the chatbot. OpenAI says it has “brought the best of the SearchGPT experience into ChatGPT.”

OpenAI is the latest tech company to debut an AI-powered search assistant, challenging similar tools from competitors such as Google, Microsoft, and startup Perplexity. Meta, too, is reportedly developing its own AI search engine. As with Perplexity’s interface, users of ChatGPT search can interact with the chatbot in natural language, and it will offer an AI-generated answer with sources and links to further reading. In contrast, Google’s AI Overviews offer a short AI-generated summary at the top of the website, as well as a traditional list of indexed links.

These new tools could eventually challenge Google’s 90% market share in online search. AI search is a very important way to draw more users, says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington, who specializes in online search. But he says it is unlikely to chip away at Google’s search dominance. Microsoft’s high-profile attempt with Bing barely made a dent in the market, Shah says.

Instead, OpenAI is trying to create a new market for more powerful and interactive AI agents, which can take complex actions in the real world, Shah says.

The new search function in ChatGPT is a step toward these agents.

It can also deliver highly contextualized responses that take advantage of chat histories, allowing users to go deeper in a search. Currently, ChatGPT search is able to recall conversation histories and continue the conversation with questions on the same topic.

ChatGPT itself can also remember things about users that it can use later —sometimes it does this automatically, or you can ask it to remember something. Those “long-term” memories affect how it responds to chats. Search doesn’t have this yet—a new web search starts from scratch— but it should get this capability in the “next couple of quarters,” says Fry. When it does, OpenAI says it will allow it to deliver far more personalized results based on what it knows.

“Those might be persistent memories, like ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ or it might be contextual, like ‘I’m going to New York in the next few days,’” says Fry. “If you say ‘I’m going to New York in four days,’ it can remember that fact and the nuance of that point,” he adds.

To help develop ChatGPT’s web search, OpenAI says it leveraged its partnerships with news organizations such as Reuters, the Atlantic, Le Monde, the Financial Times, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, and Time. However, its results include information not only from these publishers, but any other source online that does not actively block its search crawler.

It’s a positive development that ChatGPT will now be able to retrieve information from these reputable online sources and generate answers based on them, says Suzan Verberne, a professor of natural-language processing at Leiden University, who has studied information retrieval. It also allows users to ask follow-up questions.

But despite the enhanced ability to search the web and cross-check sources, the tool is not immune from the persistent tendency of AI language models to make things up or get it wrong. When MIT Technology Review tested the new search function and asked it for vacation destination ideas, ChatGPT suggested “luxury European destinations” such as Japan, Dubai, the Caribbean islands, Bali, the Seychelles, and Thailand. It offered as a source an article from the Times, a British newspaper, which listed these locations as well as those in Europe as luxury holiday options.

“Especially when you ask about untrue facts or events that never happened, the engine might still try to formulate a plausible response that is not necessarily correct,” says Verberne. There is also a risk that misinformation might seep into ChatGPT’s answers from the internet if the company has not filtered its sources well enough, she adds.

Another risk is that the current push to access the web through AI search will disrupt the internet’s digital economy, argues Benjamin Brooks, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center, who previously led public policy for Stability AI, in an op-ed published by MIT Technology Review today.

“By shielding the web behind an all-knowing chatbot, AI search could deprive creators of the visits and ‘eyeballs’ they need to survive,” Brooks writes.

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App Artificial intelligence

Nov 1 2024

This AI-generated version of Minecraft may represent the future of real-time video generation

When you walk around in a version of the video game Minecraft from the AI companies Decart and Etched, it feels a little off. Sure, you can move forward, cut down a tree, and lay down a dirt block, just like in the real thing. If you turn around, though, the dirt block you just placed may have morphed into a totally new environment. That doesn’t happen in Minecraft. But this new version is entirely AI-generated, so it’s prone to hallucinations. Not a single line of code was written.

For Decart and Etched, this demo is a proof of concept. They imagine that the technology could be used for real-time generation of videos or video games more generally. “Your screen can turn into a portal—into some imaginary world that doesn’t need to be coded, that can be changed on the fly. And that’s really what we’re trying to target here,” says Dean Leitersdorf, cofounder and CEO of Decart, which came out of stealth this week.

Their version of Minecraft is generated in real time, in a technique known as next-frame prediction. They did this by training their model, Oasis, on millions of hours of Minecraft gameplay and recordings of the corresponding actions a user would take in the game. The AI is able to sort out the physics, environments, and controls of Minecraft from this data alone.

The companies acknowledge that their version of Minecraft is a little wonky. The resolution is quite low, you can only play for minutes at a time, and it’s prone to hallucinations like the one described above. But they believe that with innovations in chip design and further improvements, there’s no reason they can’t develop a high-fidelity version of Minecraft, or really any game.

“What if you could say ‘Hey, add a flying unicorn here’? Literally, talk to the model. Or ‘Turn everything here into medieval ages,’ and then, boom, it’s all medieval ages. Or ‘Turn this into Star Wars,’ and it’s all Star Wars,” says Leitersdorf.

A major limitation right now is hardware. They relied on Nvidia cards for their current demo, but in the future, they plan to use Sohu, a new card that Etched has in development, which the firm claims will improve performance by a factor of 10. This gain would significantly cut down on the cost and energy needed to produce real-time interactive video. It would allow Decart and Etched to make a better version of their current demo, allowing the game to run longer, with fewer hallucinations, and at higher resolution. They say the new chip would also make it possible for more players to use the model at once.

“Custom chips for AI hold the potential to unlock significant performance gains and energy efficiency gains,” says Siddharth Garg, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NYU Tandon, who is not associated with Etched or Decart.

Etched says that its gains come from designing their cards specifically for AI development. For example, the chip uses a single core, which it says makes it possible to handle complicated mathematical operations with more efficiency. The chip also focuses on inference (where an AI makes predictions) over training (where an AI learns from data).

“We are building something much more specialized than all of the chips out on the market today,” says Robert Wachen, cofounder and COO of Etched. They plan to run projects on the new card next year. Until the chip is deployed or its capabilities are verified, Etched’s claims are yet to be substantiated. And given the extent of AI specialization already in the top GPUs on the market, Garg is “very skeptical about a 10x improvement just from smarter or more specialized design.”

But the two companies have big ambitions. If the efficiency gains are close to what Etched claims, they believe, they will be able to generate real-time virtual doctors or tutors. “All of that is coming down the pipe, and it comes from having a better architecture and better hardware to power it. So that’s what we’re really trying to get people to realize with the proof of concept here,” says Wachen.

For the time being, you can try out the demo of their version of Minecraft here.

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App Culture

Oct 31 2024

The arrhythmia of our current age

Thumpa-thumpa, thumpa-thumpa, bump,

thumpa, skip,

thumpa-thump, pause …

My heart wasn’t supposed to be beating like this. Way too fast, with bumps, pauses, and skips. On my smart watch, my pulse was topping out at 210 beats per minute and jumping every which way as my chest tightened. Was I having a heart attack?

The day was July 4, 2022, and I was on a 12-mile bike ride on Martha’s Vineyard. I had just pedaled past Inkwell Beach, where swimmers sunbathed under colorful umbrellas, and into a hot, damp headwind blowing off the sea. That’s when I first sensed a tugging in my chest. My legs went wobbly. My head started to spin. I pulled over, checked my watch, and discovered that I was experiencing atrial fibrillation—a fancy name for a type of arrhythmia. The heart beats, but not in the proper time. Atria are the upper chambers of the heart; fibrillation means an attack of “uncoordinated electrical activity.”

I recount this story less to describe a frightening moment for me personally than to consider the idea of arrhythmia—a critical rhythm of life suddenly going rogue and unpredictable, triggered by … what? That July afternoon was steamy and over 90 °F, but how many times had I biked in heat far worse? I had recently recovered from a not-so-bad bout of covid—my second. Plus, at age 64, I wasn’t a kid anymore, even if I didn’t always act accordingly.

Whatever the proximal cause, what was really gripping me on July 4, 2022, was the idea of arrhythmia as metaphor. That a pulse once seemingly so steady was now less sure, and how this wobbliness might be extrapolated into a broader sense of life in the 2020s. I know it’s quite a leap from one man’s abnormal ticker to the current state of an entire species and era, but that’s where my mind went as I was taken to the emergency department at Martha’s Vineyard Hospital.

Maybe you feel it, too—that the world seems to have skipped more than a beat or two as demagogues rant and democracy shudders, hurricanes rage, glaciers dissolve, and sunsets turn a deeper orange as fires spew acrid smoke into the sky, and into our lungs. We can’t stop watching tiny screens where influencers pitch products we don’t need alongside news about senseless wars that destroy, murder, and maim tens-of-thousands. Poverty remains intractable for billions. So does loneliness and a rising crisis in mental health even as we fret over whether AI is going to save us or turn us into pets; and on and on.

For most of my life, I’ve leaned into optimism, confident that things will work out in the end. But as a nurse admitted me and attached ECG leads to my chest, I felt a wave of doubt about the future. Lying on a gurney, I watched my pulse jump up and down on a monitor, erratically and still way too fast, as another nurse poked a needle into my hand to deliver an IV bag of saline that would hydrate my blood vessels. Soon after, a young, earnest doctor came in to examine me, and I heard the word uttered for the first time.

“You are having an arrhythmia,” he said.

Even with my heart beating rat-a-tat-tat, I couldn’t help myself. Intrigued by the word, which I had heard before but had never really heard, I pulled out the phone that is always at my side and looked it up.

ar·rhyth·mi·a
Noun: “a condition in which the heart beats with an irregular or abnormal rhythm.” Greek a-, “without,” and rhuthmos, “rhythm.”

I lay back and closed my eyes and let this Greek origin of the word roll around in my mind as I repeated it several times—rhuthmos, rhuthmos, rhuthmos.

Rhythm, rhythm, rhythm …

I tapped my finger to follow the beat of my heart, but of course I couldn’t, because my heart wasn’t beating in the steady and predictable manner that my finger could easily have followed before July 4, 2022. After all, my heart was built to tap out in a rhythm, a rhuthmos—not an arhuthmos.

Later I discovered that the Greek rhuthmos, ῥυθμός, like the English rhythm, refers not only to heartbeats but to any steady motion, symmetry, or movement. For the ancient Greeks this word was closely tied to music and dance; to the physics of vibration and polarity; to a state of balance and harmony. The concept of rhuthmos was incorporated into Greek classical sculptures using a strict formula of proportions called the Kanon, an example being the Doryphoros (Spear Bearer) originally by the fifth century sculptor Polykleitos. Standing today in the Acropolis Museum in Athens this statue appears to be moving in an easy fluidity, a rhuthmos that’s somehow drawn out of the milky-colored stone.

The Greeks also thought of rhuthmos as harmony and balance in emotions, with Greek playwrights penning tragedies where the rhuthmos of life, nature, and the gods goes awry. “In this rhythm, I am caught,” cries Prometheus in Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, where rhuthmos becomes a steady, unrelenting punishment inflicted by Zeus when Prometheus introduces fire to humans, providing them with a tool previously reserved for the gods. Each day Prometheus, who is chained to a rock, has his liver eaten out by an eagle, only to have the liver grow back each night, a cycle repeated day after day in a steady beat for an eternity of penance, pain, and vexation.

In modern times, cardiologists have used rhuthmos to refer to the physical beating of the muscle in our chests that mixes oxygen and blood and pumps it through 60,000 miles of veins, arteries, and capillaries to fingertips, toe tips, frontal cortex, kidneys, eyes, everywhere. In 2006, the journal Rhythmos launched as a quarterly medical publication that focuses on cardiac electrophysiology. This subspecialty of cardiology involves the electrical signals animating the heart with pulses that keep it beating steadily—or, for me in the summer of 2022, not.

The question remained: Why?

As far as I know, I wasn’t being punished by Zeus, although I couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that I had annoyed some god or goddess and was catching hell for it. Possibly covid was the culprit—that microscopic bundle of RNA with the power of a god to mess with us mortals—but who knows? As science learns more about this pernicious bug, evidence suggests that it can play havoc with the nervous system and tissue that usually make sure the heart stays in rhuthmos.

A-fib also can be instigated by even moderate imbibing of alcohol, by aging, and sometimes by a gene called KCNQ1. Mutations in this gene “appear to increase the flow of potassium ions through the channel formed with the KCNQ1 protein,” according to MedlinePlus, part of the National Library of Medicine. “The enhanced ion transport can disrupt the heart’s normal rhythm, resulting in atrial fibrillation.” Was a miscreant mutation playing a role in my arrhythmia?

Angst and fear can influence A-fib too. I had plenty of both during the pandemic, along with most of humanity. Lest we forget—and we’re trying really, really hard to forget—covid anxiety continued to rage in the summer of 2022, even after vaccines had arrived and most of the world had reopened.

Back then, the damage done to fragile brains forced to shelter in place for months and months was still fresh. Cable news and social media continued to amplify the terror of seeing so many people dead or facing permanent impairment. Politics also seemed out of control, with demagogues—another Greek word—running amok. Shootings, invasions, hatred, and fury seemed to lurk everywhere. This is one reason I stopped following the news for days at a time—something I had never done, as a journalist and news junkie. I felt that my fragile heart couldn’t bear so much visceral tragedy, so much arhuthmos.

We each have our personal stories from those dark days. For me, covid came early in 2020 and led to a spring and summer with a pervasive brain fog, trouble breathing, and eventually a depression of the sort that I had never experienced before. At the same time, I had friends who ended up in the ICU, and I knew people whose parents and other relatives had passed. My mother was dying of dementia, and my father had been in and out of the ICU a half-dozen times with myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that can be fatal. This family dissolution had started before covid hit, but the pandemic made the implosion of my nuclear family seem worse and undoubtedly contributed to the failure of my heart’s pulse to stay true.

Likewise, the wider arhuthmos some of us are feeling now began long before the novel coronavirus shut down ordinary life in March 2020. Statistics tell us that anxiety, stress, depression, and general mental unhealthiness have been steadily ticking up for years. This seems to suggest that something bigger has been going on for some time—a collective angst that seems to point to the darker side of modern life itself.

Don’t get me wrong. Modern life has provided us with spectacular benefits—Manhattan, Boeing 787 Dreamliners, IMAX films, cappuccinos, and switches and dials on our walls that instantly illuminate or heat a room. Unlike our ancestors, most of us no longer need to fret about when we will eat next or whether we’ll find a safe place to sleep, or worry that a saber-toothed tiger will eat us. Nor do we need to experience an A-fib attack without help from an eager and highly trained young doctor, an emergency department, and an IV to pump hydration into our veins.

But there have been trade-offs. New anxieties and threats have emerged to make us feel uneasy and arrhythmic. These start with an uneven access to things like emergency departments, eager young doctors, shelter, and food—which can add to anxiety not only for those without them but also for anyone who finds this situation unacceptable. Even being on the edge of need can make the heart gambol about.

Consider, too, the basic design features of modern life, which tend toward straight lines—verticals and horizontals. This comes from an instinct we have to tidy up and organize things, and from the fact that verticals and horizontals in architecture are stable and functional.

All this straightness, however, doesn’t always sit well with brains that evolved to see patterns and shapes in the natural world, which isn’t horizontal and vertical. Our ancestors looked out over vistas of trees and savannas and mountains that were not made from straight lines. Crooked lines, a bending tree, the fuzzy contour of a grassy vista, a horizon that bobs and weaves—these feel right to our primordial brains. We are comforted by the curve of a robin’s breast and the puffs and streaks and billows of clouds high in the sky, the soft earth under our feet when we walk.

Not to overly romanticize nature, which can be violent, unforgiving, and deadly. Devastating storms and those predators with sharp teeth were a major reason why our forebears lived in trees and caves and built stout huts surrounded by walls. Homo sapiens also evolved something crucial to our survival—optimism that they would survive and prevail. This has been a powerful tool—one of the reasons we are able to forge ahead, forget the horrors of pandemics and plagues, build better huts, and learn to make cappuccinos on demand.

As one of the great optimists of our day, Kevin Kelly, has said: “Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists.”

But is everything really okay in this future that our ancestors built for us? Is the optimism that’s hardwired into us and so important for survival and the rise of civilization one reason for the general anxiety we’re feeling in a future that has in some crucial ways turned out less ideal than those who constructed it had hoped?

At the very least, modern life seems to be downplaying elements that are as critical to our feelings of safety as sturdy walls, standing armies, and clean ECGs—and truly more crucial to our feelings of happiness and prosperity than owning two cars or showing off the latest swimwear on Miami Beach. These fundamentals include love and companionship, which statistics tell us are in short supply. Today millions have achieved the once optimistic dream of living like minor pharaohs and kings in suburban tract homes and McMansions, yet inadvertently many find themselves separated from the companionship and community that are basic human cravings.

Modern science and technology can be dazzling and good and useful. But they’ve also been used to design things that hurt us broadly while spectacularly benefiting just a few of us. We have let the titans of social media hijack our genetic cravings to be with others, our need for someone to love and to love us, so that we will stay glued to our devices, even in the ED when we think we might be having a heart attack. Processed foods are designed to play on our body’s craving for sweets and animal fat, something that evolution bestowed so we would choose food that is nutritious and safe to eat (mmm, tastes good) and not dangerous (ugh, sour milk). But now their easy abundance overwhelms our bodies and makes many of us sick.

We invented money so that acquiring things and selling what we make in order to live better would be faster and easier. In the process, we also invented a whole new category of anxiety—about money. We worry about having too little of it and sometimes too much; we fear that someone will steal it or trick us into spending it on things we don’t need. Some of us feel guilty about not spending enough of it on feeding the hungry or repairing our climate. Money also distorts elections, which require huge amounts of it. You may have gotten a text message just now, asking for some to support a candidate you don’t even like.

The irony is that we know how to fix at least some of what makes us on edge. For instance, we know we shouldn’t drive gas-guzzling SUVs and that we should stop looking at endless perfect kitchens, too-perfect influencers, and 20-second rants on TikTok. We can feel helpless even as new ideas and innovations proliferate. This may explain one of the great contradictions of this age of arrhythmia—one demonstrated in a 2023 UNESCO global survey about climate change that questioned 3,000 young people from 80 different countries, aged 16 to 24. Not surprisingly, 57% were “eco-anxious.” But an astonishing 67% were “eco-optimistic,” meaning many were both anxious and hopeful.

Me too.

All this anxiety and optimism have been hard on our hearts—literally and metaphorically. Too much worry can cause this fragile muscle to break down, to lose its rhythm. So can too much of modern life. Cardiovascular disease remains the No. 1 killer of adults, in the US and most of the world, with someone in America dying of it every 33 seconds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The incidence of A-fib has tripled in the past 50 years (possibly because we’re diagnosing it more); it afflicted almost 50 million people globally in 2016.

For me, after that initial attack on Martha’s Vineyard, the A-fib episodes kept coming. I charted them on my watch, the blips and pauses in my pulse, the moments when my heart raced at over 200 beats per minute, causing my chest to tighten and my throat to feel raw. Sometimes I tasted blood, or thought I did. I kept bicycling through the summer and fall of 2022, gingerly watching my heart rate to see if I could keep the beats from taking a sudden leap from normal to out of control.

When an arrhythmic episode happened, I struggled to catch my breath as I pulled over to the roadside to wait for the misfirings to pass. Sometimes my mind grew groggy, and I got confused. It became difficult during these cardio-disharmonious moments to maintain my cool with other people. I became less able to process the small setbacks that we all face every day—things I previously had been able to let roll off my back.

Early in 2023 I had my heart checked by a cardiologist. He conducted an echocardiogram and had me jog on a treadmill hooked up to monitors. “There has been no damage to your heart,” he declared after getting the results, pointing to a black-and-white video of my heart muscle contracting and constricting, drawing in blood and pumping it back out again. I felt relieved, although he also said that the A-fib was likely to persist, so he prescribed a blood thinner called Eliquis as a precaution to prevent stroke. Apparently, during unnatural pauses in one’s heartbeat blood can clot and send tiny, scab-like fragments into the brain, potentially clogging up critical capillaries and other blood vessels. “You don’t want that to happen,” said the cardiologist.

Toward the end of my heart exam, the doctor mentioned a possible fix for my arrhythmia. I was skeptical, although what he proposed turned out to be one of the great pluses of being alive right now—a solution that was unavailable to my ancestors or even to my grandparents. “It’s called a heart ablation,” he said. The procedure, a simple operation, redirects errant electric signals in the heart muscle to restore a normal pattern of beating. Doctors will run a tube into your heart, find the abnormal tissue throwing off the rhythm, and zap it with either extreme heat, cold, or (the newest option) electrical pulses. There are an estimated 240,000 such procedures a year in the United States.

“Can you really do that?” I asked.

“We can,” said the doctor. “It doesn’t always work the first time. Sometimes you need a second or third procedure, but the success rate is high.”

A few weeks later, I arrived at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. My first cardiologist was unavailable to do the procedure, so after being prepped in the pre-op area I was greeted by Andre d’Avila, a specialist in electrocardiology, who explained again how the procedure worked. He said that he and an electrophysiology fellow would be inserting long, snakelike catheters through the femoral veins in my groin that contain wires tipped with a tiny ultrasound camera and a cauterizer that would be used to selectively and carefully burn the surfaces of my atrial muscles. The idea was to create patterns of scar tissue to block and redirect the errant electrical signals and restore a steady rhuthmos to my heart. The whole thing would take about two or three hours, and I would likely be going home that afternoon.

Moments later, an orderly came and wheeled me through busy hallways to an OR where Dr. d’Avila introduced the technicians and nurses on his OR team. Monitors pinged and machines whirred as moments later an anesthesiologist placed a mask over my mouth and nose, and I slipped into unconsciousness.

The ablation was a success. Since I woke up, my heart has kept a steady beat, restoring my internal rhuthmos, even if the procedure sadly did not repair the myriad worrisome externalities—the demagogues, carbon footprints, and the rest. Still, the undeniably miraculous singeing of my atrial muscles left me with a realization that if human ingenuity can fix my heart and restore its rhythm, shouldn’t we be able to figure out how to fix other sources of arhuthmos in our lives?

We already have solutions to some of what ails us. We know how to replace fossil fuels with renewables, make cities less sharp-edged, and create smart gizmos and apps that calm our minds rather than agitating them.

For my own small fix, I thank Dr. d’Avila and his team, and the inventors of the ablation procedure. I also thank Prometheus, whose hubris in bringing fire to mortals literally saved me by providing the hot-tipped catalyst to repair my ailing heart. Perhaps this can give us hope that the human species will bring the larger rhythms of life into a better, if not perfect, beat. Call me optimistic, but also anxious, about our prospects even as I can now place my finger on my wrist and feel once again the steady rhuthmos of my heart.

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App Computing

Oct 31 2024

An easier-to-use technique for storing data in DNA is inspired by our cells

It turns out that you don’t need to be a scientist to encode data in DNA. Researchers have been working on DNA-based data storage for decades, but a new template-based method inspired by our cells’ chemical processes is easy enough for even nonscientists to practice. The technique could pave the way for an unusual but ultra-stable way to store information.

The idea of storing data in DNA was first proposed in the 1950s by the physicist Richard Feynman. Genetic material has exceptional storage density and durability; a single gram of DNA can store a trillion gigabytes of data and retain the information for thousands of years. Decades later, a team led by George Church at Harvard University put the idea into practice, encoding a 53,400-word book.

This early approach relied on DNA synthesis—stringing genetic sequences together piece by piece, like beads on a thread, using the four nucleotide building blocks A, T, C, and G to encode information. The process was expensive, time consuming, and error prone, creating only one bit (or an eighth of a byte) with each nucleotide added to a strand. Crucially, the process required skilled expertise to carry out.

The new method, published in Nature last week, is more efficient, storing 350 bits at a time by encoding strands in parallel. Rather than hand-threading each DNA strand, the team assembles strands from pre-built DNA bricks about 20 nucleotides long, encoding information by altering some and not others along the way. Peking University’s Long Qian and team got the idea for such templates from the way cells share the same basic set of genes but behave differently in response to chemical changes in DNA strands. “Every cell in our bodies has the same genome sequence, but genetic programming comes from modifications to DNA. If life can do this, we can do this,” she says.

Qian and her colleagues encoded data through methylation, a chemical reaction that switches genes on and off by attaching a methyl compound—a small methane-related molecule. Once the bricks are locked into their assigned spots on the strand, researchers select which bricks to methylate, with the presence or absence of the modification standing in for binary values of 0 or 1. The information can then be deciphered using nanopore sequencers to detect whether a brick has been methylated. In theory, the new method is simple enough to be carried out without detailed knowledge of how to manipulate DNA.

The storage capacity of each DNA strand caps off at roughly 70 bits. For larger files, researchers splintered data into multiple strands identified by unique barcodes encoded in the bricks. The strands were then read simultaneously and sequenced according to their barcodes. With this technique, researchers encoded the image of a tiger rubbing from the Han dynasty, troubleshooting the encoding process until the image came back with no errors. The same process worked for more complex images, like a photorealistic print of a panda.

To gauge the real-world applicability of their approach, the team enlisted 60 students from diverse academic backgrounds—not just scientists—to encode any writing of their choice. The volunteers transcribed their writing into binary code through a web server. Then, with a kit sent by the team, they pipetted an enzyme into a 96-well plate of the DNA bricks, marking which would be methylated. The team then ran the samples through a sequencer to make the DNA strand. Once the computer received the sequence, researchers ran a decoding algorithm and sent the restored message back to a web server for students to retrieve with a password. The writing came back with a 1.4% error rate in letters, and the errors were eventually corrected through language-learning models.

Once it’s more thoroughly developed, Qian sees the technology becoming useful as long-term storage for archival information that isn’t accessed every day, like medical records, financial reports, or scientific data.

The success nonscientists achieved using the technique in coding trials suggests that the DNA storage could eventually become a practical technology. “Everyone is storing data every day, and so to compete with traditional data storage technologies, DNA methods need to be usable by the everyday person,” says Jeff Nivala, co-director of University of Washington’s Molecular Information Systems Lab. “This is still an early demonstration of going toward nonexperts, but I think it’s pretty unique that they’re able to do that.”

DNA storage still has many strides left to make before it can compete with traditional data storage. The new system is more expensive than either traditional data storage techniques or previous DNA-synthesis methods, Nivala says, though the encoding process could become more efficient with automation on a larger scale. With future development, template-based DNA storage might become a more secure method of tackling ever-climbing data demands.

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App Biotechnology and health

Oct 30 2024

Exosomes are touted as a trendy cure-all. We don’t know if they work.

There’s a trendy new cure-all in town—you might have seen ads pop up on social media or read rave reviews in beauty magazines. Exosomes are being touted as a miraculous treatment for hair loss, aging skin, acne, eczema, pain conditions, long covid, and even neurological diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. That’s, of course, if you can afford the price tag—which can stretch to thousands of dollars.

“They’re magic!” claims one YouTube review. One US clinic exhorts: “Unlock the fountain of youth with exosome therapy.” “All aspects of skin health improve with exosome therapy,” states one UK clinic’s website, adding that “this is as cutting-edge as it gets.” Exosome particles could be used to treat “any inflammatory disease you could think about, which is almost all of them,” the founder of an exosome company says in a video on YouTube.

But there’s a big problem with these big promises: We don’t fully understand how exosomes work—or what they even really are.

We do know that exosomes are tiny particles that bud off from cells and that their contents can vary hugely, depending on the source of the cell (some popular options include human umbilical cords, salmon testicles, and roses) and how healthy or stressed it is. Even cell biologists can’t agree on what, exactly, is inside them, and how beneficial—or dangerous—those contents may be.

The world of exosome treatments is being likened to a “Wild West” by some researchers. Rigorous trials have not been conducted, so we don’t know how safe it is to spray on or inject these tiny mystery blobs. Exosome products have not been approved by regulatory agencies in the US, UK, or Europe, where the treatments are growing in popularity. Nor have they been approved for medical uses in Japan or South Korea, two other countries where exosome treatments are popular. Still, “exosomes have emerged as a sort of panacea for almost everything,” says Leigh Turner, a bioethicist and public health researcher at the University of California, Irvine, who tracks direct-to-consumer marketing of unapproved health products. “Risks are commonly minimized, and benefits are commonly exaggerated.”

This hasn’t stopped customers from flocking to the growing number of aesthetic centers, stem-cell clinics, and medspas offering exosome treatments, hoping for a miracle fix. The global market for exosome skin-care products was valued at $256 million in 2023 and is forecast to grow to $674 million in the next six years.

Mystery blobs

Technically referred to as vesicles, exosomes are made inside cells before being released. They’ve long been mysterious. The term “exosome” was introduced in the 1980s. Before that, tiny particles that are now thought to have been exosomes were described as “platelet dust” or “matrix vesicles.”

At first, scientists assumed that exosomes functioned as trash bags, shuttling waste out of the cell. But research in 1996 suggested that exosomes might also work to help cells communicate by delivering signals between them. If a cell is dying, for instance, it could perhaps send a signal to neighboring cells, giving them a chance to produce more protective substances in order to save themselves from the same fate. Cancer cells, on the other hand, could potentially use exosomes to send signals that co-opt other cells to support the growth of a tumor. Still, it’s not fully understood what signals are actually being sent.

Another major mystery is what, exactly, is inside exosomes. “It depends who you ask,” says James Edgar, who studies exosomes and similar vesicles at the University of Cambridge, UK. Cell biologists agree that exosomes contain proteins, lipids, and other molecules that result from cell metabolism. Some believe they also contain DNA and RNA, but not everyone is convinced. “It’s just very difficult to prove or disprove,” says Edgar.

That’s partly because exosomes are so small—only about 70 nanometers wide, around one-hundredth the size of a red blood cell. While the first images of them were published in the 1970s, we still don’t even know for sure what they look like; Raghu Kalluri at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and his colleagues are studying the shape of exosomes to figure out if they are round, oval, or rod-like, for example.

Further complicating all of this, cell biologists don’t know what triggers the release of an exosome from a cell. Most cells release them at a relatively steady pulse. Some cells release a lot of exosomes; others release a relatively small number. Immune cells, for example, release more exosomes than cancer cells. “We don’t really understand why that’s the case,” says Edgar.

“Fundamentally, we don’t know enough,” he adds. “We don’t quite know yet where these things go when they hit cells, and if they’re released into that cell—or how any of it happens, basically.”

Exosome explosion

Despite these enduring questions, exosomes have taken off as a beauty and health treatment. Turner has been tracking stem-cell clinics both in the US and globally for years. When he and his colleagues assessed US clinics offering direct-to-consumer treatments in 2016, exosomes “just didn’t pop up at all,” he says. When he did the same analysis in 2021, he identified around 100 clinics in the US offering exosome therapies.

It’s not clear why exosomes are taking off now. “It’s not as though there’s an overwhelming amount of safety and efficacy data,” says Turner. “I think it might be more of a buzz kind of phenomenon. This seems to be kind of a moment for exosomes.”

There are many different types of exosomes available on the market. Some are from human cells, including those from the placenta or umbilical cord. Some companies are selling exosomes from plants and animals. In the US, exosomes are regulated as drugs and biological products when they are “intended for use in the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, treatment, or prevention of disease” and “intended to affect the structure of any function of the body of man or other animals,” according to the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates medicines in the US.

Clinics get around this by using them as cosmetics, defined in law as “articles intended to be rubbed, poured, sprinkled, or sprayed on, introduced into, or otherwise applied to the human body … for cleansing, beautifying, promoting attractiveness, or altering the appearance.” What practitioners are not allowed to do is make claims about the health benefits of exosomes. After all, even anti-dandruff shampoo, which purports to treat a skin condition, is considered a drug by the FDA.

Dev Patel offers exosome treatments at his “anti-aging and skin rejuvenation” clinic, Perfect Skin Solutions, in Portsmouth, UK. Over the last 10 years, he says, he has noticed a trend: Customers are less interested in injectable treatments that merely give an impression of youth, like fillers and Botox, and more interested in the idea of treatments that can rejuvenate their skin. The demand for devices like lasers, which create heat on the skin and trigger repair, has “gone through the roof,” he says. Now, exosomes are catching on too.

Patel—who has a medical degree, served in the Royal Navy, and holds a postgraduate diploma in dermatology—left his job in the UK’s National Health Service to start his clinic around 10 years ago. He didn’t start offering exosome treatments until 2020, after he heard about them at a meeting for aesthetic clinicians.

The first treatment he offered involved unapproved exosomes derived from human fat cells—making them illegal to sell in Europe, he says. Patel says that he didn’t realize this until after he’d bought the exosomes and started using them, partly because of the misinformation he’d been fed by the distributor. He says some of the sellers were telling doctors that they were allowed to use the exosomes topically (on a person’s skin) and then inject them as part of an “off-label” use. Patel won’t name the distributor he bought from, but he says the company continued to sell its exosome products to clinics in the UK for at least two years after that point.

Patel stresses that as soon as he found out about the regulations surrounding exosomes derived from human cells, he stopped using the product. “I had probably had £5,000 [around $6,500] worth of product sitting in my clinic, and it was just thrown away,” he says. Instead, he switched to exosomes from plant cells and, more recently, others derived from salmon testes.

For hair regrowth, Perfect Skin Solutions offers a course of five exosome treatments, each delivered during a half-hour appointment, at a total cost of £2,000. When it comes to skin treatments, Patel recommends two or three sessions—more for those who are looking to counter the signs of aging. “By harnessing the power of exosomes, you can achieve a more youthful and radiant complexion, while also addressing specific skin concerns and promoting overall skin health,” according to the company’s website.

Patel says he uses the exosomes to treat clients for baldness around four times a week. He and his team members will first perform microneedling on the scalp. This technique uses tiny needles to make miniature holes in the skin—“80,000 holes a minute,” he says. Microneedling is often used to trigger a wound healing process that can improve the look of the skin. But after Patel performs the procedure on a person’s head, he uses a “jet propulsion device” that uses carbon dioxide to spray cooled salmon exosomes into the tiny indentations. “You basically create these … micro-icicles containing the product,” he says. “They pierce the skin, but you don’t feel it. It feels quite nice, actually.” After six to 10 weeks, customers can expect healthier skin and thicker, stronger hair, he says.

“The results are amazing,” says Patel. “I’ve had it done on my hair, which is probably why it’s looking out of control now,” he adds, pointing to his thick but neatly styled do, combed back and shaved at the sides.

Not everyone is as enthusiastic. Sarah, who is being identified by a pseudonym to protect her professional image, tried exosomes last year, though not at Patel’s clinic. Now in her 30s, she had acne as a teenager, and her dermatologist suggested that rubbing exosomes from human umbilical-cord cells into her face after a microneedling treatment might reduce the scarring. But he didn’t fully explain exactly what exosomes are or what they were expected to do, she says.

“I feel like it’s a little bit of health marketing bullshit,” she says. “I don’t really understand how they work.”

Sarah received three treatments, three months apart, as part of a trial her dermatologist was participating in. As a participant, Sarah didn’t have to pay for her treatment. In each of the sessions, the doctor numbed Sarah’s face with lidocaine cream before microneedling it. “Then they kind of dribbled the exosomes on with a syringe,” she recalls. She was advised to sleep on a clean pillow and avoid washing her face that evening. “There was some redness … but my skin was mostly back to normal the following day,” she says.

Her last treatment was a year ago. And she hasn’t seen a reduction in her scarring. “I don’t think I’d recommend it,” she says. “The results were very underwhelming.”

Safety in salmon?

In theory, exosomes should be safer than stem-cell therapies. Cells can be thought of as “living drugs,” while exosomes are non-living collections of biological molecules, says Ke Cheng at Columbia University in New York, who is doing more conventional research into potential applications of exosomes. Cheng is exploring the use of engineered exosomes for heart diseases. Exosomes are less likely than cells to trigger an immune response, and because they can’t replicate, the risk of tumor formation is also lower.

But that, of course, does not make them risk-free. There are no established standards or regulations for the manufacture of exosomes to be used in people. This leaves plenty of room for companies to manufacture exosomes in different ways—and for disagreements over which method is the best and safest.

The product Sarah tried that was derived from human umbilical-cord cells is called Age Zero. Erin Crowley and her father, Michael Crowley, who manufacture and sell the product, have a team that grows the cells and then harvests the exosome-containing liquid surrounding them at a clean lab in Rochester, New York.

“We have in stock right now about $3.5 billion worth of exosomes,” says Michael Crowley. That’s enough for millions of treatments, he says, although the figure will depend on what they are used for: The pair have different companies that sell exosomes for experimental medical use (25 billion to 100 billion exosomes per treatment) and cosmetic use (5 to 10 billion). Cosmetic clinics can buy vials that the company says contain 5, 10, 50, or 100 billion exosomes. Those with 10 billion exosomes are sold in packs of nine for $1,999, according to the company’s website.

“Right now, we’re in about a little less than a thousand medspas, aesthetician offices, dermatologists, plastic surgeons with our cosmetic product,” Erin Crowley says. “We can sell direct to consumer, but the product really works great after microneedling or after laser or dermaplaning.” They have been selling in the US for the last year and half; she says the product is also available in the UAE, Pakistan, Lebanon, Canada, and Turkey.

The Crowleys argue that because their exosomes come from human umbilical-cord cells, they are more effective than those from other sources, although again, rigorous side-by-side comparison studies have not been done. Exosomes from plant or fish cells “just don’t have the right language to speak to human cells,” says Erin Crowley, who has a background in mechanical engineering and quality control. She says that she analyzed the exosome market a couple of years ago and was “appalled” at what was on offer.

“The industry now … is very, very confused, and the marketing is very confused,” she says. Across the board, production quality standards are low, she says, adding that she and her dad hold their product to higher standards by testing for potential sources of infections (which can arise from contamination) and using devices to count exosomes.

On the other hand, Primacure, the company that sells the product derived from salmon testicles, argues that fish exosomes are safer than those taken from human cells or from other animals. These exosomes are collected from cells grown in a medium that contains a mix of growth factors and peptides, and the team uses ultrasound to release the exosomes from the cells, according to a video presentation by Mike Lee, CEO of Primacure. “We want to refrain from using products that are human-derived, or maybe even animal-derived, that can transmit diseases to humans,” Lee says in the video.

There are no known cases of exosomes causing such diseases in people. But some practitioners buy that argument: “Fish present a very low-risk option in terms of disease transmission,” says Patel. Turner, though, isn’t convinced: “I don’t see any reason why they would be [safer],” he says, adding that usually, biological materials from other animals are seen as posing a greater risk to patients. The use of animal cells or tissues in humans carries risks of infection, for example.

We can’t be sure either way, because rigorous research comparing these exosomes and their safety simply has not been done. “If they are from different sources, their outcomes and effects will be different,” says Cheng. “You need to have science; you need to know why they work.”

Exosomes derived from human cells will still have molecules that are foreign to a person’s body and could trigger an immune response, says Edgar. He is also concerned that because exosomes may hold the original cell’s waste, they could be introducing things that a recipient’s cells would rather be rid of. They might, for example, shuttle excess receptors for growth factors out of a cell. If another cell takes these up, it might end up with too many growth factor receptors, which could help drive cancer, he says. “We do need to understand the basics of what’s going on here before we jump into the clinic,” he adds.

At any rate, there are no rigorous human studies to support the safety or effectiveness of using exosomes for skin health, hair growth, or anything else. Look at any clinic website, and it will probably have some impressive-looking before-and-after photos of a customer or two. But these individuals are often having several treatments at the same time. Microneedling alone has been used for decades as an aesthetic treatment. And Patel says he delivers each vial of exosomes alongside a second vial containing a concoction of many other ingredients that are thought to be beneficial to skin health.

So how can a clinician be sure that the apparent effects are due to the exosomes? I put this question to Patel. “I can’t answer that,” he told me. “I’ve never just used the mix on its own to see [what it does]. You’d have to do countless patients with either [vial] to know.”

Beyond beauty

While many of the clinics offering exosome treatments are focused on their purported cosmetic benefits, a significant number claim that they can treat diseases. In the three months between November 2021 and January 2022, Turner and his colleagues identified 16 businesses that were marketing exosome-based therapies to treat or prevent covid-19 or long covid, for example. Others claim exosomes can treat sports injuries and even disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. Again, there is no rigorous research to support these claims.

There have been some promising early studies in animals, and a handful of small, weak phase I trials exploring the use of exosomes in medical treatments. But these fall way below the approval standards of the FDA.

“There are currently no FDA-approved exosome products for any use,” Paul Richards, an FDA representative, wrote in an email to MIT Technology Review. Because of this, no exosome product should be marketed for any medical use.

“There is an abundance of misleading information in the public domain regarding regenerative medicine products, including exosome products,” wrote Richards. “The FDA continues to remind consumers to be cautious of any clinics, including regenerative medicine clinics, health-care providers, physicians, chiropractors, or nurses, that advertise or offer anything purported to be an exosome product. These products are not without risk and are often marketed by clinics as being safe and effective for the treatment of a wide range of diseases or conditions, even though they haven’t been adequately studied in clinical trials.”

No exosome-based products have been approved by the UK’s Medicines & Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) or by the European Medicine Agency (EMA), either.

“They’re unproven technologies, at least from the perspective of the FDA,” says Dave Carter, head of research at the biotech company Evox, which is exploring the use of exosomes for drug delivery. “We don’t really understand [how they work] … I personally would be somewhat wary of these types of things outside of the context of proper clinical trials.”

The FDA has issued letters to some of the clinics providing these treatments. In 2020, for example, the organization wrote to Douglas Spiel, president of Regenerative Solutions of New Jersey, about its claims—being published on Facebook at the time—that exosomes could “mitigate, prevent, treat, or cure” covid. The company was also marketing exosome products for a range of other disorders, including spinal cord injury, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, lupus, and multiple sclerosis.The FDA letter listed the problematic posts and requested a response within 30 days. Spiel’s current clinic doesn’t make any claims about exosomes.

Turner is concerned that letters like these have little impact. “It’s not terribly consequential,” he says. “No one has to surrender their medical license, and there are no automatic financial penalties.”

Beyond potential harm to individual patients, both scientists and regulatory agencies are concerned that unapproved, untested, and unregulated exosome “treatments” could set back an exciting field of research. Potential uses of exosomes to diagnose and treat diseases are being explored through lab-based research and early-stage clinical trials. Companies making unsubstantiated claims to sell products could undermine that progress.

These marketing claims are often “a mishmash of marketing froth, marketing hype, and some credible claims cut and paste[d] from [scientific] papers and websites,” says Turner. “It makes it more challenging for us to have any kind of meaningful public understanding or discussion.”

In the meantime, Turner is one of many scientists cautioning people against the use of exosomes. “I would say that it’s a bit of a Wild West out there with respect to how these are being used,” says Kalluri of MD Anderson Cancer Center. “Ultimately, some science needs to be done to show that this actually works.”

“From a very basic point of view, we don’t really know what they’re doing, good or bad,” says Edgar, from the University of Cambridge. “I wouldn’t take them, let’s put it that way.”

Even Sarah, who received three exosome treatments last year, agrees. “I think there needs to be more research around it … I would just hold on and see,” she says. “Maybe [I would feel] different if I looked a million years younger after using it. But that wasn’t the case.”

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Oct 30 2024

Palmer Luckey’s vision for the future of mixed reality

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here.

War is a catalyst for change, an expert in AI and warfare told me in 2022. At the time, the war in Ukraine had just started, and the military AI business was booming. Two years later, things have only ramped up as geopolitical tensions continue to rise.

Silicon Valley players are poised to benefit. One of them is Palmer Luckey, the founder of the virtual-reality headset company Oculus, which he sold to Facebook for $2 billion. After Luckey’s highly public ousting from Meta, he founded Anduril, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense. The company is now valued at $14 billion. My colleague James O’Donnell interviewed Luckey about his new pet project: headsets for the military.

Luckey is increasingly convinced that the military, not consumers, will see the value of mixed-reality hardware first: “You’re going to see an AR headset on every soldier, long before you see it on every civilian,” he says. In the consumer world, any headset company is competing with the ubiquity and ease of the smartphone, but he sees entirely different trade-offs in defense. Read the interview here.

The use of AI for military purposes is controversial. Back in 2018, Google pulled out of the Pentagon’s Project Maven, an attempt to build image recognition systems to improve drone strikes, following staff walkouts over the ethics of the technology. (Google has since returned to offering services for the defense sector.) There has been a long-standing campaign to ban autonomous weapons, also known as “killer robots,” which powerful militaries such as the US have refused to agree to.

But the voices that boom even louder belong to an influential faction in Silicon Valley, such as Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt, who has called for the military to adopt and invest more in AI to get an edge over adversaries. Militaries all over the world have been very receptive to this message.

That’s good news for the tech sector. Military contracts are long and lucrative, for a start. Most recently, the Pentagon purchased services from Microsoft and OpenAI to do search, natural-language processing, machine learning, and data processing, reports The Intercept. In the interview with James, Palmer Luckey says the military is a perfect testing ground for new technologies. Soldiers do as they are told and aren’t as picky as consumers, he explains. They’re also less price-sensitive: Militaries don’t mind spending a premium to get the latest version of a technology.

But there are serious dangers in adopting powerful technologies prematurely in such high-risk areas. Foundation models pose serious national security and privacy threats by, for example, leaking sensitive information, argue researchers at the AI Now Institute and Meredith Whittaker, president of the communication privacy organization Signal, in a new paper. Whittaker, who was a core organizer of the Project Maven protests, has said that the push to militarize AI is really more about enriching tech companies than improving military operations.

Despite calls for stricter rules around transparency, we are unlikely to see governments restrict their defense sectors in any meaningful way beyond voluntary ethical commitments. We are in the age of AI experimentation, and militaries are playing with the highest stakes of all. And because of the military’s secretive nature, tech companies can experiment with the technology without the need for transparency or even much accountability. That suits Silicon Valley just fine.

Now read the rest of The Algorithm

Deeper Learning

How Wayve’s driverless cars will meet one of their biggest challenges yet

The UK driverless-car startup Wayve is headed west. The firm’s cars learned to drive on the streets of London. But Wayve has announced that it will begin testing its tech in and around San Francisco as well. And that brings a new challenge: Its AI will need to switch from driving on the left to driving on the right.

Full speed ahead: As visitors to or from the UK will know, making that switch is harder than it sounds. Your view of the road, how the vehicle turns—it’s all different. The move to the US will be a test of Wayve’s technology, which the company claims is more general-purpose than what many of its rivals are offering. Across the Atlantic, the company will now go head to head with the heavyweights of the growing autonomous-car industry, including Cruise, Waymo, and Tesla. Join Will Douglas Heaven on a ride in one of its cars to find out more.

Bits and Bytes

Kids are learning how to make their own little language models
Little Language Models is a new application from two PhD researchers at MIT’s Media Lab that helps children understand how AI models work—by getting to build small-scale versions themselves. (MIT Technology Review)

Google DeepMind is making its AI text watermark open source
Google DeepMind has developed a tool for identifying AI-generated text called SynthID, which is part of a larger family of watermarking tools for generative AI outputs. The company is applying the watermark to text generated by its Gemini models and making it available for others to use too. (MIT Technology Review)

Anthropic debuts an AI model that can “use” a computer
The tool enables the company’s Claude AI model to interact with computer interfaces and take actions such as moving a cursor, clicking on things, and typing text. It’s a very cumbersome and error-prone version of what some have said AI agents will be able to do one day. (Anthropic)

Can an AI chatbot be blamed for a teen’s suicide?
A 14-year-old boy committed suicide, and his mother says it was because he was obsessed with an AI chatbot created by Character.AI. She is suing the company. Chatbots have been touted as cures for loneliness, but critics say they actually worse isolation. (The New York Times)

Google, Microsoft, and Perplexity are promoting scientific racism in search results
The internet’s biggest AI-powered search engines are featuring the widely debunked idea that white people are genetically superior to other races. (Wired)

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Oct 29 2024

This AI system makes human tutors better at teaching children math

The US has a major problem with education inequality. Children from low-income families are less likely to receive high-quality education, partly because poorer districts struggle to retain experienced teachers.

Artificial intelligence could help, by improving the one-on-one tutoring sometimes used to supplement class instruction in these schools. With help from an AI tool, tutors could tap into more experienced teachers’ expertise during virtual tutoring sessions.

Researchers from Stanford University developed an AI system calledTutor CoPilot on top of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and integrated it into a platform called FEV Tutor, which connects students with tutors virtually. Tutors and students type messages to one another through a chat interface, and a tutor who needs help explaining how and why a student went wrong can press a button to generate suggestions from Tutor CoPilot.

The researchers created the model by training GPT-4 on a database of 700 real tutoring sessions in which experienced teachers worked on on one with first- to fifth-grade students on math lessons, identifying the students’ errors and then working with them to correct the errors in such a way that they learned to understand the broader concepts being taught. From this, the model generates responses that tutors can customize to help their online students.

“I’m really excited about the future of human-AI collaboration systems,” says Rose Wang, a PhD student at Stanford University who worked on the project, which was published on arXiv and has not yet been peer-reviewed “I think this technology is a huge enabler, but only if it’s designed well.”

The tool isn’t designed to actually teach the students math—instead, it offers tutors helpful advice on how to nudge students toward correct answers while encouraging deeper learning.

For example, it can suggest that the tutor ask how the student came up with an answer, or propose questions that could point to a different way to solve a problem.

To test its efficacy, the team examined the interactions of 900 tutors virtually teaching math to 1,787 students between five and 13 years old from historically underserved communities in the US South. Half the tutors had the option to activate Tutor CoPilot, while the other half did not.

The students whose tutors had access to Tutor CoPilot were 4 percentage points more likely to pass their exit ticket—an assessment of whether a student has mastered a subject—than those whose tutors did not have access to it. (Pass rates were 66% and 62%, respectively.)

The tool works as well as it does because it’s being used to teach relatively basic mathematics, says Simon Frieder, a machine-learning researcher at the University of Oxford, who did not work on the project. “You couldn’t really do a study with much more advanced mathematics at this current point in time,” he says.

The team estimates that the tool could improve student learning at a cost of around $20 per tutor annually to the tutoring provider, which is significantly cheaper than the thousands of dollars it usually takes to train educators in person.

It has the potential to improve the relationship between novice tutors and their students by training them to approach problems the way experienced teachers do, says Mina Lee, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Chicago, who was not involved in the project.

“This work demonstrates that the tool actually does work in real settings,” she says. “We want to facilitate human connection, and this really highlights how AI can augment human-to-human interaction.”

As a next step, Wang and her colleagues are interested in exploring how well novice tutors remember the teaching methods imparted by Tutor CoPilot. This could help them gain a sense of how long the effects of these kinds of AI interventions might last. They also plan to try to work out which other school subjects or age groups could benefit from such an approach.

“There’s a lot of substantial ways in which the underlying technology can get better,” Wang says. “But we’re not deploying an AI technology willy-nilly without pre-validating it—we want to be sure we’re able to rigorously evaluate it before we actually send it out into the wild. For me, the worst fear is that we’re wasting the students’ time.”

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Oct 29 2024

Palmer Luckey on the Pentagon’s future of mixed reality

Palmer Luckey has, in some ways, come full circle.

His first experience with virtual-reality headsets was as a teenage lab technician at a defense research center in Southern California, studying their potential to curb PTSD symptoms in veterans. He then built Oculus, sold it to Facebook for $2 billion, left Facebook after a highly public ousting, and founded Anduril, which focuses on drones, cruise missiles, and other AI-enhanced technologies for the US Department of Defense. The company is now valued at $14 billion.

Now Luckey is redirecting his energy again, to headsets for the military. In September, Anduril announced it would partner with Microsoft on the US Army’s Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS), arguably the military’s largest effort to develop a headset for use on the battlefield. Luckey says the IVAS project is his top priority at Anduril.

“There is going to be a heads-up display on every soldier within a pretty short period of time,” he told MIT Technology Review in an interview last week on his work with the IVAS goggles. “The stuff that we’re building—it’s going to be a big part of that.”

Though few would bet against Luckey’s expertise in the realm of mixed reality, few observers share his optimism for the IVAS program. They view it, thus far, as an avalanche of failures.

IVAS was first approved in 2018 as an effort to build state-of-the-art mixed-reality headsets for soldiers. In March 2021, Microsoft was awarded nearly $22 billion over 10 years to lead the project, but it quickly became mired in delays. Just a year later, a Pentagon audit criticized the program for not properly testing the goggles, saying its choices “could result in wasting up to $21.88 billion in taxpayer funds to field a system that soldiers may not want to use or use as intended.” The first two variants of the goggles—of which the army purchased 10,000 units—gave soldiers nausea, neck pain, and eye strain, according to internal documents obtained by Bloomberg.

Such reports have left IVAS on a short leash with members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which helps determine how much money should be spent on the program. In a subcommittee meeting in May, Senator Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican and ranking member, expressed frustration at IVAS’s slow pace and high costs, and in July the committee suggested a $200 million cut to the program.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has for years been cutting investments into its HoloLens headset—the hardware on which the IVAS program is based—for lack of adoption. In June, Microsoft announced layoffs to its HoloLens teams, suggesting the project is now focused solely on serving the Department of Defense. The company received a serious blow in August, when reports revealed that the Army is considering reopening bidding for the contract to oust Microsoft entirely.

This is the catastrophe that Luckey’s stepped into. Anduril’s contribution to the project will be Lattice, an AI-powered system that connects everything from drones to radar jammers to surveil, detect objects, and aid in decision-making. Lattice is increasingly becoming Anduril’s flagship offering. It’s a tool that allows soldiers to receive instantaneous information not only from Anduril’s hardware, but also from radars, vehicles, sensors, and other equipment not made by Anduril. Now it will be built into the IVAS goggles. “It’s not quite a hive mind, but it’s certainly a hive eye” is how Luckey described it to me.

Palmer Luckey holding an autonomous drone interceptor — Anvil, seen here held by Luckey in Anduril’s Costa Mesa Headquarters, integrates with the Lattice OS and can navigate autonomously to intercept hostile drones.

Boosted by Lattice, the IVAS program aims to produce a headset that can help soldiers “rapidly identify potential threats and take decisive action” on the battlefield, according to the Army. If designed well, the device will automatically sort through countless pieces of information—drone locations, vehicles, intelligence—and flag the most important ones to the wearer in real time.

Luckey defends the IVAS program’s bumps in the road as exactly what one should expect when developing mixed reality for defense. “None of these problems are anything that you would consider insurmountable,” he says. “It’s just a matter of if it’s going to be this year or a few years from now.” He adds that delaying a product is far better than releasing an inferior product, quoting Shigeru Miyamoto, the game director of Nintendo: “A delayed game is delayed only once, but a bad game is bad forever.”

He’s increasingly convinced that the military, not consumers, will be the most important testing ground for mixed-reality hardware: “You’re going to see an AR headset on every soldier, long before you see it on every civilian,” he says. In the consumer world, any headset company is competing with the ubiquity and ease of the smartphone, but he sees entirely different trade-offs in defense.

“The gains are so different when we talk about life-or-death scenarios. You don’t have to worry about things like ‘Oh, this is kind of dorky looking,’ or ‘Oh, you know, this is slightly heavier than I would prefer,’” he says. “Because the alternatives of, you know, getting killed or failing your mission are a lot less desirable.”

Those in charge of the IVAS program remain steadfast in the expectation that it will pay off with huge gains for those on the battlefield. “If it works,” James Rainey, commanding general of the Army Futures Command, told the Armed Services Committee in May, “it is a legitimate 10x upgrade to our most important formations.” That’s a big “if,” and one that currently depends on Microsoft’s ability to deliver. Luckey didn’t get specific when I asked if Anduril was positioning itself to bid to become IVAS’s primary contractor should the opportunity arise.

If that happens, US troops may, willingly or not, become the most important test subjects for augmented- and virtual-reality technology as it is developed in the coming decades. The commercial sector doesn’t have thousands of individuals within a single institution who can test hardware in physically and mentally demanding situations and provide their feedback on how to improve it.

That’s one of the ways selling to the defense sector is very different from selling to consumers, Luckey says: “You don’t actually have to convince every single soldier that they personally want to use it. You need to convince the people in charge of him, his commanding officer, and the people in charge of him that this is a thing that is worth wearing.” The iterations that eventually come from IVAS—if it keeps its funding—could signal what’s coming next for the commercial market.

When I asked Luckey if there were lessons from Oculus he had to unlearn when working with the Department of Defense, he said there’s one: worrying about budgets. “I prided myself for years, you know—I’m the guy who’s figured out how to make VR accessible to the masses by being absolutely brutal at every part of the design process, trying to get costs down. That isn’t what the DOD wants,” he says. “They don’t want the cheapest headset in a vacuum. They want to save money, and generally, spending a bit more money on a headset that is more durable or that has better vision—and therefore allows you to complete a mission faster—is definitely worth the extra few hundred dollars.”

I asked if he’s impressed by the progress that’s been made during his eight-year hiatus from mixed reality. Since he left Facebook in 2017, Apple, Magic Leap, Meta, Snap, and a cascade of startups have been racing to move the technology from the fringe to the mainstream. Everything in mixed reality is about trade-offs, he says. Would you like more computing power, or a lighter and more comfortable headset?

With more time at Meta, “I would have made different trade-offs in a way that I think would have led to greater adoption,” he says. “But of course, everyone thinks that.” While he’s impressed with the gains, “having been on the inside, I also feel like things could be moving faster.”

Years after leaving, Luckey remains noticeably annoyed by one specific decision he thinks Meta got wrong: not offloading the battery. Dwelling on technical details is unsurprising from someone who spent his formative years living in a trailer in his parents’ driveway posting in obscure forums and obsessing over goggle prototypes. He pontificated on the benefits of packing the heavy batteries and chips in removable pucks that the user could put in a pocket, rather than in the headset itself. Doing so makes the headset lighter and more comfortable. He says he was pushing Facebook to go that route before he was ousted, but when he left, it abandoned the idea. Apple chose to have an external battery for its Vision Pro, which Luckey praised.

“Anyway,” he told me. “I’m still sore about it eight years later.”

Speaking of soreness, Luckey’s most public professional wound, his ouster from Facebook in 2017, was partially healed last month. The story—involving countless Twitter threads, doxxing, retractions and corrections to news articles, suppressed statements, and a significant segment in Blake Harris’s 2020 book The History of the Future—is difficult to boil down. But here’s the short version: A donation by Luckey to a pro-Trump group called Nimble America in late 2016 led to turmoil within Facebook after it was reported by the Daily Beast. That turmoil grew, especially after Ars Technica wrote that his donation was funding racist memes (the founders of Nimble America were involved in the subreddit r/TheDonald, but the organization itself was focused on creating pro-Trump billboards). Luckey left in March 2017, but Meta has never disclosed why.

This April, Oculus’s former CTO John Carmack posted on X that he regretted not supporting Luckey more. Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, argued with Carmack, largely siding with Meta. In response, Luckey said, “You publicly told everyone my departure had nothing to do with politics, which is absolutely insane and obviously contradicted by reams of internal communications.” The two argued. In the X argument, Bosworth cautioned that there are “limits on what can be said here,” to which Luckey responded, “I am down to throw it all out there. We can make everything public and let people judge for themselves. Just say the word.”

Six months later, Bosworth apologized to Luckey for the comments. Luckey responded, writing that although he is “infamously good at holding grudges,” neither Bosworth nor current leadership at Meta was involved in the incident.

By now Luckey has spent years mulling over how much of his remaining anger is irrational or misplaced, but one thing is clear. He has a grudge left, but it’s against people behind the scenes—PR agents, lawyers, reporters—who, from his perspective, created a situation that forced him to accept and react to an account he found totally flawed. He’s angry about the steps Facebook took to keep him from communicating his side (Luckey has said he wrote versions of a statement at the time but that Facebook threatened further escalation if he posted it).

“What am I actually angry at? Am I angry that my life went in that direction? Absolutely,” he says.

“I have a lot more anger for the people who lied in a way that ruined my entire life and that saw my own company ripped out from under me that I’d spent my entire adult life building,” he says. “I’ve got plenty of anger left, but it’s not at Meta, the corporate entity. It’s not at Zuck. It’s not at Boz. Those are not the people who wronged me.”

While various subcommittees within the Senate and House deliberate how many millions to spend on IVAS each year, what is not in question is the Pentagon is investing to prepare for a potential conflict in the Pacific between China and Taiwan. The Pentagon requested nearly $10 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative in its latest budget. The prospect of such a conflict is something Luckey considers often.

He told the authors of Unit X: How the Pentagon and Silicon Valley Are Transforming the Future of War that Anduril’s “entire internal road map” has been organized around the question “How do you deter China? Not just in Taiwan, but Taiwan and beyond?”

At this point, nothing about IVAS is geared specifically toward use in the South Pacific as opposed to Ukraine or anywhere else. The design is in early stages. According to transcripts of a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee meeting in May, the military was scheduled to receive the third iteration of IVAS goggles earlier this summer. If they were on schedule, they’re currently in testing. That version is likely to change dramatically before it approaches Luckey’s vision for the future of mixed-reality warfare, in which “you have a little bit of an AI guardian angel on your shoulder, helping you out and doing all the stuff that is easy to miss in the midst of battle.”

Palmer Luckey sitting on yellow metal staircase — Designs for IVAS will have to adapt amid a shifting landscape of global conflict.

But will soldiers ever trust such a “guardian angel”? If the goggles of the future rely on AI-powered software like Lattice to identify threats—say, an enemy drone ahead or an autonomous vehicle racing toward you—Anduril is making the promise that it can sort through the false positives, recognize threats with impeccable accuracy, and surface critical information when it counts most.

Luckey says the real test is how the technology compares with the current abilities of humans. “In a lot of cases, it’s already better,” he says, referring to Lattice, as measured by Anduril’s internal tests (it has not released these, and they have not been assessed by any independent external experts). “People are fallible in ways that machines aren’t necessarily,” he adds.

Still, Luckey admits he does worry about the threats Lattice will miss.

“One of the things that really worries me is there’s going to be people who die because Lattice misunderstood something, or missed a threat to a soldier that it should have seen,” he says. “At the same time, I can recognize that it’s still doing far better than people are doing today.”

When Lattice makes a significant mistake, it’s unlikely the public will know. Asked about the balance between transparency and national security in disclosing these errors, Luckey said that Anduril’s customer, the Pentagon, will receive complete information about what went wrong. That’s in line with the Pentagon’s policies on responsible AI adoption, which require that AI-driven systems be “developed with methodologies, data sources, design procedures, and documentation that are transparent to and auditable by their relevant defense personnel.”

However, the policies promise nothing about disclosure to the public, a fact that’s led some progressive think tanks, like the Brennan Center for Justice, to call on federal agencies to modernize public transparency efforts for the age of AI.

“It’s easy to say, Well, shouldn’t you be honest about this failure of your system to detect something?” Luckey says, regarding Anduril’s obligations. “Well, what if the failure was because the Chinese figured out a hole in the system and leveraged that to speed past our defenses of some military base? I’d say there’s not very much public good served in saying, ‘Attention, everyone—there is a way to get past all of the security on every US military base around the world.’ I would say that transparency would be the worst thing you could do.”

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