From Airbag to Airpaq: College Kids Think Big, Save Tons of Auto Waste
Luckily, two college freshmen at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, were naïve enough to take their bicycles to the scrapyard. In a previous stroke of fortune, the freshmen, Adrian Goosses and Michael Widmann, had been assigned as roommates and had quickly hit it off. Now they were looking for a cool recycling project for their first semester “strategic entrepreneurship” course—maybe they could turn old tires into comfortable lounge chairs, they thought.
“Everybody gets around by bike in Rotterdam,” says Goosses, now 32, from his home in Cologne, Germany. “The tires were way too heavy and cumbersome to transport by bike,” Widmann chimes in via Zoom from Bolzano, Italy, where he lives.
Sifting through the car trash for something handier led the two students to an idea that has since flourished: Could the airbag and seatbelts from a banged up compact car be salvaged and turned into a sustainable backpack? The size of the airbag was already a natural fit. The seatbelts made perfect shoulder straps. After returning from the scrapyard, “We stitched the prototype together by hand with a needle and yarn,” says Goosses. “Yet we didn’t even know how to sew!”
Much to their surprise, their classmates responded with so much enthusiasm to their “trash bag” concept that it convinced the two innovators to keep going. Every semester, they improved the prototype further. With the help of YouTube videos, they taught themselves how to sew. Because modern electric sewing machines had a difficult time breaking through the tough nylon of the airbags, Goosses and Widmann went to a second-hand shop and purchased an ancient Singer from 1880 for 10 Euros. They dyed the first airbags in a saucepan in the garden outside of the apartment they shared.
“By the time we graduated, we had a presentable prototype and a business plan,” Goosses says.
Despite their progress, Goosses and Widmann are up against a problem that’s immense: Cars are notoriously difficult to recycle because many parts are considered toxic waste.
It’s an example of “upcycling,” when you spot a potential new use in something that’s been trashed, shelved or otherwise retired. The approach has received increasing attention and support from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and others to boost sustainability in all kinds of areas, from fashion (where even luxury brands like Balenciaga or Coach repurpose vintage clothing and bags) to architecture, where reusing wood, steel and bricks significantly reduces a building’s carbon footprint.
In addition to helping the planet, those who do it well can make a living from it. These days, Goosses and Widmann own a flourishing company: Airpaq. A crowdfunding campaign in 2017 yielded 70,000 Euros to get them started. Since then, they have upcycled 80,000 airbags, 100,000 seatbelts and 28,000 belt buckles – the equivalent of 60 tons of car trash.
For the successful upcycling, they received the 2021 German Design Award and, earlier this year, the renowned German Sustainability Award. The jurors evaluating the product commented that the startup “convinced us not only because of their uncompromising quality and functionality but also because of their ecological and ethical values….How well the startup translates upcycling and green fashion into an urban lifestyle brand is impressive.”
Despite their progress, Goosses and Widmann are up against a problem that’s immense: Cars are notoriously difficult to recycle because many parts are considered toxic waste. Therefore, up to 25% of vehicle scraps get shredded every year in Germany alone, the equivalent of over 501,000 tons. Because airbags and seatbelts are nearly indestructible, they are costly to recycle and almost always end up in landfills. Given that airbags and seatbelts save lives, they are subject to stringent security regulations, and manufacturers have a sky-high reject rate. “If a tiny filament protrudes somewhere, the manufacturer will throw out the entire output,” Widmann explains.
The nearly indestructible qualities that make this material very difficult to recycle render it an excellent resource for backpacks. “The material is so durable, you almost cannot tear it,” Goosses adds and demonstrates with a hard tug that even when the material already has a hole, it won’t rip it further. The material is also water repellent and extremely light.
The antique Singer is still in their Cologne headquarters but only as decoration. Their company with 12 employees is producing 500 backpacks and fanny packs every week in Romania, where the parts are professionally cut by laser, dyed and sewed. Airpaq still procures the belt buckles at scrapyards but they get most of the airbags directly from the reject pile of a nearby airbag producer. “We process the materials where they are produced,” Goosses explains. Only about 15 miles lie between one of Europe’s biggest airbag manufacturers and the Airpaq seamsters in Romania.
Co-founders Adrian Goosses and Michael Widmann demonstrate their company's equation: airbag plus seatbelt equals a backpack that's durable and eco-friendly.
Airpaq
The founders are aware that with price tags ranging from 100 to 160 Euro - a cost that reflects their intensive production process - Airpaq’s bags are hardly competitive. After all, anybody can buy a discount backpack for a fraction of the cost. So they recently added fanny packs for 30 Euro to their product line. Goosses and Widmann know they will need to lower their prices in the long run if they want to expand. Among other things, they didn’t pay themselves salaries during the first two years after founding the company.
Money-making isn’t their only objective. “Of course, it would be cheaper if we did what almost all textile producers do and move production to Asia,” Goosses says. That wasn’t an option for him. “Ship trash to Vietnam and let seamsters sew it together for cheap? No way, that would be anything but sustainable,” he says.
Michael Widmann’s family was already operating a textile production in Romania, mainly producing thin, elastic sports fashion. The family allowed Widmann and Goosses to produce their first professional prototypes there, but then the two youngsters had to buy their own machines, acquire the necessary knowhow, and hire their staff. They both moved to Romania for six months “to get to know the people behind the machines.” The founders emphasize that they pay fair wages, use eco-certified dyes and clean their own wastewater. “Normal production uses five to six liters of water per kilo material,” Widmann explains. “We only need a fraction because we massage the dye into the material by hand: 100 ml water for washing and dying per kilo.”
However, every time they return to the scrapyard, the abundance of trash sparks new ideas. “When you see how much material ends up there…” Widmann says, shaking his head without finishing the sentence. Goosses picks up the train of thought: “We want to make upcycling the new standard. You just have to be creative to get upcycling into the mainstream.”
And maybe they’ll return to their roots and finally find an idea for the tires after all. “One could turn the rubber into soles for comfortable shoes,” Widmann thinks out loud.
As Our AI Systems Get Better, So Must We
As the power and capability of our AI systems increase by the day, the essential question we now face is what constitutes peak human. If we stay where we are while the AI systems we are unleashing continually get better, they will meet and then exceed our capabilities in an ever-growing number of domains. But while some technology visionaries like Elon Musk call for us to slow down the development of AI systems to buy time, this approach alone will simply not work in our hyper-competitive world, particularly when the potential benefits of AI are so great and our frameworks for global governance are so weak. In order to build the future we want, we must also become ever better humans.
The list of activities we once saw as uniquely human where AIs have now surpassed us is long and growing. First, AI systems could beat our best chess players, then our best Go players, then our best champions of multi-player poker. They can see patterns far better than we can, generate medical and other hypotheses most human specialists miss, predict and map out new cellular structures, and even generate beautiful, and, yes, creative, art.
A recent paper by Microsoft researchers analyzing the significant leap in capabilities in OpenAI’s latest AI bot, ChatGPT-4, asserted that the algorithm can “solve novel and difficult tasks that span mathematics, coding, vision, medicine, law, psychology and more, without needing any special prompting.” Calling this functionality “strikingly close to human-level performance,” the authors conclude it “could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system.”
The concept of AGI has been around for decades. In its common use, the term suggests a time when individual machines can do many different things at a human level, not just one thing like playing Go or analyzing radiological images. Debating when AGI might arrive, a favorite pastime of computer scientists for years, now has become outdated.
We already have AI algorithms and chatbots that can do lots of different things. Based on the generalist definition, in other words, AGI is essentially already here.
Unfettered by the evolved capacity and storage constraints of our brains, AI algorithms can access nearly all of the digitized cultural inheritance of humanity since the dawn of recorded history and have increasing access to growing pools of digitized biological data from across the spectrum of life.
Once we recognize that both AI systems and humans have unique superpowers, the essential question becomes what each of us can do better than the other and what humans and AIs can best do in active collaboration. The future of our species will depend upon our ability to safely, dynamically, and continually figure that out.
With these ever-larger datasets, rapidly increasing computing and memory power, and new and better algorithms, our AI systems will keep getting better faster than most of us can today imagine. These capabilities have the potential to help us radically improve our healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing, make our economies more productive and our development more sustainable, and do many important things better.
Soon, they will learn how to write their own code. Like human children, in other words, AI systems will grow up. But even that doesn’t mean our human goose is cooked.
Just like dolphins and dogs, these alternate forms of intelligence will be uniquely theirs, not a lesser or greater version of ours. There are lots of things AI systems can't do and will never be able to do because our AI algorithms, for better and for worse, will never be human. Our embodied human intelligence is its own thing.
Our human intelligence is uniquely ours based on the capacities we have developed in our 3.8-billion-year journey from single cell organisms to us. Our brains and bodies represent continuous adaptations on earlier models, which is why our skeletal systems look like those of lizards and our brains like most other mammals with some extra cerebral cortex mixed in. Human intelligence isn’t just some type of disembodied function but the inextricable manifestation of our evolved physical reality. It includes our sensory analytical skills and all of our animal instincts, intuitions, drives, and perceptions. Disembodied machine intelligence is something different than what we have evolved and possess.
Because of this, some linguists including Noam Chomsky have recently argued that AI systems will never be intelligent as long as they are just manipulating symbols and mathematical tokens without any inherent understanding. Nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone interacting with even first-generation AI chatbots quickly realizes that while these systems are far from perfect or omniscient and can sometimes be stupendously oblivious, they are surprisingly smart and versatile and will get more so… forever. We have little idea even how our own minds work, so judging AI systems based on their output is relatively close to how we evaluate ourselves.
Anyone not awed by the potential of these AI systems is missing the point. AI’s newfound capacities demand that we work urgently to establish norms, standards, and regulations at all levels from local to global to manage the very real risks. Pausing our development of AI systems now doesn’t make sense, however, even if it were possible, because we have no sufficient ways of uniformly enacting such a pause, no plan for how we would use the time, and no common framework for addressing global collective challenges like this.
But if all we feel is a passive awe for these new capabilities, we will also be missing the point.
Human evolution, biology, and cultural history are not just some kind of accidental legacy, disability, or parlor trick, but our inherent superpower. Our ancestors outcompeted rivals for billions of years to make us so well suited to the world we inhabit and helped build. Our social organization at scale has made it possible for us to forge civilizations of immense complexity, engineer biology and novel intelligence, and extend our reach to the stars. Our messy, embodied, intuitive, social human intelligence is roughly mimicable by AI systems but, by definition, never fully replicable by them.
Once we recognize that both AI systems and humans have unique superpowers, the essential question becomes what each of us can do better than the other and what humans and AIs can best do in active collaboration. We still don't know. The future of our species will depend upon our ability to safely, dynamically, and continually figure that out.
As we do, we'll learn that many of our ideas and actions are made up of parts, some of which will prove essentially human and some of which can be better achieved by AI systems. Those in every walk of work and life who most successfully identify the optimal contributions of humans, AIs, and the two together, and who build systems and workflows empowering humans to do human things, machines to do machine things, and humans and machines to work together in ways maximizing the respective strengths of each, will be the champions of the 21st century across all fields.
The dawn of the age of machine intelligence is upon us. It’s a quantum leap equivalent to the domestication of plants and animals, industrialization, electrification, and computing. Each of these revolutions forced us to rethink what it means to be human, how we live, and how we organize ourselves. The AI revolution will happen more suddenly than these earlier transformations but will follow the same general trajectory. Now is the time to aggressively prepare for what is fast heading our way, including by active public engagement, governance, and regulation.
AI systems will not replace us, but, like these earlier technology-driven revolutions, they will force us to become different humans as we co-evolve with our technology. We will never reach peak human in our ongoing evolutionary journey, but we’ve got to manage this transition wisely to build the type of future we’d like to inhabit.
Alongside our ascending AIs, we humans still have a lot of climbing to do.
Story by Big Think
Our gut microbiome plays a substantial role in our health and well-being. Most research, however, focuses on bacteria, rather than the viruses that hide within them. Now, research from the University of Copenhagen, newly published in Nature Microbiology, found that people who live past age 100 have a greater diversity of bacteria-infecting viruses in their intestines than younger people. Furthermore, they found that the viruses are linked to changes in bacterial metabolism that may support mucosal integrity and resistance to pathogens.
The microbiota and aging
In the early 1970s, scientists discovered that the composition of our gut microbiota changes as we age. Recent studies have found that the changes are remarkably predictable and follow a pattern: The microbiota undergoes rapid, dramatic changes as toddlers transition to solid foods; further changes become less dramatic during childhood as the microbiota strikes a balance between the host and the environment; and as that balance is achieved, the microbiota remains mostly stable during our adult years (ages 18-60). However, that stability is lost as we enter our elderly years, and the microbiome undergoes dramatic reorganization. This discovery led scientists to question what causes this change and what effect it has on health.
Centenarians have a distinct gut community enriched in microorganisms that synthesize potent antimicrobial molecules that can kill multidrug-resistant pathogens.
“We are always eager to find out why some people live extremely long lives. Previous research has shown that the intestinal bacteria of old Japanese citizens produce brand-new molecules that make them resistant to pathogenic — that is, disease-promoting — microorganisms. And if their intestines are better protected against infection, well, then that is probably one of the things that cause them to live longer than others,” said Joachim Johansen, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen.
In 2021, a team of Japanese scientists set out to characterize the effect of this change on older people’s health. They specifically wanted to determine if people who lived to be over 100 years old — that is, centenarians — underwent changes that provided them with unique benefits. They discovered centenarians have a distinct gut community enriched in microorganisms that synthesize potent antimicrobial molecules that can kill multidrug-resistant pathogens, including Clostridioides difficile and Enterococcus faecium. In other words, the late-life shift in microbiota reduces an older person’s susceptibility to common gut pathogens.
Viruses can change alter the genes of bacteria
Although the late-in-life microbiota change could be beneficial to health, it remained unclear what facilitated this shift. To solve this mystery, Johansen and his colleagues turned their attention to an often overlooked member of the microbiome: viruses. “Our intestines contain billions of viruses living inside bacteria, and they could not care less about human cells; instead, they infect the bacterial cells. And seeing as there are hundreds of different types of bacteria in our intestines, there are also lots of bacterial viruses,” said Simon Rasmussen, Johansen’s research advisor.
Centenarians had a more diverse virome, including previously undescribed viral genera.
For decades, scientists have explored the possibility of phage therapy — that is, using viruses that infect bacteria (called bacteriophages or simply phages) to kill pathogens. However, bacteriophages can also enhance the bacteria they infect. For example, they can provide genes that help their bacterial host attack other bacteria or provide new metabolic capabilities. Both of these can change which bacteria colonize the gut and, in turn, protect against certain disease states.
Intestinal viruses give bacteria new abilities
Johansen and his colleagues were interested in what types of viruses centenarians had in their gut and whether those viruses carried genes that altered metabolism. They compared fecal samples of healthy centenarians (100+ year-olds) with samples from younger patients (18-100 year-olds). They found that the centenarians had a more diverse virome, including previously undescribed viral genera.
They also revealed an enrichment of genes supporting key steps in the sulfate metabolic pathway. The authors speculate that this translates to increased levels of microbially derived sulfide, which may lead to health-promoting outcomes, such as supporting mucosal integrity and resistance to potential pathogens.
“We have learned that if a virus pays a bacterium a visit, it may actually strengthen the bacterium. The viruses we found in the healthy Japanese centenarians contained extra genes that could boost the bacteria,” said Johansen.
Simon Rasmussen added, “If you discover bacteria and viruses that have a positive effect on the human intestinal flora, the obvious next step is to find out whether only some or all of us have them. If we are able to get these bacteria and their viruses to move in with the people who do not have them, more people could benefit from them.”
This article originally appeared on Big Think, home of the brightest minds and biggest ideas of all time.
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