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Japan, India to pool resources for joint lunar mission
 India and Japan took their deepening natural partnership into outer space when the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) divulged that they may jointly carry out a sample-return mission to the moon.

There is a sound rationale for this even though the two countries have independent plans to go to the moon: ISRO’s Chandrayaan-2 orbiter-lander-rover mission is proposed for launch in 2018 and JAXA’s Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission in 2019. They have had success in the past, too: since 2007-08, JAXA’s Selene orbiter and ISRO’s first orbiter-impactor, Chandrayaan-1, have found water on the moon, discovered lunar volcanic tubes, which could serve as sites for human habitation (pdf), and mapped the eternally dark Shackleton crater, among others. Their concern is the wide techno-economic gap with Beijing, which is playing an efficient game of catch-up with Washington. This, in turn, is affecting the geo-strategic balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, and, likewise, India’s and Japan’s security outlook.

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Catching up makes comparisons inevitable. While New Delhi and Tokyo took 10 long years to graduate from orbiter to the forthcoming landing-roving demonstrations, Beijing undertook four lunar missions from 2007 to 2014. The last of them, Chang’e 5-T1, went around the moon, practicing a sample-return mission. In 2018-2019, when India and Japan will carry out SLIM and Chandrayaan-2, Beijing will be technologically far ahead with its back-to-back sample-return missions, Chang’e-5 and Chang’e-6, that are likely to bring back a few kilograms of lunar soil and rocks for high-end analyses. These analyses will be vital for Beijing to develop space systems and technologies for safely carrying out human-rated missions in the 2020s. Beijing’s fast-tracked lunar exploration programme has put it on par with the US and Russia, which are also preparing for human-rated moon missions in the 2020s.

A joint moon mission makes sense also because it is thriftier to pool resources when up against the economically stronger countries: China, US, and Russia. Besides, there are many lessons that Japan can offer India, such as its success with public-private collaboration in the space launch and exploration sector: for nearly two decades, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries has been the primary manufacturer and operator of JAXA’s expendable launch system. New Delhi is mulling over privatising the manufacturing, management, and launch operations of its Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle by 2020.

The partnership will also stimulate the development of several crucial technologies, such as the electric ion propulsion (EIP) engines. ISRO recently demonstrated its EIP engines on the South Asia Satellite, a strategic undertaking of prime minister Narendra Modi’s Neighbourhood First Policy. JAXA’s EIP engines have performed intricate and autonomous manoeuvring of the Hayabusa space probe (launched in 2003) that touched the surface of asteroid Itokawa, 300 million miles away from the Earth (pdf).

Crucial for any extraterrestrial sample-return mission is the construction of non-polluting and non-contaminating clean-room infrastructure for the storage of extra-terrestrial samples. JAXA’s Hayabusa series of sample-return missions has resulted in collaborations with companies, like the Hitachi High-Tech Corporation, to develop this. Such infrastructure will also be crucial for space-station based manufacturing, which is an anticipated major industrial sector in the coming decades.

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New Delhi and Tokyo will also have to devise the network for communicating with the proposed spacecraft. India and Japan currently possess one Deep Space Communication Network (DSCN) antenna each: a 32 m antenna in Karnataka and one measuring 64 m in Nagano, Japan. All their outer space missions have been dependent so far on the US DSCN global triad—three radio antennae, located roughly 120 degrees from each other across the globe—based in California, Spain, and Australia. China, Russia, and Europe possess an independent DSCN global triad, which they regarded a national priority. Considering the numerous outer space missions, planned by American public agencies and their thriving private space sector, it is likely that the US DSCN will have too many domestic liabilities to be available for international customers. Therefore, Tokyo and New Delhi should use their partnership to build a DSCN infrastructure each—the state-of-the-art 70 m antenna—on each other’s land parcels. They should together pitch for a property in the Western Hemisphere, akin to what the Chinese acquired in Patagonia, Argentina.

Lunar exploration technologies that seemed fantasies in the past are now becoming imminent possibilities. The rush to acquire them is resulting in a space race in Asia that is additionally yielding scientific research and techno-economic growth. It is, therefore, important that the new India-Japan outer-space partnership use the lunar mission as an opportunity to fill the gaps, techno-economic and otherwise.

This article was exclusively written for Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations. We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

Output: India and Japan are looking to team up for an unmanned mission to gather samples from the moon surface in a bid to overtake China in the Asian space race. The fast-tracked Chinese lunar exploration programme has put the country on par with the US and Russia. A joint moon mission between the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) would allow the pair to pool resources when up against their economically stronger rivals and also stimulate development of technologies such as electric ion propulsion engines.


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NVIDIA to apply its AI to medical image processing
 NVIDIA's AI will help GE speed up medical image processing Deep learning tech is doing some of its best work in hospitals.

Deep learning tech is making itself at home in hospitals by helping radiologists examine medical scans for just a buck per image. Now, GE Healthcare is bringing that AI tech directly to the scanners, thanks to partnerships with NVIDIA and Intel. It announced that it will update 500,000 of its medical devices around the world with NVIDIA AI tech, most notably its Revolution Frontier CT scanner (below). The tech "is expected to deliver better clinical outcomes in liver lesion detection and kidney lesion characterization because of its speed," GE wrote in a press release.

The tech will also be used in GE's advanced ultrasound imaging devices to provide visualization and quantification of data. "NVIDIA's GPUs accelerate reconstruction and visualization of blood flow and improve 2D and 4D imaging for ... interventional deployments," the company said.

Clinical diagnosis has dramatically improved thanks to improved imaging via incredibly advanced MRI, CT and other machines, but there's a downside to that tech. It generates up to 50,000 terabytes of data, per hospital, but only three percent of that is analyzed or even tagged, says GE.

Using AI would not just help patients, but also make the data available for further analysis so the algorithms can be refined even more. As such, GE is also developing a new analytics platform and placing some of the data in NVIDIA's GPU Cloud. It has also teamed with Intel on its Xeon Scalable platform to get images to radiologists more quickly.

AI can produce impressive results, but it often takes months or even years of training to get there. For instance, Zebra-Med was only able to unveil its $1 per scan service after training its system on millions of images, in cooperation with hospitals in the UK and US. Companies like GE, NVIDIA and Intel have an even larger reach, and can potentially give researchers a more impressive amount of data to work with. So, for now, Elon Musk's fears aside, AI has a better chancing of healing us than hurting us.

Output: GE Healthcare has partnered with Intel and Nvidia to update 500,000 of its medical scanning devices with artificial intelligence (AI) technology, according to a company statement. Among the machines being improved is the Revolution Frontier CT scanner, which detects liver lesion and kidney lesion characterisation. AI will also be integrated into GE Healthcare's ultrasound devices, offering improved 2D and 4D imaging. The medical company is also set to develop an analytics platform to archive some of the 50,000 TB of data generated by the machines in Nvidia's GPU Cloud.


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Gut-monitoring wearable seen aiding post-op recovery, weight loss
 Consumer health devices are giving all of us new insights into our bodies, from the quality of our sleep to the number of steps we take each day.

But thus far, the stomach remains elusive.

Doctors at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles are testing out a new wearable called "AbStats," that can read the stomach in a similar manner to how a Fitbit tracks steps. The device was invented by Brennan Spiegel, director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai.

The device, which sits neatly on the stomach, uses sensors to record how our gut sounds when it's digesting food or at rest. The algorithm is trained to hear relevant sounds from the gut like cracks and rumbles.

Output: Wearable gut-monitoring technology being developed to aid surgical recovery may also support in weight loss programmes. The AbStats device, being tested by scientists at the Los Angeles Cedar-Sinai Hospital, uses sensors to record and assess patients' gut sounds, both while digesting food and at rest. It's being tested on post-op patients to determine whether they are ready to eat. They are also examining whether AbStats could be used to help patients lose a few pounds, as it is thought weight gain could be caused by eating meals before fully digesting an earlier one.


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Nvidia, Nuance partner to help healthcare institutions use AI
 Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More

Nvidia and Nuance announced a partnership today that’s aimed at helping health care institutions tap into artificial intelligence. The Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging is, as the name suggests, designed as a hub where medical professionals can pick up new tools for analyzing the results of X-ray imaging and other radiology tools.

AI developers will be able to release the models they’ve trained through Nuance’s PowerShare network, which will then allow participating medical institutions and radiology groups to subscribe. After they’ve subscribed, Nuance’s PowerScribe software will automatically apply the AI algorithm in relevant situations.

Nvidia’s Digits developer tool will be updated to provide developers with a way to publish their algorithms directly to Nuance PowerShare, so it’s easier for people to get their applications into the marketplace.

The deal is designed to help medical institutions benefit from the rise of machine learning by offering access to trained models. What’s more, the institutions developing these models can benefit from sharing them with other radiologists to drive the overall field forward.

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Medical imaging is a tough field to tackle with machine learning since it encompasses multiple sections of the body and uses different machines that output different results. (A static X-ray film is quite different from a video of an ultrasound, for example.) On top of that, radiologists are often looking for different objects on the resulting images or videos.

With that in mind, Kimberly Powell, vice president for health care at Nvidia, said she expects multiple algorithms working in concert will be necessary to provide even a single diagnosis through a single test. The marketplace is supposed to support that vision by making it easier for medical professionals to orchestrate the use of multiple systems.

The news comes alongside another partnership between Nvidia and GE Healthcare to use the chip maker’s hardware to help power improved hardware for CT scans and ultrasounds, as well as an analytics platform.

Output: Massachusetts computer software firm Nuance has partnered with US chip manufacturer Nvidia to launch a tool aimed at bringing artificial intelligence (AI) to the field of medical imaging. The Nuance AI Marketplace for Diagnostic Imaging offers a platform for developers to release shareable AI models which help analyse X-ray images and other radiology systems. Kimberly Powell, VP for health care at Nvidia, said she expects to see several algorithms working in concert to provide a single diagnosis due to the complex nature of the field.


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AI harnessed to help overcome doctor shortage in India
 Join top executives in San Francisco on July 11-12, to hear how leaders are integrating and optimizing AI investments for success. Learn More

In a world with limited doctors, emerging diseases and superbugs, and sharply rising costs, how can we successfully tackle health care problems at scale? This is just one of the critical challenges India’s explosive startup community hopes to solve by implementing AI to serve the needs of the country’s 1,324 billion citizens. The result of this effort will have huge implications for the U.S. and other health care ecosystems around the globe.

To understand how dire the situation is, it’s worth considering India’s health paradox. The country’s deep demographic dividend — which occurs when the majority of a country’s population consists of working-age individuals — is driving rapid and unprecedented growth, but it is also a ticking time bomb. With an average age of 27, India has one of the youngest and most educated populations in the world. Since 1991, this phenomenon has fueled approximately 7 percent annual growth, produced new goods and services, and reduced dependents in the economy.

But in order to continue reaping the benefits of this dividend, India’s young population needs to have access to quality nutrition and health care. In addition, when the dividend declines (as we are witnessing in China), the country will need to have new infrastructure in place to care for its aging population. Unfortunately, the necessary infrastructure doesn’t exist today.

The doctor-to-patient ratio in India is one of the worst in the world, with just 0.2 doctors for every 1,000 Indians (by comparison, there are 1.1 doctors for every 1,000 Americans in the U.S.). Modern medical facilities — and as a result, doctors — are heavily concentrated in urban areas.

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India’s health care issues are primarily a problem of resource scarcity. The country needs more medical facilities and more medical expertise, and both of these require time and billions of dollars to develop. Such resources are not easily obtainable, so we must consider other ways to dramatically increase access to existing resources in an effective and inexpensive way.

This is where AI has the potential to reshape India’s health care industry. Manu Rekhi, managing director of Inventus, says: “Indian AI platform companies are building upon two decades of India’s IT industry expertise. They are supercharging how software and human intelligence can partner to create new human-in-the-loop AI systems for global markets, as well as the bottom of the pyramid.”

Indeed, a number of Indian startups have implemented deep AI expertise to move the needle on specific health conditions and diseases. Some of these companies offer technology and distribution opportunities that attract Fortune 500 partners for both the India market and globally.

One such company is Tricog Health, a startup handpicked by GE’s health care accelerator program for its cloud-based cardiac diagnosis platform. Coronary heart disease is increasingly prevalent in India, having escalated from causing 26 percent of adult deaths in 2003 to 32 percent in 2013. Tricog increases access to cardiac care across 340 cities in 23 states, including in some of the most remote locations in India. The company’s platform collects physiological data and ECGs from medical devices in the field and then uses specialized AI to process the data in real time and give the cardiologist a diagnosis.The cardiologist then reviews the diagnosis and recommends next steps to the GP or nurse in the field instantaneously using the Tricog mobile app. By using Tricog’s AI engine, a few specialists can diagnose over 20,000 patients.

Another startup, Bengaluru-based Aindra Systems, is using AI to tackle cervical cancer, which is the second most common cancer among Indian women between the ages of 15 and 60. In fact, India represents a whopping one-third of the total global incidences of cervical cancer. Aindra’s solution can detect cervical cancer in its early stages and measurably increase the odds of survival. The company increases the productivity of the pathologists screening cervical cancer samples, who otherwise typically need to manually examine each sample and flag cases with a high cancer probability to an oncologist for further review.

Adarsh Natarajan, founder and CEO of Aindra Systems, says: “Our vision is to implement mass cervical cancer screening using AI, and help the 330 million Indian women in the at-risk age bracket. With early detection, up to 90 percent of deaths can be avoided with appropriate treatment. Aindra’s computational pathology platform includes an affordable and portable point-of-care cervical cancer screening device to automate deep learning analysis and bring down the screening time significantly to help detect cancer at an early stage.”

The AI boom in health care is just starting, and the up-and-coming list of players is endless. Niramai is working on early detection of breast cancer. Ten3T is providing remote health monitoring services via AI to detect anomalies and alert the patient’s doctor. HealthifyMe, a Bangalore startup, is working on lifestyle diseases like obesity, hypertension, and diabetes. With its AI-enabled nutrition coach, Ria, HealthifyMe brings the best of elite nutrition expertise with AI in the loop.

And, of course, global corporate leaders like Google are bringing their AI capabilities to India, as well. Google recently partnered with Aravind Eye Hospitals to use image recognition algorithms to detect early signs of diabetic retinopathy, an eye disease that can cause blindness in diabetics if not treated early. Aravind Eye Hospitals is the largest eye care group in the world, having treated 32 million patients and performed 4 million surgeries. The hospital has provided 128,000 retinal images to Google that have been invaluable for the application of AI to detect diabetic retinopathy in 415 million at-risk diabetic patients worldwide.

With a bevy of AI-fueled solutions in the works, India is poised to leapfrog over some of the key barriers to conventional health care. Of course, this has profound implications for health care delivery in other countries, including the U.S. With rising health care costs and unfavorable government policies, an increasing number of people in the U.S. are being priced out of access. The burden on emergency rooms across the country is increasing as more people are unable to afford preventative care at primary care centers. AI-assisted technologies could reduce health care costs in the U.S. using the same mechanisms being implemented in India to affordably scale access to millions of people.

These startup-driven innovations and global platforms are just the tip of the iceberg. AI can ultimately become a force multiplier in bringing preventative health care to everyone, rather than just those in urban or affluent communities. As you’ll often hear AI experts say, “More data beats better algorithms.” In other words, simpler algorithms only need a larger training dataset to generate accurate, valuable predictions for both payers and providers. With 1.3 billion citizens, India has the potential to provide the vast amounts of data needed to improve the accuracy and precision of these algorithms and empower both startups and large companies to help solve health care problems around the world.

Pranav Deshpande is a product marketer at Twilio in San Francisco and a volunteer with Startup Bridge at Stanford, an annual conference that connects leading technology innovators in the US and India to build new relationships for tomorrow’s moonshots.

Output: Artificial intelligence (AI) could be used to tackle India's doctor shortage. The nation's 1.3 billion population of largely working-age individuals has driven rapid economic growth but could also prove a healthcare time-bomb. The doctor-to-patient ratio is just 0.2 for every 1,000 individuals, compared with 1.1 in the US, and modern clinics tend to be concentrated in cities. AI can help address this by increasing access to existing resources. For example, Aindra Systems uses AI to increase the productivity of early-stage cervical cancer screening, while Tricog Health's mobile app helps increase access to cardiac care in remote locations.


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Coinbase to add more developers for altcoin support
 Coinbase is one of those cryptocurrency companies looking to expand its presence. There have been rumors regarding the possible addition of other cryptocurrencies. So far, no one knows which currencies those will be exactly or when this will happen. It does appear the company is looking to hire a handful of additional engineers. These staffers could work on any digital currency protocol they would like. An interesting turn of events, to say the least.

It is good to see Coinbase acknowledge they need to support additional currencies. Right now, their list is still pretty short. Given the strong demand for exposure to other altcoins, something will need to change sooner or later. Integrating altcoin support will not be easy whatsoever. In fact, the company will need to introduce some big changes to make this happen. Hiring additional engineers would certainly help move things along in this regard.

Coinbase is Serious About Altcoin Support

According to Brian Armstrong, the company would like to have five additional engineer son board. These staffers can work unsupervised and focus on whichever digital currency protocol they like. This opens the door for altcoin integration on the platform. Whether or not anyone will decide to explore this venture, remains to be seen, though. A lot of altcoin developers would like to see their coin on this exchange. However, they need to pass the engineering interview first and foremost. That may be a bit of a challenge for a lot of people.

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/934563254101164033?s=17

All of this shows the company is pretty serious about altcoin support. It would be good to see some of the respected currencies added to their platform. However, one could argue the company’s engineers should focus on this integration themselves. Then again, this new opportunity shouldn’t be ignored whatsoever. Any developer or engineer passionate about altcoins can make a meaningful impact. Whether or not anyone will respond to this “challenge” remains to be determined, though. Right now, that seems somewhat unlikely.

There is a growing demand for more fiat currency gateways associated with prominent altcoins. Right now, some currencies genuinely struggle in this regard. This even includes currencies in the top 10 by market cap. Something will need to change sooner or later to improve upon this situation. Without additional engineers, Coinbase won’t be of much help, that much is evident.

Output: San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase could expand the number of digital currencies it supports and offer a much-needed platform for a wider range of altcoins. CEO Brian Armstrong said in a series of tweets that the company was looking for five engineers to work on any altcoin they chose, if they passed the company's interview stage. The growth in digital currencies has not been matched by the number of fiat currency gateways available.


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3D-printed double-handed glove could lead to 'augmented humans'
 Nov 24, 2017 | By Benedict

Italy’s Youbionic has used 3D printing to create a bionic “Double Hand,” a robotic device worn on the wrist that doubles the wearer’s manual capacities. A fully assembled version of the device costs $2,100.

Ever find yourself with your hands full and wish you had an extra set of fingers? Perhaps you work in the service industry but hate balancing plates on your arms, or perhaps you just like buying multiple drinks at the bar.

Whatever your situation, Italian robotics company Youbionic has developed a weird and wonderful 3D printed solution to your problems: a Double Hand.

Activated by sensors worn on the user’s actual hand, the 3D printed Double Hand effectively doubles one’s manual capacities by replicating natural hand movements across two individual bionic hands.

Of course, these PLA 3D printed hands aren’t quite as dextrous as your own, but you can actually control each bionic hand individually by making finger movements: your index and middle fingers can open and close one bionic hand, while your ring finger and pinky control the other one.

That probably means you can’t do anything much more complex than gripping and lifting sturdy objects, but even that function alone could be useful in many situations.

Youbionic, however, is being highly ambitious, saying the Double Hand is the first step in evolving ourselves from regular humans to “augmented humans,” with the Double Hand able to be used by, for example, astronauts repairing the International Space Station.

It’s worth noting that, although the Double Hand is 3D printed, it isn’t open source. You have to buy the bionic device for $2,100, while the digital files for the wrist support alone cost $58.

Nonetheless, it’s intriguing to see how Youbionic used 3D printing to arrive at their design. Federico Ciccarese, Founder of Youbionic, told 3ders that all Youbionic devices are designed using Rhinoceros and printed in PLA on a Flashforge Creator Pro 3D printer.

It wasn’t a simple case of coming up with a quick design and churning it out on the Flashforge though. Ciccarese says he went through four prototypes, trying to figure out how to make the hand look sufficiently real, before settling on the current model.

Eventually, the Youbionic chief happened upon the ideal shape and position for the fingers, and is now able to create an entire Double Hand in three days: two days for printing, one day for assembly.

He’s even created a left and right version, so users can technically use four hands at once.

But if you thought having four 3D printed hands was impressive, just wait til you hear what Youbionic has in store in the future. According to Ciccarese, we’ll soon be treated to an entire “humanoid,” which will include the current 3D printed hands plus many more augmented body parts.

The Youbionic founder thinks this kind of augmented body technology is the natural accompaniment to augmented vision, i.e. AR and VR technology, with both kinds of augmentation helping humans perform complex tasks to a higher standard.

A final important matter to note concerns the target recipients of this bionic technology. The 3D printed Double Hand is, of course, designed for wearers who have a functioning hand of their own, since real finger movements prompt movements in the 3D printed device.

But Youbionic has also developed a bionic single hand for those who do not have a hand of their own. This will come as a relief to those who believe that bionic research should largely be dedicated to those who can benefit from it the most.

Youbionic’s single hand, which is designed for amputees and other users, uses electrodes to detect muscle signals in the wearer’s arm, converting those signals into artificial hand movements. We wrote about the versatile 3D printed hand last year.

Ciccarese even foresees a future in which users can update their bionic limb in the same way they update their smartphones.

See Youbionic’s work here.

Posted in 3D Printing Application

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Output: Italian robotics company Youbionic has created a 3D-printed "double hand", which uses the movements of a wearer's fingers to manipulate two bionic hands. The $2,100 device takes three days to print and assemble, and comes in left or right-handed versions. Youbionic has also developed a version for amputees, which relies on implanted electrodes to control it. Founder Federico Ciccarese said the augmented body technology is a natural accompaniment to augmented reality technology, and added the firm would be working on other body parts to eventually create a completely augmented "humanoid".


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Clinical trial results expected for neurodegenerative DNA drugs
 What started more than a decade ago as a hunch among a small group of San Diego researchers has grown into real hope for treating currently-incurable neurodegenerative diseases.

Next year, Carlsbad’s Ionis Pharmaceuticals is expected to release clinical trial results for Huntington’s and Lou Gehrig’s diseases that use designer DNA drugs to mute the mutant genes responsible for causing patients’ nervous systems to gradually go haywire.

If early trial results show a reduction in levels of the harmful proteins believed to cause these diseases, then larger trials are likely to follow providing a new path to fight life-stealing conditions that, for all of human history, have remained untouchable by medicine.

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While positive results are far from certain, Ionis already has a serious proof-of-concept in Spinraza, a drug approved late last year that uses a similar but not identical approach to successfully treat a neurological condition that kills one in 1,000 children before they reach their second birthdays.

The big deal here is that Ionis has been able to show success working on the far side of the blood-brain barrier, a protective shield of sorts that automatically filters out most drugs injected into the bloodstream, making targets in the brain and spine extremely difficult to hit.

So, if early-phase results, the first of which are expected in January, show that these DNA drugs — formally called “antisense oligonucleotides” — can reduce harmful proteins in nerve cells, well, that will be a very big deal indeed, especially because Spinraza has already proven that Ionis chemists have found ways to make these drugs last long enough in patients’ systems to create viable long-term treatments.

It’s quite a moment on the horizon, given that, just a decade ago, nobody thought this approach could work.

Well, almost nobody.

Dr. Richard Smith, a local neurologist and director of the Center for Neurologic Study in La Jolla, explained that the difficulty, the point that has drawn the most skepticism form peers, has always been drug delivery. The blood-brain barrier requires these drugs to be injected directly into the cerebrospinal fluid, and most thought such an approach would result in drugs simply floating around doing nothing.

“Everyone thought that, even if you put it directly in the spinal fluid, nerve cells wouldn’t take them up,” Smith said.

But Smith, who did pioneering work in the use of interferon to treat neurologic disease and who spent much of his career treating patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which scientists call amyotrophic lateral sclerosis or ALS, said he had an intuitive feeling that these drugs, these tiny pieces of DNA, might surprise everyone.

He approached high-flying UC San Diego neurobiologist Don Cleveland, a researcher known foundational work mapping the mechanisms of neuron growth and protein production. Smith recalls that first meeting with Cleveland as a bit of a roller coaster ride.

“I think this is pretty much a direct quote. He said it was “the looniest idea he’d ever heard,” Smith said.

There was a pause, and Smith said he figured he’d be accused of wasting Cleveland’s time.

“Then he said with the greatest enthusiasm, ‘let’s do it!” Smith said.

They approached Frank Bennett, now senior vice president of research at Ionis, and pitched the idea. With a doctorate in pharmacology, Bennett knew the challenges involved in getting tiny pieces of DNA to enter nerve cells and was skeptical but still open to Cleveland and Smith’s ideas even though Ionis, previously known as Isis Pharmaceuticals, was not at the time involved with trying to use the technology on neurological diseases.

The key, Bennett said, was that Smith and Cleveland had identified a specific type of “messenger” ribonucleic acid or “m-RNA” that could, theoretically, be blocked by a designer DNA drug.

“I listened to the idea and said, ‘it’s interesting and attractive because we finally have a target we can go after,” Bennett said.

Ionis agreed to make a batch of drug candidates for further research, and when that first batch didn’t pan out, agreed to do a second round of 80 candidates. Smith described this progression with wonder in his voice. To receive so much commitment on such a long shot, he said, is unheard of, especially because most of Ionis’ work at the time was in cancer.

“I mean, they were a cancer company, so for them to make 80 different molecules for us to try, and then another 80 after that, it was just remarkable,” Smith said.

The key to early success in animals that has allowed further work in human patients has been the ability to prove that these drugs do get sucked in by nerve cells and that chemical wizardry performed in Ionis’s huge labs has made the drug stable and durable enough to last long enough to bond with passing mRNA strands.

The efficacy, Cleveland said, has amazed everyone.

“We don’t get two hours of efficacy. We don’t get two to three days. We don’t get two or three weeks. We get three or four months. The drug lasts a really long time,” Cleveland said.

That means that patients could theoretically come in a few times a year, get a shot in the spine, and go home.

“That would be more like going to the dentist. You don’t necessarily look forward to it, but you do it,” Cleveland said.

This approach has recently produced startling results with spinal muscular atrophy, Spinraza’s successful target. Lack of a key protein causes the motor neurons in patients’ spinal cords to whither and die, but, using a specially-designed antisense oligonucleotide, researchers have been able to fix a critical error in messenger RNA, allowing a very similar substitute protein to be produced.

Approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December after its development by Ionis and a team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, the drug has already been delivered to hundreds of children and adults and, in many cases, has dramatically reversed nerve damage.

“Now they have kids who are walking, kids who never could move, for those families, it’s a miracle,” Cleveland said.

These results, coupled with the trials that are about to show results, caused a fair bit of excitement at the recent annual meeting of the American Neurological Association recently.

Gathering in a large meeting room at the Sheraton San Diego hotel, extremely sharp minds from all over the world listened as Cleveland explained the trials underway.

It’s a big change, Cleveland said, from where things were at just a few years ago.

“I wouldn’t have even been invited to speak to a meeting like that, because no one thought it could work. We’ve really gone from total skepticism and outright criticism to a feeling that these drugs are just obvious and inevitable,” Cleveland said.

After hearing Cleveland speak, Dr. Craig Blackstone, senior investigator in the cell biology section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said Cleveland and Smith get lots of credit for their sheer tenacity.

“They’re the ones who really moved things forward in terms of convincing Ionis that they should do this. They’ve shown lots of people that there’s a real possibility that this approach is going to be effective,” Blackstone said.

So, are similar results coming for Huntington’s and ALS given that they use the same designer DNA approach in a different way?

At the moment, all results are still blinded, and researchers don’t know what’s coming.

It’s important to note that, while all of the estimated 30,000 Americans living with Huntington’s could potentially be affected, it is not yet known what a reduction of harmful protein levels will mean for these patients. And, for ALS, these drugs will affect only the “familial” form of the disease, which is estimated to affect only 5 percent to 10 percent of all cases. The vast majority of ALS cases are termed “sporadic” and their cause has not been traced to specific genetic mutations.

Still, a detectable drop in the harmful proteins that cause ALS or Huntington’s, Cleveland said, even if it does not cause a meaningful reversal in symptoms, will be good enough to justify larger and longer trials where more significant results would be more likely.

“If we can shut off the bad gene, it’s just really likely that will have a big effect on disease,” Cleveland said. “That would be very exciting.”

Health Playlist × On Now Video: Leaders urge public to help extinguish hepatitis outbreak On Now San Diego starts cleansing sidewalks, streets to combat hepatitis A On Now Video: Scripps to shutter its hospice service On Now Video: Scripps La Jolla hospitals nab top local spot in annual hospital rankings On Now Video: Does a parent's Alzheimer's doom their children? On Now EpiPen recall expands On Now Kids can add years to your life

paul.sisson@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1850

Twitter: @paulsisson

Output: The results of clinical trials of designer DNA drugs that treat neurodegenerative diseases are expected to be released next year. California-based Ionis Pharmaceuticals is testing antisense oligonucleotides that mute the mutant genes behind conditions such as Huntington's and Lou Gehrig's diseases. If early-phase results show a reduction in the levels of proteins thought to trigger malfunctions in patients' nervous systems, larger trials are likely to follow.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
UK house prices gain contradicts Brexit-pundit warnings: YOPA
 Another reminder never to listen to pundits, this time with data on UK home prices gathered over the past ten months…

In a result that surprised many, the vote on June 23 2016 resulted in a decision to leave the European Union.

The impact of the decision has been much debated, with many economists stating that the UK economy would be harmed by a decision to leave, whether that’s through a loss of cheap labour that powers the fruit picking industry or the restriction of movement for those in the Square Mile.

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Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges with determining how the economy is performing is the ‘lag’ between the economic data being collected and the data being analysed and reported on. Take GDP growth for example, which usually reports on the performance of the past three months.

Luckily the financial markets often have an almost immediate reaction to political crisis’, and indeed fluctuations in Sterling have certainly occurred since the Brexit vote. But the financial markets don’t always reflect the state of a national economy.

Instead, the estate agent YOPA decided to check how UK home prices were doing in the wake of the Brexit vote, and the results are somewhat surprising. First, the estate agent collected and aggregated industry predictions in January 2017, and then created a Brexit house price widget to track how these predications would correlate against the actual house price changes throughout the year.

The reasoning behind creating this house price widget was that property prices are a good barometer of how an economy is doing performing, mainly because they closely correlate with consumer confidence in the economy. If you can’t afford a house, you don’t buy one. If you can’t afford a price, you lower it. This may be a very simplistic view of it, but it broadly holds true.

The industry expert predictions yielded a total gain in house prices of 1.2% throughout 2017. This would have been a modest leap, simply because house prices have typically significantly outpaced inflation. Due to various concerns about how the economy would fare and the uncertainty surrounding the negotiation process meant that these experts were generally sensible to produce lower figures.

Yet what happened was unexpected: UK home prices over the past 10 months have risen significantly – to the tune of 5.2%, according to Land Registry values. While there was an initial dip, house prices surged after April, and they kept on rising. A property worth £200,000 in January could well be worth more than £210,000 today.

Brexit UK home prices: Encouraging or not encouraging?

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say whether this is symptomatic of the overall economy. The significant devaluation of the currency has made it easier for people overseas to buy houses, as their money is worth a lot more, and this is particularly true of London.

With talks currently stalled and the overall negotiating position unclear, investing in housing is likely to be a cautious process for the next few years as we wait to see how Brexit pans out.

Output: UK house prices have risen 5.2% in the past 10 months, contradicting predictions that the Brexit vote last year would suppress home values, according to data compiled by online estate agent YOPA. Its calculation, based on Land Registry values, compares with a 1.2% aggregated forecast of industry pundits, a figure YOPA established through its own methodology. While industry insiders said a devaluation in the pound following the vote in June 2016 was behind some of the boost, it may be too early to tell whether the surprising increase will affect the rest of the economy.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Humanity has a 10% chance of making AI safe: Elon Musk
 It’s mid-afternoon on a Friday at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and three of Elon Musk’s children are gathered around him – one of his triplets, both of his twins.

Musk is wearing a gray T-shirt and sitting in a swivel chair at his desk, which is not in a private office behind a closed door, but in an accessible corner cubicle festooned with outer-space novelty items, photos of his rockets, and mementos from Tesla and his other companies.

Most tellingly, there’s a framed poster of a shooting star with a caption underneath it that reads, “When you wish upon a falling star, your dreams can come true. Unless it’s really a meteor hurtling to the Earth which will destroy all life. Then you’re pretty much hosed, no matter what you wish for. Unless it’s death by meteorite.” To most people, this would be mere dark humor, but in this setting, it’s also a reminder of Musk’s master plan: to create habitats for humanity on other planets and moons. If we don’t send our civilization into another Dark Ages before Musk or one of his dream’s inheritors pull it off, then Musk will likely be remembered as one of the most seminal figures of this millennium. Kids on all the terraformed planets of the universe will look forward to Musk Day, when they get the day off to commemorate the birth of the Earthling who single-handedly ushered in the era of space colonization.

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And that’s just one of Musk’s ambitions. Others include converting automobiles, households and as much industry as possible from fossil fuels to sustainable energy; implementing a new form of high-speed city-to-city transportation via vacuum tube; relieving traffic congestion with a honeycomb of underground tunnels fitted with electric skates for cars and commuters; creating a mind-computer interface to enhance human health and brainpower; and saving humanity from the future threat of an artificial intelligence that may one day run amok and decide, quite rationally, to eliminate the irrational human species.

So far, Musk, 46, has accomplished none of these goals.

But what he has done is something that very few living people can claim: Painstakingly bulldozed, with no experience whatsoever, into two fields with ridiculously high barriers to entry – car manufacturing (Tesla) and rocketry (SpaceX) – and created the best products in those industries, as measured by just about any meaningful metric you can think of. In the process, he’s managed to sell the world on his capability to achieve objectives so lofty that from the mouth of anyone else, they’d be called fantasies.

At least, most of the world. “I’m looking at the short losses,” Musk says, transfixed by CNBC on his iPhone. He speaks to his kids without looking up. “Guys, check this out: Tesla has the highest short position in the entire stock market. A $9 billion short position.”

His children lean over the phone, looking at a table full of numbers that I don’t understand. So his 13-year-old, Griffin, explains it to me: “They’re betting that the stock goes down, and they’re getting money off that. But it went up high, so they lost an insane amount of money.”

“They’re jerks who want us to die,” Musk elaborates. “They’re constantly trying to make up false rumors and amplify any negative rumors. It’s a really big incentive to lie and attack my integrity. It’s really awful. It’s…”

He trails off, as he often does when preoccupied by a thought. I try to help: “Unethical?”

“It’s…” He shakes his head and struggles for the right word, then says softly, “Hurtful.”

It is easy to confuse who someone is with what they do, and thus turn them into a caricature who fits neatly into a storybook view of the world. Our culture always needs villains and heroes, fools and geniuses, scapegoats and role models. However, despite opinions to the contrary, Elon Musk is not a robot sent from the future to save humanity. Nor is he a Silicon Valley savant whose emotional affect has been replaced with supercomputer-like intelligence. Over the course of nine months of reporting, watching Musk do everything from strategize Mars landings with his rocket-engineering team to plan the next breakthroughs with his artificial-intelligence experts, I learned he is someone far, far different from what his myth and reputation suggest.

The New York Times has called him “arguably the most successful and important entrepreneur in the world.” It’s an easy case to make: He’s probably the only person who has started four billion-dollar companies – PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX and Solar City. But at his core, Musk is not a businessman or entrepreneur. He’s an engineer, inventor and, as he puts it, “technologist.” And as a naturally gifted engineer, he’s able to find the design inefficiencies, flaws and complete oversights in the tools that power our civilization.

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“He’s able to see things more clearly in a way that no one else I know of can understand,” says his brother, Kimbal. He discusses his brother’s love of chess in their earlier years, and adds, “There’s a thing in chess where you can see 12 moves ahead if you’re a grandmaster. And in any particular situation, Elon can see things 12 moves ahead.”

His children soon leave for the home of their mother, Musk’s ex-wife Justine. “I wish we could be private with Tesla,” Musk murmurs as they exit. “It actually makes us less efficient to be a public company.”

What follows is … silence. Musk sits at his desk, looking at his phone, but not typing or reading anything. He then lowers himself to the floor, and stretches his back on a foam roller. When he finishes, I attempt to start the interview by asking about the Tesla Model 3 launch a week earlier, and what it felt like to stand onstage and tell the world he’d just pulled off a plan 14 years in the making: to bootstrap, with luxury electric cars, a mass-market electric car.

The accomplishment, for Musk, is not just in making a $35,000 electric car; it’s in making a $35,000 electric car that’s so good, and so in-demand, that it forces other car manufacturers to phase out gas cars to compete. And sure enough, within two months of the launch, both GM and Jaguar Land Rover announced they were planning to eliminate gas cars and go all-electric.

Musk thinks for a while, begins to answer, then pauses. “Uh, actually, let me go to the restroom. Then I’ll ask you to repeat that question.” A longer pause. “I also have to unload other things from my mind.”

Five minutes later, Musk still hasn’t returned. Sam Teller, his chief of staff, says, “I’ll be right back.”

Several minutes after that, they both reappear and huddle nearby, whispering to each other. Then Musk returns to his desk.

“We can reschedule for another day if this is a bad time,” I offer.

Musk clasps his hands on the surface of the desk, composes himself, and declines.

“It might take me a little while to get into the rhythm of things.”

Then he heaves a sigh and ends his effort at composure. “I just broke up with my girlfriend,” he says hesitantly. “I was really in love, and it hurt bad.”

He pauses and corrects himself: “Well, she broke up with me more than I broke up with her, I think.”

Thus, the answer to the question posed earlier: It felt unexpectedly, disappointingly, uncontrollably horrible to launch the Model 3. “I’ve been in severe emotional pain for the last few weeks,” Musk elaborates. “Severe. It took every ounce of will to be able to do the Model 3 event and not look like the most depressed guy around. For most of that day, I was morbid. And then I had to psych myself up: drink a couple of Red Bulls, hang out with positive people and then, like, tell myself: ‘I have all these people depending on me. All right, do it!'”

Minutes before the event, after meditating for pretty much the first time in his life to get centered, Musk chose a very telling song to drive onstage to: “R U Mine?” by the Arctic Monkeys.

Musk discusses the breakup for a few more minutes, then asks, earnestly, deadpan, “Is there anybody you think I should date? It’s so hard for me to even meet people.” He swallows and clarifies, stammering softly, “I’m looking for a long-term relationship. I’m not looking for a one-night stand. I’m looking for a serious companion or soulmate, that kind of thing.”

I eventually tell him that it may not be a good idea to jump right into another relationship. He may want to take some time to himself and figure out why his previous relationships haven’t worked in the long run: his marriage to writer Justine Musk, his marriage to actress Talulah Riley, and this new breakup with actress Amber Heard.

Musk shakes his head and grimaces: “If I’m not in love, if I’m not with a long-term companion, I cannot be happy.”

I explain that needing someone so badly that you feel like nothing without them is textbook codependence.

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Musk disagrees. Strongly. “It’s not true,” he replies petulantly. “I will never be happy without having someone. Going to sleep alone kills me.” He hesitates, shakes his head, falters, continues. “It’s not like I don’t know what that feels like: Being in a big empty house, and the footsteps echoing through the hallway, no one there – and no one on the pillow next to you. Fuck. How do you make yourself happy in a situation like that?”

There’s truth to what Musk is saying. It is lonely at the top. But not for everyone. It’s lonely at the top for those who were lonely at the bottom.

“When I was a child, there’s one thing I said,” Musk continues. His demeanor is stiff, yet in the sheen of his eyes and the trembling of his lips, a high tide of emotion is visible, pushing against the retaining walls. “‘I never want to be alone.’ That’s what I would say.” His voice drops to a whisper. “I don’t want to be alone.”

A ring of red forms around his eyes as he stares forward and sits frozen in silence. Musk is a titan, a visionary, a human-size lever pushing forward massive historical inevitabilities – the kind of person who comes around only a few times in a century – but in this moment, he seems like a child who is afraid of abandonment. And that may be the origin story of Musk’s superambitions, but more on that later. In the meantime, Musk has something he’d like to show me.

“If you say anything about what you’re about to see, it would cost us billions,” he says, rising from his desk. “And you would be put in jail.”

The most interesting tourist attraction in Los Angeles County is one that’s not in many guidebooks: It’s in the otherwise-untouristed southwestern city of Hawthorne, around SpaceX. If you walk along Crenshaw Boulevard from Jack Northrop Boulevard to 120th Street, what you will see is a city of the future that’s under construction. This is Musk city, an alternate reality, a triumph of futuristic imagination more thrilling than anything at a Disney park. On the west side of the street, a 156-foot-tall rocket towers above SpaceX headquarters, symbolizing Musk’s dream of relatively low-cost interplanetary travel. This particular rocket booster was the first in human history to be launched into space, then recovered intact on Earth after separating, and then fired back into space. On the east side of the street, an employee parking lot has been dug up and turned into the first-ever tunnel for the Boring Company, Musk’s underground-honeycomb solution to traffic jams and the future home of all his terrestrial transportation projects. Then, running for a mile beside Jack Northrop Boulevard, there’s a white vacuum tube along the shoulder of the road. This is the test track for the Hyperloop, Musk’s high-speed form of city-to-city travel. Taken together, the dreams of Musk city promise to connect the planet and the solar system in ways that will fundamentally change humanity’s relationship to two of the most important facets of its reality: distance and time.

But there is a particular building in Musk city that few have visited, and this is where Musk takes me. It is the Tesla Design Studio, where he’s slated to do a walkthrough of the Tesla Truck and other future vehicle prototypes with his team of designers and engineers.

Outside the door, a guard takes my phone and audio recorder, and I’m given an old-fashioned pen and paper to take notes on. Musk then continues into the building and reveals the Tesla Truck, which aims to help the trucking industry go green. (Musk has even been toying with creating a supersonic electric jet, with vertical takeoff and landing, in the future.) Four key members of the Tesla team are there – Doug Field, JB Straubel, Franz von Holzhausen, Jerome Guillen – and watch with anticipation as Musk explores a new configuration of the cab for the first time.

Guillen explains the idea behind the truck: “We just thought, ‘What do people want? They want reliability. They want the lowest cost. And they want driver comfort.’ So we reimagined the truck.”

This is a perfect example of the idea that Musk-inspired wannabe visionaries around the world worship like a religion: first principles thinking. In other words, if you want to create or innovate, start from a clean slate. Don’t accept any ideas, practices or standards just because everyone else is doing them. For instance, if you want to make a truck, then it must be able to reliably move cargo from one location to another, and you must follow existing laws of physics. Everything else is negotiable, including government regulations. As long as you remember that the goal isn’t to reinvent the truck, but to create the best one, whether or not it’s similar to past trucks.

As a result of this type of thinking, Musk is able to see an industry much more objectively than others who’ve been in the field their whole lives.

“I was literally told this is impossible and I’m a huge liar,” Musk says of the early days of Tesla. “But I have a car and you can drive it. This is not like a frigging unicorn. It’s real. Go for a drive. It’s amazing. How can you be in denial?”

An unfortunate fact of human nature is that when people make up their mind about something, they tend not to change it – even when confronted with facts to the contrary. “It’s very unscientific,” Musk says. “There’s this thing called physics, which is this scientific method that’s really quite effective for figuring out the truth.”

The scientific method is a phrase Musk uses often when asked how he came up with an idea, solved a problem or chose to start a business. Here’s how he defines it for his purposes, in mostly his own words:

1. Ask a question.

2. Gather as much evidence as possible about it.

3. Develop axioms based on the evidence, and try to assign a probability of truth to each one.

4. Draw a conclusion based on cogency in order to determine: Are these axioms correct, are they relevant, do they necessarily lead to this conclusion, and with what probability? 5. Attempt to disprove the conclusion. Seek refutation from others to further help break your conclusion. 6. If nobody can invalidate your conclusion, then you’re probably right, but you’re not certainly right.

“That’s the scientific method,” Musk concludes. “It’s really helpful for figuring out the tricky things.”

But most people don’t use it, he says. They engage in wishful thinking. They ignore counterarguments. They form conclusions based on what others are doing and aren’t doing. The reasoning that results is “It’s true because I said it’s true,” but not because it’s objectively true.

“The fundamental intention of Tesla, at least my motivation,” Musk explains in his halting, stuttering voice, “was to accelerate the advent of sustainable energy. That’s why I open-sourced the patents. It’s the only way to transition to sustainable energy better.

“Climate change is the biggest threat that humanity faces this century, except for AI,” he continues. “I keep telling people this. I hate to be Cassandra here, but it’s all fun and games until somebody loses a fucking eye. This view [of climate change] is shared by almost everyone who’s not crazy in the scientific community.”

For the next 20 minutes, Musk examines the Tesla Truck. He comments first on the technical details, even ones as granular as the drawbacks and advantages of different types of welding. He then moves on to the design, specifically a driver-comfort feature that cannot be specified here, due to said threatened jail time.

“Probably no one will buy it because of this,” he tells his team. “But if you’re going to make a product, make it beautiful. Even if it doesn’t affect sales, I want it to be beautiful.”

According to Musk’s best guess, our personalities might be 80 percent nature and 20 percent nurture. Whatever that ratio actually is, if you want to understand the future that Musk is building, it’s essential to understand the past that built him, including his fears of human extinction and being alone.

For the first eight or so years of his life, Musk lived with his mother, Maye, a dietitian and model, and his father, Errol, an engineer, in Pretoria, South Africa. He rarely saw either of them.

“I didn’t really have a primary nanny or anything,” Musk recalls. “I just had a housekeeper who was there to make sure I didn’t break anything. She wasn’t, like, watching me. I was off making explosives and reading books and building rockets and doing things that could have gotten me killed. I’m shocked that I have all my fingers.” He raises his hands and examines them, then lowers his digits. “I was raised by books. Books, and then my parents.”

Some of those books help explain the world Musk is building, particularly Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series. The books are centered around the work of a visionary named Hari Seldon, who has invented a scientific method of predicting the future based on crowd behavior. He sees a 30,000-year Dark Ages waiting ahead for humankind, and creates a plan that involves sending scientific colonies to distant planets to help civilization mitigate this unavoidable cataclysm.

“Asimov certainly was influential because he was seriously paralleling Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but he applied that to a sort of modern galactic empire,” Musk explains. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one.”

Musk was around 10 at this time, and plunged in his own personal dark age. He’d recently made a move that would change his life. It was a wrong decision that came from the right place.

When his parents split up two years before, he and his younger siblings – Kimbal and Tosca – stayed with their mom. But, Musk recounts, “I felt sorry for my father, because my mother had all three kids. He seemed very sad and lonely by himself. So I thought, ‘I can be company.'” He pauses while a movie’s worth of images seem to flicker through his mind.

“Yeah, I was sad for my father. But I didn’t really understand at the time what kind of person he was.”

He lets out a long, sad sigh, then says flatly about moving in with Dad, “It was not a good idea.”

According to Elon, Errol has an extremely high IQ – “brilliant at engineering, brilliant” – and was supposedly the youngest person to get a professional engineer’s qualification in South Africa. When Elon came to live with him in Lone Hill, a suburb of Johannesburg, Errol was, by his own account, making money in the often dangerous worlds of construction and emerald mining – at times so much that he claims he couldn’t close his safe.

“I’m naturally good at engineering that’s because I inherited it from my father,” Musk says. “What’s very difficult for others is easy for me. For a while, I thought things were so obvious that everyone must know this.”

Like what kinds of things?

“Well, like how the wiring in a house works. And a circuit breaker, and alternating current and direct current, what amps and volts were, how to mix a fuel and oxidizers to create an explosive. I thought everyone knew this.”

But there was another side to Musk’s father that was just as important to making Elon who he is. “He was such a terrible human being,” Musk shares. “You have no idea.” His voice trembles, and he discusses a few of those things, but doesn’t go into specifics. “My dad will have a carefully thought-out plan of evil,” he says. “He will plan evil.”

Besides emotional abuse, did that include physical abuse?

“My dad was not physically violent with me. He was only physically violent when I was very young.” (Errol countered via email that he only “smacked” Elon once, “on the bottom.”)

Elon’s eyes turn red as he continues discussing his dad. “You have no idea about how bad. Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done. Almost every evil thing you could possibly think of, he has done. Um…”

There is clearly something Musk wants to share, but he can’t bring himself to utter the words, at least not on the record. “It’s so terrible, you can’t believe it.”

The tears run silently down his face. “I can’t remember the last time I cried.” He turns to Teller to confirm this. “You’ve never seen me cry.”

“No,” Teller says. “I’ve never seen you cry.”

The flow of tears stops as quickly as it began. And once more, Musk has the cold, impassive, but gentle stone face that is more familiar to the outside world.

Yet it’s now clear that this is not the face of someone without emotions, but the face of someone with a lot of emotions who had been forced to suppress them in order to survive a painful childhood.

When asked about committing crimes, Musk’s father said that he has never intentionally threatened or hurt anyone, or been charged with anything, except … in this one case, he says he shot and killed three out of five or six armed people who broke into his home, and was later cleared of all charges on self-defense.

In his e-mail, Errol wrote: “I’ve been accused of being a Gay, a Misogynist, a Paedophile, a Traitor, a Rat, a Shit (quite often), a Bastard (by many women whose attentions I did not return) and much more. My own (wonderful) mother told me I am ‘ruthless’ and should learn to be more ‘humane.'” But, he concluded, “I love my children and would readily do whatever for them.”

As an adult, Musk, with the same optimism with which he moved in with his father as a child, moved his dad, his father’s then-wife and their children to Malibu. He bought them a house, cars and a boat. But his father, Elon says, hadn’t changed, and Elon severed the relationship.

“In my experience, there is nothing you can do,” he says about finally learning the lesson that his dad will never change. “Nothing, nothing. I wish. I’ve tried everything. I tried threats, rewards, intellectual arguments, emotional arguments, everything to try to change my father for the better, and he… no way, it just got worse.”

Somewhere in this trauma bond is the key to Musk’s worldview – creation against destruction, of being useful versus harmful, of defending the world against evil.

Things at school weren’t much better than life at home. There, Musk was brutally bullied – until he was 15 years old.

“For the longest time, I was the youngest and the smallest kid in the class because my birthday just happens to fall on almost the last day that they will accept you into school, June 28th. And I was a late bloomer. So I was the youngest and the smallest kid in class for years and years. …The gangs at school would hunt me down – literally hunt me down!”

Musk put down the books and started learning to fight back – karate, judo, wrestling. That physical education, combined with a growth spurt that brought him to six feet by age 16, gave him some confidence and, as he puts it, “I started dishing it out as hard as they’d give it to me.”

When he got into a fight with the biggest bully at school and knocked him out with one punch, Musk noticed that the bully never picked on him again. “It taught me a lesson: If you’re fighting a bully, you cannot appease a bully.” Musk speaks the next words forcefully. “You punch the bully in the nose. Bullies are looking for targets that won’t fight back. If you make yourself a hard target and punch the bully in the nose, he’s going to beat the shit out of you, but he’s actually not going to hit you again.”

When he was 17, Musk left college and moved to his mother’s home country, Canada, later obtaining passports for his mother, brother and sister to join him there. His father did not wish him well, Musk recalls. “He said rather contentiously that I’d be back in three months, that I’m never going to make it, that I’m never going to make anything of myself. He called me an idiot all the time. That’s the tip of the iceberg, by the way.”

After Musk became successful, his father even took credit for helping him – to such a degree that it’s listed as fact in Elon’s Wikipedia entry. “One thing he claims is he gave us a whole bunch of money to start, my brother and I, to start up our first company [Zip2, which provided online city guides to newspapers]. This is not true,” Musk says. “He was irrelevant. He paid nothing for college. My brother and I paid for college through scholarships, loans and working two jobs simultaneously. The funding we raised for our first company came from a small group of random angel investors in Silicon Valley.”

Musk’s career history decorates his desk. There’s an item from nearly all of his companies, even a mug for X.com, the early online bank he started, which became PayPal. The sale of Zip2 resulted in a $22 million check made out directly to Musk, which he used in part to start X.com. With the roughly $180 million post-tax amount he made from the sale of PayPal, he started SpaceX with $100 million, put $70 million into Tesla, invested $10 million into Solar City, and saved little for himself.

One of the misunderstandings that rankles Musk most is being pigeonholed and narrowcast, whether as the real-life Tony Stark or the second coming of Steve Jobs. When, at a photo shoot, he was asked to wear a black turtleneck, the trademark garb of Jobs, he bristled. “If I was dying and I had a turtleneck on,” he tells me, “with my last dying breath, I would take the turtleneck off and try to throw it as far away from my body as possible.”

So what is Musk about?

“I try to do useful things,” he explains. “That’s a nice aspiration. And useful means it is of value to the rest of society. Are they useful things that work and make people’s lives better, make the future seem better, and actually are better, too? I think we should try to make the future better.”

When asked to define “better,” Musk elaborates, “It would be better if we mitigated the effects of global warming and had cleaner air in our cities and weren’t drilling for vast amounts of coal, oil and gas in parts of the world that are problematic and will run out anyway.

“And if we were a multiplanetary species, that would reduce the possibility of some single event, man-made or natural, taking out civilization as we know it, as it did the dinosaurs. There have been five mass-extinction events in the fossil record. People have no comprehension of these things. Unless you’re a cockroach or a mushroom – or a sponge – you’re fucked.” He laughs sharply. “It’s insurance of life as we know it, and it makes the future far more inspiring if we are out there among the stars and you could move to another planet if you wanted to.”

This, then, is the ideology of Musk. And though basic, it’s actually very rare. Think of the other names that one associates with innovation this century: They’re people who built operating systems, devices, websites or social-media platforms. Even when it didn’t start out that way, the ideology in most cases soon became: How can I make my company the center of my users’ world? Consequently, social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter use a number of tricks to activate the addictive reward centers of a user’s brain.

If Musk’s employees suggested doing something like this, he’d probably look at them like they were crazy. This type of thinking doesn’t compute. “It’s really inconsistent to not be the way you want the world to be,” he says flatly, “and then through some means of trickery, operate according to one moral code while the rest of the world operates according to a different one. This is obviously not something that works. If everyone’s trying to trick everyone all the time, it’s a lot of noise and confusion. It’s better just to be straightforward and try to do useful things.”

He discusses building a permanent moon base, and further funding SpaceX by creating passenger rockets capable of traveling to any city in the world in less than an hour, a form of transport he calls “Earth-to-Earth.” I ask if there’s anything that he believes works that surprises people.

“I think being precise about the truth works. Truthful and precise. I try to tell people, ‘You don’t have to read between the lines with me. I’m saying the lines!'”

On another occasion, I watch Musk at a weekly SpaceX engineering-team meeting, where eight experts sit around a table in high-backed red chairs, showing Musk a PowerPoint with the latest updates to the Mars spaceship design. And while Musk keeps pace on technical details with some of the most brilliant minds in aerospace, he also adds an element that goes beyond logistics and engineering.

“Make sure it doesn’t look ugly or something,” he advises at one point. Then, later, “The aesthetics of this one are not so great. It looks like a scared lizard.” And, in a characteristically wry moment, “When you land on Mars, you want the list of what you have to worry about to be small enough that you’re not dead.”

Overall, there’s a theme to Musk’s feedback: First, things have to be useful, logical and scientifically possible.

Then he looks to improve efficiency on every level: What are people accepting as an industry standard when there’s room for significant improvement?

From there, Musk pushes for the end product to be aesthetically beautiful, simple, cool, sleek (“He hates seams,” says one staffer) and, as Musk puts it at one point in the meeting, “awesome.”

Throughout this process, there’s an additional element that very few companies indulge in: personalization. This usually involves Musk adding Easter eggs and personal references to the products, such as making the Tesla sound-system volume go to 11 (in homage to Spinal Tap) or sending a “secret payload” into space in his first Dragon launch that turned out to be a wheel of cheese (in homage to Monty Python).

Beyond all this, most maddening or exciting for Musk’s employees, depending on which one you ask, is the time scale on which he often expects work to be done. For example, one Friday when I was visiting, a few SpaceX staff members were frantically rushing back and forth from the office to the parking lot across the street. It turns out that during a meeting, he asked them how long it would take to remove staff cars from the lot and start digging the first hole for the Boring Company tunnel. The answer: two weeks.

Musk asked why, and when he gathered the necessary information, he concluded, “Let’s get started today and see what’s the biggest hole we can dig between now and Sunday afternoon, running 24 hours a day.” Within three hours, the cars were gone and there was a hole in the ground.

On the other hand, one thing Musk is notorious for is setting ambitious deadlines that he often can’t meet. The Roadster, the Model S and the Model X were all delayed from his original timeline, and now the Model 3 – with its nearly half-a-million-person-long waiting list – is experiencing its own production delays. There are many reasons for this, but Musk summarizes: “Better to do something good and be late than bad and be early.” So expect Musk to get it done, just not on time. Because if he can’t do it, he won’t pretend otherwise.

“I expect to lose,” Musk says. He’s in a three-story building in San Francisco that has only recently been furnished. It used to belong to Stripe, the credit-card payment processor, but now belongs to Musk, who’s housing two of his companies there: Neuralink and OpenAI.

These are visions of what Tesla or SpaceX may have looked like when they first began. A small group of excited people working with limited resources to hit a distant, ambitious target. But unlike Tesla and SpaceX, there aren’t anything close to road maps toward these goals, nor are they so clear-cut.

OpenAI is a nonprofit dedicated to minimizing the dangers of artificial intelligence, while Neuralink is working on ways to implant technology into our brains to create mind-computer interfaces.

If it sounds like those are contradictory ideas, think again. Neuralink allows our brains to keep up in the intelligence race. The machines can’t outsmart us if we have everything the machines have plus everything we have. At least, that is if you assume that what we have is actually an advantage.

It’s an unusual day at the office: Musk is showing a documentary about artificial intelligence to the Neuralink staff. He stands in front of them as they sit splayed on couches and chairs, and lays out the grim odds of his mission to make AI safe: “Maybe there’s a five to 10 percent chance of success,” he says.

The challenge he’s up against with OpenAI is twofold. First, the problem with building something that’s smarter than you is … that it’s smarter than you. Add to that the fact that AI has no remorse, no morality, no emotions – and humanity may be in deep shit. This is the good son’s second chance against the remorseless father he couldn’t change.

The other challenge is that OpenAI is a nonprofit, and it’s competing with the immense resources of Google’s DeepMind. Musk tells the group he in fact invested in DeepMind with the intention of keeping a watchful eye on Google’s AI development.

“Between Facebook, Google and Amazon – and arguably Apple, but they seem to care about privacy – they have more information about you than you can remember,” he elaborates to me. “There’s a lot of risk in concentration of power. So if AGI [artificial general intelligence] represents an extreme level of power, should that be controlled by a few people at Google with no oversight?”

“Sleep well,” Musk jokes when the movie ends. He then leads a discussion about it, writing down some ideas and bluntly dismissing others. As he’s speaking, he reaches into a bowl, grabs a piece of popcorn, drops it in his mouth and starts coughing.

“We’re talking about threats to humanity,” he mutters, “and I’m going to choke to death on popcorn.”

It is 9 p.m. on a Thursday night, and I’m waiting in the foyer of Musk’s Bel Air home for our final interview. He walks down the stairs a few minutes later, wearing a T-shirt depicting Mickey Mouse in space. A tall blond woman follows him down the stairs.

He is, true to his words, not alone.

The woman, it turns out, is Talulah Riley, his second wife. They met in 2008, and Musk proposed after 10 days together. They married in 2010, then divorced two years later, then remarried the following year, then filed for divorce again, then withdrew the filing, then re-filed for divorce and finally followed through with it.

Musk suggests doing something rare for him: drinking. “My alcohol tolerance is not very high,” he says. “But I tend to be a fuzzy bear when I drink. I go happy fuzzy.”

He pours two glasses of whiskey for us, and the three of us adjourn to his living room, where there’s a mechanical Edison phonograph, an Enigma machine and a short-wave radio from World War I on display.

During the interview, Riley lounges on the couch nearby, half paying attention to the conversation, half paying attention to her phone.

Musk is in a different mood than he was at SpaceX, and that’s something that those who’ve come to know Musk observe. One moment, he may be reciting favorite lines from an animated TV show he just saw, the next he may be curtly giving detailed instructions, the next he may be ignoring you while lost in a thought, the next he may be asking for your advice on a problem, the next he may be breathless with laughter while riffing on a humorous tangent for five minutes, the next he may be acting as if you’ve both never met. And through it all, you learn not to take it personally, because chances are that it has nothing to do with you.

We start off talking, or at least with me trying to talk, about AI, because a few weeks earlier, Musk had tweeted, “Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3 imo.”

But when I ask him about that, Musk gets testy. “I don’t have all the answers. I’m not saying that I have all the fucking answers. Let me be really clear about that. I’m trying to figure out the set of actions I can take that are more likely to result in a good future. If you have suggestions in that regard, please tell me what they are.”

Riley chimes in: “I think just the way it gets couched is that ‘Elon Musk says we’re all gonna die,’ as opposed to ‘Hey, let’s have some regulation.'”

Musk, it soon becomes clear, is not in the mood to talk about his work. Instead, he has some advice he’d like to offer to the world from his personal experience: “I find one learns lessons in the course of life,” he begins with a wry half-smile. “And one lesson I’ve learned is, don’t tweet on Ambien. That’s on the record: Tweeting on Ambien is unwise. You may regret it.”

Musk grabs a coffee-table book published by The Onion and starts leafing through it, laughing hysterically. “In order to understand the essential truth of things,” he theorizes, “I think you can find it in The Onion and occasionally on Reddit.”

Afterward, he asks excitedly, “Have you ever seen Rick and Morty?” And the conversation bounces from that animated show to South Park to The Simpsons to the book Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

One of the lines from Hitchhiker’s, Musk says, ended up being Musk Family Rule Number One: “Don’t panic.”

“The boys were quite skittish about all kinds of things,” Riley explains.

“That’s our other rule,” Musk continues. “Safety third. There’s not even a Rule Number Two. But even though there’s nothing in second place, safety is not getting promoted to number two.”

We’re interrupted by Teller, Musk’s chief of staff, who informs him that as we were talking, the Hawthorne City Council ended an hours-long debate with a 4-to-1 vote allowing Musk to burrow his tunnel two miles into the city.

“Good,” Musk says. “Now we can dig past our own property line. Dig like fiends!”

He laughs at the expression, and I understand now that Musk didn’t have me over to talk about his projects and vision. There’s nothing to be gained from talking about the problems of science with someone who doesn’t understand them. At the end of the day, he just wants to unwind and laugh about the world he’s trying to improve.

I

leave his home still hearing his chuckles in the doorway, and hoping that when

the Mars colony builds its first statues of Musk, they’re not of a stiff man

with a tight-lipped expression looking out into space, but of a fuzzy bear.

Output: Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said humans have between a 5% and 10% chance of making artificial intelligence (AI) safe. Speaking from the office of his non-profit outfit OpenAI, Musk told Rolling Stone magazine that making something that was cleverer than humans but which lacked remorse, morality or emotion could leave mankind facing serious problems. "If artificial general intelligence represents an extreme level of power, should that be controlled by a few people at Google with no oversight?"


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Samsung SDS to build admin blockchain for Seoul city government
 Samsung SDS has won an order from the Seoul city government to draw up a roadmap to apply blockchain for administrative use.

Seoul plans to first apply blockchain in municipal duties that actively collect private information of citizens.

It will apply blockchain to all administrative duties by 2022, including in public transportation, social security, and public safety.

The goal is to increase citizen convenience and increase transparency.

Samsung SDS will, for the next five months, take a comprehensive look at Seoul's governance environment to see how to apply and expand the use of blockchain.

The IT service provider will design a future model and come up with a step-by-step approach for application.

Samsung SDS, together with affiliate Samsung Card, first commercialised its blockchain platform Nexledger earlier this year.

In May, it joined global blockchain alliance EEA, whose members include Microsoft and Intel, to spread blockchain use globally.

Last month it applied its blockchain solution to local shipping firms for trials.

Samsung is pushing for its security solution offerings, such as Nexledger and its biometric solution Nexsign. Last month, it announced the integration of behavioral biometrics into Nexsign through a partnership with BioCatch.

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Output: Samsung subsidiary Samsung SDS will develop a blockchain-based administration solution for Seoul city's government. After initially evaluating the existing governance infrastructure, Samsung SDS will create a roadmap for blockchain's use in collecting private citizen data, which will then be rolled out to other municipal services, such as transportation and social security, by 2022. Last month saw the start of trials with local shipping outfits of the company's blockchain technology.


Instruction: create a high quality summary of the given input

Input:
Airbnb acquires disabled travel start-up
 Airbnb has acquired accessible-travel startup Accomable as part of plans to improve its offering for disabled travellers.

Accomable was launched just over two years ago by childhood friends Srin Madipalli and Martyn Sibley – who both have spinal muscular atrophy – to make it easier for people to find accessible places to stay around the world. It lists properties that can cater for a range of disabilities, highlighting details such as step-free access, hoists, roll-in showers and shower chairs.

The site, now run by a team of six, with more than500 listings in 60 countries, grew rapidly thanks to a grant from the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, part of Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, and a further £300,000 funding from “angel” investors.

Now, Accomable’s team and listings will be merged with Airbnb’s. In the coming months, the listings will be made available via the Airbnb site, and the team says it will now work towards improving the overall Airbnb experience for disabled travellers. Airbnb is also developing an “accessibility needs” checklist that allows hosts to be more descriptive about their home.

In an open letter posted on its site, Madipalli reassured customers that the merger with a larger platform won’t mean accessibility becomes an “afterthought”.

“Our decision to join Airbnb was one that we spent a long time considering,” he says. “Our work has allowed us to develop unrivalled expertise in the world of accessible travel, building a brand that disabled travellers can trust. We are convinced that joining Airbnb provides the best opportunity to take our dream and mission to a global level.”

For accessible tourism expert and travel writer Carrie-Ann Lightley, it is significant to see accessible travel being taken seriously by a mainstream travel business though itremains just one aspect of the solution.

“Airbnb’s investment in accessibility gives another option for disabled travellers, whose options are typically limited, and one I’m sure many will take up,” she says. “It shouldn’t overshadow the work of specialist operators though: many disabled travellers want and need a level of support that the mainstream industry still can’t cater for.”

For Lightley, when it comes to travel, reliable information about facilities is the “single biggest barrier” disabled people face.

“Armed with the right details, as a disabled traveller I can go anywhere, and make anything work,” she says. “Accommodation providers need to include good, detailed photographs of all rooms on their websites, as well as detailed accessibility guides.”

Output: Airbnb has acquired Accomable, a start-up that provides travel information for people with disabilities. The company, which lists over 500 accessible places to say in 60 countries, was launched two years ago by Srin Madipalli and Martyn Sibley, both of whom have spinal muscular atrophy. It received a grant from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, in addition to £300,000 ($399,958) from angel investors. Accomable’s listings will now be merged with Airbnb’s, appearing on the latter’s site within months. Airbnb also intends to improve its overall offerings for disabled travellers.