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Deep Future

Implementing Science Fiction

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Robotics

CreateMe

The global fashion industry produces 2.1 billion tonnes of GHG emissions annually – more than aviation & shipping combined.

Worse, 20% of global freshwater pollution is from making clothes.  Soon, wars will be fought over water.

About 150 billion garments were produced in the last year. 30% of them will never be worn by a human.  Imagine if we drove ⅓ of all the cars ever manufactured directly from the factory to a landfill.

This $1.7TT industry is built on low cost labor in the poorest countries overproducing with speculative manufacturing – creating garments long before finding out if anyone actually wants them.

We’ve backed CreateMe to flip the script.  They wait until somebody clicks “buy now” before manufacturing on-demand and shipping out the next day.  Using advanced automation, they can produce high quality, low cost garments close to the consumer.

CreateMe is much further along than most of the companies we invest in, but this is an important use of technology that is near and dear to my heart.  Before starting Deep Future, I spent years of nights & weekends working on this very problem.  CreateMe is taking this vision even further – rearchitecting the industry to bring H&M, Adidas & LVMH into the future, but without the greenwashing.  Those are all current customers.

CreateMe already has strong revenue and a world class team developing automation technology that has done it before in electronics and semiconductor.  They need talent and will take on their first strategic investors this year – please think about who could be a good match for them and reach out to Michael or I.

Tags: Automation, Robotics

Ladon Robotics

No crew, no fuel, no emissions. We have (mostly) self driving cars, why not a self driving cargo ship? While we’re at it, why not make it sail in the wind?

Photo by Strandgutsuche

The shipping industry literally burns half of their operating budget, as fuel. Most people don’t realize that ships have two gas tanks: One with refined diesel, like you’d use in a semi truck, and the other full of “bunker fuel.” When the ship is close to shore, it burns the cleaner stuff, but as soon as it gets out of sight, it switches to burning the thick, black, unrefined gunk optimized for creating air pollution.

But why burn any fuel at all? We’ve been sailing across oceans for centuries.

Ladon Robotics is building autonomous ships driven by the wind and sun. We invested because this vision for the future of shipping is irresistibly better.

Tags: Robotics

Can Robots be Artists? — Hod Lipson

Today, I spent some time with Hod Lipson who is a professor at Columbia University. In fact, we recorded this episode right out in front of the university with crying babies going by and kids playing in the park. So it’s a little noisy, but I’ve been inspired by Hod for a long time, because he’s another inventor that worked on 3D printing early on.  He is at the forefront of what we’ve been able to do with computers. That’s the kind of thing I’m always really interested in.

He was actually inventing 3D printing at the same time I was, a long time ago.  We get to have a conversation about that…both of us were probably the two people who worked on inventing 3D printers for food. And Hod has since gone on to do a really cool side project trying to create a robot artist and it’s called Pix18. It’s not like any other creative robot that you’ve seen or heard about. Honestly, this is a difficult thing to get your head around: can a robot be creative? And that’s hard for humans to accept.  And so of all the people on earth to have a conversation with about this topic, I probably couldn’t do any better than Hod Lipson.  Towards the end of this episode, you’ll see. It’s pretty exciting because Hod manages to really blow my mind.

Deep Future
Deep Future
Can Robots be Artists? — Hod Lipson
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Tags: Artificial Intelligence, Automated Design, Creative Machines, Robot Artist, Robotics, Technological Bias

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