Sarah de Lagarde had her right arm amputated after getting run over by a train.
Thanks to her newly fitted artificial intelligence (AI) bionic arm, she can finally cuddle her daughter again. Think about how good that must feel.
Source: nytimes.com
We’ve had “dumb” prosthetic limbs for decades. Although they’re better than nothing, they’re essentially pieces of plastic strapped to our bodies. Sometimes they use preprogrammed robotic commands to clunkily move.
Sarah controls her bionic arm with her mind. When she thinks about picking up a glass, the AI reads her thoughts and signals to the arm to close its fingers around the glass at exactly the right pressure.
And the more she uses it, the better the AI system gets at knowing her intentions.
Imagine being stuck in a wheelchair… unable to chase your kid around the yard or even take a walk. Unfortunately, that’s life for millions of people.
I introduced you to Noland Arbaugh, the first human to get a Neuralink chip implant in his brain. Noland was paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a freak spinal cord injury.
Neuralink’s brain chip allows him to control a computer with his mind so he can work again!
Chips to control a computer with your brain…
AI-powered bionic limbs that read your mind…
See where this is going? To borrow a phrase from my friend Matt Ridley, when these two technologies “have sex,” being stuck in a wheelchair may be something our grandkids only read about in history books.
We could build “exoskeleton suits” for paralyzed people to put on in the morning, allowing them to walk around normally.
This is likely a decade away. But the days of dumb plastic limbs are ending. Mind-reading bionic arms are here. Legs too! A team of MIT researchers has developed a bionic leg that can be controlled by the user’s thoughts.
For now, these are expensive. Sarah’s new arm cost $190,000. That’ll improve. Entrepreneurs and innovators working together will ensure the tech only gets better, cheaper, and more accessible to those who need it most.
Rational optimists know the world has never been better. Just flick through our good news gallery.
But we must keep pushing forward. How could I look Noland Arbaugh in the eyes and say the world is awesome? He can’t brush his own teeth.
We owe it to those in need to keep innovating. So our grandkids will look back at the 2020s as barbarian times when paralyzed folks were confined to wheelchairs and there was nothing we could do.
More innovation = less suffering. We can make the world so much better.
You up for the job?
My aunt will kill me for showing you this
This is four-year-old me in my aunt’s bedroom on the night of her 21st birthday.
See the ashtray full of smoke butts on the dresser?
Can you imagine? Your kid comes home from a friend’s house and tells you their mom was chain smoking in the same room? Sorry son, can’t go there anymore.
Yet kids playing indoors in clouds of toxic smoke was totally normal in my lifetime!
Smartphones are the new smoking.
Today it’s perfectly normal to hand your 10-year-old an iPhone. But piles of evidence point to smartphones being the root cause of the teen depression epidemic.
Every “clued in” parent I know already doesn’t let their kids have an iPhone. Soon it’ll be as frowned upon as chain smoking around your little ones.
It’s your duty to be an optimist
That’s a lesson from oil tycoon J. Paul Getty, once the richest man alive.
I religiously listen to David Senra’s Founders podcast. It’s the best way to learn from history’s greatest entrepreneurs.
Getty, an optimist, said young businessmen would complain to him that there were no more opportunities. Sure, it was possible to make a million bucks in the good ol’ days. But you couldn't do it now.
They were saying this in 1965… one of the best times to start a business in America! People still tell themselves these lies today.
Getty says pessimism is "merely convenient alibis for the unimaginative, the incompetent, the nearsighted and narrow-minded and the lazy."
Who will achieve more in life—the optimist who believes he can improve the world… or the pessimist who makes excuses?
(Rational) optimists decide the future.
An optimist’s paradise?
My wife and I were in Abu Dhabi last week. The place is booming!
Abu Dhabi was a dirt-poor fishing village within our lifetimes. They’ve transformed a barren, inhospitable desert into a world-class city.
All the schools we visited were great. One had an Olympic-sized swimming pool on the roof.
Luxury hotels are sprouting up where there were once only piles of sand.
And it just opened the first nuclear power plant in the Arab world.
Abu Dhabi oozes optimism. It was inspiring to see what they’ve built. I want my kids to grow up with this “can do” attitude.
America is still the best large country on earth, and the center of innovation. But innovative “city states” like Abu Dhabi are the next big opportunity, and I want to be a part of it.
Even my wife was convinced of this after the trip. We’re set on moving our family there early next year. More soon…
(Yes, Abu Dhabi is oppressively hot. But unlike Europe, everywhere is well air conditioned, so it’s not that bad.)
Stephen McBride
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