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A lethal hand-held gun that runs on batteries? Welcome to the sad side of emerging technology.

The weapon weighs about three kilograms and is powerful enough to burn through a gas tank and ignite the fuel inside. It is entirely silent and the beam is invisible. At around $20,452 per rifle, the weapon is relatively inexpensive, considering that it will not need additional ammunition as it runs on batteries.

When people play the University at Buffalo’s new strategy game, they first have to agree to be hooked up to electroencephalogram (EEG) technology so that the game’s designers can record their brain activity. As they play, their eye movements are also tracked by way of special ultra high-speed cameras to see exactly how they respond to what they’re doing. This information, which can be teased out using machine learning algorithms, will then be used to develop new algorithms that can help train large numbers of future robots. In particular, the hope is that these insights into complex decision-making can improve coordination between large teams of autonomous air and ground robots.

Allan Savory convincingly argues that we need more cattle, as opposed to less, in order to reverse desertification and save our planet. A fascinating perspective that goes against the prevailing sentiment.

Savory presents a few mind-blowing examples of how simulating the natural movement of herd animals improves the overall health and humidity-retaining properties of soil in grasslands.

So it seems more cattle and farm animals are good for our planet, we just need to let them run freely and occasionally nudge them in certain, carefully-chosen directions.

Can’t say that I’m 100% convinced after a single video, but there is a good portion of common-sense presented here.

fascinating discussion about sleep, packed with insightful and often mind-blowing information

personalized artificial organs

more info

Motion graphics essay visualizing future technology of Synthetic Biology

The video has a tad bit too much of a commercial aesthetic for my taste but it presents some interesting concepts – I find the idea of ‘living buildings’ growing directly out of Earth particularly intriguing.

The article portrays a very positive picture. Would love to hear thoughts from architects and engineers.

CLT has been called “the concrete of the future,” and in a sense – it’s true. It delivers at minimum the same structural strength as reinforced concrete, but it’s a material with a high degree of flexibility that has to undergo great deformations to break and collapse – unlike concrete. Moreover, 1 m3 of concrete weighs approximately 2.7 tons, while 1 m3 of CLT weighs 400 kg and has the same resistance. The same goes for steel.

In the Anthropocene, it is becoming increasingly difficult to recognize whether a natural process has been impacted by human activity. At the same time, we have become so dependent on certain technological processes that we consider them natural.

Today, we see nature as something recreational—a Disneyland for grown-ups—more than something unpredictable and dangerous. We no longer connect with the same feelings of the sublime that troubled Burke, or the Romantic poets of the 19th century. Instead, van Mensvoort says that “our image of nature is being carefully constructed in a recreational simulation,” and that it is designed by bureaucrats under the pretext of recreating a lost heritage. In other words, nature is demystified and reduced to a nostalgic trope.

Cables, pipes, robots, servers. These noumenal objects become elements of a new techno-ecology that treats everything the same way, whether natural or inorganic. This is the “mutual programmed harmony” between mammals and robots that poet Richard Brautigan described in his 1967 poem All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace: in “a cybernetic forest” inhabited by “pines and electronics,” animals “stroll peacefully past computers as if they were flowers.”

The computational landscapes with their systems (algorithms) “are no longer or are not simply instructions to be performed, but have become performing entities: actualities that select, evaluate, transform, and produce data,” Parisi wrote in Contagious Architecture. They “construct the digital spatio-temporalities that program the architectural forms and urban infrastructures, and thereby modes of living.”

An interesting, but slightly oversimplified look at how Japanese, Shinto-based culture looks at robots as opposed to Westerners whose views are shaped by history of slavery.

The article closes with a few well-intentioned remarks about extended intelligence and our spiritual connection to non-human forms of existence.

My view is that merely replacing oppressed humans with oppressed machines will not fix the fundamentally dysfunctional order that has evolved over centuries.

Thinking about the development and evolution of machine-based intelligence as an integrated “Extended Intelligence” rather than artificial intelligence that threatens humanity will also help.

Rather than just being human-centric, we must develop a respect for, and emotional and spiritual dialogue with, all things.

Followers of Shinto, unlike Judeo-Christian monotheists and the Greeks before them, do not believe that humans are particularly “special.” Instead, there are spirits in everything, rather like the Force in Star Wars. Nature doesn’t belong to us, we belong to Nature, and spirits live in everything, including rocks, tools, homes, and even empty spaces.

A honest look at the prospect of homo sapiens colonising Mars.

It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve these problems here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. There’s no ‘Planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.

While there’s no doubt in my mind that humans will eventually visit Mars and even build a base or two, the notion that we’ll soon set up colonies inhabited by hundreds or thousands of people is pure nonsense, and an unmitigated denial of the tremendous challenges posed by such a prospect.

A critical look at how online retail, and Amazon in particular, is reorganising geospatial and workplace dynamics in urban areas.

Far from existing beyond the physical realm, online retail is significantly affecting our cities, our social interactions, our livelihoods, our economy and our planet, all the while seeking new ways of freeing itself from the messy complications of being an ultimately physical medium.

Amazon’s humans are automated, for now their human-ness gives them an edge over automation: robots currently lack good eyeballs.

In this ever-churning object soup, contained within row upon row of identical shelves, there are no reliable landmarks that allow the pickers to establish their own sense of orientation. Their autonomy is subverted by automation.

The real environmental costs (and associated geopolitical issues) are often underplayed or entirely ignored in discussions about ‘clean energy’.

This prompts the questions: do we have enough rare earths to build the clean and smart future we’re imagining; can China, supplier of 90% of the global rare earths over the last 20 years, meet expected growth in demand; and what will the environmental consequences be.

A brilliant essay about the state of ethics and moral in design.

We need an informed discussion in parliament, not a clump of aunts and uncles trying to figure out on the fly how the Internet works, or how to make websites, in a time when nobody is talking about “the Internet” or how to make “websites” anymore. We need well-meaning technologists working closely with informed lawmakers, trying to find how to deal with a situation that evolves very quickly. The law needs to protect those who tried to improve the industry from within. Whistleblowers, protestors, those who have the civic courage to disobey.

What we’re lacking today is not measurable. There’s something wrong, but it’s hard to fix with science, cash or engineering. Unfortunately, you can’t easily multiply growth with better morals. Thinking about others usually works against accumulating profit for yourself.

McKinsey, Accenture, and Deloitte will start selling ethics in the same old PowerPoint presentations with the same old pyramids and pie charts, and the same old bullshit. They probably already do. It’s annoying. The obscene money and time goodwill and trust they waste annoys everyone.

But if in your design you try to slow things down and make people more mindful about what they do, you probably have a better impact than when you try to speed things up.

If philosophers learn to design and designers learn to think, they’d both improve. There’s a delicate, but powerful connection.

A fascinating read about the evolution of darknet markets and how technology is changing the illegal trade (for better if you ask me).

I thought I knew how these trade networks operate but after reading this article I’ve realized my knowledge is outdated by a few years.

The result of this evolution is a highly decentralized, specialized and resilient method of running black market commerce. Less information is acquired, shipments are faster, isolation between participants is high, and multiple independent sales channels are established.

Unfortunately, creation by destruction is what capitalism does best, and its damaging practices are anything but green. This market-driven “sustainable” vision of economic activity, ecological-conscious diets and “hipness” within modern capitalism reinforce inequality and still hurt the environment.

The higher efficiency of planes, cars and electronic devices is immediately offset by cheaper prices, resulting in an increase in demand and ultimately greater consumption of energy and resources. And within the globalised economic system we live in, the enhanced efficiency in one place often happens at the expense of growing inefficiency or waste in others.

In other words, the more efficient we are, the cheaper consumption gets, and in an economy predicated on endless growth, the more we consume and waste. The environment will always be at the losing endof this logic.

Indeed, growth-oriented capitalism will “sell” you veganism as a noble practice that reflects your values and benefits your health, but it would not tell you the full story about the ongoing and long-term social and ecological consequences of industrial veganism.

What’s potentially more problematic with the classist nature of green production and consumption is that urban hipsters pride themselves as being “woke” about sustainability issues, while simultaneously alienating the rural and overseas agricultural, peri-urban, and manufacturing classes, without whom “hip” lifestyles would not be possible.

A very insightful piece into Spotify’s mood-oriented behavioural engineering.

In Spotify’s world, listening data has become the oil that fuels a monetizable metrics machine, pumping the numbers that lure advertisers to the platform. In a data-driven listening environment, the commodity is no longer music. The commodity is listening. The commodity is users and their moods. The commodity is listening habits as behavioral data. Indeed, what Spotify calls “streaming intelligence” should be understood as surveillance of its users to fuel its own growth and ability to sell mood-and-moment data to brands.

Spotify’s enormous access to mood-based data is a pillar of its value to brands and advertisers, allowing them to target ads on Spotify by moods and emotions. Further, since 2016, Spotify has shared this mood data directly with the world’s biggest marketing and advertising firms.

A pervasive surveillance system being put in place in the US under the guise of protecting children in schools.

Arguably, this is a moral and ethical grey zone, but I’m sure there must be other, more humane ways to improve our lot than with technology monitoring and analysing every detail of our lives.

Some of the cases in the article are chilling.

Social media monitoring companies track the posts of everyone in the areas surrounding schools, including adults. Other companies scan the private digital content of millions of students using district-issued computers and accounts. Those services are complemented with tip-reporting apps, facial-recognition software, and other new technology systems.

One student was flagged for having photos of himself taking bong hits. Other students were flagged for personal photos showing fights and nude images that could be considered child pornography. Evergreen school administrators responded by notifying parents, police, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The age on nano bots is upon us.

“In this research, we designed micro-motors that no longer rely on external manipulation to navigate to a specific location. Instead, they take advantage of variations in biological environments to automatically navigate themselves.”

This is significant not just for medical applications, but for micro-motors generally.

Cancers in the human body may one day be treated by tiny, self-propelled “micro-submarines” delivering medicine to affected organs after UNSW Sydney chemical and biomedical engineers proved it was possible.

An interview with one of my favourite urbanists Adam Greenfield

The technologies of communication, mediation and knowledge production we’ve embraced are throwing up all sorts of unintended consequences for who we understand ourselves to be, the ways in which we organize ourselves as publics and the ways we identify, construct and address matters of public concern. And even if we ourselves have been lucky enough to avoid some of its uglier manifestations personally, we feel the general tenor of the shared sociotechnical regime in our bones, as a rising but so far mostly inchoate sense of dread. What smart-city advocates are arguing for is more of the same techniques and practices that produced this sense of dread in so many of us, and I don’t see any way to understand that except as either blithe privilege, conscious malice or frank insanity.

Just the opposite: the technology is already so good that the identifiability of someone moving through public space is, in principle at least, utterly overdetermined — whether from facial recognition, gait period or other latent, easily retrievable and hard to camouflage biometric signature; from habitual patterns of location, behavior and association; directly retrieved from the devices they may be carrying; or via some other means, and especially through some combination of “all of the above.” Whether that turns out to be the case consistently in practice is a different question entirely, but I think we’d be best advised to act on the assumption that the anonymity of bodies moving through public space is a dead issue.

Drones do not make much sense in urban areas but they may prove useful as part of a country-wide delivery network targeting remote and hard-to-reach areas.

The service will operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week from four distribution centres - each equipped with 30 drones - and deliver to over 2,000 health facilities serving 12 million people across the country.

Zipline, a California-based automated logistics company, will use drones to make on-demand, emergency deliveries of high priority products including emergency and routine vaccines and other health products.

A good example of the potential of big data analysis and machine learning to improve the state of the world.

A nonprofit artificial intelligence firm called WattTime is going to use satellite imagery to precisely track the air pollution (including carbon emissions) coming out of every single power plant in the world, in real time. And it’s going to make the data public.

We predict ourselves into existence

A new way to store information in molecules could preserve the contents of the New York Public Library in a teaspoon of protein, without energy, for millions of years

A team of researchers at Virginia Tech have managed to decode the language of honey bees in such a way that will allow other scientists across the globe to interpret the insects’ highly sophisticated and complex communications […]

At Imperial College London’s new campus in West London, some rooftops will soon hold bright green “biosolar” panels covered with algae. The plants suck carbon dioxide out of the air and produce fresh oxygen at a rate 100 times faster than trees covering the same amount of land–and then the microscopic organisms can be harvested to be used in food.

For some reason I find the advances in sonic technologies to be some of the most exciting.

On the other hand, the possibility to target individuals with sound without anyone else hearing it feels a bit uncanny.

Our system can be used from some distance away to beam information directly to someone’s ear,” said research team leader Charles M. Wynn. “It is the first system that uses lasers that are fully safe for the eyes and skin to localize an audible signal to a particular person in any setting.

Absolutely fascinating discussion with Graham Hancock about little-known lost civilisations which shatters widely-accepted view of of history.

Called the Synthetic Training Environment, the initiative aims to create a unified training environment for the infantry that lets soldiers practice combat scenarios dozens, potentially even hundreds, of times before setting foot in a battlezone.

Using a unique A.I. layer, the software also allows these millions of intelligent entities can act of their own accord. That means that no two training scenarios will be exactly like. The software is additionally able to interact with the DoD’s existing simulation systems, meaning that the infantry will be able to practice in a shared virtual world with, say, a helicopter simulator.

An eloquent piece about the pervasiveness of digitalization and the importance of developing a more integrated cross-disciplinary approaches to analyzing and dealing with consequences of the Anthropocene.

The further integration of ubiquitous computing technologies into the deep fabric of our societies may become immensely useful when adapting the global metabolism to the challenges of the Anthropocene. But it may also lead, through the value-chain logics of companies that own our data, or companies that own Internet of Things-ready networks, to a surveillance society of unprecedented reach. Such developments may even constitute a step in the direction of turning the digital sphere into a self-organizing intelligence with potential control over human behaviour, a powerful political weapon that invites dangerous misuse.

Space10 delicious attempt to re-envision the future of fast food

A glimpse into the strange economics of social media influencers.

Bennett, the influencer marketing consultant, says that in 2016 an endorsement from a top-level influencer would generally cost about $5,000 to $10,000; now, brands are expected to pay “well over $100,000 for the same placement.

Fascinating project by Gilberto Esparza.

Vegetation and microorganisms live in symbiosis inside the body of the Nomadic Plants robot. Whenever its bacteria require nourishment, the self-sufficient robot will move towards a contaminated river and ‘drink’ water from it. Through a process of microbial fuel cell, the elements contained in the water are decomposed and turned into energy that can feed the brain circuits of the robot. The surplus is then used to create life, enabling plants to complete their own life cycle.

Prototype to be ready by the end of March 2019.

The system, called the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS), uses a combination of AI and statistics to try to assess the risk of someone committing or becoming a victim of gun or knife crime, as well as the likelihood of someone falling victim to modern slavery.

As for exactly what will happen when such individuals are identified, that is still a matter of discussion, says Donnelly. He says the intention isn’t to pre-emptively arrest anyone, but rather to provide support from local health or social workers. For example, they could offer counselling to any individual with a history of mental health issues that had been flagged by NDAS as being likely to commit a violent crime. Potential victims could be contacted by social services.

A project is China’s effort to do something that has never been done before.

China is planning to build a deep sea base for unmanned submarine science and defence operations in the South China Sea, a centre that might become the first artificial intelligence colony on Earth, officials and scientists involved in the plan said.

Genetically engineered humans may be born sooner than we have expected.

It might be the case that this is just a first publicly acknowledged experiment. There is a real possibility that there are scientists working on modifying human embryos’ DNA in other laboratories around the world.

As much as I am against messing with natural processes that took aeons to perfect, it would be naive to think that humanity would not take the opportunity when it presents itself. It was just a matter of time. We should remind ourselves that Huxley’s A Brave New World was a cautionary tale, not a guide for the future.

An ambitious plan that sets the right tone. Lets hope more countries follow suit.

Insightful and incredibly fascinating documentary about Shenzhen and China’s approach to innovation.

Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo to launch the world’s first commercial driverless car service in early December.

It’s a big milestone for self-driving cars, but it won’t exactly be a “flip-the-switch” moment. Waymo isn’t planning a splashy media event, and the service won’t be appearing in an app store anytime soon

Our own understanding of the situations we encounter is grounded in broad, intuitive “common-sense knowledge” about how the world works, and about the goals, motivations and likely behavior of other living creatures, particularly other humans. Additionally, our understanding of the world relies on our core abilities to generalize what we know, to form abstract concepts, and to make analogies — in short, to flexibly adapt our concepts to new situations. Researchers have been experimenting for decades with methods for imbuing A.I. systems with intuitive common sense and robust humanlike generalization abilities, but there has been little progress in this very difficult endeavor.

As the A.I. researcher Pedro Domingos noted in his book “The Master Algorithm,” “People worry that computers will get too smart and take over the world, but the real problem is that they’re too stupid and they’ve already taken over the world.”

Unlocking A.I.’s barrier of meaning is likely to require a step backward for the field, away from ever bigger networks and data collections, and back to the field’s roots as an interdisciplinary science studying the most challenging of scientific problems: the nature of intelligence.

China is openly looking to develop AI-powered weapons.

A passion for developing new weapons is a must … and they must also be patriots.

This is the first university programme in the world designed to aggressively and strategically encourage the next generation to think, design and deploy AI for military research and use.

Another cautionary example of the extent of data extractivism.

over the course of a single week, Quantcast has amassed over 5300 rows and more than 46 columns worth of data including URLs, time stamps, IP addresses, cookies IDs, browser information and much more.

Advertising companies and data brokers have been quietly collecting, analysing, trading, and selling data on people for decades. What has changed is the granularity and invasiveness at which this is possible.

The world is being rebuilt by companies and governments so that they can exploit data. Without urgent and continuous action, data will be used in ways that people cannot now even imagine, to define and manipulate our lives without us being to understand why or being able to effectively fight back.

Apple openly pushing for improving digital privacy which can be seen as an important competitive advantage.

A brief overview of the current state of the field of lab-grown meat. According to the projections, we should have competitively priced tasty lab-grown meat available on the shelf of supermarkets in 10 years.

This year Alibaba sold $10bn of stuff in the first hour (which is about 6 months worth of ALL online shopping in the UK).

At its peak they have more than 350,000 transactions per second. It’s all astounding.

France is ‘banning shops from throwing away unsold food/clothes and instead they have to donate the unsold products to charities and people who need it most’.

This policy is a reaction to a symptom of a broken system which doesn’t address the underlying mechanisms of relentless production/waste cycles. Nevertheless, changing consumption attitudes and habits is a prerequisite towards a truly sustainable policy in the long-run.

A fascinating interview with a Czech publicist and activist Vít Jedlička who is a founder of a ‘self-declared libertarian micronation’.

A glimpse into shady business practices of data brokers. Thasos is just a tip of the iceberg of an expanding global surveillance assemblage.

Thasos says it can paint detailed pictures of the ebb and flow of people, and thus their money.

Thasos gets data from about 1,000 apps, many of which need to know a phone’s location to be effective, like those providing weather forecasts, driving directions or the whereabouts of the nearest ATM. Smartphone users, wittingly or not, share their location when they use such apps.

A provocative Black Mirror-esque project by Keiichi Matsuda.

Hyper-Reality […] is a concept film by Keiichi Matsuda. It presents a provocative and kaleidoscopic new vision of the future, where physical and virtual realities have merged, and the city is saturated in media.

An essay exploring cognitive biases that occur when we try to predict future.

Ideas, not technology, have driven the biggest historical changes.

We expect more change than actually happens in the future because we imagine our lives have changed more than they actually have.

As the theorist Nassim Nicholas Taleb writes in Antifragile, “we notice what varies and changes more than what plays a larger role but doesn’t change. We rely more on water than on cell phones, but because water does not change and cell phones do, we are prone to thinking that cell phones play a larger role than they do.”

As well as reforming taxation, Sachs proposed a radical rethink of intellectual property laws to ensure that the benefits of AI are distributed fairly across society, and around the world. “The marginal cost of production of AI is effectively zero. The ability to make these technologies available to the poorest countries at no cost is an evident option. So we should be taking special care to make sure that this revolution can reach everybody.”

New research suggests that the environmental impact of mining cryptocurrencies may be higher than we originally thought.

Bounding digital interactions to the physical space.

China’s tech ambitions are getting over the moon. Announced to launch in 2 years.

the illumination satellite would be designed to complement the moon at night, with its own brightness eight times that of the earth’s natural satellite, and “bright enough to replace street lights in the city.”

the precise illumination range can be controlled within a few dozen meters

Large-scale, industrial agriculture is often held up as the solution for feeding the world’s growing population. But small farms—with about 25 acres or less—along with family-run operations like Masumoto’s produce over 70 percent of the world’s food.

By joining the Open Invention Network, Microsoft is offering its entire patent portfolio to all of the open-source patent consortium’s members.

We’ve reached an era of a less-connected web, a web focused on retaining users rather than sharing content.

Just a reminder that China has already figured out mobile payments.

A critical look at what the future of the urban way of life looks according to Amazon’s vision.

An obvious move for Amazon that already has an enormous delivery infrastructure in place.

A convincing case for putting machine learning capabilities into tiny low-energy chips as opposed to the current approach that relies on tech behemoths to provide vast computational power. The article presents a solid argument for why it makes economic and practical sense and how it is already possible with the current technology.

Personally, I find this philosophy of a decentralised, ideally open-sourced, AI much more intriguing then massive AI assemblage controlled by a handful of private companies.

My guess is that Amazon could achieve a similar level of automation but faces a more dramatic political and media backlash which prevents it from deploying it outright.

JD.com, a Chinese e-commerce gargantuan, has built a big new Shanghai fulfillment center that can organize, pack and ship 200,000 orders a day. It employs four people — all of whom service the robots.

This is the sort of application where I see the greatest short-term potential of AI.

The AI was trained to predict how toxic tens of thousands of unknown chemicals could be, based on previous animal tests, and the algorithm’s results were shown to be as accurate as live animal tests.

This will presumably make it easier for Google to link your online behaviour to your purchases in physical stores.

A study from Germany that links higher Facebook usage to attacks on refugees by quite a startling proportion.

Wherever per-person Facebook use rose to one standard deviation above the national average, attacks on refugees increased by about 50 percent.

Conclusions may not sound surprising in the context of recent media coverage of fake news and hate speech online. The study provides solid empirical evidence that social media (specifically Facebook) may have a direct effect on how we perceive reality and discern right and wrong. Correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation, but it seems like the study controlled for enough variables to merit some level of accuracy.

A fascinating story of how e-commerce is transforming China, where drones deliver goods to remote villages, and people use phones to pay for virtually everything.

Experts agree that China has already surpassed Silicon Valley in terms of innovation and development. A unique combination of hypercapitalism, communist legacy and oppressive state power allow new technology to be implemented at an unprecedented pace with disregard for privacy or human agency.

As far-fetched the things happening in China may seem, most Western countries seem to be headed in a similar direction; just more covertly and at a slower pace due to legislation and a greater need to appease the public.

Schneier on the fragility of our increasingly interconnected world and why it is necessary to start regulating how technology is deployed and integrated into our lives.

There’s no industry that’s improved safety or security without governments forcing it to do so. Again and again, companies skimp on security until they are forced to take it seriously. We need government to step up here with a combination of things targeted at firms developing internet-connected devices. They include flexible standards, rigid rules, and tough liability laws whose penalties are big enough to seriously hurt a company’s earnings.

I highly recommend check it our more of Schneier’s work on his website.

3D printing technology is still relatively expensive and slow compared to traditional mass production processes. The new Metal Jet from HP can print objects from steel, and it may be a first significant entry into the market that has a potential to be more widely adopted. Volkswagen and other large companies that have partnered with HP announced its plans for large-scale mass customisation alongside the release.

The ability of GROWLAY to serve as a growing medium is due to its porosity, and the microcapillaries that run through the material. This means a 3D print made with GROWLAY can absorb water, take in added nutrients such as liquid fertilizer and allow a degree of root ingrowth so that a plant can attach to the print.

This is a significant news story that probably deserves more attention than it is (not) getting.

In this case, the genetic modification seems to be rather minor and is not related to malaria (yet). However, legitimising large-scale release of genetically engineered organisms into the environment marks the next phase of our relationship with planet Earth. We can expect more such experiments to appear in the coming years.

“Teams in three African countries — Burkina Faso, Mali, and Uganda — are building the groundwork to eventually let loose “gene drive” mosquitoes, which would contain a mutation that would significantly and quickly reduce the mosquito population. Genetically engineered mosquitoes have already been released in places like Brazil and the Cayman Islands, though animals with gene drives have never been released in the wild.”