Years' End 2024
A social experiment, a salmon, and a cassobeary. Thank you to everyone who subscribed over the past six weeks. I'll be back with more of the Salmon in 2025.
A massive thank you to the friends, family, colleagues and new connections who have been reading these posts over the past six weeks. I hope I haven’t come off as the half-crazed, dehydrated and bearded wanderer I sometimes feel like. I promise I haven't been lost in the desert for that long.
When I started writing this, the pitch I made to the mirror was a social experiment with twin goals: to write in a way that was authentically me, and to find out if there was actually a readership for the kind of material that might emerge from that process.
What I have learnt over the last six weeks is that it is possible to eke out a 1,000 words a week stealing time from a Sunday evening, and that a fit of AI image generation can crack a well-set frown on a downcast day.
I am going to be taking a break for the next two weeks to go full urban warfare on some recent cassobeary incursions.1
Reader Feedback
In the interim, I’m going to be planning a vision for 2025 content. The key reader feedback I’ve received to date is that I ask an awful lot of questions but answer very few of them. I can only attribute that rhetorical technique to the joy of posing questions when you’re not obliged to answer them. That’s not a joy I tend to professionally enjoy. However, I do promise that next year I’ll make *real* moves to provide more answers than questions, albeit in an oblique and plausibly deniable fashion.
As you may have noticed, I’m less focused on numbers than I am on words. I was poisoned by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s opinion of economists early on in my life and have yet to see an economic forecast that was accurate. I find the vagaries and dreams of narratives cling much closer to reality than the ever-too smooth growth curves of economics. Life is fractal, fractured, fragmented and fraught, it is not some smooth 50-year growth curve where “everything being equal” our current assumptions are born out with no surprises.
Queue the 2020 theme music.
Imperfect information distributions do not work this way. Engineering biology proves this rule just as do all historical funding winters for next-gen tech. It was a hard play to work on AI in the 1980s, but we are thankful to those who did. Economic forecasts are most useful for testing our current assumptions and we test those assumptions through story telling, counter-factuals and counter-narratives.
While I have not locked down the content plan for next year, I do intend to have a long-running argument with myself about engineering biology. If you enjoy reading someone red team their own world view, please join me for the ride.
If you have any feedback on the writing or would like me to tackle a particular area of the engineering biology endeavour, please send in your comments. They are always welcome.
Not enough salmon
One of the promises made in my “hello world” post was that I would deliver a voluminous quantity of Douglas Adams references. I have tried to capture the essence of Adams’ humour and tone but have not made many references. I will try to rectify this gross and deeply negligent oversight.
As Stephen Fry said, we live in a post-Douglas world. For those who love and inhabit the technological frontier, Adams’ vision permeates everything we do. He gifted us John Cleese’s voicework for the bomb on the Starship Titanic, a sandwich chef chasing a sofa across the prairies of an alien world, and a depressed robot with a brain the size of a planet. Adams saw the future of engineering biology without living long enough to participate in it. It is a genuine loss to us all that the voice of technology is not here to comment on the world of today and tomorrow.
The restaurant at the end of the universe biomanufactured its food - simple as that.
So unless anyone objects, I’m going to double down on the style credits as we work through the verticals of engineering biology. The world is a confluent mess of mega-trends, geopolitical drivers and the winds of change. It pays dividends to inhabit the slipstream of these forces rather that trying to face them head on.2 Finding the slipstream is an exercise in deep tech proprioception, a process of learning to feel your way through the hype cycles, the spurious pitches and some occasional techno-optimistic baby babble. I hope I can help.
Recommended reading
Before I sign off for the year, I'd like to recommend one book to add to your reading list - should you find yourself a spare moment and a hammock in the weeks ahead. This book came to me as a gift from my youngest sister, and like all good books it sat on a shelf biding its time waiting for the moment I was ready to read it.
Until I read this book I didn't know slime mould was an energy efficient champion of nearest neighbour computation, I hadn't questioned my assumptions for analogue computing in biological substrates, and I certainly didn't know you could make art from trapping an autonomous car in a painted circle. If that seems like your sort of thing, I'd highly recommend it.
Thank you for reading, I'll be back in 2025 with more of the Salmon!3
I've detected some grey zone cyberbio maneuver in the medical system from a non-state crack squad of cassobearys that go by the name of Phantom Chlorophyll. It's all the more impressive because these guys don't have fingers. It's time to go all Bellingcat on them.
The slipstream is a song I first heard sung by Jason Whitfield who has the knowledge, networks and vision to see the currents and eddies of biomanufacturing trends. Even more incredibly, he takes the time to kindly guide others to where the flow is strongest.
The astute observer will notice that the salmon conceptually carries this little venture. I'll have more on why I chose this in 2025. One of the things that I love about the biological sciences is that everything is metaphor. When you have to make sense of a multiscalar alien world, metaphor is the most important tool in the shed. Henceforth I'm colloquially calling this Substack the Salmon.