Dean Kamen

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pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

The four founders weren’t hindered: Personal interviews with Lon Binder, December 30, 2014, and Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, February 2, 2015. As an inventor: Adam Higginbotham, “Dean Kamen’s Mission to Bring Unlimited Clean Water to the Developing World,” Wired, August 13, 2013, www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/08/features/engine-of-progress; Christopher Helman, “Segway Inventor Dean Kamen Thinks His New Stirling Engine Will Get You off the Grid for Under $10K,” Forbes, July 2, 2014, www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2014/07/02/dean-kamen-thinks-his-new-stirling-engine-could-power-the-world; Erico Guizzo, “Dean Kamen’s ‘Luke Arm’ Prosthesis Receives FDA Approval,” IEEE Spectrum, May 13, 2014, http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/dean-kamen-luke-arm-prosthesis-receives-fda-approval. 3: Out on a Limb Out on a Limb: Susan J.

Before it was too late, Dean Kamen would have learned to make it practical or licensed the technology to someone who could. The Segway may have failed, but Kamen is still a brilliant inventor, Jeff Bezos is still a visionary entrepreneur, and John Doerr is still a shrewd investor. Whether you’re generating or evaluating new ideas, the best you can do is measure success on the kind of yardstick that batters use in baseball. As Randy Komisar puts it, “If I’m hitting .300, I’m a genius. That’s because the future cannot be predicted. The sooner you learn it, the sooner you can be good at it.” Dean Kamen has moved on to unveil a series of new inventions, back in the health-care space where he made his original mark.

Their methods question conventional wisdom about the relative importance of intuition and analysis in assessing ideas, and about how we should weigh passion in evaluating the people behind those ideas. You’ll see why it’s so difficult for managers and test audiences to accurately evaluate new ideas, and how we can get better at deciding when to roll the dice. A Random Walk on the Creative Tightrope The inventor of the Segway is a technological whiz named Dean Kamen, whose closet is stocked with one outfit: a denim shirt, jeans, and work boots. When I asked venture capitalists to describe Kamen, the most common response was “Batman.” At sixteen, he took it upon himself to redesign a museum’s lighting system—and only then sought the chairman’s permission to implement it.


pages: 501 words: 114,888

The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

PART 3: THE FASTER FUTURE Chapter Thirteen: Threats and Solutions Water Woes “Special Report on Global Warming”: The intergovernmental panel on climate change, see: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/. Global Risks Report: World Economic Forum, “Global Risks Report 2018: 13th Edition,” January 17, 2018. See: https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-global-risks-report-2018. Dean Kamen: Dean Kamen, author interview, 2018. For more information about Dean Kamen, see his bio on the FIRST Robotics website here: https://www.firstinspires.org/about/leadership/dean-kamen. we recounted the story of Kamen’s “Slingshot”: Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (Free Press, 2012), pp. 88–91. 900 million people lack access to clean drinking water: World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), “Progress on Drinking Water, Sanitation and Hygiene,” 2017.

Solving our planet’s ecological woes requires technology, for certain, but it also demands one of the largest cooperative efforts in history. If we can learn to work together like never before, we like our chances. But in light of these recent reports, sooner rather than later. And this brings us to Dean Kamen. Dean Kamen is a kind of geek superhero, a nerd Batman in a denim work shirt. For starters, he lives in a secret lair—an island fortress complete with hidden rooms, helicopter launchpads, and after peacefully seceding from the United States, its own constitution. His résumé includes over 440 different patents, including insulin pumps, robotic prosthetics, and all-terrain wheelchairs.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Iridium is another example: Details in this paragraph are from John Bloom, Eccentric Orbits: How a Single Man Saved the World’s Largest Satellite Constellation from Fiery Destruction (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2016); market research projections are described on p. 196 and the $6.4 billion investment is cited on p. 209. “If I had asked people”: Patrick Vlaskovits, “Henry Ford, Innovation, and That ‘Faster Horse’ Quote,” Harvard Business Review blog, Aug. 29, 2011. Dean Kamen, the inventor: Details in this paragraph are from Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen’s Quest to Invent a New World (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2003). ADL projections are cited on p. 63; the initial consumer rider test is described on p. 227. the company sold just thirty thousand: Jordan Golson, “Well, That Didn’t Work: The Segway Is a Technological Marvel.

Also, as discussed in Chapter 4, entrepreneurs can supplement smoke testing by getting customer feedback on a “looks like” prototype, as Jibo’s team did when they built a “Wizard of Oz” prototype that could be puppeteered by a hidden human operator to see how consumers would interact with a social robot. Another barrier to gauging customer demand can be an entrepreneur’s paranoia. Some founders insist on staying in stealth mode as long as possible to keep rivals from stealing their ideas. Steve Jobs was famous for insisting on strict secrecy and then introducing new products with a flourish. Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway—the two-wheel, self-balancing (via gyroscope stabilization) “personal transporter” unveiled in late 2001—and the startup’s founder, was worried about Honda or Sony copying his concept; for years, Kamen refused to let his marketing team get direct customer input. Segway did hire Arthur D.

Under the spell of a reality distortion field, potential employees, investors, and strategic partners perceive a reality in which their commitment to the venture can—despite enormous obstacles—help make the founder’s dream come true. Shai Agassi rivaled Jobs in his ability to spin up a reality distortion field. So did Dean Kamen, Segway’s charismatic founder. Like Agassi, Kamen believed he could save the planet, once electric-powered Segways replaced automobiles in cities around the world. And much like Agassi, who predicted that his company would soon overtake GM in market capitalization, Kamen insisted Segway would become the fastest-growing company in the world, because it would “do to the car what the PC did to the mainframe.”


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

We should care more about public and civic value than about personal or communal value because society benefits more from them, but also because public and civic value are harder to create. The amount of public and civic value we get out of our cognitive surplus is an open question, and one strongly affected by the culture of the groups doing the sharing, and by the culture of the larger society that those groups are embedded in. As Dean Kamen, the inventor and entrepreneur, puts it, “In a free culture, you get what you celebrate.” Depending on what we celebrate in one another, we can get a few pieces of public and civic value, like those we see today in Wikipedia and open source software and the Responsible Citizens, or we can celebrate people who create civic value, making it a deep part of the experience of users everywhere.

storyId=100624625 (accessed January 10, 2010). 170 Susan’s campaign flooded Muthali’s office with chaddis: Robert Mackey, “Indian Women Fight Violence with Facebook and Underwear,” New York Times Lede Blog, February 13, 2009, http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/indian-women-use-facebook-for-valentines-protest (accessed January 10, 2010). 171 the state of Mangalore arrested Muthali: “Muthali Arrested to Save V-Day in Karnataka,” Indian Express, February 13, 2009, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/muthalik-arrested-to-save-vday-in-karnataka/423184 (accessed January 9, 2010). 175 You can always get what you want . . .: From Gary Kamiya’s “The Death of the News,” Salon, February 17, 2009, http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2009/02/17/newspapers/index.html (accessed January 10, 2010). 176 In a free culture, you get what you celebrate: Dean Kamen describes this idea in “You Get What You Celebrate,” Xconomy Boston, January 2, 2008, http://www.xconomy.com/boston/2008/01/02/you-get-what-you-celebrate (accessed January 10, 2010). 177 the assumption that “people are basically good”: “Pierre Omidyar on ‘Connecting People,’” BusinessWeek, June 20, 2005, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_25/b3938900.htm (accessed January 10, 2010). 177 This idea, as noble as it is, didn’t quite pan out for eBay: Tobias J.


Smart Cities, Digital Nations by Caspar Herzberg

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, business climate, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, demographic dividend, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Hacker News, high-speed rail, hive mind, Internet of things, knowledge economy, Masdar, megacity, New Urbanism, operational security, packet switching, QR code, remote working, RFID, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart meter, social software, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, telepresence, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, X Prize

It is one thing to propose digital urban infrastructure, another to find a government with the means and intent to build it. For instance, there may be many unforeseen (or obvious) impediments to reducing the cost of the “Slingshot,” a prototype machine that can purify 250 gallons of water per day for a few dollars worth of energy. This is a remarkable breakthrough, which its inventor Dean Kamen believes can be the type of game-changer that could end water-borne diseases that kill two million people a year. But at present, each unit costs $100,000. It will be an uphill climb to achieve the economy of scale necessary to bring a Slingshot to every village in Africa. An innovator and his team have provided the world with a great technological advance, but it remains to be seen if global markets and political calculations will help in the creation of necessary supply chains.2 The “smart villages” of India, which must overcome the severe water shortage in that nation, will depend on exactly this sort of problem-solving.

And it will be constant, as the body’s sensors talk with data analysis engines that serve each patient individually. Surgery and long-term care will be automated more often (although not exclusively). Care for the swelling population of elderly citizens will be managed in great part by machines that can dispense proper doses of medicine, provide locomotion (Dean Kamen has also invented the iBOT, a motorized wheelchair),5 perform surgeries, and, through future generations of telepresence and other communication technology, keep their trusts in regular contact with their families. Human error that leads to deaths will have dropped significantly. Air-quality sensors will help identify bacteria and reduce airborne illnesses.


pages: 102 words: 27,769

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

call centre, Clayton Christensen, Dean Kamen, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, fixed-gear, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Y Combinator

And here’s a list of some of the people we know, and don’t know, who have inspired us in one way or another: Frank Lloyd Wright Seth Godin Warren Buffett Jamie Larson Clayton Christensen Ralph Nader Jim Coudal Benjamin Franklin Ernest Kim Jeff Bezos Scott Heiferman Antoni Gaudi Carlos Segura Larry David Steve Jobs Dean Kamen Bill Maher Thomas Jefferson Mies van der Rohe Ricardo Semler Christopher Alexander James Dyson Kent Beck Thomas Paine Gerald Weinberg Kathy Sierra Julia Child Marc Hedlund Nicholas Karavites Michael Jordan Richard Bird Jeffrey Zeldman Dieter Rams Judith Sheindlin Ron Paul Timothy Ferriss Copyright © 2010 by 37signals, LLC.


pages: 692 words: 127,032

Fool Me Twice: Fighting the Assault on Science in America by Shawn Lawrence Otto

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, commoditize, cosmological constant, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, desegregation, different worldview, disinformation, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, energy security, Exxon Valdez, fudge factor, Garrett Hardin, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, luminiferous ether, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, smart grid, stem cell, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, War on Poverty, white flight, Winter of Discontent, working poor, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

“Every 11 seconds, America moves one person closer, and number three hundred million could come by birth, by oath as a legal immigrant, or by stealth: someone sneaking into history.”31 Even the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper made it look easy: “Nobody knows the precise second at which the US will cross the 300 million mark, though the time given next Tuesday [9:01 and 48 seconds in the morning] is the literal interpretation of US census projections.”32 As inventor Dean Kamen says, “We get what we celebrate. If we celebrate actors and celebrity, we get the balloon boy and stupid people acting out to get on reality shows. If we celebrate sports, we get a bunch of kids wearing jerseys, but how many of them will actually become millionaire sports heroes? What if we celebrate science and engineering with that same adoration?”

Natty Adams, Gillian Adler, Peter Agre, Rick Anthes, Paula Apsell, Derek Araujo, Chuck Atkins, Randy Atkins, Norm Augustine, Jennifer Ayers, David Baltimore, Craig Barrett, Bill Bates, Erik Beeler, Rosina Bierbaum, Larry Bock, Ben Bova, Bob Breck, Douglas Bremner, David Brin, Deborah Byrd, Art Caplan, Arne Carlson, Darlene Cavalier, Bill Chameides, Matthew Chapman, Peg Chemberlin, Steven Chu, Pat Churchland, Ralph Cicerone, Rita Colwell, George Crabtree, Austin Dacey, Ronald DePinho, Keith Devlin, Calvin DeWitt, Ann Druyan, Vern Ehlers, Harold Evans, Dick Feely, Kevin Finneran, Andrew Fire, Ira Flatow, Al Franken, Gwen Freed, Peter Frumhoff, Richard Gallagher, Jim Gentile, Jack Gibbons, Newt Gingrich, Linda Glenn, Wolfgang Goede, Bart Gordon, Kurt Gottfried, Francesca Grifo, David Guston, Jocey Hale, Michael Halpern, Philip Hammer, Bruce Hendry, Sharon Hendry, Kathryn Hinsch, Roald Hoffman, John Holdren, Rush Holt, Doug Holtz-Eakin, Al Hurd, Shirley Ann Jackson, Thomas Campbell Jackson, Mariela Jaskelioff, James Jensen, Eric Jolly, Dean Kamen, Steve Kelley, Don Kennedy, Alex King, Sheril Kirshenbaum, Barbara Kline Pope, Sara Kloek, Kevin Knobloch, Kei Koizumi, Lawrence Krauss, Paul Kurtz, Eric Lander, Neal Lane, Phoebe Leboy, Leon Lederman, Russ Lefevre, Alan Leshner, Simon Levin, Jane Lubchenco, Michael Mann, Elizabeth Marincola, Thom Mason, John Mather, Bob May, Angie McAllister, Jim McCarthy, Robert McKee, Marcia McNutt, Ann Merchant, Ken Miller, Chris Mooney, Jonathan Moreno, Jan Morrison, Elizabeth Muhlenfeld, P.Z.


pages: 170 words: 51,205

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age by Cory Doctorow, Amanda Palmer, Neil Gaiman

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Brewster Kahle, cloud computing, Dean Kamen, Edward Snowden, game design, general purpose technology, Internet Archive, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, MITM: man-in-the-middle, optical character recognition, plutocrats, pre–internet, profit maximization, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Streisand effect, technological determinism, transfer pricing, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy

Mark and Carla took up other projects after that, and many years later Mark found himself covering the launch of a new service called Blogger for a magazine called the Industry Standard. He still had the boingboing.net domain, and so he “revived” the magazine as a blog, posting a few items a week for a year, for the enjoyment of himself and a few friends. But in early 2001, Mark broke a major story. He dug up the patent drawings for a secret device created by famed inventor Dean Kamen that had been code-named “Ginger.” Everyone was abuzz about what Ginger might be. (It turned out to be the Segway scooter, which pretty much failed to revolutionize the world the way its investors had claimed it world.) CNN featured Boing Boing’s home page on the air, and Mark’s readership shot up exponentially overnight.


pages: 204 words: 54,395

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, behavioural economics, call centre, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, deliberate practice, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional fixedness, game design, George Akerlof, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, performance metric, profit maximization, profit motive, Results Only Work Environment, scientific management, side project, TED Talk, the built environment, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, zero-sum game

And if your starting assumption is that workers' default setting is to shirk, monitoring their time can keep them on their toes. But the billable hour has little place in Motivation 3.0. For nonroutine tasks, including law, the link between how much time somebody spends and what that somebody produces is irregular and unpredictable. Imagine requiring inventor Dean Kamen or actress Helen Mirren to bill for their time. If we begin from an alternative, and more accurate, presumption that people want to do good work then we ought to let them focus on the work itself rather than the time it takes them to do it. Already, a few law firms are moving in this new, more Type I direction charging a flat rate rather than a time-based fee with the presiding partner of one of New York's leading law firms recently declaring, This is the time to get rid of the billable hour.


pages: 209 words: 54,638

Team Geek by Brian W. Fitzpatrick, Ben Collins-Sussman

anti-pattern, barriers to entry, cognitive dissonance, Dean Kamen, do what you love, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fear of failure, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Ken Thompson, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, publish or perish, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, value engineering, web application

” — Vint Cerf “I’ve been working with engineers for over 30 years, and in that time I’ve learned that engineering is as much about people as it is science and technology, but most engineers put little or no effort into understanding how to work with others. If you want to be more effective and efficient at creating and innovating, then this book is for you.” — Dean Kamen “Ben and Fitz have assembled an amazing collection of patterns and anti-patterns for software development teams to consider. This book is for anyone struggling with understanding how to make such a team more productive—for the code wranglers themselves, for their managers, and for everyone in orbit around them.


pages: 558 words: 164,627

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

The hand was preprogrammed, like a player piano.” In some regards, Revolutionizing Prosthetics did more for DARPA’s image than it did for warfighters who had lost limbs in war. Major news organizations wrote stories about the DEKA arm, hailing it as revolutionary, spectacular, and astounding. In 2009, Dean Kamen, DEKA’s founder, recalled on 60 Minutes what it was like when DARPA officials came to him proposing to build a robotic arm. “They said, ‘We want these kids to have something put back on them that will essentially allow one of these kids to pick up a raisin or a grape off the table, know the difference without looking at it.’”

Armed Forces, 2000–2012,” Medical Surveillance Monthly Report 20, no. 7 (July 2013): 4–11. 7 SUBNETS: “SUBNETS Aims for Systems-Based Neurotechnology and Understanding for the Treatment of Neuropsychological Illnesses,” Department of Defense, press release, October 25, 2013. 8 chips wirelessly transmit: George Dvorsky, “Electroconvulsive Therapy Can Erase Unwanted Memories,” iO9, December 23, 2013. 9 “incorporate near real-time”: “SUBNETS,” DARPA News, October 25, 2013. 10 “notes on a piano”: Emily Singer, “Playing Piano with a Robotic Hand,” MIT Technology Review, July 25, 2007. 11 “The Intrinsic hand”: Jonathan Kuniholm, “Open Arms,” IEEE Spectrum, March 1, 2009. 12 Dean Kamen: Kamen interview with Scott Pelley, CBS News, 60 Minutes, April 10, 2009. 13 yet to find a partner: Rhodi Lee, “FDA Approves DEKA Arm System,” Tech Times, May 10, 2014. 14 “debt we owe”: “From Idea to Market in Eight Years: DARPA-Funded DEKA Arm System Earns FDA Approval,” DARPA News, May 9, 2014. 15 “turn a valve”: Interview with Noel Sharkey, September 2014. 16 Even the cooks: Interview with LANL cooks, March 2014. 17 Kenyon and his team: Kenyon’s DARPA contract is administered through the University of Michigan as part of the New Mexico Consortium (NMC).


Emotional design: why we love (or hate) everyday things by Donald A. Norman

A Pattern Language, crew resource management, Dean Kamen, industrial robot, job automation, language acquisition, Neal Stephenson, Rodney Brooks, Vernor Vinge, Yogi Berra

An excellent review of these issues—and the source for this paragraph—is Krumhansl, 2002, especially note p. 46. 117 "All cultures have evolved musical scales." This section draws heavily from Krumhansl (2002) and Meyer (1956, p. 67). 120 "The designers of the Segway." Descriptive material for the "Segway Human Transporter." Amazon.com site. December 2002. Also, personal conversation with Dean Kamen, the inventor of Segway, February 25, 2003. 123 "the passions aroused in film" (Boorstin, 1990, p. 110) 124 "The vicarious eye puts our heart in the actor's body" (Boorstin, 1990, p. 110) 125 "the social scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi" (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) 126 "The word'voyeur'" (Boorstin, 1990, p. 12) 126 "The voyeur's eye demands."


The Jobs to Be Done Playbook: Align Your Markets, Organization, and Strategy Around Customer Needs by Jim Kalbach

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Build a better mousetrap, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, data science, Dean Kamen, fail fast, Google Glasses, job automation, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, market design, minimum viable product, prediction markets, Quicken Loans, Salesforce, shareholder value, Skype, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Zipcar

CHAPTER 6 Delivering Value IN THIS CHAPTER, YOU WILL LEARN ABOUT THESE PLAYS: • How to create a customer journey map • How to make customers successful during onboarding • How to reduce churn • How to provide better customer support On December 3, 2001, the Segway was unveiled on the ABC News morning program Good Morning America. The first of the self-propelled transporters was delivered in early 2002. The hype leading up to the launch of the Segway was immense. For instance, Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, expected to be selling 10,000 units a week by the end of 2002—that’s half a million a year. Venture capitalist John Doerr also predicted it would reach $1 billion in sales faster than any company in history, and that the Segway could be bigger than the internet. Even Steve Jobs commented that the Segway would be as big a deal as the PC.


pages: 294 words: 80,084

Tomorrowland: Our Journey From Science Fiction to Science Fact by Steven Kotler

adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alexander Shulgin, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, Dennis Tito, epigenetics, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Helicobacter pylori, interchangeable parts, Kevin Kelly, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, North Sea oil, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, theory of mind, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

He saluted as he crossed the finish line, placing in the bottom third of the field but still ahead of dozens of able-bodied competitors. “It’s pretty strange to see guys with two legs looking at me with jealousy,” says Rozelle, “but that’s what happened.” Meanwhile, with all the wounded soldiers returning from battle, the military continued to fund bionic research. In 2006, DARPA contracted inventor Dean Kamen, who specializes in revolutionary medical devices, to develop a new kind of arm. As Kamen put it, “DARPA wanted me to build an arm-hand combo that could pick up a grape without breaking it, which requires very fine haptic sensing; lift a raisin without dropping it, which requires fine motor control and wrist, elbow, and shoulder flexibility; be entirely self-contained, including the power supply; weigh less than nine pounds; and fit on a 50th-percentile female frame, 32 inches from the long finger to the shoulder.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The following shows how four major brands are launching initiatives that will nudge them towards an MTP: Vodafone: Partnering with the Malala Fund to bring literacy to millions of women in developing countries. Vodafone aims to use mobile technology to lift 5.3 million women out of illiteracy by 2020. Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola has partnered with entrepreneur and inventor Dean Kamen to leverage the Slingshot, Kamen’s water purification device. One unit can provide enough drinking water for three hundred people daily. By 2015, Coca-Cola plans to bring one hundred million liters of water to 45,000 people across twenty countries. Cisco: From 2008 to 2012, Cisco Israel invested $15 million to establish a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem in the Palestinian territory of the West Bank.


pages: 361 words: 86,921

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor by Andy Kessler

airport security, Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Dean Kamen, digital divide, El Camino Real, employer provided health coverage, full employment, George Gilder, global rebalancing, Law of Accelerating Returns, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, Network effects, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration

It’s the flip side that’s most interesting. We’re gonna need lots more nursing homes. Or extra bedrooms in our kids’ homes. Homes on golf courses go on a tear. Cruise ships out of Florida and San Diego see a resurgence. Online bridge replaces poker as the new hot fad. I can see Social Security and Medicare being means tested. Dean Kamen needs to dust off the plans for his Segway personal transportation device and make it senior-friendly. Bland food makes a comeback. The Rolling Stones set up permanently at Caesars in Las Vegas. A pretty scary thought. And me? Do I think I’m going to live forever? Our economy and our technology can and will do spectacular things.


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

—Søren Lund, director, Mindstorms NXT IT WAS LATE APRIL 2010, AND THE GEORGIA DOME WAS rocking. Thousands of LEGO Mindstorms fans had packed the vast arena in downtown Atlanta to witness the world finals of the FIRST LEGO League robotics competition, a kind of Junior Olympics for math and science athletes from every part of the planet. Pioneered by Segway inventor Dean Kamen and his nonprofit organization, FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), the three-day tourney featured a rollicking series of showdowns between eighty-one teams with a total of eight hundred Mindstorms wizards ages nine to sixteen, and hundreds of adult volunteers supporting them.


pages: 304 words: 88,773

The Ghost Map: A Street, an Epidemic and the Hidden Power of Urban Networks. by Steven Johnson

call centre, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Dean Kamen, digital map, double helix, edge city, Ford Model T, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, Google Earth, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, John Nash: game theory, John Snow's cholera map, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, pattern recognition, peak oil, side project, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the scientific method, trade route, unbiased observer, working poor

They’ll be dealing with 20 million people, instead of 2 million, but the scientific and technological wisdom available to them far exceeds what Farr and Chadwick and Bazalgette had at their disposal. Some of the most ingenious solutions now being proposed take us back to the waste-recycling visions that captivated so many Victorian minds. The inventor Dean Kamen has developed two affiliated machines—each the size of a dishwasher—that together can provide electricity and clean water to rural villages or shantytown communities that lack both. The power generator runs off a readily available fuel—cow dung—though Kamen says it will run off “anything that burns.”


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

—BILL GATES "If you have ever wondered about the nature and impact of the next profound discontinuities that will fundamentally change the way we live, work, and perceive our world, read this book. Kurzweil's Singularity is a tour de force, imagining the unimaginable and eloquently exploring the coming disruptive events that will alter our fundamental perspectives as significantly as did electricity and the computer." —DEAN KAMEN, physicist and inventor of the first wearable insulin pump, the HomeChoice portable dialysis machine, the IBOT Mobility System, and the Segway Human Transporter; recipient of the National Medal of Technology "One of our leading AI practitioners, Ray Kurzweil, has once again created a 'must read' book for anyone interested in the future of science, the social impact of technology, and indeed the future of our species.

My peer expert readers who provided the invaluable service of carefully reviewing the scientific content: Robert A. Freitas Jr. (nanotechnology, cosmology), Ralph Merkle (nanotechnology), Martine Rothblatt (biotechnology, technology acceleration), Terry Grossman (health, medicine, biotechnology), Tomaso Poggio (brain science and brain reverse-engineering), John Parmentola (physics, military technology), Dean Kamen (technology development), Neil Gershenfeld (computational technology, physics, quantum mechanics), Joel Gershenfeld (systems engineering), Hans Moravec (artificial intelligence, robotics), Max More (technology acceleration, philosophy), Jean-Jacques E. Slotine (brain and cognitive science), Sherry Turkle (social impact of technology), Seth Shostak (SETI, cosmology, astronomy), Damien Broderick (technology acceleration, the Singularity), and Harry George (technology entrepreneurship ).


pages: 372 words: 101,174

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, anesthesia awareness, anthropic principle, brain emulation, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, double helix, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, George Gilder, Google Earth, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jacquard loom, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, linear programming, Loebner Prize, mandelbrot fractal, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, speech recognition, Steven Pinker, strong AI, the scientific method, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I’d like to express my gratitude to my wife, Sonya, for her loving patience through the vicissitudes of the creative process; To my children, Ethan and Amy; my daughter-in-law, Rebecca; my sister, Enid; and my new grandson, Leo, for their love and inspiration; To my mother, Hannah, for supporting my early ideas and inventions, which gave me the freedom to experiment at a young age, and for keeping my father alive during his long illness; To my longtime editor at Viking, Rick Kot, for his leadership, steady and insightful guidance, and expert editing; To Loretta Barrett, my literary agent for twenty years, for her astute and enthusiastic guidance; To Aaron Kleiner, my long-term business partner, for his devoted collaboration for the past forty years; To Amara Angelica for her devoted and exceptional research support; To Sarah Black for her outstanding research insights and ideas; To Laksman Frank for his excellent illustrations; To Sarah Reed for her enthusiastic organizational support; To Nanda Barker-Hook for her expert organization of my public events on this and other topics; To Amy Kurzweil for her guidance on the craft of writing; To Cindy Mason for her research support and ideas on AI and the mind-body connection; To Dileep George for his discerning ideas and insightful discussions by e-mail and otherwise; To Martine Rothblatt for her dedication to all of the technologies I discuss in the book and for our collaborations in developing technologies in these areas; To the KurzweilAI.net team, who provided significant research and logistical support for this project, including Aaron Kleiner, Amara Angelica, Bob Beal, Casey Beal, Celia Black-Brooks, Cindy Mason, Denise Scutellaro, Joan Walsh, Giulio Prisco, Ken Linde, Laksman Frank, Maria Ellis, Nanda Barker-Hook, Sandi Dube, Sarah Black, Sarah Brangan, and Sarah Reed; To the dedicated team at Viking Penguin for all of their thoughtful expertise, including Clare Ferraro (president), Carolyn Coleburn (director of publicity), Yen Cheong and Langan Kingsley (publicists), Nancy Sheppard (director of marketing), Bruce Giffords (production editor), Kyle Davis (editorial assistant), Fabiana Van Arsdell (production director), Roland Ottewell (copy editor), Daniel Lagin (designer), and Julia Thomas (jacket designer); To my colleagues at Singularity University for their ideas, enthusiasm, and entrepreneurial energy; To my colleagues who have provided inspired ideas reflected in this volume, including Barry Ptolemy, Ben Goertzel, David Dalrymple, Dileep George, Felicia Ptolemy, Francis Ganong, George Gilder, Larry Janowitch, Laura Deming, Lloyd Watts, Martine Rothblatt, Marvin Minsky, Mickey Singer, Peter Diamandis, Raj Reddy, Terry Grossman, Tomaso Poggio, and Vlad Sejnoha; To my peer expert readers, including Ben Goertzel, David Gamez, Dean Kamen, Dileep George, Douglas Katz, Harry George, Lloyd Watts, Martine Rothblatt, Marvin Minsky, Paul Linsay, Rafael Reif, Raj Reddy, Randal Koene, Dr. Stephen Wolfram, and Tomaso Poggio; To my in-house and lay readers whose names appear above; And, finally, to all of the creative thinkers in the world who inspire me every day.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

The secret was all in the dismount. The slightest shearing force on the seat as you pushed off and you’d send your Schwinn careening off-centerline. So when self-driving cars started to show their mettle, I wondered now and again whether bikes would be next. In 2001, after the unveiling of Ginger, Dean Kamen’s infamous Segway self-balancing scooter, I hoped that our imaginary ghost cycles might become a reality. But I didn’t dare tell anyone about my little daydream. I wasn’t the only one to imagine such things. But it would take a few more years to strip down the self-driving car’s ambitions to cycles.


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

Mills, CEO, Digital Power Group, ‘The Cloud Begins with Coal – Big Data, Big Networks, Big Infrastructure, and Big Power, An Overview of the Electricity used by the Global Digital Ecosystem’, August 2013. CHAPTER XIV All Change 311 ‘you have a product so revolutionary’, Steve Kemper, Code Name Ginger: The Story Behind Segway and Dean Kamen’s Quest to Invent a New World, 2003. See: http://www.stevekemper.net/disc.htm. 312 For UK commuting statistics 2011, see: http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_227904.pdf. 314 ‘who think that if we just don’t build any roads’, Alan Pisarski, ‘Forcing Drivers Off the Road Won’t Solve Virginia’s Traffic Woes’, The Virginia News Letter, vol. 76, no. 1, January/February 2000. 314 For US commuter statistics, see ‘Commuting in America III: The Third National Report on Commuting Patterns and Trends’, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, 2006; and Alan E.


pages: 441 words: 113,244

Seasteading: How Floating Nations Will Restore the Environment, Enrich the Poor, Cure the Sick, and Liberate Humanity From Politicians by Joe Quirk, Patri Friedman

3D printing, access to a mobile phone, addicted to oil, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Celtic Tiger, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Dean Kamen, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, export processing zone, failed state, financial intermediation, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open borders, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, price stability, profit motive, radical decentralization, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, stem cell, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, young professional

“It is estimated that 5.3 billion people, two-thirds of the world’s population, will suffer from water shortages by 2025.” See also “What Makes Clean Water So Important?,” accessed March 21, 2016, http://blueplanetnetwork.org/water. The twenty-five poorest countries spend 20 percent of their GDP on water: Dean Kamen, quoted in Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think (New York: Free Press, 2012), 86. Also in Forbes: www.forbes.com/sites/briancaulfield/2012/01/26/abundance-why-the-future-will-be-much-better-than-you-think. More than a billion people do not have access to safe drinking water, and Six thousand children die every day for lack of clean water to drink, and African and Asian women walk an average of six kilometers each day to provide water: accessed March 21, 2016, http://econopure.com/drinking-water. 120 gallons of water to produce one egg: accessed www.amwater.com/learning-center/water-101/what-is-water-used-for.html.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

So we made appointments in Cambridge, New York, London, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Washington, DC, and other places, and set out. In addition to the interviewees who are quoted in this book, many others taught us a lot: Daron Acemoglu Susan Athey David Autor Jeff Bezos Nick Bloom Christian Catalini Michael Chui Paul Daugherty Tom Davenport Tom Friedman Demis Hassabis Reid Hoffman Jeremy Howard Dean Kamen Andy Karsner Christine Lagarde Yann LeCun Shane Legg John Leonard David Lipton Tom Malone James Manyika Kristina McElheren Tom Mitchell Elon Musk Ramez Naam Tim O’Reilly Gill Pratt Francesa Rossi Daniela Rus Stuart Russell Eric Schmidt Mustafa Suleyman Max Tegmark Sebastian Thrun But you can put off writing for only so long.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

However, at the Page party, the Yaskawa robot had no apparent difficulty finding the party favor boxes, each of which contained a commemorative T-shirt. Ironically, humans had packed each of those boxes, because the robot was not yet able to handle loose shirts. The Industrial Perception arm wasn’t the only intelligent machine at the party. A telepresence robot was out on the dance floor, swaying to the music. It was midnight in Woodside, but Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway, was controlling the robot from New Hampshire—where it was now three A.M. This robot, dubbed a “Beam,” was from Suitable Technologies, another small start-up just a couple of blocks away from Industrial Perception. Both companies were spin-offs from Willow Garage, a robotics laboratory funded by Scott Hassan, a Stanford graduate school classmate and friend of Page’s.


pages: 525 words: 116,295

The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives by Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen

access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Andy Rubin, anti-communist, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, borderless world, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, false flag, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, hive mind, income inequality, information security, information trail, invention of the printing press, job automation, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, market fundamentalism, Mary Meeker, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, power law, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Robert Bork, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Susan Wojcicki, The Wisdom of Crowds, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, young professional, zero day

Our gratitude to all our friends and colleagues whose ideas and thoughts we’ve benefited from: Elliott Abrams, Ruzwana Bashir, Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Chris Brose, Jordan Brown, James Bryer, Mike Cline, Steve Coll, Peter Diamandis, Larry Diamond, Jack Dorsey, Mohamed El-Erian, James Fallows, Summer Felix, Richard Fontaine, Dov Fox, Tom Freston, Malcolm Gladwell, James Glassman, Jack Goldsmith, David Gordon, Sheena Greitens, Craig Hatkoff, Michael Hayden, Chris Hughes, Walter Isaacson, Dean Kamen, David Kennedy, Erik Kerr, Parag Khanna, Joseph Konzelmann, Stephen Krasner, Ray Kurzweil, Eric Lander, Jason Liebman, Claudia Mendoza, Evgeny Morozov, Dambisa Moyo, Elon Musk, Meghan O’Sullivan, Farah Pandith, Barry Pavel, Steven Pinker, Joe Polish, Alex Pollen, Jason Rakowski, Lisa Randall, Condoleezza Rice, Jane Rosenthal, Nouriel Roubini, Kori Schake, Vance Serchuk, Michael Spence, Stephen Stedman, Dan Twining, Decker Walker, Matthew Waxman, Tim Wu, Jillian York, Juan Zarate, Jonathan Zittrain and Ethan Zuckerman.


pages: 624 words: 127,987

The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume by Josh Kaufman

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, Black Swan, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, business process, buy low sell high, capital asset pricing model, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, discounted cash flows, Donald Knuth, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Santayana, Gödel, Escher, Bach, high net worth, hindsight bias, index card, inventory management, iterative process, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loose coupling, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Network effects, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, place-making, premature optimization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, scientific management, side project, statistical model, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, systems thinking, telemarketer, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra

SHARE THIS CONCEPT: http://book.personalmba.com/economically-valuable-skills/ The Iron Law of the Market Market matters most; neither a stellar team nor fantastic product will redeem a bad market. Markets that don’t exist don’t care how smart you are. —MARC ANDREESSEN, VENTURE CAPITALIST AND FOUNDER OF NETSCAPE AND NING.COM What if you throw a party and nobody shows up? In business, it happens all the time. Dean Kamen, a renowned and prolific inventor whose creations include the Sterling engine, the world’s first insulin pump, and water purification devices, poured over $100 million into the development of the Segway PT, a $5,000, two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter that he claimed would revolutionize personal transportation “in the same way that the car replaced the horse and buggy.”


pages: 607 words: 133,452

Against Intellectual Monopoly by Michele Boldrin, David K. Levine

accounting loophole / creative accounting, agricultural Revolution, barriers to entry, business cycle, classic study, cognitive bias, cotton gin, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, experimental economics, financial innovation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, independent contractor, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jean Tirole, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, linear programming, market bubble, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, new economy, open economy, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pirate software, placebo effect, price discrimination, profit maximization, rent-seeking, Richard Stallman, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, the market place, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Y2K

They are captured by the observation first made by Jack Hirshleifer, that the innovator, by virtue of inside information, may be able to earn vastly more than the social value of the innovation.11 To understand Hirshleifer’s argument, consider the recent innovation of the Ginger scooter, now relabeled the Segway, which was said to revolutionize urban transportation, and grant that this unlikely prediction was actually true. How could the inventor, Dean Kamen, profit from this knowledge? There was a point in the development of the scooter at which Mr. Kamen was the only one to know that urban transportation is soon to be revolutionized, and that the automobile itself is soon to be obsolete. Rather than surround himself with patents, and hawk his knowledge to venture capitalists, as he did, he could simply have sold short automobile stock using whatever funds he had available to him and leveraged to the maximum extent possible.


pages: 790 words: 150,875

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

* Angostura bitters were in fact invented by a German in Bolívar’s service, by the name of Dr Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Siegert, who first produced the alcoholic concentrate from a still-secret recipe in 1824. A Pisco Sour without a few drops of Siegert’s concoction is not worthy of the name. * Every stage of the process – cutting, carting, milling, boiling and drying – was physically demanding, and there could be no delay between them. * Dean Kamen’s simple but effective water-purifier could quite easily be distributed through the soft-drink company Coca-Cola’s unrivalled network of production facilities and sales outlets, which extends throughout the developing world. Considering the staggering number of lives lost each year to contaminated drinking water, this would surely lay to rest for ever the pejorative term ‘coca-colonization’


pages: 836 words: 158,284

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss

23andMe, airport security, Albert Einstein, Black Swan, Buckminster Fuller, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, confounding variable, correlation does not imply causation, Dean Kamen, game design, Gary Taubes, Gregor Mendel, index card, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, language acquisition, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, messenger bag, microbiome, microdosing, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Buchheit, placebo effect, Productivity paradox, publish or perish, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, William of Occam

Advanced ICE AGE Mastering Temperature to Manipulate Weight Don’t tell me it’s impossible, tell me you can’t do it. Tell me it’s never been done … the only things we really know are Maxwell’s equations, the three laws of Newton, the two postulates of relativity, and the periodic table. That’s all we know that’s true. All the rest are man’s laws. —Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway and recipient of the National Medal of Technology and Lemelson-MIT Prize “Michael Phelps eats 12,000 calories a day …” That was all Ray Cronise heard from across the room. He jerked his eyes up from the spreadsheet and reached for the TiVo to pause the television. Twelve thousand calories.


pages: 700 words: 160,604

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anne Wojcicki, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bernie Sanders, Colonization of Mars, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discovery of DNA, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Edward Jenner, Gregor Mendel, Hacker News, Henri Poincaré, iterative process, Joan Didion, linear model of innovation, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, Nick Bostrom, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, wikimedia commons

Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. NOTES Introduction: Into the Breach 1. Author’s interview with Jennifer Doudna. The competition was run by First Robotics, a nationwide program created by the irrepressible Segway inventor Dean Kamen. 2. Interviews, audio and video recordings, notes, and slides provided by Jennifer Doudna, Megan Hochstrasser, and Fyodor Urnov; Walter Isaacson, “Ivory Power,” Air Mail, Apr. 11, 2020. 3. See chapter 12 on the yogurt makers for a fuller discussion of the iterative process that can occur between basic researchers and technological innovation.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

Both Brin and Page were certainly smart enough and sufficiently self-aware to understand the disrupting impact of unconventional behavior, but it’s as if somewhere along the line—Montessori?—they made independent decisions to act on impulse—even if the results sometimes were, as Mayer says, “mildly socially mortifying.” Larry—do you realize you just questioned the physical constant to [famed inventor] Dean Kamen? Are you sure you’re right about that? Sergey—you just asked Colin Powell whether he made the right moves in Desert Storm. Seriously, you’re talking to Colin Powell! Then there was the time in St. James’s Palace, when they were having dinner with the queen’s husband, Prince Philip. The pomp was intense, a multicourse formal menu.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Though relatively uncommon today, bionic prosthetics will grow tremendously in the coming years, particularly spurred on by the unfortunate needs of thousands of young soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan who have been gravely injured in war. In response, the Pentagon and DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, have launched the Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, a $100 million investment with over three hundred scientists to completely transform the world of bionics. One such triumph has been the inventor Dean Kamen’s Luke Arm/DEKA prosthesis, whose name was inspired by Luke Skywalker’s robotic arm in Star Wars. The device is controlled by electrical signals from electrodes connected to the wearer’s muscles and is so precise its fingers can pick up a quarter lying flat on a table. Other efforts are under way as well, including MIT’s Human Bionic Project, which catalogs a “repository of every FDA-approved replacement part for amputees, to make it easier for them to find the best ways to rebuild their bodies.”


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

Already an Israeli company called Water-Gen is manufacturing a machine that extracts clean water out of air, and it uses only two cents’ worth of electricity to produce each liter of water. And in remote villages that have no electricity, there’s a new kind of water tower that uses only its shape and natural materials to pull moisture out of the air and turn it into drinking water. The amazing inventor Dean Kamen (best known for the Segway scooter) has partnered with Coca-Cola to bring the world an energy-efficient machine the size of a dorm-room refrigerator that vaporizes dirty water and makes it clean and safe. It’s called the Slingshot—as in a David-sized solution to a Goliath of a problem. With innovations such as these, before long the problem of water scarcity will be solved, period.