products. DuPont, an early investor, has a multi-year agreement across several fields, from agricultural and industrial segments to human and animal therapeutics. Caribou is also collaborating with a U.K. company, Genus, to target a debilitating virus in pigs, cattle and other livestock, and with Novartis to address a range of medical needs, from vaccines to eye care.

 On the surface, this technology sounds a lot like an extension of the GMO (genetically modified organisms) work being done by corporations such as Monsanto, but the processes are quite different. GMOs are created when a gene from a radically different species is introduced, such as an antifreeze gene from a cold-weather flounder inserted into a tomato to protect it from frost. CRISPR, on the other hand, edits the existing genome rather than inserting foreign ones. This technique can be just as successful as GMOs in achieving the desired outcome, potentially with a much lower price tag, which might eventually make current GMO techniques (and the controversies surrounding them) moot.

 One scientist whose work has been fueled by Doudna’s discovery is Sarah Richardson, a keynote speaker at SXSW Eco 2016. As a child, Richardson looked to the stars and science fiction for inspiration. Now as chief scientist at a startup called Ignition Genomics, she still has the same sense of awe about the invisible world teeming all around us and calls herself the “bacteria whisperer.”

In 2013 and 2014, Richardson was working at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute, close to Doudna's labs at UC Berkeley. The two met regularly to discuss their projects, and Richardson now leverages CRISPR-Cas9 to help accelerate her efforts to coax bacteria to create products such as fuel, pesticides and industrial cleaning agents with broad environmental implications. "There are bacteria out there now that can pull heavy metals from water,” she says. “We just need to make it happen faster."

 t was only a few years ago that Dr.Jennifer Doudna, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier, her lab partner at the time, devised a revolutionary process for gene editing. The process, called CRISPR-Cas9, has since taken scientists and investors by storm, creating a media frenzy in the process with cures for cancer, cystic fibrosis or Alzheimer’s; disease-free crops; designer babies for the rich and entitled (and maybe even unicorns) among its possible applications.

 Like so many major breakthroughs, this seemingly radical shift is actually the next step in a continuum that has been unfolding for years. “Genome engineering is actually not new; it's been in development since the 1970s,” Doudna noted in a 2015 TED Talk. “We've had technologies for sequencing DNA, for copying DNA and even for manipulating DNA. And these technologies were very promising, but the problem was that they were either inefficient, or they were difficult enough to use that most scientists had not adopted them.”

CRISPR, short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, is a segment of DNA derived from bacteria such as the one that causes strep throat, and Cas9 refers to a particular protein. Paired up, the protein and the DNA segment act like a surgical tool that can recognize and cut strands of DNA, allowing scientists to effectively remove or change existing genes within an organism.

 The CRISPR discovery has radically accelerated the pace of genomic research. One reason is its simplicity. Doudna compares CRISPR to running a software application, versus previous genome engineering techniques, which were more like rewiring a whole computer. Also, genetic changes, once introduced, can be carried down through generations—so-called “germline” transformations. Now, experiments requiring mice with specific gene modifications can be conducted over a matter of weeks or months, rather than years.

 That speed has led to an outpouring of CRISPR-derived research in both the private and public sectors, ranging from environmental uses to agricultural and medicinal applications. A pathologist at Penn State University successfully used CRISPR-Cas9 to edit out the genetic base pairs that make white button mushrooms turn brown. Researchers have used CRISPR to make both tomato and cotton plants resistant to common diseases. Chinese scientists even claim (the results have not been made public) to have used the CRISPR tool to treat lung cancer.

 Doudna herself has co-founded a startup, Caribou Biosciences, which has partnered with several corporations to develop new

 Daniels grew up in West Philadelphia, the youngest of five. Dad was a policeman; mom held various jobs. Daniels picked up a hardcover copy of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in a public library when he was eight years old and would make the neighborhood kids act it out on his stoop. “I didn't know it was directing but I guess it was,” he recalls. “They would do anything I said.” (This would serve him well, as he has famously shouted at everyone from David Oyelowo to Oprah Winfrey while directing.)

 Daniels moved to Hollywood in his teens and directed plays at local churches while working at a nursing staffing company .By the age of 21, he had opened his own staffing agency and sold it for millions. He then became a casting director (notably working on Purple Rain), and talent manager before producing his first film, Monster’s Ball, for which Halle Berry won an Oscar in 2001.

 His directorial debut, Shadowboxer, featured an unorthodox mother/stepson duo of assassins (Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr.). Audiences truly began to take notice with the based-on-a-true-story 2009 drama Precious, which earned Daniels a Best Director Oscar nomination. When he first brought the film to Sundance,

 ee Daniels—writer, producer, director, actor—is in Atlanta working 16-hour days on his new Fox series, Star, and jumps on the phone enthusiastically, declaring: “I don’t know what to talk about first!” But ask him about his favorite part of filmmaking, and the gregarious showman falls uncharacteristically quiet.

 “I really like discovery,” he finally says, and pauses again, considering his words carefully. “I find it sometimes in my writing. I find it sometimes in my directing. I find it sometimes in my producing. Whether it's a Gabourey Sidibe and I'm directing, or a director I discovered like Mark Forster for Monster's Ball, or whether it's letting America know that Taraji P. Henson was always our Meryl Streep in the ‘hood. What I like most is being able to take pride in introducing talent or new ideas to the public.”

 To Daniels, introducing the world to the new is exciting; to the world, meeting Daniels has been new and exciting at every turn. And though the 56-year-old has no formal filmmaker training, he has gone on to create vividly emotional portrayals of the African-American experience on screens both big and small.

 More recently, a video for a song called "Chaika" appeared, protesting Russia's prosecutor general Yuri Chaika and accusing him of corruption. It’s a stylish piece of film with professional production—a far cry from the ad-hoc, DIY, though always well-planned guerrilla protest performances that marked Pussy Riot’s original incarnation.

 Musically, it is also valid to ask, what is Pussy Riot? The "Chaika" song blends hip-hop rhythms, trip-hop noir, and jazzy horn blasts. It’s far more an electronic track than punk. The political message remains strong, and clearly the point of making the music and video is to deliver a message. Is Pussy Riot then a new form of folk music that is producing songs about and for the people, without profit or commercial purpose? Are they kindred spirits to Billy Bragg, whose musical performances are never far away from social and political insights, and shared freely with his audience? Maybe they are sisters-in-arms with guerrilla artist Banksy—except that while decrying the art world, that British artist makes millions. Perhaps they are offspring of the Sex Pistols’ original cry for social equality, except that the Brit punks were damaged by drug drama and hounded by police and managerial issues until they split up at the height of their notoriety.

 Pussy Riot’s trademark hoods, which protected their anonymity, came off not due to any choice, but because the authorities unmasked Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and a third member, Yekaterina Samutsevich, who also went through the terrifying ordeal of arrest and sentencing but had her prison term lessened to a suspended sentence. The three were forced in front of the public eye and cameras in a Moscow courtroom. Yet, they looked far from afraid and remained on message, as the political campaigners put it. Sleekly produced music and stylish videos are one thing, but it’s motive that defines Pussy Riot as a powerful political force, not just a pop culture effort bandying around suave socialist ideas and non-commercial ideals.

 Pussy Riot formed in 2011 from a group of young women sharing a modern, progressive social agenda, LGBT rights and anti-fascism at heart. The first sentence of the group’s Wikipedia page reads, “Pussy Riot was a Russian feminist punk rock protest group based in Moscow” — was. In a world of Kardashian aspirations and fake reality, where the human race seemingly blindly burns through the planet, Pussy Riot and their refusenik kind are more important than ever.

  o misquote John Lennon, for a while Pussy Riot was bigger than the Beatles. At least in the winter of 2012, after video of the Russian group’s audacious agit-prop “Punk Prayer” musical/performance piece went viral on the Internet, the group became infamous overnight. The images of five young women wearing knitted masks, jumping up and down and performing in front of the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Saviour Russian Orthodox cathedral, was either shocking or stimulating—or both. Either way, they had the world’s attention.

 The full title of the song they performed that fateful day translates as "Punk Prayer – Mother of God, Chase Putin Away!” It was anti-Putin, anti-church, and an act that defied and decried both church and state. It was punk rock and riot grrl venom tied up with a socio-politico agenda, and “Anarchy in the USSR” seemed probable—for a minute or two, at least. If you followed the original story, you know how the Putin government and Russian Orthodox Church responded.

 Just in time for this year’s American Presidential elections, the Pussy Riot name is back in the headlines with the release of three provocative new songs and accompanying videos. Spearheading this latest activity is Nadezhda (Nadya) Tolokonnikova, who has become the most easily identifiable member of the group—if indeed it is even a formal group now, as Tolokonnikova’s rise as the public face of Pussy Riot has caused a considerable rift within its ranks. But considering that it was she and fellow member Maria Alyokhina who were convicted of "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred" in the cathedral case in March 2012 and sentenced to two-year prison sentences, Tolokonnikova has weathered the brunt of the Russian hammer’s retaliation.

 If the prison sentence wasn’t shocking enough, when news of the women’s transfer to separate Siberian labor camps surfaced, shock turned to horror. Tolokonnikova’s subsequent hunger strike, decrying conditions in the camp, pushed her further to the forefront as Pussy Riot’s leader. Even speaking from the labor camp, she was a photogenic spokesperson who refused to back down. Far from silencing her, the jail sentence gave her a bigger voice and yet another cause: prisoners’ rights.

 So what and who is Pussy Riot in 2016? Is it a group, one person, or several individuals—each performing at will under one banner of social justice? What began in 2011 as a dozen or so girls gathering together to voice their opposition to then prime minister Vladimir Putin and social injustice in their homeland, now seems splintered and tainted by outside interference, such as the group’s defense lawyer attempting to copyright the name as a brand. To market what? Pussy Riot t-shirts and bobbleheads?

 Since her release from jail in December 2013, two months shy of the full sentence, Tolokonnikova hasn’t shied away in supporting LGBT, feminist and free speech issues in the U.S., Russia and internationally. In 2015, Pussy Riot released an English-language song and video, "I Can't Breathe," in response to Eric Garner’s death while he was being restrained by police officers in Staten Island, New York.

 We have the technology right now, Nye said, to power 130 of the world’s countries renewably. This would be done mostly with wind and solar energy, and some tidal and geothermal energy, and without building any new nuclear power plants.

 “Texas gets 10 percent of its energy right now from wind, without subsidies,” Nye said. “In the state of Texas, we could run the whole thing renewably right now if we just decided to do it.”

 And why don’t we decide? One reason is climate change deniers, both in Congress and at the head of powerful corporations. They’ve been very successful, Nye said. “They’ve introduced this idea that scientific uncertainty, plus or minus two percent, is the same as plus or minus 100 percent.”

 It’s not all vested interest, either. There are intelligent deniers, Nye said, and ones that do not have self-serving motives. For many people, particularly those without much scientific knowledge, it can be hard to imagine that one’s individual actions on such a big planet can have global consequences.

 The good news? “Very, very few people who are 17 deny global warming,” Nye said. To the millennials in the audience, he added, “We’re at a tipping point. Your generation is going to be on this … you’ve got to play the hand you’re dealt. Yes, you could have anger toward people like me [in older generations], but we all got here together, and we’ve all got to solve this problem.”

 Nye concluded his talk with a call to optimism and a lesson from space exploration, the pinnacle of optimistic scientific endeavor. In science as in society, he said, it is necessary to do everything at once: address climate change, improve global living conditions and strive to answer the fundamental questions of human existence. Why are we here? Are we alone? The scale of the cosmos can be overwhelming but the fact that our brains can grasp it at all is astonishing, and if we can conquer that, we can conquer anything:

 “And with our brains, my friends, we are going to solve these problems. We are going to address climate change and we are going to—dare I say it?—change the world!”

 Once he formally made the leap from academia to the corporate/VC sector, he also saw what he’d suspected for some time: That in the business world, things move exponentially faster. Maeda says an “aha” moment came when he first saw Jack Dorsey’s Square, the device that attaches to smart phones, laptops and other electronics, allowing the owner to swipe credit cards and become, essentially, a one-person vendor:

 “When this came out, it struck me: ‘Wow, you can be a professor in a university classroom, but all it takes is one smart professor to stand outside in the park, or anywhere outside the school, and gather a bunch of students and do credit card swipes.’ They (students) didn’t need the university president or a professor to teach them how to do it.”

 But even as they’re exploring and discovering outside of lecture halls and studios, Maeda emphasizes that aspiring designers must keep an eye on the human element: “I guess over time I’ve realized that what design is really about is connecting with people. Yes, you can make it perform better, you can make it feel better, but who are you doing this for? People ... But maybe you don’t ‘know’ that person, and if you aren’t inclusive of the people you’re making it for, you’re going to make something that doesn’t really work …”

 As an example, he cites the Snapchat app that finds a user’s face and puts it in a mask or a framework. “But, if you’re African-American or Mexican, it can’t find your face,” Maeda says. “And that’s because the people who made it tested it on their own faces. And there weren’t a lot of people with darker skin who made it, so then (if you’re a person of color) the Snapchat app couldn't find ‘you.’ ”

 It is at this intersection of design, technology and inclusion that Maeda has discovered his latest classroom. And here, he’s setting his own learning curve: “At this point in my life, I’m not just interested in designing cool things; I’m interested in asking who’s designing these things, and who do they know when they’re designing them? Do they know who they might be excluding in the process?”

 However, he concludes, “It’s not just about social justice. When the subject turns to ‘the right thing,’ I like to think more that it’s just pragmatics. It’s just business. If you’re serving N customers, and there are Y customers you’re not reaching, why not design it for N + Y?”

 Now that may be design at its most Darwinian.

John Maeda will present his “Design in Tech Report 2017” at SXSWedu 2017. For more.

  ry all you want to find a less prosaic way to say it, but science advocate and television personality Bill Nye’s essential message is: You can save the world. Yes, climate change is here and the threat is severe, but the technology we need to survive and scale it back is just about here, too. Innovations like more efficient solar panels, longer-lasting batteries and new desalinization techniques are ready to be either invented or refined, perhaps by you, or by someone who is a college student or child today. Either way, it’s going to take a global effort, and education will be crucial.

 That is the message Nye delivered at his SXSW Eco Keynote on October 12 called “The Optimistic View for Merging Energy and Climate Policies.” The pro-education, pro-science message is perhaps not a surprising one from Nye, the man who expanded the basic scientific knowledge of countless millennials with his Bill Nye the Science Guy television show in the 1990s. In his keynote, he focused little on what is at stake in our changing world—few dire-looking graphs, no pictures of threatened polar bears—in favor of what we can achieve in the face of this challenge.

 “You could, when faced with this global warming and the climate change associated with it, run in circles screaming! But that has proven completely ineffective,” he said.

 There are two things driving the climate to change, Nye said: the Earth’s thin atmosphere and our advancing population. By 2050, nine billion people will be here, “and they’re all going to want to eat something and drink something.” The solution to the problem will have three parts, he said: clean renewable energy around the world, universal access to safe drinking water and universal access to the Internet, with the opportunities for education and commerce that it represents. That’s a tall order and will certainly be a key challenge of our time, but Nye thinks it is possible.

 “We can do this,” he said. “We can get to work, have new sources of energy and new ways to store energy, and we can change the world.”

 And he emphasizes the need for a global effort. Discussing his WWII veteran parents, Nye said that “the greatest generation” solved a worldwide crisis in five years. We could do something similar— particularly today’s young people, if they are educated and motivated. His message for them is that scientific breakthroughs are within reach and so are, probably, rich rewards.

 “The [solar panels] that are being produced now are nearly 30 percent efficient,” he said, “and it sure looks like we’ll be able to make solar panels that are as good as the ones on spacecraft and better than that at 40 or 50 percent efficient. What if they were 70 percent efficient? And what if you were the one that invented it, or your student invented it? He or she would—dare I say it?—change the world! And not only that, you tell these kids, ‘You’re going to get rich!’ Like Bill Gates rich! Like board of directors of Ikea rich.”

 esign is part of nature and in every manmade object we encounter. It’s simple and complex, elementary and heady. Yet the bottom line is, if something isn’t properly designed, then it doesn’t work for the user. Nature knows this and responds accordingly.

 Prominent designer and author John Maeda believes that today’s designers, particularly in the tech field, are starting to follow that lead. They’re learning to design for “inclusion,” to engage the largest possible range of beneficiaries. And many of them are learning this outside the classroom. Kind of like … nature.

 “Whether design for performance or design for emotions, it is extremely valuable for corporations and VCs today … and I think the education world is challenged to understand what that is, what that means.” says Maeda, Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at Automattic Inc., the web development firm best known for WordPress.

 For years, design at its highest levels has been taught—and learned—within the confines of academia, explains Maeda, formerly a tenured professor at the MIT Media Lab, and then the president of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) for six years. But lately, Maeda has found more satisfaction designing (and responding to design problems) in the real world.

 Maeda believes that while design in technology is advancing at warp speeds, the teaching of design is not. He thinks that aspiring designers may well learn more by experimenting in the workaday world. And of course, that hinges on a more democratic view of its definition:

 “Most people don’t know what ‘design’ is—or they would like to know. But there’s always a different answer. It can mean too many things. It can mean the design of your hairstyle, the design of your shoes, the design of your app, the design of your logo, the design of your food … When you think about why it’s important, (you realize) it’s about being able to make something better that was already good. It’s either going to be technically better, it’s been designed to perform better, or its design is more emotional, so that it makes you feel better.”

 Maeda’s quest to broaden this view of design was part of a major career move. In early 2014, he left RISD to join the Palo Alto-based VC firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) as a design partner, before moving to Automattic in August.

 “I was in education for 12 years,” says Maeda, “and I decided to leave because I began to question it all … And by spending three years in VC, it has changed my whole perspective. But it’s kept me feeling, knowing, what I had cared about all along.”

 Creating the protocols for accomplishing these tasks from scratch is a massive undertaking made even more difficult by the opacity of some systems, like deep neural nets, where the way in which they work isn't yet understood. Professional organizations and conferences such as Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency in Machine Learning (FAT-ML) are places where these questions get hashed out. "We've got some amazing people who are really now just starting to come together and think about how do we build fair systems? And that's a really new question. That's not a question that we've had to face before," she says.

 Crawford likes the cross-disciplinary audience available at SXSW. "You have data scientists talking to artists talking to social scientists talking to philanthropists talking to designers," she says. "That's a really nice space to have conversations about how we make these systems better."

 Last year, the Future of Life Institute, whose board members include Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, released an open letter articulating their priorities for AI research, with an accompanying document that closed with a warning about the dangers of a superintelligence that escapes human control. Crawford considers this something of a luxury concern.

 "When it gets down to it, being concerned about the creation of a superintelligent AI that will dominate and exploit humanity is something that people who are already very wealthy and generally white and male tend to worry about, because if you want to look at technology that's creating domination and producing unfair results, we already see that happening," she says. "The things that are currently already affecting marginalized populations are of a much bigger concern to me than killer robots of the future."

 But of course, one of the reasons that imagery is so prominent in our minds is because of the cultural representation of AI, which is why "Skynet," from the Terminator movies, is such effective shorthand for a malevolent superintelligence. That's why Crawford would love to see culture makers in the audience when she speaks:

 "I would love to see Sam Esmail think about the next Mr. Robot as being about what will happen in society when AI is part of everything we do … where it's like the water pipes, it's the infrastructure, it's the traffic lights, it's phones, it's when you walk into a school, when you walk into the shop, when you walk in the street, it's omnipresent.”

Kate Crawford will be a Featured Speaker in the Intelligent Future Track at SXSW 2017.

 efore she became a prominent researcher called on by theWhite House and Microsoft for her analysis of the social and ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, Kate Crawford was a self-described "music nerd" as both a fan and a musician. Her experience as a performer and television host in her native Australia explains why she's such a dynamic speaker, as she regularly makes the case for why those creating and utilizing machine learning systems should be taking their cultural impacts into account.

 Crawford has served as co-chair for the White House's AINow symposium, emphasis on the "Now." Her primary concern is not with what might happen but what is already happening with AI, and specifically who is being affected.

 "If there's a big overarching theme that I think we really need to think a lot about, it's social inequality. How does AI contribute to or ameliorate social inequality?" says Crawford. "We're already starting to see these kinds of distinctions being made where some communities are experiencing the downsides more than others, but how is this already feeding into societies that already have issues with social inequality?"

 As big data and machine learning play an increasingly large role in institutional decision-making, Crawford says issues of transparency and accountability have to be addressed, citing a ProPublica investigation that found black defendants in Florida were twice as likely to be wrongly predicted as “at risk of violent recidivism” by a risk assessment algorithm. This translated into real-world differences in sentencing and probation conditions, influenced by a tool whose workings defendants (and prosecutors) didn't grasp.

 When untested systems and tools are rushed into social institutions without an understanding of their workings, the public trust is at stake. As continued interest and investment pours into AI and new applications arise, Crawford says that a highly visible, poorly functioning system can wreak much more damage to the field than a delay to make the system more fair. "What we've been seeing in what I would call almost precursor AI systems, we're seeing forms of sort of racial, class and gender bias, and that should concern all of us," she says.

 A recent editorial Crawford co-authored with law and technology researcher Ryan Calo for Nature calls for establishing the means to measure the effect of AI on the populations in which it's being used. "There's a lot of money being spent on AI right now, a lot of research being done and a lot of new startups, specifically looking at the potential around applying AI in everyday life," says Crawford. "There's this huge gap in terms of thinking about what are the actual impacts of AI ... How do we assess them? How do we see and test and verify and measure the impacts on human populations?"