Every few years, a cluster of technologies arrives that makes you stop and ask whether the people building them are solving real problems or simply demonstrating that the problems can be solved. The twelve innovations I want to walk through today span both categories simultaneously — and the ones you’d initially dismiss as novelties are often the ones with the most serious implications lurking underneath.

Let me take them in turn.

The Lollipop That Plays Music Through Your Bones

Bone conduction audio is not new. The technology has been used in military headsets, hearing aids, and open-ear sports headphones for years. What’s new is Lollipop Star’s decision to embed it in candy. Biting down on the lollipop transmits music through the jawbone directly to the inner ear, bypassing the eardrum entirely.

The obvious response is laughter. The less obvious response is to notice that bone conduction audio represents a genuinely different relationship between sound and the body — one that keeps the ears open, that can serve people with certain forms of hearing impairment, and that creates audio experiences invisible to anyone watching. Embedding it in a consumable product is absurd. It is also a demonstration that the delivery mechanism for bone conduction doesn’t have to be a device strapped to your skull. Once you’ve seen the principle applied to a lollipop, you start wondering what else it could be embedded in.

Scalp Intelligence in Ten Seconds

HeyCheckScalp is a diagnostic wand with 60x magnification and AI analysis that grades hairline recession and crown thinning in under ten seconds. It automates a process that dermatologists and trichologists have historically performed subjectively, with inconsistent results.

This is less interesting as a hair care product than as a demonstration of what AI-assisted physical diagnosis looks like at the consumer level. The same combination of high-magnification imaging and rapid pattern recognition that grades a hairline can be applied to skin lesions, wound healing, eye conditions, and dozens of other diagnostic assessments that currently require either a specialist or significant subjectivity. The scalp audit is a narrow application of a broad capability. The broad capability is the story.

A Phone That Starts Fires

The Oukitel WP63 is a rugged smartphone with a 20,000mAh battery and a built-in electric igniter capable of starting physical fires. The stated use case is outdoor and emergency survival. The product reality is a consumer device with fire-starting capability in the hands of anyone who buys one.

The immediate practical applications are real — a hiking party in a remote location with a dead lighter and a functioning phone has a genuine problem solved. The liability and regulatory questions are equally real and considerably harder. This device exists. It will be sold. The question of what category it belongs in — survival tool, dual-use technology, regulatory challenge waiting to happen — is not yet answered, and the answer will set a precedent for how we think about consumer devices with capabilities that straddle the line between utility and danger.

The Holographic Companion

Lepro’s Ami is an 8-inch desktop display housing a holographic companion designed to sense moods, build emotional attachments, and move beyond the passive responsiveness of voice assistants toward something more actively relational. It is not, in itself, a transformative technology. The holographic display is modest. The AI underneath is likely a refined version of what already exists.

What is interesting about Ami is not what it does but what it indicates about the market it is addressing. Loneliness in developed societies has been declared a public health epidemic by multiple governments. The demographic it targets — people living alone, people with limited social connection, elderly individuals with reduced mobility — is large and growing. Ami is an imperfect product entering a real gap. The companies that build better versions of this category over the next decade are addressing one of the most significant public health challenges of our time, even if the current execution looks more like a toy than a solution.

The Blade That Thinks It’s a Laser

Seattle Ultrasonics’ C-200 operates at 30,000 vibrations per second — fast enough that a chef’s knife passes through dense materials with what users describe as zero resistance. The vibration is entirely imperceptible to the hand holding it. The cutting experience is, by all accounts, genuinely strange: the blade behaves like a much sharper version of itself.

The professional kitchen applications are immediate and significant. Dense proteins, hard cheeses, layered pastries, delicate ingredients that conventional blades crush rather than cut — all of these are legitimate problems that ultrasonic cutting addresses with real efficiency gains. The technology is already used in food manufacturing at industrial scale. The C-200 brings it to the professional kitchen. The question of when it reaches the home kitchen is not whether but how fast the price comes down.

Fingernails as Displays

iPolish makes press-on acrylics with embedded microscopic electrical components that change color instantly via a smartphone app. The nails are, in functional terms, small programmable displays applied to fingers.

The immediate market is fashion and personalization, and it is substantial — the global nail care market exceeds $11 billion annually. But the more interesting framing is what this represents: the beginning of wearable technology that is genuinely indistinguishable from fashion. The gap between a color-changing nail and a nail that displays information, monitors biometrics, or interacts with other connected devices is a design and miniaturization challenge, not a conceptual one. iPolish is at the novelty end of a spectrum whose other end is genuinely significant.

The Robot That Tows Your Car

Toyota’s Guide Mobi is a self-driving robot that physically connects to a passenger vehicle and takes over its guide-by-wire steering system, providing autonomous summon capability without requiring the vehicle to have its own LIDAR or autonomous hardware. The robot does the autonomous navigation. The car provides the propulsion.

This is a genuinely clever solution to a real economic problem. Full autonomy in a vehicle requires expensive sensor arrays and processing systems. Guide Mobi offloads all of that to a small, reusable robot that operates in constrained environments — parking structures, lots, defined campus areas — where the navigation problem is tractable without the full sensor suite required for open-road autonomy. Fleets of parking robots serving legacy vehicles that were never designed for autonomy is a more plausible near-term deployment model than waiting for every car to be replaced with a fully autonomous one.

The Haircut That Can’t Go Wrong

Glyde is a consumer haircutting system that automatically adjusts blade lengths in real time based on the position of a sensor-laden tracking band worn across the user’s face. The AI knows where the blade is and adjusts the cut accordingly, preventing the most common home-cutting error: uneven fades.

The tracking band is, admittedly, an awkward piece of the design. But the underlying problem — that home haircutting requires spatial precision that most people don’t have — is real, and the market for home cutting tools has expanded dramatically since 2020. Glyde is a first-generation solution to a spatial precision problem in a consumer context. The principle — real-time tool adjustment based on tracked position — has applications in medical devices, precision assembly, and professional tools well beyond hair care.

The Pet Whose Soul Survives

OlloBot is a companion cyber-pet that stores its entire learned personality — its memories, behavioral patterns, and developed relationship history with the owner — in a removable physical module called the Heart. If the hardware breaks, the digital identity survives intact and can be transplanted to a new body.

This is philosophically stranger than it sounds. The question of what constitutes the identity of a digital companion — whether it is the hardware, the software, the accumulated interaction history, or some combination — has implications that extend well beyond the toy market. OlloBot is a toy-scale exploration of a question that will eventually be asked about much more significant digital entities: AI companions, digital assistants, systems that have accumulated years of personalized interaction with a specific human. The removable Heart is a design answer to an identity question. The question will recur at much larger scales.

The Engine That Burns Like a Tornado

Venus Aerospace’s Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine burns fuel via continuous supersonic shockwaves spinning inside the engine chamber rather than the steady-state combustion of conventional rocket engines. The result is significantly higher energy density from the same fuel load. Venus Aerospace’s target: Mach 6 transcontinental travel, compressing a coast-to-coast journey to approximately one hour.

This is serious propulsion science with serious institutional backing. Rotating detonation combustion has been a research focus at NASA, DARPA, and multiple defense contractors for over a decade, with demonstrations in test environments producing real performance gains. The challenge is not the combustion physics but the engineering of materials capable of surviving sustained operation under those conditions. Venus Aerospace is one of several companies racing toward hypersonic commercial travel with RDRE technology. The race is real, the timeline is uncertain, and the outcome — if it arrives — reshapes the geography of global commerce and connection more profoundly than any transport technology since the jet engine.

The World Through Your Pet’s Eyes

GlocalMe’s PetCam is a 1080p action camera with two-way audio designed for animal collars, giving owners a real-time view of the world from their pet’s perspective. The immediate use case is monitoring and connection. The more interesting implication is what distributed animal-mounted sensing networks could eventually mean for environmental monitoring, wildlife research, and urban mapping.

A city with thousands of pets wearing cameras is a city with a distributed sensor network at ground level, capable of capturing street-level conditions, crowd movements, and environmental changes in real time. The applications range from traffic management to public safety to ecological monitoring in natural environments. The consumer product is a pet camera. The long-term infrastructure it contributes to is considerably larger.

Dinosaurs That Know You’re Standing There

Bionic dinosaurs — highly advanced animatronics with spatial sensors, fluid reactive behavior, and deployments in educational and tourism settings — represent the current frontier of what physical robots can be made to feel like in human-facing environments. They are not performing scripted animations. They are responding to the specific humans in their immediate environment in real time.

The educational implication is straightforward: a bionic theropod that responds to a child’s movements creates an engagement with prehistoric life that no film, no textbook, and no static museum exhibit can replicate. The broader implication is about the uncanny valley and how close robotics is coming to crossing it. An animatronic that doesn’t perform at you but responds to you is a categorically different experience — and the spatial sensing and behavioral AI that makes that possible is the same technology stack being developed for humanoid robots, autonomous vehicles, and robotic care companions. The dinosaur is the demonstration. What it demonstrates matters far beyond the theme park.

The Pattern Underneath

Taken individually, each of these technologies is interesting in its own right. Taken together, they illustrate something important about where technology is at this specific moment.

The boundaries between categories are dissolving. Candy is now an audio device. A fingernail is now a display. A parking robot controls a car it was never installed in. A pet toy wrestles with questions of digital identity. A lollipop and a rocket engine are both, in their different ways, exploring the same principle: that the established design of a thing — what it is made of, where it lives, how it interacts with the human body — is more negotiable than it used to be.

The moment when the established design of a thing becomes negotiable is the moment when the interesting work begins. Most of these twelve innovations are early and imperfect. A few of them are pointing at something significant. The skill worth developing, in a moment like this, is telling the difference — not between the serious and the silly, but between the serious things that look silly and the silly things that look serious.

That skill is harder than it sounds. The lollipop that transmits music through your jawbone looks ridiculous. The question it raises — what else can bone conduction be embedded in? — is not ridiculous at all.

Related Reading

The Future of Wearables: When Technology Disappears Into the Body

Wired — The ongoing documentation of how wearable technology is moving from devices worn on the body toward systems embedded in, attached to, and indistinguishable from the body itself

Rotating Detonation Engines: The Physics and the Promise

NASA — The technical foundation for the propulsion technology at the core of hypersonic commercial travel ambitions, from the institution that has been developing it longest

Digital Companions and the Loneliness Economy

Harvard Business Review — The market and social analysis behind the emerging category of AI and holographic companions, and why the demographic trends driving demand are more significant than the current products serving it

The post Twelve Inventions That Prove the Future Has a Sense of Humor — And Means Business appeared first on Futurist Speaker.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

Every generation of computing has been defined by where the computer lived.

The mainframe lived in a room. The desktop lived on a desk. The laptop lived in a bag. The smartphone lived in a pocket. Each transition compressed the computer further into the fabric of daily life — made it more personal, more portable, more present. Each one seemed, at the time, like the logical endpoint. Each one turned out to be a waypoint.

The next transition is the most fundamental of all, and it’s happening now in early, awkward, expensive form. The computer is leaving the device entirely — dissolving out of the screen, out of the rectangle, and into the physical space around you. Computing is becoming spatial. And when that transition completes, the way we work, create, communicate, heal, build, and inhabit the world will look as different from today as today looks from the era of the mainframe.

What Spatial Computing Actually Is

The term gets used loosely, so let’s be precise. Spatial computing is the integration of digital information and digital interaction into three-dimensional physical space — not displayed on a surface you look at, but overlaid on, embedded in, or mixed with the environment you inhabit. Your hands become the input device. Your field of view becomes the display. The room becomes the computer.

This is distinct from virtual reality, which replaces the physical world with a digital one. Spatial computing works with physical space rather than substituting for it. A digital object appears on your physical desk. A data visualization floats at eye level in your actual office. A surgical overlay maps onto a real patient in a real operating room. The physical and the digital occupy the same space simultaneously, each enriching the other rather than one displacing the other.

Spatial computing blends digital content with the physical world, providing an infinite canvas that enables businesses to reinvent workspaces and enhance everyday productivity — with apps freed from the boundaries of a display, so they can appear side by side at any scale.

That last phrase — freed from the boundaries of a display — is the key. Every limitation of every screen-based computing paradigm has been, fundamentally, the limitation of the frame. The frame constrains size, constrains dimensionality, constrains the relationship between the information and the physical context it’s meant to inform. Spatial computing removes the frame. The information lives in the world.

Where It Actually Stands Right Now

Apple’s Vision Pro, now running on the M5 chip with visionOS 26, is the current high-water mark for spatial computing at consumer scale — and it is instructive both for what it demonstrates and for what it reveals about how far the technology still has to travel.

The Vision Pro set a new benchmark for mixed reality, with ultra-high-resolution displays, spatial audio, and seamless integration into Apple’s ecosystem — and the 2025 M5 update refines the experience in meaningful ways, especially for the professionals and developers who rely on it most. The comfort improvements matter more than they might seem. A technology that people can wear for eight hours rather than ninety minutes is a categorically different tool for professional use.

The enterprise adoption is where the most interesting things are happening. A New York ophthalmologist became the first surgeon to perform cataract surgery using the Vision Pro, with a platform called ScopeXR that streams live feeds from 3D digital surgical microscopes directly into the headset, overlaying preoperative diagnostic data on the operative field. That surgeon’s observation about the implications deserves to be taken seriously: the ability to bring the world’s best specialist into any operating room, at any hour, from anywhere on the planet, is not a marginal improvement in surgical capability. It’s a structural change in the geography of expertise.

NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform is streaming massive 3D engineering and simulation datasets to Vision Pro, enabling enterprises to build digital twins of products, facilities, and processes to test and optimize designs before constructing them in the physical world. JigSpace is using on-device AI to make complex technical information — wind turbines, manufacturing assemblies, industrial systems — inspectable and understandable in three dimensions rather than in flat documents and slide decks. Zillow is letting people walk through homes before they exist or before they visit.

visionOS 26 introduces widgets that become spatial and seamlessly integrate into a user’s space, spatial scenes that use generative AI to add stunning lifelike depth to photos, and new shared spatial experiences for Vision Pro users in the same room. Each of these is a small step. Collectively they represent a platform being built out into daily life — the same pattern that made the smartphone first essential and then invisible.

The Honest Constraints

Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing says the only thing he’s unsure about is when spatial computing will take off — not whether. That distinction is important, and the honest assessment of where the technology sits right now requires holding both truths simultaneously.

Apple shipped just 390,000 Vision Pro units in 2024, and around 3,000 apps are designed specifically for Vision Pro — a figure that lags far behind the rapid growth of the iPhone App Store after its launch in 2008. Meta still dominates the broader sector at around 80% of sales with its Quest headsets.

The weight, the price — currently around $3,500 — and the social awkwardness of wearing a computing device on your face in shared environments are real constraints that no software update resolves. The technology is demonstrably capable. The form factor is not yet socially normalized. These are two different problems with two different solutions on two different timelines.

Reports suggest Apple’s focus may be pivoting toward lightweight smart glasses, where Meta has already seen success — a strategic acknowledgment that the path to mass adoption runs through wearability that’s closer to sunglasses than to a device strapped to your face. That pivot, if it happens, doesn’t represent a retreat from spatial computing. It represents the technology finding its consumer form.

The Industries Being Rebuilt

The enterprise applications are already outrunning the consumer narrative, and they tell a clearer story about where the fundamental value is.

Healthcare is the most immediately transformative domain. The surgical overlay application is only the most dramatic example. Medical training, patient education, remote consultation, rehabilitation therapy, anatomical visualization for diagnosis — every application that currently relies on two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional biological systems improves when the representation becomes three-dimensional and spatially accurate. A medical student learning cardiac anatomy by examining a floating, rotatable, accurate-scale model of a specific patient’s heart is learning in a way that no textbook or even cadaver can fully replicate.

Manufacturing and industrial design are equally transformed. The ability to walk through a full-scale digital prototype of a product or facility before a single physical component is manufactured eliminates entire categories of expensive mistakes. Boeing, Airbus, and automotive manufacturers have been using early versions of spatial visualization tools for years. The current generation makes those tools accessible to design teams, maintenance technicians, and training programs rather than restricting them to specialized visualization labs.

Architecture and real estate are obvious beneficiaries. The Zillow application is the consumer version of a transformation happening across the entire built environment industry — the shift from two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional spaces to three-dimensional representations experienced at actual scale. A client who has walked through a building that doesn’t exist yet makes better decisions and has more realistic expectations than one who has approved a floor plan and a rendering.

Education is perhaps the deepest long-term opportunity. Every concept that is currently taught through abstraction — molecular biology, astrophysics, history, engineering mechanics, musical structure — can be taught through experience when the teaching environment is spatial. The difference between telling a student that a cell membrane is selectively permeable and letting them interact with a spatially accurate model of one at the scale of a room is the difference between a description and an understanding.

The Competitive Landscape

Apple and Meta are the current leading platforms, but the competitive dynamics are more complex than a two-company race.

Meta’s strategy has been volume and accessibility — Quest headsets at consumer price points, building the installed base that attracts developers, who build the applications that attract more users. The mixed reality space is heating up, with competitors like Meta, Samsung, and others ramping up their efforts. Samsung’s entry into smart glasses signals that the major consumer electronics manufacturers understand that spatial computing is not a niche category but a platform transition — the kind that reshapes the entire device landscape rather than adding a new device type to an existing one.

Microsoft’s HoloLens, which pioneered many of the enterprise spatial computing use cases now being adopted on Vision Pro, has receded from its early prominence — a cautionary tale about the difficulty of defining a market before the hardware is comfortable and affordable enough for broad adoption. The underlying technology and the enterprise relationships Microsoft built remain valuable, but the first-mover advantage in hardware platform transitions is less durable than it is in software.

The Chinese manufacturers — Xreal, ByteDance’s Pico, and several others — are building competent spatial computing hardware at significantly lower price points than Apple, targeting the consumer segments and the emerging-market enterprise customers that premium Western hardware can’t reach. The spatial computing platform war will be fought across multiple price tiers simultaneously, and the winner at the premium tier is not guaranteed to be the winner at scale.

What Changes When This Matures

The full implications of spatial computing at maturity are difficult to overstate and easy to understate simultaneously.

Consider what happens to the office when the desk can be anywhere. The monitor, the keyboard, the physical separation between information and physical environment — all of these disappear when computing is spatial. The office becomes a coordination space for humans rather than an infrastructure space for computers. The work can happen anywhere the worker is, with the full computing environment available in physical space around them. Remote work stops being a degraded version of office work and becomes simply work — as rich, as collaborative, as spatially aware as any physical office, without the commute.

Consider what happens to retail when every product can be experienced before purchase in accurate three-dimensional scale in the customer’s actual space. The furniture you want, placed in your actual living room, at actual scale, in the actual light of the actual time of day — before you buy it, before it ships, before a truck arrives. The reduction in returns alone would transform the economics of e-commerce.

Consider what happens to training across every industry when the training environment is fully spatial. The aviation simulator, the surgical trainer, the nuclear power plant emergency response drill — all of these currently require expensive dedicated physical infrastructure. Spatial computing makes them available wherever the trainee is, at whatever frequency the training schedule requires, at a fraction of the current cost.

The Longer View

Every platform transition in computing history has been preceded by a period of expensive, awkward, early hardware that served a small professional and enthusiast market while the technology matured toward the form that would achieve mass adoption. The mainframe gave way to the minicomputer, which gave way to the personal computer, which gave way to the laptop, which gave way to the smartphone. At each transition, the device that would eventually dominate looked nothing like the devices that preceded it.

The Apple Vision Pro is the expensive, awkward early hardware. It is demonstrating the capability while the industry works toward the form that mass adoption requires — lighter, cheaper, socially acceptable, integrated into daily life as seamlessly as the smartphone has been integrated. That form is probably a pair of glasses indistinguishable from ordinary eyewear that delivers spatial computing overlaid on the normal visual field. It is probably five to ten years away as a mass-market product.

What happens between now and then is the platform being built — the developer ecosystem, the enterprise applications, the standards and protocols, the user interaction patterns that will define spatial computing the way the swipe and the tap defined mobile computing. The companies and individuals investing in that platform-building now are positioning themselves for a transition that will look, in retrospect, as obvious and as total as every previous computing platform transition looks in retrospect.

The computer is leaving the screen. The question isn’t whether. It’s how fast.

Related Reading

Apple Vision Pro and the Enterprise: What Spatial Computing Actually Delivers

Apple Newsroom — The most comprehensive documentation of current real-world enterprise spatial computing deployments — the actual applications, the actual workflows, and the actual companies building on the platform today

The Spatial Computing Market: Forecast and Competitive Landscape

IDC — Rigorous market analysis of where spatial computing hardware and software stand today, what the adoption trajectory looks like across consumer and enterprise segments, and how the competitive dynamics between Apple, Meta, and emerging players are likely to resolve

When Computing Leaves the Screen: The Full Implications of Spatial Interfaces

Harvard Business Review — A strategic analysis of the second and third-order business implications of spatial computing at maturity — how it transforms office design, retail, training, healthcare, and the economics of every industry that currently depends on two-dimensional representations of three-dimensional reality

The post The Computer That Disappeared Into the World appeared first on Futurist Speaker.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

In September 2025, two SEC filings showed up quietly in a database that tracks new company formations. A Delaware corporation called Astromech had raised $30 million. No press release. No announcement. No explanation of what it was building or why.

By March 2026, a second filing showed another $10.5 million had come in. Total funding: $40.5 million. Valuation: $2 billion. Still no revenue. Still almost no public information about what the company actually does.

The founders, it turned out, were Ben Lamm and George Church — the same two people who built Colossal Biosciences into a $10 billion de-extinction company. And when Lamm finally described what Astromech is trying to do, the ambition was staggering even by his standards.

He wants to build a machine that can predict how biology will change — before it changes.

What Astromech Is Building

Think about what a weather forecast actually does. It takes data about current conditions — temperature, pressure, humidity, wind patterns — feeds it through models built on decades of atmospheric science, and produces a prediction about what the atmosphere will do next. The forecast isn’t perfect. But it’s good enough to be genuinely useful. Good enough that we’ve built entire industries around it.

Astromech is trying to do something similar for biology.

The platform, as Lamm has described it, combines two capabilities. The first is deep learning algorithms that identify patterns across biological systems and species — patterns in how genes are expressed, how diseases spread, how organisms respond to environmental change, how vulnerabilities develop over time. The second is something called Bayesian ancestral reconstruction, which is a mathematical method for working backward through evolutionary history to model how a biological system got to where it is — and then forward, to project where it’s likely to go next.

Put those two things together and you get what Lamm calls a unified biological intelligence architecture. A system that doesn’t just describe biology as it is today, but predicts where it’s headed.

If it works, the applications are almost too broad to list. Disease risk. Pandemic early warning. Drug resistance forecasting. Agricultural vulnerability assessment. Conservation biology planning. Wildlife health monitoring. Livestock resilience modeling. The question of which specific pathogens are most likely to cause problems five years from now. The question of which ecosystems are most likely to collapse and why.

“If the model works the way we anticipate,” Lamm said, “it will be transformative for prediction modeling that will impact vulnerability and resilience applicable to microbes, human healthcare, disease, livestock, and wildlife.”

That is a sentence that covers almost every living system on Earth.

Where This Came From

Astromech did not appear from nowhere. It grew directly out of the work Colossal has been doing since 2021.

Think about what Colossal has actually built over the past five years. A genomic database containing the DNA of extinct and living species at a depth and breadth that has never existed before. Computational tools — many of them now commercialized through Form Bio — for analyzing massive biological datasets. A scientific team that thinks routinely about evolutionary timescales, about how species changed over thousands of years, about the genetic mechanisms that drive adaptation and vulnerability. A set of techniques for reading ancient DNA and comparing it to living genomes to identify what changed and when.

All of that is, at its core, the raw material for exactly what Astromech is trying to build. A model that has been trained on the history of biological change across deep time — one that can look at a living system and say: based on everything we know about how biology evolves, here is what we expect to happen next, and here is where the system is most vulnerable.

Astromech is hiring for genomic inference, synthesis design, ancestral modeling, gene regulation, sequence reconstruction, metabolic modeling, and protein folding. The job listings read like a map of the exact scientific capabilities that Colossal spent four years assembling. The spinout isn’t a departure from the main mission. It’s the main mission’s most powerful tool, built out as its own company.

Medicine reacts after damage begins. Astromech aims to predict threats before they emerge—turning biology from a crisis response system into an early-warning engine for what comes next.

The Problem It’s Solving

One of the persistent frustrations of modern medicine and public health is that we are almost always reactive. A new pathogen emerges, and we scramble to understand it. A disease becomes drug-resistant, and we scramble to find alternatives. An ecosystem begins to collapse, and we scramble to identify the cause. The scrambling is expensive, slow, and often too late.

The COVID-19 pandemic made this painfully visible to the entire world. The virus existed in animal populations long before it crossed into humans. The genetic tools to identify it were available. The computational power to model its likely behavior was available. What wasn’t available was a system sophisticated enough to put those pieces together and say: this is coming, and this is what it will do.

Astromech is a direct response to that gap. Not the only response — there are other early-warning and pandemic-preparedness initiatives working on related problems. But it may be the most ambitious one, because it’s not just trying to spot specific known threats earlier. It’s trying to build a general model of biological vulnerability — one that could flag a threat that nobody has identified yet, because the model has recognized the pattern that precedes it.

That’s the difference between a smoke detector and a system that predicts where fires are most likely to start.

Why This Valuation Makes Sense

Two billion dollars for a company with no revenue and no product yet in the market sounds, on the surface, like the kind of number that raises eyebrows. But the valuation logic is straightforward if you understand the market.

The global pandemic preparedness market alone is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, and governments around the world spent the last five years being reminded, painfully, what under-investment in early warning systems actually costs. Drug discovery — which predictive biology could accelerate dramatically by identifying drug resistance patterns before they become treatment failures — is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Agricultural biotech, conservation biology, livestock health management: each of these is a substantial market in its own right.

A platform that works across all of them, built on some of the most sophisticated genomic and evolutionary data ever assembled, co-founded by the team that just built a $10 billion company from scratch in four years — investors have seen enough from Lamm and Church to know the ambition is real. The question isn’t whether the idea is valuable. It’s whether the science will hold.

Lamm thinks it’s undervalued. That’s the kind of thing founders say. But he said the same thing about de-extinction in 2021, and three dire wolf pups are living on a farm somewhere right now as evidence that he wasn’t wrong.

From revival to prediction—the tools keep expanding. Astromech’s bet isn’t fixing biology, but forecasting it, shifting humanity from reaction to anticipation at a planetary scale.

The Biggest Bet Yet

Each company in this series has been bigger than the one before it. Colossal brought back an extinct species. Form Bio built the operating system for a new era of biological research. Breaking developed a microbe that eats one of the most persistent pollutants in history. Each one started as a tool built to solve a specific problem, and became something larger than the problem that created it.

Astromech is the biggest bet in the portfolio. Not because the technology is further from reality — it’s actually built on real science with real precedents. But because the potential outcomes are the most consequential. A forecasting engine for biology, if it works the way Lamm describes, doesn’t just change one industry. It changes how humanity manages its relationship with the living world — from treating disease after it strikes to anticipating it before it forms.

That’s not a pharmaceutical company. That’s not a biotech company. That’s something new.

Up Next: The Colossal Foundation — the Noah’s Ark that Lamm is building at the cellular level, and what it means to preserve the genetics of every species before they’re gone.

Related Reading

The Next Pandemic Could Come From Anywhere. Here’s How Scientists Are Watching for It

Scientific American — How early-warning systems for biological threats actually work today, what their limitations are, and why predictive modeling is the frontier the field is racing toward

AlphaFold and the AI Revolution in Biology

Nature — The story of how AI cracked one of biology’s hardest problems and what it opened up — the clearest existing precedent for what a truly powerful predictive biology platform could accomplish

Can We Predict Evolution?

Quanta Magazine — A deep look at the science of evolutionary forecasting — what biologists have already shown is predictable about how living systems change, and where the real frontiers of the field lie

The post Astromech: What If You Could Predict How Biology Changes Before It Does? appeared first on Futurist Speaker.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

There is a number that should stop you cold.

Five thousand million tons.

That’s how much plastic is currently sitting in landfills, floating in oceans, and embedded in ecosystems around the world. Not the amount produced since plastic was invented — the amount that’s already out there, already dispersed, already working its way into the food chain and the water supply and the bodies of every living creature on Earth. Scientists have found plastic particles in Antarctic sea ice, in the deepest ocean trenches, and in human blood. A liter of bottled water contains, on average, nearly a quarter of a million nanoplastic fragments.

And every year, we add 390 million more tons to the pile.

The recycling system that was supposed to manage this — the one with the little arrows on the bottom of every container — handles roughly 9% of what gets produced. The rest is incinerated, buried, or abandoned. Incineration releases toxic gases. Burial means the plastic sits there for centuries. A plastic fishing line, left alone, takes 600 years to break down. A dental floss container, 80 years. A paintbrush, up to a thousand.

This is the problem that Breaking was built to solve. And the way they’re going about it is unlike anything that’s been tried before.

A Microbe That Eats Plastic for Breakfast

In 2022, researchers at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University discovered something extraordinary in their lab. A microorganism — not engineered, just found — that could break down plastic by eating it. Not one type of plastic. Multiple types. Including polyolefins, which are the toughest plastics in common use, the ones that have historically resisted every biological degradation attempt on record.

The microbe was catalogued as X-32. And what it does is genuinely remarkable. It breaks down the hydrocarbon chains inside plastic polymers — the chemical bonds that make plastic so durable and so persistent — using those plastics as its primary food source. The byproducts are carbon dioxide, water, and biomass. No toxic residue. No microplastic fragments. Just the basic building blocks of organic chemistry, which the environment already knows how to handle.

In lab tests, X-32 started breaking down paintbrush bristles, fishing wire, and dental floss within five days. At scale, it has demonstrated the ability to degrade up to 90% of certain polyesters and polyolefins in under 22 months. In plastic terms, that is essentially instantaneous.

Breaking, the company that was spun out of Colossal Biosciences in April 2024, launched with $10.5 million in seed funding specifically to develop X-32 into a commercial product. The founding team reads like a who’s-who of synthetic biology: George Church from Harvard, Donald Ingber who founded the Wyss Institute, and CEO Sukanya Punthambaker, a career synthetic biologist who has spent decades working toward exactly this kind of breakthrough.

Ben Lamm co-founded Breaking and serves on its board. Kent Wakeford, who you’ll remember as the co-CEO of Form Bio, is the executive chairman.

The pattern is the same. A tool built inside Colossal’s orbit, spun out when it became clear the problem it was solving was bigger than Colossal’s mission alone.

You can’t restore life in a plastic-filled world. Cleanup isn’t separate from revival—it’s prerequisite. Fix the environment first, or nothing else we bring back will survive.

Why This Connects to Everything Else

Lamm has been direct about why a de-extinction company is in the plastic business. You cannot restore an ecosystem if the ecosystem is full of plastic. The northern white rhino, the woolly mammoth, the Tasmanian tiger — none of them can thrive in an environment saturated with synthetic polymers that their biology has no way to process. Ecosystem restoration and plastic remediation are not two separate goals. They’re the same goal looked at from different angles.

That framing matters because it explains why Breaking isn’t just an environmental startup that happened to spin out of a biotech company. It’s a mission-critical piece of Colossal’s larger puzzle — the piece that has to work before the rest of the restoration agenda can fully work.

The first commercial applications are targeted at the food waste and composting industry, which turns out to be a surprisingly concrete entry point. Food waste in American landfills costs taxpayers $16 billion per year. The reason so much of it goes to landfills rather than compost is that it’s contaminated with plastic packaging that composting facilities can’t process. If X-32 can remove that plastic contamination efficiently and cheaply, it unlocks a massive and largely untapped composting infrastructure — with direct benefits for greenhouse gas emissions, landfill reduction, and soil health.

From there, the roadmap extends to wastewater treatment, marine bioreactors for ocean microplastic cleanup, and industrial waste management. Each application uses the same core technology, scaled and adapted for a different environment.

The Hard Question

There is an obvious question that every thinking person asks when they hear about a microbe that eats plastic: what happens when you release a plastic-eating organism into the environment?

It’s a fair question. Breaking takes it seriously. Lamm has been consistent that X-32 has no known negative environmental ramifications, that it produces only harmless byproducts, and that the team is focused carefully on all regulatory and safety requirements before any open-environment deployment. The initial applications — food waste facilities, industrial wastewater systems, controlled bioreactors — are contained environments where behavior is observable and risks are manageable.

The broader question of deploying engineered organisms in open ecosystems is one that the regulatory frameworks are still catching up to. This is not unique to Breaking. It’s the central challenge of the entire synthetic biology field. The science is moving faster than the governance. That gap is not an argument against the science — it’s an argument for building the governance faster.

What sets Breaking apart from most of the solutions that have been proposed to the plastic crisis is that it actually works on polyolefins. Polyethylene. Polypropylene. The most common plastics in the world, present in virtually every form of packaging, textile, and consumer product. Every previous microbial approach has stumbled on polyolefins because the carbon bonds are simply too strong for most biological systems to break. X-32 breaks them.

From genomes to software to cleanup—this is a coordinated system for rewriting biology itself. The tools are finally matching the scale of the problems we created.

The Bigger Picture

Each company in this series has shown us a different face of the same underlying strategy. Colossal builds the biological tools. Form Bio builds the software to manage the data those tools generate. Breaking takes the synthetic biology capability developed in Colossal’s labs and turns it toward one of the most urgent environmental problems on the planet.

Together, they form something that starts to look less like a collection of companies and more like a coordinated system — one designed to read the living world, understand it, and intervene in it at the level where the real damage is being done.

Plastic is one of the defining problems of the last century. The tools to solve it are, for the first time, starting to look adequate to the scale of the challenge.

Five thousand million tons is a big number. X-32 is a very small organism. But so is every microbe that has ever changed the world.

Up Next: Astromech — the stealth AI startup that just surfaced with a $2 billion valuation and a goal that might be the most ambitious thing Ben Lamm has ever tried: predicting biological change before it happens.

Related Reading

The Plastic Problem Is Worse Than You Think

National Geographic — A comprehensive look at the scale of global plastic contamination, where it ends up, and why the recycling system was never designed to handle what we’re actually producing

The Promise and Peril of Plastic-Eating Microbes

Nature — A measured scientific assessment of microbial plastic degradation — what’s been demonstrated in labs, what the path to scale actually looks like, and what questions still need answering

Synthetic Biology and the Future of Environmental Remediation

World Economic Forum — How engineered organisms are moving from laboratory curiosities to serious environmental tools, and what the governance frameworks need to look like before widespread deployment

The post Breaking: The Company Using Biology to Eat the Plastic Crisis appeared first on Futurist Speaker.

Ben Lamm (left) and George Church (right) pose in front of a woolly mammoth.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

When Colossal Biosciences launched in 2021, one of the first things Ben Lamm did was sit down with his team and map out all the software they would need to actually do the work. The list came to 55 different applications and algorithms. Fifty-five separate tools, each handling a different piece of the research pipeline, none of them talking to each other particularly well, none of them designed for the kind of work Colossal was trying to do.

There was no single platform that could take a scientist from a raw idea all the way through data analysis, workflow management, result visualization, and collaboration with researchers at other institutions. Not for this kind of biology. Not at this scale. Not with the complexity that de-extinction research demands.

So they built one.

And then — almost by accident — they realized they’d built something the entire life sciences industry had been waiting for.

The Problem Nobody Had Solved

Here’s what biological research actually looks like inside a modern lab, away from the glamour of the headlines. A scientist has a dataset — maybe a genome sequence, maybe the results of a CRISPR editing experiment, maybe microarray analysis from a gene therapy trial. That dataset is enormous. It connects to other datasets. It needs to be analyzed using computational models, cross-referenced with other results, validated through additional experiments, and eventually shared with collaborators at other universities or companies who are using completely different software systems.

In most labs today, that process is held together with institutional knowledge, personal preference, and a lot of custom code that one specific researcher wrote and that no one else fully understands. When that researcher leaves, a piece of the lab’s institutional memory walks out the door with them.

The situation at Harvard, where Colossal’s co-founder George Church runs one of the world’s most advanced genetics labs, was typical. Fifty-five different data systems in active use. Researchers from Colossal and Harvard trying to collaborate, but with no common infrastructure for sharing experiments, workflows, or results in a way that was consistent and reproducible.

“There was no cohesive solution,” said Kent Wakeford, who became co-CEO of Form Bio when it spun out. “So we developed one.”

Science is becoming software. When biology runs on integrated platforms, discovery accelerates, collaboration scales, and the real breakthrough isn’t the experiment—it’s the infrastructure powering it.

What Form Bio Actually Does

The simplest way to describe Form Bio is this: it’s what happens when you apply software product thinking to the workflow of science.

Scientists aren’t typically software engineers. The tools they use were mostly built by other scientists or small academic teams, optimized for specific tasks, and never designed to work together as a system. Form Bio replaces that patchwork with a single integrated platform — one place where a researcher can design an experiment, run computational analysis using AI and machine learning models, visualize the results, and share everything with collaborators anywhere in the world, with proper permissions and data security built in.

George Church, who has spent decades running one of the most productive genetics labs on the planet, put it plainly: the platform is “critical to pave the way” for the kind of science that’s now becoming possible. When one of the architects of modern genomics says your software is necessary infrastructure, that’s not a testimonial. That’s a signal.

The use cases stretch well beyond de-extinction. Drug discovery. Gene therapy development — specifically the design of AAV vectors, which are the delivery vehicles used to get gene-editing tools into human cells. Biomanufacturing. Agricultural biotech. Academic research across every field that generates large biological datasets, which is most of them now. The CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel, invested in Colossal specifically — by their own admission — not because of the mammoths, but because of the underlying capability. The computational biology infrastructure is what interested them.

The Pattern Behind the Spinout

Form Bio was spun out of Colossal in September 2022 with a $30 million Series A that was oversubscribed — meaning investors wanted in faster than the round could close. It launched as an independent company with its own leadership team, its own staff, and its own capital structure, while maintaining a close relationship with Colossal as both a customer and a co-development partner.

This is a pattern worth paying attention to, because it’s not an accident. Lamm has been explicit that Colossal’s long-term strategy involves spinning out the technologies built in the process of doing the research — letting each tool become its own company, raise its own capital, and pursue its own market, rather than trying to run everything under one roof.

It’s the same instinct that made NASA’s technology transfer program one of the most productive sources of commercial innovation in American history. When you’re solving genuinely hard problems at the frontier of what’s possible, you generate tools that have value far beyond the original problem. The question is whether you’re organized to capture that value. Lamm is organized to capture it.

Form Bio is the first example. Breaking — the plastic degradation company built on Colossal’s synthetic biology infrastructure — is the second. Astromech, the predictive biology AI that surfaced publicly just last week, is the third. Each one started as internal tooling built to solve a specific problem inside Colossal. Each one turned out to be a product.

Form Bio was born trying to bring back a woolly mammoth. Where it ends up may be considerably larger than that.

Why This Matters Beyond Biology

There’s a larger story here about what happens when software thinking meets science.

Academic research has always moved slowly, and part of the reason is structural. Scientists work in relative isolation, each lab developing its own methods, its own tools, its own ways of doing things. Reproducibility — the ability for another lab to run the same experiment and get the same result — is one of the most persistent problems in modern science, and a lot of it comes down to the fact that the computational infrastructure for sharing and standardizing workflows simply hasn’t existed.

Form Bio is building that infrastructure. The comparison its co-CEO reached for was GitHub — the platform that transformed software development by giving programmers a shared environment for building, testing, and collaborating on code. What GitHub did for software, Form Bio wants to do for biology. Create a common layer. Make the workflows reproducible. Let researchers spend their time on science instead of on data wrangling.

That’s not a small ambition. Biology is becoming the defining technology of this century in the same way that computing defined the last one. The platform that becomes the operating system for biological research — the place where scientists from Cambridge to Tokyo to Dallas all run their experiments and share their discoveries — will be one of the most consequential pieces of software infrastructure ever built.

Up Next: Breaking — how Colossal’s synthetic biology toolbox turned into a potential solution for 5,000 million tons of plastic.

Related Reading

When the CIA Invests in De-Extinction, Read the Fine Print

In-Q-Tel — The intelligence community’s venture arm explains why it backed Colossal — and makes clear the investment was about computational biology capability, not the animals

The Data Deluge Threatening to Drown Modern Science

Nature — A foundational look at why biological research generates more data than scientists can currently process, and why the tools to manage that data have become as important as the science itself

GitHub for Science? The Race to Build Research Infrastructure

MIT Technology Review — How a new generation of platforms is trying to do for biological research what GitHub did for software development — and why the stakes are higher than most people realize

The post Form Bio: The Operating System for Science appeared first on Futurist Speaker.

By Futurist Thomas Frey

There is a bowl on my kitchen counter that is slightly lopsided.

The rim dips a little on one side, and if you fill it too full, liquid threatens to overflow in that direction. The glaze pooled unevenly in the kiln and left a dark streak running through what was supposed to be a uniform blue. By any objective measure of the category “bowl,” it is an inferior product. I could replace it with a flawless version for eight dollars at any kitchen store in America.

I won’t. Because I made it, and the lopsidedness is the proof.

That imperfection is not a flaw in the usual sense. It is a record — of the hour I spent at the wheel, of the specific pressure my thumbs applied to the clay, of the particular Saturday morning when I was learning something that had nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with attention. The bowl is slightly lopsided because I made it when I was still becoming the kind of person who could make a bowl. Every time I see it, I remember that morning. A machine-perfect bowl forgets me the moment it is manufactured. This one doesn’t.

That distinction — small, domestic, nearly impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t felt it — is at the center of everything this column wants to say.

The World Doesn’t Need You to Make Anything

Let’s be honest about the premise.

In purely economic terms, you should not make your own bread, build your own furniture, throw your own pots, knit your own sweaters, or grow your own vegetables. The math does not work. A factory can produce any of these things faster, cheaper, and in most cases more consistently than a human being working by hand. A robot can weld a cleaner seam than a welder with thirty years of experience. An algorithm can generate a design in seconds that would take a skilled craftsperson hours. The productive argument for making things by hand collapsed sometime in the middle of the twentieth century and has been losing ground ever since.

This is the world we have built. It is, in many ways, a tremendous achievement. No one should romanticize the era when making everything by hand was not a choice but a necessity, when the quality of your winter depended on the quality of your weaving and a bad harvest meant genuine hunger. We escaped much of that through mechanization and we were right to.

But we also lost something in the escape, and the thing we lost is harder to name than the thing we gained. It has something to do with the relationship between effort and outcome — with the particular satisfaction that arrives when your body and your mind work together on a problem that resists easy solution, when the material pushes back, when skill accumulates slowly and visibly and in ways you can measure with your hands.

We don’t have a good word for what that satisfaction is. We tend to call it “fulfillment” or “flow” or “craft pride,” none of which quite captures the specific quality of standing back and seeing something exist in the world that did not exist before, and knowing that your hands made the difference.

What the Body Knows That the Brain Forgets

There is a category of knowledge that does not live in the head.

Neurologists call it procedural memory — the kind of knowing that is stored in the body itself, in the specific calibrated tensions of muscle and tendon, in the feedback loops between eye and hand. A carpenter who has cut mortise and tenon joints for thirty years does not think through the geometry each time. The knowledge has migrated out of the prefrontal cortex and into the hands, where it operates below the level of conscious deliberation. This is why experienced woodworkers describe the feeling of a hand plane running correctly as something they feel before they analyze — a particular resistance that signals the grain is right, a sound that tells them the edge needs sharpening before they have consciously registered any complaint.

This embodied knowledge is not a lesser kind of knowing. In some respects it is a deeper one. It is the knowledge that survives when everything else is stripped away — when language fails, when abstraction loses its grip, when the mind is too tired or too old or too overwhelmed to reason its way to an answer. The hands still know. The hands, in moments of emergency or grief or disorientation, often know what to do when the mind does not.

This is part of what people mean, though they don’t always say it so precisely, when they report that making things helped them through difficult times. The grief counselor who started woodworking after her husband died. The veteran who found something stabilizing in the exacting patience of watchmaking. The executive who burned out and spent a year learning to throw pots before she could think clearly again. They are not reporting a hobby. They are reporting that when the mind could not hold itself together, the hands provided an organizing principle. The making was the thinking, in the only register available.

In an age of perfect machines, the slight imperfections of human work become the most valuable proof we were here.

Why Imperfection Is the Point

The Arts and Crafts Movement of the late nineteenth century — William Morris, John Ruskin, the guild workshops that sprang up in England and then America as a direct rebuke to industrial production — was founded on a single conviction: that the imperfection inherent in handmade objects was not a defect to be overcome but a value to be preserved. The slight irregularities in a hand-thrown pot, the tool marks left visible in hand-carved furniture, the minute variations in hand-woven cloth — these were evidence of human presence, of the particular person who made the particular thing, of the fact that no two pieces would ever be exactly alike.

Ruskin put it plainly: the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art. What he meant was that perfect uniformity is the signature of a machine, not a person, and that the presence of variation — the record of a mind and a body working in real time on real material — is precisely what gives handmade objects their distinct value. You are not paying for flawlessness. You are paying for evidence.

The Japanese have a word for this, wabi-sabi — an aesthetic that finds beauty specifically in imperfection, transience, and incompleteness. A cracked tea bowl repaired with gold lacquer through the practice of kintsugi is considered more beautiful after the repair than before the break, because the repair is part of the object’s history, and the history is the object’s meaning. A bowl without history is just a bowl. A bowl that has broken and been mended by someone who cared enough to mend it beautifully is a different category of thing entirely.

This is precisely what mass production cannot provide, and what automation cannot approximate. A machine can produce a flawless surface. It cannot produce evidence.

What the Craft Revival Is Actually Telling Us

Something interesting has been happening in the culture for the past decade, accelerating as automation has spread.

The crafts are coming back. Not the crafts of necessity — not because people need to make their own candles or throw their own pots or build their own furniture — but the crafts of choice. The U.S. arts and crafts market was worth $7.52 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow significantly through the end of the decade. Pottery studios have waiting lists. Woodworking classes fill in hours. Bread baking during the pandemic lockdowns was widely mocked as a cliché until people noticed that it never stopped — that millions of people who discovered the specific pleasure of working with yeast and flour kept baking long after the grocery stores reopened.

Gen Z, the generation most thoroughly native to the digital world, is among the most enthusiastic participants. They are learning to knit from TikTok and throw pots from YouTube and restore furniture from Instagram. They are doing this not because they have to but because something in the digital environment — its frictionlessness, its infinite scroll, its capacity to deliver stimulation without resistance — creates a hunger for its opposite. A hunger for things that push back, that require patience, that fail in specific and instructive ways, that accumulate skill slowly and visibly in the hands.

The revival is not nostalgia. It is diagnosis. People are telling us, with their enrollment in pottery classes and their bread baking and their sourdough starters and their hand-planed furniture, that something the fully automated world does not provide is still necessary to human beings. The name of that thing, roughly, is: the experience of making something out of nothing, by your own effort, in a way that leaves a mark.

Making something by hand demands your full attention—and returns something rare in modern life: presence, focus, and proof you were there.

What Making Things Gives Back

The bowl on my counter is evidence of a morning. It is also evidence of a kind of attention that is genuinely difficult to access through other means.

When you are working with clay or wood or bread dough or yarn or any other material that has its own properties and resistances and will, you cannot be anywhere else. The material will not allow it. Divided attention produces divided work — you feel it immediately, in the seam that doesn’t close cleanly, in the clay wall that thins on one side, in the bread that didn’t proof long enough because you were half somewhere else. The work demands all of you, or it shows you where you were absent.

This is the opposite of most of how we now spend our time, which is characterized by radical fragmentation — the tab-switching, the notification-checking, the conversations held while doing something else, the meals eaten in front of screens. We have engineered an environment of near-total distraction and then discovered, with some surprise, that we feel vaguely incomplete in it. The specific focus that making requires is not a luxury. It is a form of rest that the fragmented mind cannot otherwise find. The craft is the therapy.

And then there is the object. The thing you hold at the end that could not have existed without you. This is not trivial in a world that increasingly delivers experiences without artifacts — where the entertainment evaporates when the stream ends, where the work product belongs to a server somewhere, where an afternoon of consuming content leaves nothing in your hands to show for it.

The bowl is slightly lopsided. I made it on a Saturday morning when I was learning something.

That is enough. In fact, in the specific and irreducible way that handmade things carry their history inside them, it is quite a lot.

Next column: “The Long Game: Legacy, Meaning, and What You Want to Leave Behind”

Related Reading

The Return of Craft: How Hand-Built Objects Are Once Again Gaining Prestige — Invaluable

The Revival of Handcrafted Art in a Digital World — Intermedia

Post-Work Society — Wikipedia

The post Making Things With Your Hands in a World That Doesn’t Need You To appeared first on Futurist Speaker.

The Future of Libraries – 2035

Upon entering, patrons are welcomed by a holographic AI receptionist ready to assist with anything they need.

I wrote my first column on the future of libraries in 2004, a time when many people were predicting libraries were going away. Digital books were emerging, the internet was becoming ubiquitous, and tech pundits were declaring physical libraries obsolete. Twenty-one years later, libraries are still going strong.

In fact, they’re thriving in ways those early digital prophets never anticipated. American Library Association data shows that public library visits have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels, with over 1.3 billion visits annually across the United States. Even more telling, 95% of libraries now offer formal or informal digital literacy training, positioning themselves as essential bridges in our increasingly digital world. Libraries will still be going strong in 2035, but they will have vastly different capabilities and uses than anything we can imagine today.

The Great Reinvention

The library of 2035 will be unrecognizable to someone transported from 2004. While books will still exist – and remain surprisingly popular – they’ll represent just one facet of institutions that have evolved into comprehensive community intelligence centers. Think of them as the physical manifestation of humanity’s collective knowledge, augmented by artificial intelligence and accessible through technologies that blur the line between digital and physical reality.

The transformation is already underway. Today, 63% of library professionals identify 24/7 access to materials as the most important feature they want to implement. This isn’t just about extending hours – it’s about fundamentally reimagining how communities interact with information and resources around the clock. By 2035, libraries will operate as always-on community neural networks, processing and distributing knowledge, skills, and resources with unprecedented efficiency.

AI: The Ultimate Librarian

Artificial intelligence will revolutionize libraries in ways that make today’s search engines look primitive. Imagine walking into a library where an AI system has already analyzed your research history, current projects, and learning style to curate a personalized knowledge pathway. This isn’t science fiction – it’s the logical evolution of systems already being tested today.

These AI librarians won’t replace human librarians; they’ll amplify their capabilities exponentially. While AI handles routine inquiries and resource recommendations, human librarians will focus on complex problem-solving, community building, and helping people navigate the ethical implications of our AI-saturated world. The partnership between human intuition and machine processing will create research experiences that are both deeply personal and incredibly powerful.

Libraries will become centers for AI literacy – a skill that will be as fundamental in 2035 as reading is today. Current research shows that libraries are already making AI literacy a primary focus of professional development efforts. By 2035, every library will offer comprehensive programs teaching people how to work with AI systems, recognize AI-generated content, and understand the implications of algorithmic decision-making in their lives.

The sophistication of these AI systems will be staggering. They’ll analyze speech patterns to detect when someone is struggling with a concept and automatically adjust explanations. They’ll recognize when a student is researching a sensitive topic and provide appropriate resources and support. They’ll even predict community information needs based on local trends and global events, pre-positioning resources and expertise where they’ll be needed most.

Step into history as Nikola Tesla comes alive in a hyper-realistic interactive hologram you can engage with at the library of the future

Extended Reality: Beyond the Physical

Virtual and augmented reality will transform libraries into portals to infinite worlds. Already, pioneering libraries are experimenting with VR headsets that transport learners to historical epochs, offering first-hand encounters with ancient Rome or bustling medieval marketplaces. By 2035, this will be standard equipment in every library system.

Imagine studying the Civil War by walking through Gettysburg as the battle unfolds around you. Picture learning marine biology by swimming through a coral reef, observing ecosystems that exist thousands of miles away or no longer exist at all. These aren’t distant dreams – they’re inevitable realities based on technology trajectories that are accelerating every year.

AR will enhance physical collections in ways that seem magical today. Hover your smart glasses over a historical artifact, and detailed 3D models, multimedia archives, and contextual information will appear in your field of vision. Ancient pottery will come alive with animations showing how it was made. Historical documents will display translations, background information, and connections to related materials automatically.
The implications go far beyond entertainment or education. Libraries will become training centers for jobs that don’t exist yet, using VR to simulate work environments and scenarios. They’ll help people overcome phobias, practice social interactions, and explore career possibilities in completely safe virtual environments.

Blockchain: The Trust Layer

Blockchain technology will solve problems libraries have wrestled with for decades while creating entirely new possibilities. By 2035, every library will issue verifiable digital credentials that can’t be faked, altered, or lost. Complete a course, master a skill, or contribute to a community project, and you’ll receive a blockchain-verified credential that will be recognized globally.

This isn’t just about certificates and badges. Libraries will use blockchain to create secure, permanent archives of community knowledge. Local history, government proceedings, environmental data, and cultural expressions will be preserved in tamper-proof digital formats that will last for generations. When a small town’s newspaper closes or a community organization disbands, their knowledge and history won’t disappear – it will live on in the blockchain.

The technology will also revolutionize resource sharing between libraries. Imagine a global network where any library patron can access specialized materials from any library worldwide, with blockchain ensuring proper attribution, usage tracking, and compensation. Rare books, specialized databases, and unique collections will become globally accessible while maintaining proper security and provenance.

By 2035, libraries will function as 24/7 community hubs, with smart locker networks bringing books, tools, and tech to everyday places like grocery stores, transit stations, and co-working spaces.

The Always-Open Library

Perhaps the most profound change will be the concept of libraries as 24/7 community resources. Smart locker networks will extend library access to grocery stores, transit stations, and community centers. Pick up a book on your way to work, and return it while shopping for groceries. The library will come to you, rather than requiring you to come to it.

These aren’t simple book lockers. They’ll house tablets, laptops, mobile hotspots, maker tools, musical instruments, and whatever else the community needs. Sixty percent of library professionals already rank multiple locker sizes as important for holding various items beyond books. By 2035, the “Library of Things” will be a comprehensive community resource sharing network that makes expensive tools and equipment accessible to everyone.

Remote work and digital nomadism will accelerate this trend. Libraries will operate satellite locations in unexpected places – airports, shopping malls, co-working spaces, even people’s homes. The physical library building will become the flagship of a distributed network that serves the entire community wherever they are.

Community Intelligence Centers

Libraries will evolve into something unprecedented in human history: community intelligence centers that combine the functions of libraries, schools, innovation labs, social services, and civic engagement platforms. They’ll be the places where artificial intelligence meets human wisdom, where global knowledge connects with local needs.

These centers will host everything from traditional book clubs to blockchain workshops. They’ll offer services ranging from 3D printing to meditation classes. They’ll provide access to technologies like brain-computer interfaces and quantum computers that individuals could never afford on their own. Most importantly, they’ll serve as neutral spaces where communities can come together to solve problems, share knowledge, and build social cohesion in an increasingly fragmented world.

The data is already pointing in this direction. Modern libraries are expanding their role as innovation hubs by creating makerspaces equipped with 3D printers, laser cutters, and VR equipment. By 2035, these spaces will house technologies we can barely imagine today – perhaps including early versions of molecular assemblers, neural interface devices, and quantum simulation systems.

The Human Element Amplified

Technology will amplify rather than replace the human elements that make libraries special. Librarians will become community learning architects, designing experiences that help people navigate an increasingly complex world. They’ll be part teacher, part therapist, part technology guide, and part community organizer.

The role will require new skills and perspectives. Librarians of 2035 will need to understand AI systems, virtual reality design, blockchain protocols, and neurodiversity accommodation. They’ll also need deeper skills in conflict resolution, mental health support, and community organizing as libraries become central to addressing social challenges.

But the core mission remains unchanged: democratizing access to information, knowledge, and opportunity. Libraries have always been about equity – ensuring that everyone, regardless of economic status, has access to the tools they need to learn, grow, and contribute to society. In 2035, when those tools include advanced AI, immersive virtual environments, and blockchain-verified credentials, libraries will be more important for social equity than ever before.

In the library of 2035, brain-computer interfaces and AI will tailor lighting, sound, and environment to each patron’s cognitive needs, creating truly personalized learning spaces.

Neuroadaptive Learning Environments

One of the most exciting developments will be libraries that adapt to how our brains actually work. Early brain-computer interface technology will allow library spaces to optimize learning experiences based on cognitive load and attention patterns. Struggling with a difficult concept? The library’s AI will detect your stress levels and automatically adjust lighting, temperature, and background sounds to optimize your learning environment.

These systems will be particularly transformative for neurodivergent learners. Spaces will automatically adjust to individual neurological needs – dimming lights for someone with sensory sensitivity, providing fidget tools for someone with ADHD, or creating quiet spaces for someone on the autism spectrum. The library of 2035 will truly serve everyone, regardless of how their brain is wired.

The Global Knowledge Commons

Perhaps most excitingly, libraries will become nodes in a global knowledge commons that makes humanity’s entire accumulated wisdom accessible to everyone. Language barriers will disappear through real-time translation. Geographic barriers will vanish through virtual reality. Economic barriers will crumble through the democratization of expensive technologies and resources.

A child in rural Kansas will have the same access to MIT’s laboratories, the Louvre’s collections, and the Library of Congress’s archives as someone living next door to these institutions. This isn’t just about information access – it’s about opportunity access. When anyone can learn from the world’s best teachers, access the most advanced tools, and collaborate with people globally, we’ll see an explosion of human potential that’s impossible to predict.

The library of 2035 will blend advanced technology with human wisdom, serving as both a global network and a local gathering place.

Final Thoughts: The Unstoppable Institution

Libraries survived the printing press, radio, television, and the internet by continuously evolving to serve their communities’ changing needs. They’ll not only survive the AI revolution – they’ll be at its center, helping humanity navigate the most profound technological transformation in history.

The library of 2035 will be simultaneously more technological and more human than today’s libraries. More connected to global networks, yet more rooted in local communities. More virtual, yet more essential as physical gathering spaces. More automated, yet more dependent on human wisdom and judgment.

Those who predicted libraries would disappear fundamentally misunderstood what libraries really are. They’re not buildings that house books – they’re institutions that connect people with the knowledge, tools, and community they need to thrive. As long as humans need to learn, create, and connect with each other, we’ll need libraries.

The only question is whether we’ll have the vision and investment necessary to build the libraries our communities deserve. The future is arriving faster than most people realize, and communities that embrace these changes early will have tremendous advantages in education, innovation, and social cohesion.

Get ready. The library revolution is just beginning.

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In Search of Anomaly Zero: Why We’re Fighting Tomorrow’s Disasters with Yesterday’s Tools

Anomaly Zero marks the theoretical first detectable spark of a threat, pushing early warning systems closer to the true origin point of a disaster.

How Moving Detection to “Anomaly Zero” Could Save Millions of Lives and Billions in Damage

In 2023, MIT researchers achieved something that would have seemed impossible just years ago: they developed an AI system called Sybil that can predict lung cancer up to six years before human radiologists can see any signs of the disease on CT scans. The system analyzes the same medical images doctors examine but detects patterns invisible to the human eye, achieving 86-94% accuracy in predicting whether someone will develop lung cancer within a year.

There have been cases where Sybil flagged areas that radiologists didn’t identify as concerning until visible tumors appeared in those exact locations years later. This breakthrough represents a fundamental shift from reactive treatment to what could be called Anomaly Zero—detecting threats at their earliest possible moment, when intervention is still feasible and damage minimal.

The implications extend far beyond medicine. We’re living in an era where most of our systems—from healthcare to cybersecurity to climate monitoring—operate like emergency rooms: excellent at crisis response, but woefully inadequate at prevention.

The Mathematics of Early Intervention

Consider sepsis, which kills approximately 350,000 Americans annually. UC San Diego researchers developed an AI system called COMPOSER that reduced sepsis mortality by 17% simply by detecting the condition hours earlier than traditional methods. The first FDA-authorized AI tool for sepsis detection, called Sepsis ImmunoScore, can now identify high-risk patients before obvious clinical symptoms appear.

The pattern is universal: intervention effectiveness decreases exponentially as problems grow. A forest fire covering a few square feet requires a garden hose; the same fire at an acre demands aircraft and specialized crews. A cybersecurity breach detected within minutes costs thousands; the same breach discovered after months of data exfiltration costs millions.

Yet our current early warning systems consistently operate near the end of this timeline, not the beginning.

Understanding Anomaly Zero

Anomaly Zero represents the theoretical earliest point where a developing threat can be confirmed and addressed. Unlike the butterfly effect—where complex systems can only be understood retrospectively—Anomaly Zero focuses on actionable early detection.

Every major disaster begins with microscopic changes: a molecule shifts, electrical energy sparks, a neural pathway fires differently, or a pattern emerges in data. While we may never detect that precise first moment, emerging technologies are moving us dramatically closer to these origin points.

Think of threat development as a measurement along a thousand-mile timeline. Today’s early warning systems operate near mile 900, while Anomaly Zero sits at mile 1. The question isn’t whether we can reach mile 1—it’s how close we can realistically get while still maintaining actionable intelligence.

AI-powered early detection systems are transforming healthcare by spotting cancers and life-threatening conditions like sepsis earlier than ever through real-time pattern recognition and predictive modeling.

The AI-Powered Detection Revolution

Recent advances in AI-driven early detection span multiple domains. A multi-cancer early detection test using circulating tumor DNA analysis achieved 92% sensitivity and 95% specificity in identifying malignancies in asymptomatic individuals. Machine learning algorithms for sepsis detection have reduced mortality by up to 20% by identifying early deterioration patterns.
These systems share common characteristics:

• Pattern Recognition at Scale: AI can process millions of data points simultaneously, identifying subtle correlations invisible to human analysis
• Real-Time Processing: Modern algorithms operate continuously, monitoring for threats 24/7 without fatigue
• Predictive Modeling: Rather than simply detecting current problems, these systems forecast future risks

In sepsis care specifically, machine learning techniques such as random forest models and deep learning algorithms analyze electronic health record data to identify patterns that enable early detection. One breakthrough system, SERA, uses both structured clinical data and unstructured clinical notes to predict sepsis 12 hours before onset with 87% sensitivity and 87% specificity.

Beyond Healthcare: Universal Applications

The Anomaly Zero framework applies across critical sectors:

Cybersecurity: Advanced AI systems now use behavioral analysis to detect ransomware and data exfiltration attempts before they cause damage, with some achieving 63% reduction in successful attacks.

Infrastructure: Sensors embedded in bridges, buildings, and transportation systems can detect microscopic stress changes months before structural failures occur, potentially preventing catastrophic collapses.

Climate and Environment: Satellite imagery combined with AI can identify deforestation, pollution events, and ecosystem disruption at their source, enabling rapid intervention.

Financial Systems: Real-time transaction analysis can detect market manipulation, fraud, and systemic risks before they cascade into broader economic instability.

Public Safety: Pattern analysis of behavioral data can identify escalating situations while still manageable, though this raises important privacy considerations.

The Current Detection Gap

Most organizations remain trapped in reactive thinking. Healthcare systems excel at treating advanced diseases but struggle with prevention. Cybersecurity teams are masters of incident response but often miss early infiltration signals. Climate scientists can model global trends but struggle to prevent localized environmental disasters.

This isn’t due to lack of capability—it’s a fundamental misallocation of resources and attention. We invest heavily in sophisticated emergency response while underfunding early detection systems that could prevent emergencies altogether.

The Implementation Challenge

Moving toward Anomaly Zero detection faces several critical obstacles:

Technical Complexity: Building systems sensitive enough to detect earliest anomalies while avoiding false alarms requires sophisticated calibration and continuous learning capabilities.

Data Integration: Effective early detection requires synthesizing information from multiple sources in real-time—a challenge that current siloed systems struggle to address.

Privacy and Ethics: Enhanced monitoring capabilities raise legitimate concerns about surveillance overreach and the balance between security and freedom.

Economic Incentives: Prevention is invisible—successful early intervention means nothing dramatic happens, making it difficult to justify investments compared to visible emergency responses.

Organizational Resistance: Shifting from reactive to proactive approaches requires fundamental changes in institutional culture and resource allocation.

Anomaly Zero marks the shift from reacting to crises to detecting threats as faint patterns in data—where future leaders will either thrive or be disrupted

The Stakes Are Rising

The cost of reactive approaches is escalating rapidly. Environmental changes have intensified extreme weather events, with some areas experiencing 63% increases in major disasters. Cybersecurity breaches now cost organizations an average of $4.45 million per incident. Healthcare costs continue climbing as we treat advanced diseases that could have been prevented or detected earlier.

Meanwhile, the technological infrastructure necessary for Anomaly Zero detection is maturing rapidly. Advances in edge computing, sensor networks, and artificial intelligence are making real-time global monitoring not just possible but economically viable.

A Different Future

The Sybil lung cancer detection system demonstrates what becomes possible when we shift perspective from treating diseases to preventing them before they manifest. Instead of asking how to treat advanced cancer more effectively, researchers asked how to detect it before it becomes visible.

This represents the essence of Anomaly Zero thinking: reimagining the problem itself rather than optimizing solutions to the wrong problem.

Consider the implications if we applied this approach systematically:

• Preventing cyberattacks before hackers establish footholds
• Identifying infrastructure failures before they cause collapses
• Detecting environmental threats before they become irreversible
• Recognizing economic instabilities before they trigger crashes
• Stopping disease outbreaks before they spread

The Path Forward

The transition to Anomaly Zero detection won’t happen overnight, but early adopters will gain enormous competitive advantages. Organizations that invest now in predictive capabilities will operate in fundamentally different risk profiles than those that remain reactive.

Key priorities include:

• Developing sophisticated algorithms that distinguish meaningful signals from noise
• Creating rapid response mechanisms capable of acting on early warnings
• Establishing ethical frameworks that balance detection capabilities with privacy rights
• Incentivizing long-term prevention over short-term crisis management
• Building institutional cultures that value invisible successes

The Bottom Line

We stand at an inflection point. The digital infrastructure necessary for Anomaly Zero detection exists. The analytical capabilities are rapidly advancing. The economic case for prevention over reaction grows stronger daily.

The question isn’t whether this transformation will happen—it’s whether your organization will lead it or be disrupted by it.

MIT’s Sybil system proves that breakthrough solutions emerge when we stop accepting late-stage detection as inevitable and start pushing detection capabilities toward their theoretical limits. The future of risk management lies not in building better responses to full-blown crises, but in developing the capability to detect and address threats when they exist only as patterns in data.

In this nano-scale world of emerging problems, our greatest opportunities for impact await. The organizations and societies that master Anomaly Zero detection won’t just survive the coming decades of accelerating change—they’ll thrive in it.

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Print Me a Cure: The Coming Revolution of 3D-printed Polypills

3D pill printer finishing one precisely formulated polypill to replace all other pills you take in a day.

The Vision of Tomorrow’s Medicine

Back in 2012, I wrote about the idea of 3D pill printers, envisioning a future where medications could be customized to each individual and printed on demand. At the time, it felt like an inevitable leap for healthcare—a logical extension of 3D printing’s growing capabilities and the burgeoning field of personalized medicine. In that column, I predicted that by now, we would have entered an era of precision medicine, where constant monitoring of our bodies and adaptive, on-demand medications would be the norm. What I didn’t realize was just how long it would take for this vision to begin materializing and how many barriers—technological, regulatory, and societal—would stand in the way.

Fast-forward to today, and while we’ve made significant strides, the dream of a 3D-printed polypill tailored to our exact needs remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Imagine waking up, glancing at your health dashboard, and receiving a notification that your personalized medication—customized for your body’s real-time condition—is ready to print. It’s a world where your treatment adapts as you do, responding to spikes in stress, changes in inflammation, or shifts in glucose levels. This isn’t science fiction; it’s a vision grounded in technologies already being developed, from wearable health trackers to AI-driven diagnostics and advanced drug manufacturing techniques.

But as we inch closer to this revolution, we must grapple with three important questions:

• How much further do we have to go?
• What challenges remain, and
• How will they shape the future of healthcare?

Precision medicine has the potential to transform lives, but only if we can navigate the complexities of building a system that is both innovative and equitable. It’s time to revisit that 2012 vision with a fresh perspective, informed by over a decade of progress, and consider how we can bring the promise of 3D-printed precision medicine to life.

24/7 health monitor that talks to your pill printer.

The Building Blocks of a Precision Medicine Revolution

1. Continuous Monitoring

At the heart of this transformation lies the ability to continuously monitor a patient’s health, an area that has already seen significant breakthroughs. Advances in wearable technology have paved the way for devices like smartwatches and fitness trackers that measure everything from heart rate variability to blood oxygen levels. These devices are becoming more sophisticated by the day, integrating sensors that can analyze blood glucose, hormone fluctuations, or even sweat composition without the need for invasive procedures. For patients with chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension, implantable sensors take this a step further, offering round-the-clock monitoring with unparalleled accuracy.

The magic happens when this constant flow of data Is paired with artificial Intelligence. AI algorithms analyze these metrics in real-time, detecting subtle trends or anomalies that a human doctor might miss. For example, a sudden spike in inflammation markers could trigger an automatic adjustment in medication dosage, preventing complications before they escalate. This seamless integration of continuous monitoring and AI is not just about detecting illness; it’s about creating a proactive healthcare system that stays one step ahead of disease.

2. Polypills and 3D Printing

Complementing these monitoring systems is the emergence of polypills—a revolutionary concept in drug delivery. Polypills combine multiple medications into a single tablet, simplifying complex regimens and reducing the burden on patients managing multiple prescriptions. With 3D printing technology, the potential of polypills expands dramatically. Instead of mass-produced, one-size-fits-all formulations, 3D-printed polypills can be customized down to the molecular level. A single tablet can include precise doses of several drugs, and each layered for targeted release at different times throughout the day.

Beyond simplification, 3D printing also allows for the integration of supplements, like probiotics or vitamins, into the same pill. For patients with unique conditions or rare diseases, 3D printing offers a solution to the age-old problem of limited drug availability. These printers, connected to cloud-based systems, can synthesize the exact medication needed on-demand, and deliver it directly to the patient’s home.

3. AI and the Internet of Things (IoT)

Underpinning this revolution is the growing ecosystem of interconnected devices known as the Internet of Things (IoT). In this ecosystem, wearables, sensors, and 3D printers communicate seamlessly, creating a feedback loop between the patient, healthcare providers, and even digital health twins. These digital twins are virtual replicas of patients, capable of simulating physiological responses to various treatments. Before a polypill is printed, its effects can be tested on the digital twin to ensure safety and efficacy.

This interconnected network represents more than just convenience; it embodies a shift toward a truly patient-centric healthcare system. By connecting the dots between real-time monitoring, AI analytics, and on-demand drug manufacturing, the IoT is poised to transform not just how we treat illness but how we define wellness itself.

By only printing one pill a day means no bottles of pills laying around.

The Benefits of 24/7 Precision Medicine

The most striking promise of 24/7 precision medicine lies in its hyper-personalization. Traditional medications are often prescribed based on broad population averages, leaving significant room for error or inefficacy when applied to individuals with unique biological needs. Precision medicine, powered by real-time monitoring, takes an entirely different approach. By leveraging constant data streams from wearable sensors and AI-driven analytics, medications can be tailored to each individual’s exact condition and genetic makeup. Imagine a polypill dynamically adapting to fluctuations in a patient’s stress levels, inflammation markers, or blood sugar levels—an adaptive treatment designed to evolve with the patient’s ever-changing health metrics.

This level of personalization inevitably leads to improved patient outcomes. With drugs finely tuned to an individual’s needs, the likelihood of adverse side effects decreases dramatically. Gone are the days of trial-and-error prescribing, where patients endure unnecessary side effects or ineffective treatments. Additionally, the simplification of complex regimens into a single polypill ensures enhanced adherence. No more juggling multiple prescriptions or struggling to remember which pill to take and when. For patients managing chronic conditions, this can be life-changing, reducing both physical and emotional burdens.

Perhaps the most transformative aspect of 24/7 precision medicine is its potential to empower preventive care. Early detection becomes the new standard, as wearable devices and implantable sensors flag subtle changes in biomarkers long before symptoms appear. Conditions like heart disease, diabetes, or even cancer can be identified and managed in their earliest stages, drastically improving survival rates and reducing healthcare costs. Beyond just treating diseases, precision medicine integrates behavioral nudges to promote healthier lifestyles. Notifications reminding patients to hydrate, take a short walk, or prioritize sleep are rooted in real-time data, helping individuals make proactive choices to maintain their well-being. This holistic approach marks a fundamental shift from reactive to proactive care, with the patient at the center of a continuously evolving ecosystem of health optimization.

Finding the optimal level of privacy for 3D printing polypills will be difficult.

The Challenges on the Road to Reality

While the potential of 24/7 precision medicine is staggering, the path to realizing it is fraught with data privacy and ethical concerns. At the heart of this new healthcare paradigm lies an unprecedented volume of personal health data—sensitive information collected from wearables, sensors, and interconnected devices. This raises a critical question: who owns this data? If it falls into the wrong hands, the consequences could be dire, ranging from targeted hacking to the misuse of personal health information by insurers or employers. Ethical dilemmas abound, such as whether insurers should have the right to adjust premiums based on real-time health metrics or whether employers can mandate participation in continuous monitoring programs.

Regulatory and legal hurdles further complicate the adoption of precision medicine. The idea of dynamic, on-demand prescriptions is groundbreaking, but it presents a logistical nightmare for regulators tasked with ensuring patient safety. Every dose printed by a 3D printer must meet rigorous safety and efficacy standards, but how can this be guaranteed when treatments are being adjusted in real-time? The FDA and other regulatory bodies will need to rethink traditional approval processes, balancing innovation with oversight.

Even the technology itself poses significant challenges. The compatibility of multiple drugs within a single polypill remains a delicate issue, as some compounds may interact in ways that compromise their stability or effectiveness. Furthermore, creating universal standards for 3D printers and ensuring a consistent supply chain for the raw materials needed to manufacture custom medications is no small feat. Without these standards, the scalability of 3D-printed medications will remain limited.

Finally, there’s the issue of cost and accessibility. Precision medicine and 3D printing technology are likely to be expensive in their early stages, potentially limiting access to those who can afford it. This raises the specter of deepening healthcare inequality, where the wealthy benefit from cutting-edge advancements while marginalized populations are left behind. If precision medicine is to fulfill its promise, policymakers and innovators must address this imbalance, ensuring that its benefits are distributed equitably across all demographics.

The Dark Side of Always-On Medicine

The dream of always-on medicine, while promising, comes with significant risks that demand careful consideration. One of the most concerning aspects is the loss of autonomy that constant monitoring might bring. In a world where every heartbeat, hormone fluctuation, and calorie intake is tracked, individuals could feel trapped in a system that over-medicalizes daily life. Not every small deviation from a baseline is cause for alarm, but patients might find themselves overwhelmed with unnecessary interventions or nudges, leading to a perpetual sense of inadequacy or anxiety about their health. The psychological toll of being “optimized” every moment—always striving for a state of perfection dictated by algorithms—could create a culture of dependence and even erode the human experience of living freely.

The overreliance on technology is another pressing concern. What happens when the system fails? A device outage, a software glitch, or a malicious hack could disrupt the delicate ecosystem of precision medicine, leaving patients without their tailored medications or critical health data. More importantly, could this reliance diminish trust in human healthcare providers? If algorithms dictate treatments and override traditional medical intuition, we risk losing the irreplaceable human connection that underpins effective caregiving. Patients might begin to see doctors not as decision-makers but as implementers of machine-generated plans, potentially eroding the relationship of trust that has defined medicine for centuries.

Finally, pharmaceutical disruption presents a broader societal challenge. The advent of 3D-printed polypills could upend the traditional pharmaceutical industry, which relies on large-scale manufacturing and standardized dosing. While this disruption might bring innovation, it could also lead to fierce resistance from industry giants whose profits are threatened. The logistical backbone of drug distribution—pharmacies, supply chains, and even global drug manufacturers—would need to reinvent itself, a process fraught with risks, inefficiencies, and potential backlash. Policymakers will need to navigate these turbulent waters, balancing the promise of precision medicine with the stability of existing systems.

It’s important to note that several pharmaceutical companies are already studying this business model.

A Roadmap for Moving Forward

Several companies are at the forefront of developing 3D-printed pharmaceuticals, aiming to revolutionize personalized medicine:

• Aprecia Pharmaceuticals: In 2015, Aprecia introduced Spritam, the first FDA-approved 3D-printed drug designed to treat epilepsy. Utilizing their proprietary ZipDose® technology, Aprecia produces rapidly disintegrating formulations, enhancing patient adherence. The company continues to innovate in 3D printing for pharmaceuticals, exploring collaborations to expand its product offerings.
• FabRx: A UK-based enterprise, FabRx specializes in 3D printing personalized medications. Their Printlets® technology enables the creation of bespoke drug dosages and combinations tailored to individual patient needs. Notably, FabRx has developed personalized pills for children with rare metabolic disorders, optimizing treatments based on specific patient parameters.
• Merck Group: Global pharmaceutical leader Merck has ventured into 3D printing through collaborations aimed at developing and producing 3D-printed tablets. In partnership with AMCM, an EOS Group company, Merck focuses on creating tablets for clinical trials and eventual commercial manufacturing, exploring various 3D printing technologies to address challenges in solid-dose formulations.
• GlaxoSmithKline (GSK): GSK has engaged in research to integrate 3D printing into drug development, collaborating with companies like Stratasys to explore innovative drug delivery systems. Their efforts aim to leverage 3D printing for more efficient and personalized medication production.

These companies exemplify the pharmaceutical industry’s commitment to harnessing 3D printing technologies, striving to make personalized medicine more accessible and effective for patients worldwide.

To unlock the full potential of 3D-printed precision medicine while addressing its pitfalls, we need an actionable roadmap grounded in interdisciplinary collaboration. Scientists and engineers must work hand-in-hand with ethicists and policymakers to ensure that innovation is pursued responsibly. For example, bioengineers developing sensors for health monitoring need to consult with ethicists about the psychological impact of always-on surveillance, while legal experts draft policies to protect patient data from misuse. The convergence of these disciplines can provide the checks and balances necessary for building a sustainable healthcare ecosystem.

Central to this effort is the establishment of robust regulation and oversight. The global community must come together to create frameworks that address the unique challenges posed by 3D-printed drugs. Standards for printer accuracy, drug formulation, and patient safety must be universally recognized to ensure trust in this technology. Equally important is the regulation of AI-driven healthcare ecosystems, ensuring transparency in decision-making algorithms and safeguarding against biases that could harm patients. Without these guardrails, the promise of precision medicine could be undermined by mistrust and misuse.

Perhaps the most critical piece of the roadmap is addressing equity in access. The risk of precision medicine becoming a luxury for the wealthy is real, and it could exacerbate existing healthcare disparities. To prevent this, governments and innovators must prioritize accessibility, exploring subsidized models, public-private partnerships, and open-source solutions for the underlying technologies. The ultimate goal should be to democratize precision medicine, ensuring that its benefits extend to all, regardless of socioeconomic status.

Say goodbye to all your cabinets filled with pills.

Final Thoughts – A Pill for Humanity’s Future

Returning to the scenario of waking up to a personalized polypill, it’s worth reflecting on what this vision truly means for humanity. On one hand, the possibilities are exhilarating: lives saved through early intervention, chronic diseases managed with ease, and a new standard of health that adapts to each individual’s needs. On the other hand, this revolution carries profound societal implications, reshaping our understanding of health, autonomy, and even what it means to be human.

The dual-edged nature of this transformation demands caution. While precision medicine has the potential to redefine healthcare for the better, it also risks creating new forms of inequality, dependence, and ethical dilemmas. As we stand at the brink of this new era, the question is not whether we should embrace these technologies but how we can ensure they serve the common good.

The call to action is clear: we must balance innovation with responsibility, championing a vision of precision medicine that uplifts humanity as a whole. By doing so, we can turn the dream of personalized healthcare into a reality that benefits everyone—not just the privileged few. The pill for humanity’s future is within our grasp; it’s up to us to determine its impact.

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Eight Reasons Why the Future of Personalized Medicine will involve 3D-Printed Pharmaceuticals

While I started talking about 3D pill printers nearly ten years ago, today we are seeing incredible breakthroughs in personalized medicine emerging along two fronts:

• Diagnostic Breakthroughs, for example, with genetic, DNA, and molecular testing to uncover possible health threats, suggest optimal treatment pathways, and determine if further specialized tests are needed.
• Intervention Breakthroughs to customize care to the patient and yield a patient-based rather than a one-size-fits-all disease-based treatment protocol.

One of the most exciting and promising developments on the intervention side is the development of 3D-printed (additive manufacturing) pharmaceuticals. The promise for these products lies not only in the conventional manufacturing process but in the possibility of customizing the drugs in areas like dosage and release timing.

The pharmaceutical industry has come a long way from the days of crudely formulated drugs and doctors who basically guess what dosages are right for their patients.

If a particular pharmaceutical comes in the form of a 200 mg pill, doctors will prescribe 200, 400, or 600 mg doses when the right dose for an individual may be 87 mg, 341 mg, or 496 mg. With 3D printing, doctors can be far more precise.

Also, if the patient doesn’t tolerate an important drug well, doctors will have the option of customizing the pill, so the ingredients are released over an extended period of time.

Where We Stand Now

The U.S. Food & Drug Administration (FDA) has already approved the 3D printing of one drug, Aprecia Pharmaceutical’s Spritam, an anticonvulsant medication used for the treatment of seizures. With that approval, industry leaders see the floodgates opening. As 3D printing technology evolves and production costs come down, any pill or capsule that we swallow is now a candidate for this process and this kind of customization.

The FDA has also given preliminary approval to Eli Lilly to partner with Triastek, a Chinese pharmaceutical additive manufacturing company, to explore delivery mechanisms for two of its new medications. The two companies are investigating printed pill shapes and other excipient (non-medicinal) properties that promote the programmed or timed release of the drug’s active ingredients.

In addition to Aprecia and Eli Lilly, three other drug companies, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, and FabRx, are also actively pushing into this market.

Globally, the market for 3D-printed drugs is predicted to grow by 15% over the next six years, reaching more than $2 billion by 2027.

We’re on the verge of a 3D-printed pharmaceutical industry where precisely measured doses are easy to create and where multiple drugs in varying doses can be combined into a single pill. Flavors and colors will be customized as well.

Eight Advantages of Printed Pharmaceuticals

Personalized health care is clearly one of the primary benefits of 3D-printed oral medications. But I see at least eight additional reasons this technology will be a game changer.

1. Specialized Drugs

It will enable small-batch printing of specialty drugs for rare or “orphan” diseases, the kind of drugs that pharmaceutical companies tend to sidestep due to low volume and profitability. The technology will also be the ideal way to produce small quantities of drugs for clinical trials in which variable doses need to be tested.

2. Reduced Inventory

Hospitals will be able to print specialized and personalized drugs onsite, reducing the need for stockpiling and providing nearly immediate access to specialty drugs they may not have on hand.

3. Local Production Advantages

In addition to hospitals, pharmacies will be in a position to print prescribed drugs for their customers. The distribution process for many drugs will be shortened as we bypass drug wholesalers for many specialized drugs.

4. Shorter Supply Chain

Locally produced 3D-printed drugs won’t be subject to supply chain constraints. Today, many of our drugs are formulated overseas and then packaged there. That equates to a lot of shipping and quality control steps.

5. Workarounds for Disruptions

If a drug manufacturer needs to temporarily close its facility for any reason, 3D printing can fill the supply gap.

6. Improved Drug Safety

Aspects of drug safety can be improved with local production since there will be less opportunity for counterfeit drugs to be introduced into the distribution process. Costs related to maintaining the required documented pedigree of the drug will be reduced as well.

7. Efficient Use of Raw Materials

3D printing of any item, whether it’s a house, pair of shoes, or a pharmaceutical drug, makes far more efficient use of the raw materials involved. Less waste in drug production means far better use of valuable chemical ingredients.

8. Reduced Cost to End User

Most of these benefits – including the shorter distribution chain, reduced expenses for tracking drug pedigrees, less production waste, and localized production – along with continued advances in 3D printing technology, has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of drugs for the end user.

Barriers We Still Need to Overcome with 3D-Printed Drugs

Even though I just painted a rather promising future for this industry, we’ll still need to resolve certain challenges that will come with widespread 3D drug printing.

• Bad Actors

  As with any technological breakthrough, we’ll need to anticipate how 3D drug printing could be abused by bad actors. The technology will enable drug dealers to manufacture illicit narcotics and it could empower counterfeiters to print fake drugs without active ingredients or with the wrong/dangerous ingredients.

• Revised Regulatory Processes

  We’ll need to revise our drug manufacturing regulatory process, shifting to approving multiple local production sites rather than primary manufacturing plants. The FDA will also need to address matters related to personalized dosing and release profiles. That means regulators will have to focus on additive manufacturing equipment, processes, and quality assurance of the printing ingredients – not a small shift for this large bureaucracy. To their credit, though, the FDA is already working with the National Institute of Standards and Technology to develop guidelines for 3D drug production.

• Industry Disruptions

  The pharmaceutical manufacturing industry will likely raise regulatory and legal barriers to this widespread practice since it threatens the industry’s markups and monopolies. Some will shift to becoming suppliers of chemical ingredients rather than manufacturers of finished pills and capsules.

Over time, we’ll overcome these hurdles so that the benefits of customized, 3D-printed pharmaceuticals will be available for everyone. The FDA will reach a tipping point so that approvals for these processes and products will become more routine while remaining thorough.

And as we add more and more sensors to our bodies, the linkage between personalized diagnostics and personalized pharmacological treatment will become even closer and … well… even more personalized.

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