Highlights from the Brazil: A New Roadmap session at #wef2023 #davos2023 featuring Fernando Haddad, Minister of Finance and Marina Silva, Minister of Environment and Climate Change 1/ ? • The aftermath of the January 8th insurrection is still being felt throughout Brazil

🧵- Yesterday, the USPTO invalidated the patent rights it had granted UC Berkeley -- the home of Nobel winner Jennifer Doudna. I know we're following developments in Russia/ Ukraine right now, but the decision has big implications for the future of health & life itself. ICYMI: There has been a years-long legal battle over who invented Crispr, pitting researchers at publicly-funded UC Berkeley against those at privately-funded Broad Institute of Harvard/ MIT.

Yesterday, the USPTO decided the revolutionary genome editing tech belongs to Broad.

My new book—THE GENESIS MACHINE—comes out on Feb 15. It’s a book about how we can reprogram the machinery of living cells, and why that’s both great and also really dangerous. Here’s a short 🧵on the book and why we wrote it. /1

publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/amy-web… A caveat. This book takes a deep look into evolution and how we currently think about life's origins. We recognize that some of what’s in our book is too radical for a general audience –– possibly too radical even for an audience of scientists. /2

I'm sitting in the vestibule of a hospital ER. My dad's blood pressure spiked dangerously high and his heart rate dropped to 40. He has a genetic hypertension issue that I'm hopeful synthetic biology will someday solve. But that's not why I'm writing. Please read entire thread. I have so far seen 8 drivers for Uber or Lyft pull up with patients in various conditions.

A high school kid with what looked like a broken leg--there was blood.

An elderly man, struggling to breathe, who couldn't walk on his own.

A family with a small child--looked bad.

Galleys are here! Right now, scientists are rewriting the rules of our reality. They can use computers to gain access to the cells of any living organism and write new, potentially better, biological code. Which means we have critical decisions to make about the future of life. We must decide to whom we will grant the authority to program life, create new life forms, and even bring former life back from extinction (yes, that’s already in the works). To make these decisions intelligently, we urgently need a deeper understanding of the science.

There is a strong connection between uncertainty and anxiety, certainty and depression, OCD and catastrophizing. Which means there's a link between how we think and what we think about the future. (1/5) It's very, very difficult to think critically and pragmatically about the future, especially when that thinking triggers anxiety, depression or catastrophic ideation.

A few things happen: we avoid thinking about the future; we idealize it; or we go all in on catastrophe (2/5)

Journalists, hello! Have you noticed a lot of people referring to themselves as futurists lately? It's true -- this is a thing.

But interestingly, it's not the first time in history that "futurist" has been a trendy job title.

Very quick thread on this 🧵 Throughout history, there have been times when humanity faces rapid change and deep uncertainty.

Here's a story from Ladies Home Journal just after the 1893 World Fair in Chicago and the Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris. These were game-changing events.

I've been thinking this weekend about the future of what I'm calling Tech Migrants.

Tech Migrants are employees of the G-MAFIA (from my book #TheBigNine - Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM & Apple) and other tech co's who are WFH but choose to move to other places. The WSJ is reporting that Google will keep its 200k employees home until at least next July. Facebook is exploring more permanent WFH options. This is a STRONG signal about Tech Migrants and it's worth thinking through next-order risks/ opportunities.

Here are some thoughts.

📚It's #WorldBookDay. Many authors and independent bookstores are struggling right now. Today I'll be tweeting some of my favorite books, some upcoming books I recommend, and some of my favorite indie bookstores around the world.📚 To start, here are some of my favorite books on AI. The Master Algorithm by @pmddomingos was terrific. I loved You Look Like A Thing and I Love You by
@JanelleCShane Novacene & Society of Mind are essential reading. (Included my own book on AI: The Big Nine.) #WorldBookDay

Hello! It’s my birthday today! In the past, I’ve asked you to help me celebrate by supporting causes near and dear to me. Today, I’m going to ask you for something different. So please read on… 2 - As a futurist and as an American, I believe very strongly in public service. I consider it my civic duty and moral obligation to make positive contributions back to my country.

I've spent two solid days reading papers and books published in the 1980s - early 2000s by prominent thinkers who were predicting the next 50-100 years. I've noticed some common threads..... They all:

- argued Japan would be the dominant economic force, behind America

- completely missed China's ascent

- thought Russia would implode by 2020 <or>

- said the dominant global conflict would be US vs Russia

- thought climate change was temporary/ a fad

1- Our best science fiction and fantasy writers help us see the future as it is unfolding in the present. They force us to view our worlds through a different lens. They make us confront uncomfortable truths. And they compel us into taking action. 2 - With that in mind, I'm recommending that we all re-read @neilhimself's American Gods. For me, it was a brilliant story about religion, about tribalism, and about the role technology plays in changing how we think, act, learn, love. (It's also my favorite of Neil's works.)

1 - My dad is in the hospital, again, for the third time in four weeks. The reason? Various "problems" diagnosed by various specialists. Here's my diagnosis: the guys is on 14 different medications, prescribed by 4 different doctors, who aren't looking at the bigger picture. 2 - Somehow in America, this is what we've allowed to happen:

• The standard of care has been to forego rigorous discovery--determining why, specifically, someone is sick--for piling on more meds. (Argue with me all you want, but show me evidence I'm wrong.)

1 - This morning I have some thoughts about immigration, what's happening at America's southern border, the Trump Administration's use of the Bible to justify separating families, and future scenarios/ implications.

Here come the tweets. 2 - It's clear to me that the genesis for separating families at the border stems from the Trump Administration's zero-tolerance attitude on immigration.

Mini-tweet storm's a'coming..... please stand by.

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1- Dinesh D'Souza's book, "The End of Racism," was the subject of my sophomore year rhetorical criticism competition speech and analysis in college. (I was on the speech team and I also competed in policy debate.) I spent a significant amount of time with all 750 pages of it.

1 - Journalists, foundations that fund journalism, publishers, city officials, venture capitalists/ hedgies who've bought news orgs, and people who care about democracy, we need to have a chat this morning.

Like, right now. 2 - Some of you were at #ONA17 and at the recent @knightfdn Media Forum, and you heard my catastrophic scenarios for the near-future of news. These weren't predictions. I don't make predictions.

These were plausible data-driven models showing where we were headed.