Why I watch cars
Have you ever wondered where the synbio killer app is while being stuck in traffic or waiting for your tires to be aligned? Of course you have, that's why you, like me, get lost watching cars
I live in Sydney. Now we don’t quite have the famed levels of traffic that crawl Bangkok, Tokyo or Jakarta, but you won’t get from go to woe in less than an hour. I love Sydney’s traffic though, it’s strangely meditative.
Every jam of endless backed-up red lights is a chance for me to stare out the windscreen and sum the sheer magnitude of economic activity idling on the bitumen. The tire alignments, roadside service providers, the insurance policies, licence plate registrations, panel beaters and second hand dealers, the hobby collectors, online marketplaces, the electricals and radio, smash repair, and of course, the new car dealerships and financing arrangements. The invisible weave of automotive relations feels like the smooth flowing code of the Matrix.
Which brings me to synthetic biology.
A few years back the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology was honored to have Prof Drew Endy as a keynote speaker at their annual conference. I’d never been particularly good at keeping tabs on the agenda and this year was no exception. I had no idea he was going to be there. My moment of realisation came when I was searching for a table at the welcome dinner. I sat down in my chair, found my bearings in the prevailing conversation, and realised I was in for one of the more fascinating dinnertime conversations of that year.
Drew posed a very simple question, which he re-iterated during the keynote plenary at the conference.
Where is synthetic biology’s killer app?
We all have a smartphone, we all rely on automotive engines, but when it comes to synbio, there is no business-to-consumer equivalent. I cannot name a single synbio product that I could carry with me every day and subconsciously weave my being into such that a splinter of my soul becomes bound into the product. Neither glow-in-the-dark plants nor mRNA vaccines pass this “soul splinter” test.
You know you’ve got a soul splinter because it becomes the target of intelligence agencies, surveillance capitalism and cyber crime. Synbio will know it’s hit the big leagues when it’s killer app is going through a tear down on the floor of Q Branch. Until then, synbio is just mooching around in the low rent provinces of business-to-business value propositions and stealth mode venture capital raises.
Green eggs and ham
Would you ferment in your house? Would you, could you, with a mouse?
Let’s suppose you could buy some platform technology killer app that would bring synbio into your home. Let’s name this Synbio Killer App, hello there SKA. What is the job I need SKA to do?
In thinking this through I always return to Henry Ford’s quote because for SKA to work it needs to create its own economic category.
If I’d have asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse
Our homes have a small number of appliances that partially automate a limited set of routine jobs. You’ve got your standards: toaster, oven, microwave, fridge, freezer, kettle, washing machine, dishwasher, dryer, iron, coffee machine, sparkling water dispenser, stovetop, tv and BBQ. For good measure I’ve thrown in some duplication, luxury goods and redundancy.
Where in this list do I need a SKA?
To answer this I’ve chosen five jobs that SKA could feasibly do within the next decade given reasonably optimistic assumptions of technology readiness and speed to deployment at non-trivial economic scales. I’ve set my persona to home owner, my tech friendliness to early adopter, and my disposable income to high.
I would like my house to clean the air and show me the air quality rating through a visible feedback mechanism (clean air)
I would like food and beverages that increase my cognitive and physical capacity (increase personal performance)
I would like plants and paints that glow in the dark or provide sensing related to my environment, time of day, or my mood (biosensing, biofeedback and display)
I would like health monitoring that integrates with my bio-electro-chemical information and enables me to live a healthier life (bio-enhanced wearables)
I would like to grow a steak in my bedroom (cellag biohacker)
I’ve placed a little bit of overlap into these use cases to demonstrate a common category issue. Once you zoom out far enough there are only two user stories to be seen. There’s just the biophysical and the bioinformational. More simply, we want to change, make or monitor some thing.
And this lines up with the jobs our current army of whitegoods perform:
I want to make this clothing clean
I want to make this food cold
I want to make this water hot
I want to know the temperature of the room so I can make it hot, then cold, then hot again
Once you peer into the deep dark empty void of whitegoods they’re all pretty much modulating temperature or spinning clothes. Long live the thermostat.
But to return to the green eggs and ham, what is it that I want to make or monitor in my home that I cannot with existing tech right now and that would require a SKA?
Pager versus brick versus Starlink
Would you carry a SKA in your pocket? Would you strap one to your caravan?
We’re talking a price range of $1,000 - $10,000, and this category is primarily dominated by information technology and communications. Televisions, computers, smartphones and satellite installations feature heavily. They are commonly bound by their ability to connect humans via electromagnetic substrates. Could SKA steal some ground in this category?
I used to be bullish that SKA could be something you carried everywhere and used day-to-day. But I’m not anymore.
What do you actually care about when it comes to digital connectivity?
Speed, latency, volume and quality.
SKA isn’t changing any of these metrics anytime soon.
Maybe one of your semi-interesting biometrics could be monitored in real-time on your phone.
Maybe your house plants can talk to your tap.
Maybe your wall can talk to your phone and tell you about the air quality in your home.
Maybe.
None of these options create an original category, something new, something that cannot be done with any other suite of technologies.
Capture the category
Instead of looking to spaces and categories that already exist, like communications or the home, let’s be more creative.
I want a living picture frame that provides visual feedback on my health, wellbeing and mood.
I want a touch screen that sticks to my skin, rolls up in my pocket and draws energy from my body heat.
I want to see the inflammation status of my immune system in real time.
I want to recycle my household waste into petrol.
I want a genetically engineered plant that can move in real time, learns from me, changes colour, and exhibits behaviour like a pet.
I want to pick a new tattoo every day.
Nuclear fusion researchers will happily tell you how important their work was for advancing superconducting magnets capable of MRIs. NASA will laud the downstream benefits of technologies originally developed to get to the Moon. Wifi was originally invented to resolve an issue in satellite communications.
So where is SKA?
It’s possible I’m being overly critical in my doubts that SKA is coming anytime soon. Technology frontiers can be opened in an instant. Indeed, many a new fandangled technology has been born from a war that irrevocably changed our innovation landscape. Radio, television and the internet all reached mature adoption during wars. Geopolitical competition in biotechnology is only going to make SKA more likely to emerge than less. Battlefield biosensors will be very likely to enable SKA. If it’s robust enough for a marine to use under fire, then it follows anyone should be able to if the use case fits.
The categories available for SKA go to the essence of social life and human culture. I’d therefore wager that SKA requires our cultures to better embrace organic growth, or at the very least, develop a rudimentary consumer language for analogue computing in biological substrates. Pregnancy tests are great, but we don’t check them once every five minutes for all of our waking hours. SKA needs to solve a problem that hooks the consumer through always-on frequency of use.
Final thoughts
The SKA issue is humbling, and it’s one of the key bugs synbio needs to resolve to properly mature against competitor tech that we in the bio community all love to look down on as “so abiotic”. Yes, I’m staring at you artificial intelligence.
My tip, look to the olfactory realm and inhale some Brave New World. In Aldous Huxley’s dystopian feast there was an olfactory device called a scent organ. A synesthetic instrument that can create layered olfactory landscapes as part of an entertainment experience.
This is my SKA.
I want to be able to sample and replay aroma like I’m hitting Shazam because I keep forgetting Drake’s name. I want my phone to alert me in high stress rooms because it can do instant analysis of chemical aerosols. I want the most ancient of senses to finally come out and play, because our worlds are shaped by gut instinct driven by smell.
Build that for me and I’ll use it every hour of every day.
Endnote:
The astute observer will have identified that my throughput on posts has hit a mid-year low. And I’ve been having a multi-month debate with myself about whether continuing to write here is sustainable. The nagging self-doubt about quality won’t go away and the end result is that I’m going to write long-form less often, but hopefully to a higher standard. I’m not going away, at least, not yet.
I am opening up a new channel in case you’d like to meet and talk all things bio. Here’s my freshly minted Calendy page, I’ve preserved some Friday lunchtimes AEST in case you’d like to join me for some virtual green eggs and ham.