Kanye West’s new song has created something of an internet furore. Not for the rhapsodic lyrics or the grinding beats, but because it’s not actually written or performed by the artist. Kayne’s AI voice double can take the credit for that.

There comes an age when all modern music sounds like a random collection of clanking noises, and lyrics a jumble of nonsensical misgivings, so it’s somewhat difficult to discern whether the musical, lyrical or stylistic content of Roberto Nichson’s AI-generated ‘Kanye Song’ facsimile was in any way accurate. Gone are the days when computer-generated speech sounded something akin to a kitchen appliance making first contact. AI has now reached a point where a human voice, works of art and many other forms of human endeavour can be almost perfectly replicated in real-time. Such is the similarity that some have come to believe that LaMDA – Google’s AI-based large language model for dialogue applications – is sentient.

Continue reading here: https://www.cipa.org.uk/journal/ This article was published by The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys. CIPA Journal July-August 2023 / Volume 51 / Number 7-8.

One of the most frequent questions we encounter is ‘If your idea is so straightforward, why hasn’t it already been done?’ To which there is no real answer beyond ‘There’s a first time for everything.’, and so it was with some amusement when two friends separately told me variations on the above joke.

All disruptive innovations have to clear this hurdle before they enter the mainstream. Until they are established their existence seems unbelievable. Afterwards they seem indispensable, even inevitable.

Steve Jobs famously left his position at HP because they wouldn’t run with his idea of building personal computers: computers are machines for business, the thinking went, why would you want one at home?  Today a home computer is as commonplace as a microwave oven (based on military technology) or a telephone (devised as a machine for communicating with the deaf).  The first step in the innovation process is not a technological leap, but a change in mindset.   For many this change is too big a leap to make, and for some it comes too late: Netbooks stole a march on all the big hardware manufacturers, but by the time they’d caught up Apple had hit back with the tablet computer.

There are two sectors that are absolutely ready for disruptive innovation: energy generation and agriculture. Mitravitae has an innovation that will impact both.

Speaking at the 22nd Annual Martin J. Forman memorial lecture Josette Sheeran, Vice-Chairman of the World Economic Forum gives us a flavour for the scale of the problems we face in simply feeding ourselves:

Over the next 40 years we will have to produce more food than we have in the last 8,000.

What will prevent us from producing this much food? There are plenty of factors, not least a lack of clean water and fertile land on which to grow crops. Man-made desertification has been going on since Roman times – and it’s accelerating. From the salination of ground water in Australia to the plummeting water table in India it’s getting more and more difficult to meet even our most basic requirement for food and water. Even the affluent west cannot escape this eventuality with ever rising food prices set to see us enter an “era of permanent food crisis” as global demand increases.

Energy Dinosaur

A New Beginning

Our old way of exhausting a resource by turning it into something disposable has to change. We still tolerate outdated linear ‘input-output-waste’ production processes in a world where social and business interactions have embraced the efficiency of  networking and collaboration.   Our energy, food and water systems can work together,  just as they do in nature where biotic and abiotic systems interact to create sustainable and robust biogeochemical cycles.

Single function linear processes that consume finite resources and create temporary products at low efficiencies are being exposed: they are not industrial behemoths so much as lumbering dinosaurs. A product of a bygone wish to dominate rather than collaborate. The comet has come. It is time to change our mindset and realise the benefits of working with nature: a collaboration where every output has a function and waste is eliminated.

At Mitravitae we have felt this sense of waste for some time, which set us on the road we are currently treading. Originally conceived on an industrial scale, we have just completed initial development on a small scale system – one that is within the reach of all of us.  It looks possible that if there is disruptive innovation waiting to happen to the energy and agricultural sectors it might well be coming from the consumers themselves who will make their own water, electricity, food and fuel, rather than paying the high prices of the dinosaurs.

Reunited: the importance of being together

The Victorians and early Edwardians were obsessed with their postal service. Great chunks of novels of the period – Dracula, Wuthering Heights and Howard’s End are just three that spring to mind – feature letters as part of the text. But from the Great War right up to the invention and propagation of email, correspondents could only look back at the past with envy, much as we might now look at the seventies and marvel that it was a time when people walked on the moon and you could get from Heathrow to New York in three and a half hours.

Perhaps paradoxically, in virtualising our physical selves and firewalling our interpersonal relations technology has made the face to face meeting more important than ever. I can send the words ‘buy my product’ to my entire address book at the click of a button but it’s not until I ask you what your needs are that I can persuade you my product is the one that solves all your problems. Indeed, email marketing has become so commonplace that it’s largely ignored. With a meeting, you’re not only more likely to sell the thing you want to, but if you don’t, you come away with an understanding of why not. Meeting clients shouldn’t be thought of as ‘hospitality’, it’s basic R&D.

Too many people forget that the telephone remains the most efficient way of exchanging information. On the phone you can establish in seconds what can take hours via email. Meetings are deeply inefficient ways of exchanging information, but they are the best way of establishing and deepening relationships, and this is their value. Mitravitae has progressed through face to face meetings: planned ones with our partners at Exeter, inspiring ones over cups of tea with BJ Cunningham, informative ones with salt workers in India, and formal ones at conferences. We don’t have to imagine the communities that would benefit from the Mitravitae project; we’ve met some of them, and look forward to meeting more.

If you’re interested in how we’re solving the energy nexus we want to meet you – come and hear us speak:

Biodiversity 2012 Hyderabad, India: 14-15 September

EcoSummit 2012 Ohio, USA: 30 September – 5 October

First, there were the physical symptoms: jet lag and sleeplessness operated with a push-me-pull-you disregard for my wristwatch, until I couldn’t work out if it was bedtime, afternoon or Christmas. Fortunately, our guides Mustakim and Deepak gently corralled us into the back of a 4×4 for the journey from Jamnagar to the Kush Highway. The 4×4 turned out to be essential kit when we came off the road and bumped through a village, with heaps of new brown bricks in buttressed stacks drying in the sunshine. When we rejoined the road, I even managed to close my eyes for a nap, and when we reached our destination, I felt refreshed, ready to stretch my legs, with my body clock confidently assuring me it was now early afternoon on a fine spring day at some point in the early 1980s.

India, the parts we saw anyhow, is a country of human industry. We didn’t pass a field without a cluster of labourers, or walk down a street without a rickshaw slowing next to us. On the back of a motorbike, I saw two boys tucked behind their father, doing their school homework. In contrast our destination was stark and desolate – we had reached the salt fields.

Salt is big news in India. There’s the industry itself: India is a huge player in the international salt market. Then there is the history: Gandhi’s march to the sea in order to make salt in defiance of the British Raj was a defining moment in India’s assertion of independence. And if Gandhi could’ve stood here with me and looked around, what would he see?

A weird, alien landscape, stretching out to the horizon under a relentlessly cloudless sky. Salt piled into hundred of barrows, surreal blocks of white in a desert. The air is still and silent, only a single bird, high up, wheeled around for a short time before realising its mistake and heading back to the green farms behind us. Miles from the sea, salty water is pumped out of the ground, and into flat, rectangular basins. As the water evaporates, the salt crystallises and glitters in the sunshine.

We found a well, a steep funnel driven into the grey earth, with a circular hole at the bottom. Noël ventured down, his head a good two feet below ground level when he reached the thick pipe that vanished into the manhole-sized opening at the centre.

When Noël came out from the well, we went to find some workers, who were sitting in the shade smoking. They were typically very friendly, answering our questions and telling us about their lives. There were five hundred wells on this salt plain, and the majority of work was done by hand, and by the sun. I watched a man and a woman working in an adjacent basin: he raked the salt into a bowl, which she carried on her head and added to one of the barrows. As far as the eye can see, the only signs of life are the workers and the occasional dog.

Four kilometres up the road, some momentous change in underground geography is revealed: here the groundwater isn’t salty and agriculture flourishes. It’s a startling moment to cross the divide from a dead land to a living one. Here the salt ends; there the trees begin to grow, birds nest in lush hedgerows, and a tractor plumes blue smoke as it rolls from field to field.

India needs her salt plains, of course, and Gandhi would be proud of her flourishing economy. But Noël and I were both aware with this sudden real-life example, that clean water has the capacity to transform some pretty hostile environments into viable ecosystems.

We had skipped breakfast, but my body clock is not easily fooled, and at 2.30pm, we gave in to our stomachs’ requests for what we confidently concluded was a midnight snack.

Agriculture in Spain is about control of water and sunlight. On the jouney from Malaga, we drove past acres of covered crops, tents filling the valleys between the mountains like giant summer music festivals for plants. Stopping for directions en route to CeMAT, one side of the road was home to old vines and new saplings; the other side was a stony desert. So we arrived with the aims of Mitravitae in mind: taking energy from the sun and rejuvenating the soil. The evidence of the necessity of water for life was, if not all around us, then certainly on the southern side of this particular road.

We drove around CeMAT looking at the various research projects. It was reminiscent of the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida. The heat, the clear and brilliant sky, and space-age looking machines, practical tools for achieving remarkable dreams. It is a little disappointing to learn that the facility doesn’t feed electricity back into the grid and the solar desalination units aren’t run on a commercial scale. On the other hand, this entire project has had a massive impact across the solar industry in Europe and beyond.

No trip to a solar concentrator would be complete without holding a heavy steel tile with a hole burned clean through the centre by a focussed beam of sunlight. We are assured it took only a minute to burn a hole about the width of an orange through the quarter-inch thick metal. Elsewhere on site, a tower carries the black scorch marks of a solar beam concentrated where it shouldn’t have been, and an array produces a ball of energy, like a second sun, in mid air over the facility. Outside the car, the air is noisy with birdsong, even though the various concentrators, mirrors and reflected beams of sunlight must make the airspace over CeMAT a hazardous place to fly through.

What is the value of coming to a place like this? Well, one cannot help but feel inspired and excited to see things up and running, ideas made practical, to know that what looks good on paper also looks pretty smart when you go out and build it. Solar energy is a reality – it works. Hopefully, these solar arrays and concentrators will become a familiar sight in sunny climates, but like any industry, it needs people with ideas to come in and refine it, make it better, make it more efficient and more profitable. Mitravitae isn’t inventing the wheel, but with what I’ve seen today, I’m tempted to suggest we might have invented the axle.