"Design is the beauty of turning constraints into advantages" - Aza Raskin

The ATM/bank teller story is the most-cited historical analogy in the automation debate, and for good reason. When automatic teller machines were rolled out across the United States in the 1970s through 1990s, the prevailing assumption was that bank tellers would disappear. Machines that could dispense cash, accept deposits, and display balances seemed to make the human teller obsolete. That’s not what happened. As economist James Bessen documented in his influential IMF analysis (2015), ATMs reduced the number of tellers needed per branch from 21 to about 13. But this cost reduction made it economically viable to open more branches. Bank branches in urban areas increased 43% during the period of ATM proliferation. Fewer tellers per branch, but more branches, meant that total teller employment grew. Classic Jevons Paradox. What this chart shows and why the AI story is critically different: The left panel depicts the classic ATM/teller Jevons Paradox (as technology increases the efficiency with which a resource is used, the total consumption of that resource increases rather than decreases): automation made each branch cheaper to operate, banks expanded their branch networks, and total teller employment grew. This is the productivity effect in action. But notice what happened after 2010: mobile banking - a different, more complete form of automation — finally caused the teller decline that ATMs never produced. When the technology graduated from automating some of the teller’s tasks to automating nearly all of them, the Jevons effect broke down. The right panel shows AI’s impact on programming. The critical difference is speed. The ATM transition played out over approximately 40 years. The AI coding transition took roughly 3 years. When the pace of automation is slow, the economy has time for the Jevons Paradox to operate — businesses reorganize, new markets emerge, displaced workers retrain. When automation arrives in 3 years instead of 40, there is no time for these adjustment mechanisms. MIT Sloan research provides the academic framework for this observation: when AI automates only some tasks within a role, employment in that role often increases — because the remaining human tasks become more valuable. This is the ATM phase. But when AI can perform most tasks within a role, employment declines by approximately 14% at the firm level. This is the mobile banking phase. The central question for every AI-exposed occupation is: are we in the ATM phase (partial automation, Jevons effect, potential growth) or the mobile banking phase (near-complete automation, structural decline)? For programmers, the answer appears to be the latter. For many other knowledge-work categories, we are at the tipping point.

Post-mortem Alzheimer's brains had 19 to 30% fewer copies of mitochondrial DNA (the mitochondria's own small genome) once diabetic donors were excluded. The finding survived multiple-testing correction in the amygdala and cerebellum but not in the hippocampus. Diabetic donors had 31 to 49% more copies, so mixing the two groups masks the Alzheimer's drop. Another example of the many complex confounders that plague Alzheimer's trials and why we should think of it as a whole body disease. doi.org/10.1002/alz.71870

Excited to announce WARHOUND. techcrunch.com/2026/10/22/be…

The US agency ARPA-H selected @mybevimi for up to $2 million to study early cognitive change and Alzheimer's-related biology. We'll take more than 15,000 molecular measurements over 24 weeks in 150 adults who have noticed changes in memory or thinking. globenewswire.com/news-relea…

DNA repeats in the promoter of the FAM193B gene tracks with Alzheimer's in Chinese adults. Odds about double at 18+ repeats, nearly triple at 21+. The signal is weaker in Europeans with odds about 21% higher. Typical genetic tests miss repeats like this. We need more long-read sequencing on Alzheimer's cohorts. doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-0…

The dire wolf pups just had their biggest check-up yet. 🐺 CT scans, heart scans, X-rays, bloodwork, even whole-genome sequencing. The verdict? Happy and healthy from snoot to tail. But how big are they? Scroll for the official weigh-in. ⬇️ (1/10)

1/ We discovered something totally unexpected about the neural structure of consciousness that overturns decades of thinking on its biological basis and brings us significantly closer to the recipe for generating conscious awareness. New preprint: biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… (led by @HesseJanis, with @FrankLanfranchi, @_conor_mcgrory, @Yuelin_Shi, and @EngelTatiana)

Extraordinary power of iPSCs: "Voices: What impact has iPSC technology had on your research and/or field?" cell.com/stem-cell-reports/f…

"Modulator Resolves Transcript-, Allele-, and Condition-associated RNA Modification Differences from Direct RNA Sequencing." biorxiv.org/content/10.64898… our lab's cool new algorithm and epitranscritpome analysis tool set led by Theo @MakeBrainHappy in partnership with the Horner lab. Check it out!

"Clinical actionability of metagenomic next-generation sequencing for antimicrobial stewardship for urinary tract infections: a retrospective, single-centre, BI-Biotia UTI cohort study" new paper with @BiotiaInc ijidonline.com/article/S1201…

Long-term major histocompatibility complex class I suppression in astronauts and clinical implications nature.com/articles/s42003-0…

The first #CRISPR medicine, Casgevy for SCD/TDT, edits a stretch of accessible chromatin in an enhancer. And now: "chromatin accessibility mediates roughly 79% of the inherited risk of immune disease" = enough data to design 384 Casgevy-like programs! nature.com/articles/d41586-0…

Base editing and prime editing clinical trial landscape, including today’s GSD type I clinical readout from @BeamTx.

🚇 India’s first Metro system study from Chennai Metro @mSphereBIO*! 🧬✨ Understanding the invisible microbial ecosystems on station and train surfaces.. @metasub doi.org/10.1128/msphere.0043… #UrbanMicrobiome #IITMadras #ChennaiMetro #PublicHealth #Metasub #AMR

Biotia Raises New Oversubscribed $9M Financing and Expands Board to Scale Infectious Disease Diagnostics in Women's Health and Orthopedics prnewswire.com/news-releases… Very excited to expand our diagnostic tools and patient impact at @BiotiaInc !

Extraordinarily creative!

TRUST4: immune repertoire reconstruction from bulk and single-cell RNA-seq data nature.com/articles/s41592-0…

It costs about $100K-$500K+ to manufacture a single dose of a systemically administered AAV gene therapy. What factors go into this high cost? This paper (Park et al.) breaks down the details of AAV production and analyzes why it is so expensive. Link: nature.com/articles/s41434-0…

"Atlas of Proteomic Technologies: an evidence based framework for selecting and combining commercial proteomics platforms" biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…