The Deep End #6
Packages dropping from the sky, affordable genome sequencing, and the risks of AI
šĀ Hi everyone,Ā RobertĀ here. I hope you enjoy The Deep End, a subsection of the Airframe newsletter. If you havenāt subscribed yet, join the hundreds of aerospace executives, investors, and deep tech operators who read Airframe and The Deep End weekly.
š If you missed this weekās profile on EPS, a game-changing aviation battery company, check it out here and let me know what you think!
Airframe is about the future of mobility, which will fundamentally change the way we live, work, and play. But this is only one part of a broader category: the set of startups working on technically challenging, capital-intensive, regulatory-laden problems.
Today we look at the people, companies, and societies swimming in the deep end. Letās jump in.
Better drone delivery
Zipline recently received a lot of hype around its āZip,ā an autonomous drone that drops a payload to the ground on a long line, while keeping the noisy drone high up in the sky where it canāt be heard by neighbors. Flyby, a competitor, showed off a real delivery in the wild on Twitter today. Super cool.
An AI Robot to handle household chores
Bring home a healthy mix of dystopia and utopia.
The cost of sequencing a human genome has decreased dramatically in the past 20 years
Full data set here. The ability to sequence the human genomeāthe complete map of all 23 large DNA sequences (chromosomes) that encodes our speciesāin a cost-effective way is changing how we identify and fight disease.
One more thing: Tyler Cowen on the existential risks of AI
The reality is that no one at the beginning of the printing press had any real idea of the changes it would bring.Ā No one at the beginning of the fossil fuel era had much of an idea of the changes it would bring.Ā No one is good at predicting the longer-term or even medium-term outcomes of these radical technological changesĀ (we can do the short term, albeit imperfectly).Ā No one.Ā Not you, not Eliezer, not Sam Altman, and not your next door neighbor.
Full blog post here.