EP13 - An analogue renaissance, digital real estate and bioinformatics

In a world of digital landlords and nanosensors, the ones and zeros are king. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Tech Journal. My name is Mark Verehamenam and I am the digital speaker. Throughout this series, I, or my real world twin, have teleported my digital brother, me, into cyberspace to bring you the latest in digital breakthroughs, from bioinformatics and Bitcoin through to quantum computing and AI. I want to take a closer look at what digital innovation means for our personal and professional lives. Let's take a quick look at what I'm covering on today's show. Today I am going to explore an emerging trend in the digital sphere, an increasing aversion of the digitized tech, and we may be on the cusp of an analog renaissance. After, we will go to the other end of the digital spectrum and examine how the land I am standing on now, this digital world I exist in, could one day be worth more than the land in the real world. Then, for the final segment in today's Digital Download, I'm going to take a look at bioinformatics, what is it, and what it spells for the digital future of healthcare. And with that, my systems are fully charged, the data is collected and correlated, and my parameters are ready. It's time to start your digital download. A couple of years ago, Apple officially confirmed they intentionally slowed down all the phone models in order to encourage, I use the term very liberally, consumers to buy the latest model. This news came only a year after the iPhone7 was released, a model which famously removed the universal headphone jack in favor of pairing their devices with wireless headphones sold separately. Of course, little did Apple realize, but their actions jump started a movement with within millennials, a movement built on the resentment of the constant forward march of digitalization. This only confirmed what millennials knew anyway, backed up by a social Quora study showing only 6% of millennials consider online advertising to be credible. Being the first generation to be young enough to embrace digital tech, but old enough to remember playing outside, millennials have found themselves in a unique position between a rock and a hard place, or more aptly, between digital and analog. Unlike Generation Z, whose streaming idols and social media lives have been digital since their birth, millennial idols were straight out of analog TV studios and paper magazines. This aversion to digital tech can be seen in the statistic dug up by Forrester research back in 2014. Might as well be 100 years ago. I know that states 29% of the Internet using American adults do not use smartphones as their main phones. To get a more recent number, we can look at the 2020 Nielsen study which states over 85% of millennials own smartphones. So to invert that 15% of millennials do not own smartphones, 15% refuse to be part of the digital world. What does this mean then? Well, the underlying desire for less complex digital devices, devices that do not demand 24 hour attention, is being translated into the growing dumbph. According to a counterpoint research project reported by the Wall Street Journal, while international smartphone Sales dropped in 2018 Smart feature phone shipments, in other words, dumb phones rose to roughly 75 million, going up to 84 million the following year. Pricing also plays a role, while complicated digital devices like iPhones averaging around $1,000, a considerable price difference with dumb phones which on average hit the $25 mark. But it's not just hipster millennials who are not using smartphones. According to a We Are Social, also reported by the Wall Street Journal, even as wealthy nations look towards rolling out 5G, roughly 3.4 billion people are still smartphone free and remain cut off from the digital world, something which if you watched my space Internet video Elon Musk's Starlink aims to solve. If the trend continues and as millennials get older, becoming increasingly nostalgic for the 90s, digital giants like Apple may adjust their business model to accommodate this growing trend. It would not be the first time digital tech has been sidelined for an analog version. Digital music was and still is looked down on in favor of analog records. While some digital technologies are forsaken in fav in favor of analog ones. Recently one of the most analog industry in existence made its way into the digital sphere. Real estate. Earlier this year, the digital realm Xie Infinity reported a record digital real estate sale. The platform sold nine digital land plots for 888.25 ether, roughly translating to US$1.5 million, a significant jump from the average digital land plot pricing of 343 US DOL madness. So why did the buyer pay so much? Well, axie infinity offers NFTs non fungible tokens for axies, creatures that live in the player controlled crypto Tamagotchi virtual ecosystem dubbed Lunasia. The more land you have, the more creatures you have access to, which translates into more NFTs. The buyer, who goes by the name Flying Falcon and describes himself as a digital landowner on his Twitter we are witnessing a historic moment, the rise of digital nations with their own systems of clearly delineated irrevocable property rights. Axiland has entertainment value, social value, economic value in the form of future resource flows. To translate that, Mr. Falcon sees great potential to make money from the land and has great faith in the land's longevity. This isn't the first time digital real estate set real world records, though. Back in 2010, John Jacobs, an Entropia Universe user, set a record when he sold his asteroid to another player, John Foma Callum, known as pesog, for $335,000. Another arguably ancient example comes from the retro game Second Life. A player known online as Anshizhung bought and developed virtual real estate and reportedly made $150,000 annually from the pursuit. Nevertheless, NFTs are a fascinating development, and the recent auction of Beeple's masterwork for $69 million shows what a strange world we seem to live in. For those who missed this, the digital artist sold a JPEG that anyone can view on his or her computer for the staggering amount of $69 million. In fact, I have it right here in my studio. NFTs are rapidly changing the digital world and I will certainly be covering NFTs a lot more. With traditional digital tech moving back towards analog and analog businesses moving into the digital sphere, there's one industry where digital tech will always be chosen over analog the healthcare industry. One of the latest digital innovations to come out of bioinformatics world are nanosensors. Bioinformatics is the field that develops methods and software tools for understanding biological data. These nanosensors, or bionanomaterials, are used to analyze biomolecules in an effort to detect cancer mutations and diseases significantly earlier than is currently possible. So what type of real world thing can nanosensors pick up on me? Nanosensors are designed to inspect the small stuff, stuff human eyes and tools struggle with these sensors once present in a patient, and analyze DNA in real time. As Kate Arnie, Science Information Manager at Cancer Research uk, put it, they are looking for ways to detect DNA that has been shed by tumor cells once present in the bloodstream. Nanosensors are small enough to detect these changes and can be used as a way of monitoring cancerous cells without the need for scans or biopsies. And according to a study coming out from the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marshland NHS Foundation Trust, it did just that. The study involved 55 women who had been successfully treated for early stage breast cancer with the nanosensors in their blood. A simple blood test was enough to detect cancer resurgences at an average of 7.9 months before any visible signs appeared due to their smaller size, durability, the potential to be controlled by a single AI, and enhanced biocompatibility. Thomas Webster, a nanotech engineer and chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Northeastern University in Boston, had this to say and I We think that there is a strong promise for nanotechnology that's used in medicine, obviously because the small size allows you to penetrate cells, get inside the cells, and manipulate their function in ways that you can't do with conventional material. What is more, with the inclusion of DeepMind AI to analyze medical results, we are looking at the potential situation where AI nanobots can detect and treat mutations inside a cell without instruction. Without going too far into the realm of imagination, this form of deep tech, a technology designed to solve some of mankind's biggest scientific and engineering challenges, has the potential to dramatically increase the average lifespan and even eradicate cancer. If we then also take into account other digital innovations I covered in previous videos, like liquid neural networks, nanosensors, and alphafold protein folding, we suddenly find we are looking at the near future where digital healthcare speeds up exponentially, much like in the same way we watch the screen and network technology like the Internet, smartphones and TVs take off in the early millennium, taking us to a place where we are using devices that were confined to the pages of science fiction only 20 years ago. What types of inventions and solutions do you think bioinformatics can solve? What about nanosenso? Leave your thoughts in the comment section below. And on that e note, I have been your digitized host Marc Verheimenh, the digital speaker. This has been Tech Juno. If digital tech floats your processors, be the first out of your network to hear about the latest digital breakthroughs. Press the subscribe button now. Our digital algorithmic overlords command it. See you next time. For your information, download Stay Digital.