NYC meetup, disease, brain damage, serial killers
Lux Recommends #466
Mapping ancient disease, AI and brain damage, and does lead use explain the rise and fall of serial killers? Plus AI’s cigarette butler problem.
NYC Tech + Abundance Meetup
On August 6, we’re co-hosting an event with Abundance New York and Company Ventures! Old paradigms of liberal governance are being challenged by adherents of abundance as AI disrupts industries. Join us to chat about what all that means for founders and teams in NYC and whether our city can become more hospitable to innovation.
From Lux Capital
This week, Lux scientist-in-residence Sam Arbesman joined Invested to talk AI, biology, sci-fi, and more.
Meanwhile, Deena Shakir envisions the future form of robotics. “Robotics should follow the logic of evolution - not the ego of its creators,” she writes on LuxCapital.com, “and hence not converge on humans, but on whatever embodiment best supports generalizable intelligence. The next giants will win by developing AI that generalizes across forms, learns across modalities, and acts with agility in the real world – regardless of shape.” A handy summary of the report is available on X.
Finally, , the chief medical officer of Lux portfolio company Maven, updates us on the latest in diagnosing and treating preeclampsia over on his Substack. And Chris Power, founder and CEO of another Lux company, Hadrian, discusses the company’s $260 million series C round to expand its autonomous factories for space and defense manufacturing.
From around the web
1. Going viral
Disease has been around as long as humans (and well before), but we’ve had surprisingly scant information about what ancient diseases actually looked like, how modern ones evolved, and how our ancestors coped. Recently, though, scientists used remains from 1,313 ancient people to map the rise and spread of 214 illnesses in Europe and Asia over the course of 37,000 years. Sam recommends ’s reporting on the study.
The nomads expanded over the next few centuries across the steppes of Asia and eastern Europe. In that time, their pathogens thrived; the scientists frequently found several individuals in a single grave with DNA from plague or other diseases.
Those epidemics were so intense that they changed the genetic profile of the nomads. Last year, Dr. Willerslev and his colleagues found that the nomads experienced a spike in mutations that boosted their immune system and that may have helped them resist the diseases they contracted. But their active immune systems may have also attacked their own bodies, producing chronic diseases such as multiple sclerosis.
2. This is your brain on AI
Forget ancient diseases. Is AI the next plague? There’s certainly been a lot of hype around the idea that use of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT could damage our brains. It won’t, but it is worth examining the underlying fear, which describes as “actually a fear of our own laziness. The technology offers an easy out from the hard work of thinking, and we worry we’ll take it.” H/t Laurence.
So how do you get AI’s benefits without the brain drain? The key is sequencing. Always generate your own ideas before turning to AI. Write them down, no matter how rough. Just as group brainstorming works best when people think individually first, you need to capture your unique perspective before AI’s suggestions can anchor you. Then use AI to push ideas further: “Combine ideas #3 and #7 in an extreme way,” “Even more extreme,” “Give me 10 more ideas like #42,” “User superheroes as inspiration to make the idea even more interesting.”
3. Lead to kill
True crime fanatics will be aware of the of one of the central mysteries surrounding serial killers: Why did they rise so quickly (from 50–70 in the 1940s and 50s to more than 200 in the 1960s, more than 600 in the 70s, and more than 768 by 1980), fall so suddenly (to 117 from 2010–2020); and center so prominently on Tacoma, Spokane, and Seattle?
A new book by Caroline Fraser suggests the answer was lead. But is the truth more mundane? Lux editor (and Millennial podcast listener) Katie Salam flags a review by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker. If you’re curious about how humans came to use so much lead — and how they gave it up — she also suggests reading a new history in . From Gideon:
The area south and southwest of Seattle was home to massive ore-processing facilities, and [Caroline Fraser], her classmates, and her subjects were reared in their murky, particulate shadows. “Spare some string for the smelters and smoke plumes,” she writes of her crazy wall, “those insidious killers, shades of Hades.” The smelters caused a profusion of heavy metals in the region’s air and water, and toxins such as lead and arsenic were found in staggering concentrations in the blood of Tacoma’s postwar children. Some were merely dulled, or delinquent; a few became tabloid monsters. Bundy was the most famous figure in “a long line of outlandishly wanton necrophiliac killers who’ve lived, at one time or another, within the Tacoma smelter plume.”
4. Butterfly in the sky
You can thank Sam for the earworm. He found Kayla Randall’s delightfully nostalgic look back at the creation and legacy of “Reading Rainbow.”
Lintelman says plenty of research confirms that when students come back to school in the fall, teachers need to take some time to bring them back up to speed to the levels of literacy and reading comprehension that they were at when they ended the previous school year. “Reading Rainbow” was made to bridge this reading gap for children and improve their reading skills—and to be a show that kids wanted to watch.
It was known that kids were watching TV all summer, Lintelman says, “So why not do something with it?”
