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19 February 2010

Silent drama on flight BA487

Filed under: flight, risks — David Wood @ 12:36 pm

Can the senior member of the cabin staff please come to the cockpit immediately.

I hadn’t heard that announcement on an airplane before, and I hope I don’t hear it again.

About 20 minutes after take off from Barcelona, the pilot of the BA487 clearly had something that needed attention in a hurry.

I was seated quite far back in the plane, so I couldn’t see whether any cabin staff actually ran up the aisle.  Indeed, there was nothing to see at all – everything seemed to be progressing smoothly.  I had my head in a book; someone nearby was watching a movie on his laptop; many other people were sleeping.  It seemed as if nothing had happened.

But about five minutes later, an air stewardess leaned over to the person near me watching the movie, and gently instructed:

Please turn off the laptop – the captain hasn’t switched off the fasten-seatbelts sign.

Other passengers were asked to straighten the backs of their seats.  I overheard one air stewardess say to another “I think the pilot will make an announcement”.

For a moment, I wondered to myself if my own laptop could, somehow, be the cause of this as yet unknown issue.  It was in my laptop bag, in the locker above the seats.  I know that, occasionally, the laptop seems to switch itself on (perhaps to run an auto-timed virus scan) and then fails to close down again.  On these occasions, the laptop can become hotter and hotter, with the airconditioning fan going at full speed.  Perhaps – I speculated – it might be running at frantic speed at this very moment, above my head, emitting some kind of dangerous wireless rays, which were influencing cockit equipment.  Should I own up to this remote possibility, open my seatbelt, stand up, look inside my laptop bag, and check?  Probably not.

Then an air stewardess said quietly, in a reassuring voice:

We’re going back.  The pilot’s turning round.  There’s nothing to be worried about.

A few moments later, the pilot confirmed the same information via a cockpit announcement.  There was a strange smell in the cockpit, he said.  As a precaution, we would be returning to Barcelona.

I thought to myself: things can’t be too bad.  Otherwise we’d be diverting as quickly as possible to some other nearby airport, closer than Barcelona.

However, I found myself unable to concentrate on my book.  I read the same few paragraphs time and again, losing track of where I’d reached.  My mind was racing elsewhere.

Then all the cabin lights went out – apart from the low-level emergency lighting.  My mind jumped ahead again – hmm, the captain is accustomising everyone’s eyes to the darkness, in case the plane crashes and we all need to be able to see things clearly in the midst of nighttime chaos.  But the cabin as a whole seemed calm.  The British stiff upper lip was in play.  Or perhaps it was just that we were all tired – we’d had a long, hard week of meetings, meetings, meetings at the Mobile World Congress.

In the near-darkness, I half wondered about switching on my phone to compose a text message to my loved ones.  What would I say? Then the captain announced:

Cabin crew, ten minutes to landing

which had the happy side effect of calming me down.  But I couldn’t help noticing that someone a few rows away appeared to be praying.

The lights of Barcelona were, by now, visible outside the window.  We seemed an awfully long way up in the air.  Could we really descend all that way in just ten minutes?

Psychologically, those ten minutes lasted an age.  Chronologically, they lasted 12 minutes (according to my watch) – until the airplane wheels touched down on the runway.  A few people nervously clapped their hands, but the applause was muted, and failed to catch.

The potentially heart-stopping drama was over.  161 passengers (according to Telegraph.co.uk) had survived without any physical injury.  But another, lesser, drama was starting.  161 travel plans had been disrupted, and it was not at all clear how the plans would be re-made.  Most British Airways ground staff had gone home for the evening.  A few Iberian staff were, a few hours later, still processing a long line of passengers.  The lucky first few in the queue got seats on a mid-morning flight.  Those of us further back in the queue were assigned to increasingly late flights.  Too bad – it will mean I miss my early evening engagement in London.  But at least we’re all in one piece.

At around 1.30am in the morning, a minibus took a group of us to a hotel in Barcelona town centre.  We drove past the main FIRA location of the Mobile World Congress, which we had all been attending earlier in the week.  At last, the silence and stiff upper lip vanished.  Laughter broke out, with lots of black humour.  Momentarily, it seemed that the bus was stopping at the FIRA itself, and we joked that we needed to get out and start arranging more business meetings.

Postscript 1: There was at least one journalist on the flight, and he used mobile technology to file a report which appeared on Sky News while we were still in the airport arrival hall awaiting our luggage delivery: BA Flight Makes Emergency Landing.  (That story contains exaggerations.  For example, there was no announcement that there was going to be an emergency landing.  Don’t believe everything you read on news sites!)

The story was picked up by The Aviation Herald in its report, “Incident: British Airways B752 near Barcelona on Feb 18th 2010, strange odour in cockpit“.  Some of the reader comments there are interesting:

  • There is often a strange odour in the cockpit when I fly.
  • Tried a shower lately? Then use a different shampoo. [This one is a joke, by the way.]
  • Same aircraft had a similar problem on the 12th Feb. I guess they didn’t find the root cause yet.

The last comment is particularly interesting.  I wonder if the cause lies in software – the same as with the Toyota car recalls?

Postscript 2: By chance I found myself standing next to the pilot and co-pilot in the check-in area next day.  After thanking them for getting the flight down safely, I asked about the report of a similar incident the previous week.  They confirmed it had happened.  Indeed, they had been in the cockpit on that occasion too.  On that occasion, the fumes had caused them feelings of illness and lack of concentration – not something you want in the flight cockpit!  On this occasion, they had reacted quicker, putting on oxygen masks as soon as they smelt the fumes.  Better safe than sorry.

Postscript 3: My thanks to Jorgen Behrens for drawing my attention to a 2006 Guardian article by Antony Barnett which seems highly relevant: “Toxic cockpit fumes that bring danger to the skies“.  Here’s the beginning of that article:

Dozens of pilots have flown while dizzy, nauseous and suffering double vision on crowded passenger flights. The cause is contaminated air and it can strike without warning – but the cases have been kept from the public.

Three weeks ago the pilot of a FlyBe flight from Belfast international airport to Gatwick was preparing his passenger jet for take-off . He had just received clearance from air traffic control and released the aircraft’s brakes, pushing forward on the power levers in the cockpit to open the throttle.

As the plane began to accelerate down the runway at more than 100mph, he began to smell a strange odour described as similar to a ‘central heating boiler’. His throat became very dry and his eyes began to burn. Such was his discomfort that he was forced to hand control of the plane to his co-pilot. His fingers were tingling and his shirt soaked in sweat. He was confused, talking incoherently and unable to answer questions from his co-pilot. He could not accurately do safety checks. An emergency was declared and the flight returned to Belfast…

Chilling.

2 December 2009

The next IT industry: Synthetic biology

Filed under: risks, Singularity University, Synthetic biology — David Wood @ 2:30 am

Synthetic biology will be “the next IT industry”, and will even be “more important than the last one”.  These are two of the claims in the extraordinary video from the Singularity University featuring Andrew Hessel.

The video lasts nearly one hour, and is full of thought-provoking material.  The subtitle of the video is “hacking genomes”.

Here are just a few of the highlights and topics I noted while watching it:

  • Cells inside organisms are in many ways akin to computers inside networks
  • People with engineering backgrounds are bringing engineering ideas into biology
  • push-button biology: “dream is to design … press a button, and have the design translated to DNA sequences that can be synthesised and put to work in living cells”
  • “DNA printers” will become better and better
  • iGEM: international genetically engineered machines
  • DIYbio: “an organization dedicated to making biology an accessible pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers”
  • Developing a genetic programming language
  • Creating the conditions for the emergence of a new generation of “computing whiz kids” – the synthetic biotech equivalents of Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, and Bill Gates
  • “We’ll soon see molecular biological labs on iPhones”
  • Cost decrease curve for DNA synthesis (“writing DNA”) is tracking that for DNA sequencing (“reading DNA”), lagging it by around 8 years
  • “The human genome synthesis project is coming”

This is the same field where Craig Venter (famous from the first human genome project) is now working.  To quote from the website of his company, Synthetic Genomics:

The Global Challenge: Sustainably meeting the increasing demand for critical resources

The world is facing increasingly difficult challenges today. Population growth resulting in the growing demand for critical resources such as energy, clean water, food and medicine are taxing our fragile planet. To fulfill these needs we need disruptive technologies. We believe genomic advances offer the world viable, sustainable alternatives.

At Synthetic Genomics Inc. we are creating genomic-driven commercial solutions to revolutionize many industries. We have started by focusing on energy, but we imagine a future where our science could be used to produce a variety of products, from synthetically derived vaccines to prevent human diseases to efficient cost effective ways to create clean drinking water. The world is dependent on science and we’re leading the way in turning novel science into life-changing solutions.

Three possible reactions to the idea of synthetic biology

One reaction to the idea of synthetic biology is to say, “Wow – I’d love to become involved!”

A second reaction is to point out the potential huge risks if the process creates dangerous new life forms, such as a fast-spreading new virus.  One of the audience members in the video lecture asked about this; I wasn’t fully convinced by the answer Andrew Hessel gave.

A third reaction is to say that it’s very unlikely that we will, in fact, be able to improve on nature.  This is similar to a comment made by Mark Wilcox in response to my previous blogpost, “The single biggest problem”.  I wrote that:

rather than seeing “natural” as somehow akin to “the best imaginable”, we must be prepared to engineer solutions that are “better than natural”

Mark replied:

I actually find it rather arrogant given millions of years of evolution and our relatively short spell of technological development that any of us presume to know what “better than natural” actually is

This last point in turn poses two questions:

  • Is the outcome of millions of years of evolution” the best outcome possible?
  • If not, is there any reliable way to try to do better than evolution?

For a discussion of the imperfect output of evolution, see (for example) my earlier blogpost, “The human mind as a flawed creation of nature“.

It’s also well worth reading the paper by Nick Bostrom and Anders Sandberg, “The Wisdom of Nature: An Evolutionary Heuristic for Human Enhancement” (PDF).  Here’s a copy of the abstract of that paper:

Human beings are a marvel of evolved complexity. Such systems can be difficult to enhance. When we manipulate complex evolved systems, which are poorly understood, our interventions often fail or backfire.

It can appear as if there is a ‘‘wisdom of nature’’ which we ignore at our peril. Sometimes the belief in nature’s wisdom—and corresponding doubts about the prudence of tampering with nature, especially human nature—manifest as diffusely moral objections against enhancement. Such objections may be expressed as intuitions about the superiority of the natural or the troublesomeness of hubris, or as an evaluative bias in favor of the status quo. This chapter explores the extent to which such prudence-derived anti-enhancement sentiments are justified. We develop a heuristic, inspired by the field of evolutionary medicine, for identifying promising human enhancement interventions. The heuristic incorporates the grains of truth contained in ‘‘nature knows best’’ attitudes while providing criteria for the special cases where we have reason to believe that it is feasible for us to improve on nature.

In conclusion, I personally see this emerging field as being full of tremendous promise, though I will seek to ensure that it is approached with great care and thoughtfulness (as well as excitement).

20 July 2008

Rationally considering the end of the world

Filed under: bias, prediction markets, risks — David Wood @ 8:38 pm

My day job at Symbian is, in effect, to ensure that my colleagues in the management team don’t waken up to some surprising news one morning and say, “Why didn’t we see this coming?“. That is, I have to anticipate so-called “Predictable surprises“. Drawing on insight from both inside and outside of the company, I try to keep my eye on emerging disruptive trends in technology, markets, and society, in case these trends have the potential to reach some kind of tipping point that will significantly impact Symbian’s success (for good, or for ill). And once I’ve reached the view that a particular trend deserves closer attention, it’s my job to ensure that the company does devote sufficient energy to it – in sufficient time to avoid being “taken by surprise”.

For the last few days, I’ve pursued my interest in disruptive trends some way outside the field of smartphones. I booked a holiday from work in order to attend the conference on Global Catastrophic Risks that’s been held at Oxford University’s James Martin 21st Century School.

Instead of just thinking about trends that could destabilise smartphone technology and smatphone markets, I’ve been immersed in discussions about trends that could destabilise human technology and markets as a whole – perhaps even to the extent of ending human civilisation. As well as the more “obvious” global catastrophic risks like nuclear war, nuclear terrorism, global pandemics, and runaway climate change, the conference also discussed threats from meteor and comet impacts, gamma ray bursts, bioterrorism, nanoscale manufacturing, and super-AI.

Interesting (and unnerving) as these individual discussions were, what was even more thought-provoking was the discussion on general obstacles to clear-thinking about these risks. We all suffer from biases in our thinking, that operate at both individual and group levels. These biases can kick into overdrive when we begin to comtemplate global catastrophes. No wonder some people get really hot and bothered when these topics are discussed, or else suffer strong embarrassment and seek to change the topic. Eliezer Yudkowsky considered one set of biases in his presentation “Rationally considering the end of the world“. James Hughes covered another set in “Avoiding Millennialist Cognitive Biases“, as did Jonathan Wiener in “The Tragedy of the Uncommons” and Steve Rayner in “Culture and the Credibility of Catastrophe“. There were also practical examples of how people (and corporations) often misjudge risks, in both “Insurance and catastrophes” by Peter Taylor and “Probing the Improbable. Methodological Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stakes” by Toby Order and co-workers.

So what can we do, to set aside biases and get a better handle on the evaluation and prioritisation of these existential risks? Perhaps the most innovative suggestion came in the presentation by Robin Hanson, “Catastrophe, Social Collapse, and Human Extinction“. Robin is one of the pioneers of the notion of “Prediction markets“, so perhaps it is no surprise that he floated the idea of markets in tickets to safe refuges where occupants would have a chance of escaping particular global catastrophes. Some audience members appeared to find the idea distasteful, asking “How can you gamble on mass death?” and “Isn’t it unjust to exclude other people from the refuge?” But the idea is that these markets would allow a Wisdom of Crowds effect to signal to observers which existential risks were growing in danger. I suspect the idea of these tickets to safe refuges will prove impractical, but anything that will help us to escape from our collective biases on these literally earth-shattering topics will be welcome.

(Aside: Robin and Eliezer jointly run a fast throughput blog called “Overcoming bias” that is dedicated to the question “How can we obtain beliefs closer to reality?”)

Robin’s talk also contained the memorable image that the problem with slipping on a staircase isn’t that of falling down one step, but of initiating an escalation effect of tumbling down the whole staircase. Likewise, the biggest consequences of the risks covered in the conference aren’t that they will occur in isolation, but that they might trigger a series of inter-related collapses. On a connected point, Peter Taylor mentioned that the worldwide re-insurance industry would have collapsed altogether if a New Orleans scale weather-induced disaster had followed hot on the heels of the 9-11 tragedies – the system would have had no time to recover. It was a sobering reminder of the potential fragility of much of what we take for granted.

Footnote: For other coverage of this conference, see Ronald Bailey’s comments in Reason. There’s also a 500+ page book co-edited by Nick Bostrom and Milan Cirkovic that contains chapter versions of many of the presentations from the conference (plus some additional material).

3 July 2008

Nanoscience and the mobile device: hopes and fears

Filed under: Morph, nanotechnology, Nokia, risks — David Wood @ 10:56 am

Nokia’s concept video of a future morphing mobile phone, released back in February, has apparently already been viewed more than two million times on YouTube. It’s a clever piece of work, simultaneously showing an appealing vision of future mobile devices and giving hints about how the underlying technology could work. No wonder it’s been popular.

So what are the next steps? I see that the office of Nokia’s CTO has now released a 5 page white paper that gives more of the background to the technologies involved, which are collectively known as nanotechnology. It’s available on Bob Iannucci’s blog, and it’s a fine read. Here’s a short extract:

After a blustery decade of hopes and fears (the fountain of youth or a tool for terrorists?), nanotechnology has hit its stride. More than 600 companies claim to use nanotechnologies in products currently on the market. A few interesting examples:

  • Stain-repellant textiles. A finely structured surface of embedded “nanowhiskers” keeps liquids from soaking into clothing—in the same way that some plant leaves keep themselves clean.
  • UV-absorbing sunscreen. Using nanoparticulate zinc oxide or titanium dioxide, these products spread easily and are fully transparent —while absorbing ultraviolet rays to prevent sunburn.
  • Purifying water filters. Aluminum oxide nanofibers with unusual bioadhesive properties are formulated into filters that attract and retain electronegative particles such as bacteria and viruses.
  • Windshield defoggers. A transparent lacquer of carbon nanotubes connects to the vehicle’s electrical source to evenly warm up the entire surface of the glass.

Even more interesting, to my mind, than the explanation of what’s already been accomplished (and what’s likely to be just around the corner), is a set of questions listed in the white paper. (In my view, the quality of someone’s intelligence is often shown more in the quality of the questions they ask than in the quality of the answers they give to questions raised by other people.) Here’s what the white paper says on this score:

As Nokia looks toward the mobile device of 2015 and beyond, our research teams, our partner academic institutions, and other industry innovators are finding answers to the following questions:

  1. What will be the form factors, functionalities, and interaction paradigms preferred by users in the future?
  2. How can the device sense the user’s behavior, physiological state, physical context, and local environment?
  3. How can we integrate energy-efficient sensing, computing, actuation, and communication solutions?
  4. How can we create a library of reliable and durable surface materials that enable a multitude of functions?
  5. How can we develop efficient power solutions that are also lightweight and wearable?
  6. How can we manufacture functional electronics and optics that are transparent and compliant?
  7. How can we move the functionality and intelligence of the device closer to the physical user interface?
  8. As we pursue these questions, how can we assess—and mitigate— possible risks, so that we introduce new technologies in a globally responsible manner?

That’s lots to think about! In response to the final question, one site that has many promising answers is the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, founded by Mike Treder and Chris Phoenix. As he explains in his recent article “Nano Catastrophes“, Mike’s coming to Oxford later this month to attend a Conference on Global Catastrophic Risks, where he’ll be addressing these issues. I’ll be popping down that weekend to join the conference, and I look forward to reporting back what I find.

This is a topic that’s likely to run and run. Both the potential upsides and the potential downsides of nanotechnology are enormous. It’s well worth lots more serious research.

11 June 2008

Technology and the risks of global catastrophe

Filed under: risks, UKTA — David Wood @ 10:45 pm

I’m a passionate enthusiast about the capabilities of technologies. But at the same time, I’m keenly aware of the potential for technology to wreak havoc and destruction. So I’m eagerly looking forward to the UKTA technology debate on Saturday (14th June):

Technology risks and the survival of humanity: Is emerging technology more likely to destroy human civilisation or to radically enhance it?


This is taking place in Birkbeck College, central London, from 2pm-4pm. Everyone is welcome to attend – there’s no charge. (If you Facebook, you can RSVP here.)

This event will in some ways be a preview of a considerably longer event taking place in Oxford during July: The Future of Humanity Institute’s conference on “Global Catastrophic Risks“. Speakers at this later conference include:

  • Professor Jonathan Wiener, current President of the Society of Risk Analysis;
  • Professor Steve Rayner, Director of the James Martin Institute for Science and Civilisation;
  • Professor William Potter, Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies;
  • Sir Crispin Tickell, a leading authority on the interaction between science and global governance, and an advisor on climate change to successive British Prime Ministers;
  • Eliezer Yudkowsky, Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence;
  • Mike Treder , co-founder and Executive Director, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology;
  • Professor Bill Napier , Honorary Professor, Institute for Astrobiology, Cardiff University.

I’m anticipating a lot of thought-provoking discussion. For this conference, advance registration is essential. There’s about a week left before registration closes.

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