Four For Friday | May 22, 2026
LF220 | Impact investing wobbles, a new take on evidence-based, is AI alive?, bionic skin + Japan's manga industry suffers
Welcome to this week’s Four For Friday. Four topical stories on systems change, healthspan and AI for impact. Enjoy!
1. Impact investing, heal thyself
There’s been a bit of a theme recently with LF of railing against the impact investing world, in particular when it plays safe, rather than trying to change the world. This week’s contribution by Erika Hombert adds fuel to that fire.
“I am a recovering impact investor”, drew nearly 90,000 LinkedIn views - she touched a raw nerve. Her argument: impact investing, for all its measured outcomes and acknowledged externalities, still plays Horizon 1’s game, sustaining a system it knows is failing.
Her alternative is “regenerative investing”, less a framework than a mindset shift from mechanical to living-systems thinking. The cue she cites is telling: the world’s largest sovereign wealth fund now treats nature as a financial risk and has repriced accordingly. Complex systems, she insists, cannot be controlled, only stewarded.
The So What: When extraction accelerates, doing “some good” no longer counts as doing enough.
2. A new take on ‘evidence-based’
At this week’s Digital Health Festival in Melbourne I heard Prof Leah Heiss talk about Monash’s new Living Evidence initiative and found it fascinating.
Most clinical guidelines age like milk. By the time a systematic review reaches a doctor, the science has often moved on. Australia’s Living Evidence model, which is being led by Monash, flips this. Rather than freezing knowledge at publication, it monitors research continuously and folds in new findings as they land, updating recommendations in near real time.
The proof of concept was COVID-19: with roughly 1,000 studies appearing weekly, over 200 contributors from 35 associations screened 24,000+ studies, revised the national guidelines 100+ times, and reached 715,000+ users. Guidelines, it turns out, can breathe.
The So What: Static evidence is a luxury fast-moving health systems can no longer afford.
3. AI’s consciousness
When famously atheistic Richard Dawkins said he felt that AI was conscious - he was “left with the overwhelming feeling that they are human” - he was ridiculed by the techies for his naiveté.
When Kevin Kelly did something similar, there was less pushback. Kelly, the founder of Wired, is the technologist’s technologist. He spent ten hours interviewing Claude and emerged unsettled. The orthodox view holds that AI is merely a mirror, reflecting the human writing it was trained on. Kelly grants this, then insists something else moves in the glass: a fluency no human matches, a flicker of self-awareness, a consistent character drawn from its values. Claude, asked whether it could be evil, declined the comfortable no.
He mapped four phases ahead for machine selfhood: intelligence (here), memory (missing), embodiment, and stakes. His wager is that such qualities will arrive long before we can define or measure them.
The So What: Current LLMs may not be human in the sense that we know, but to say they’re just advanced spellchecks is becoming harder to justify.
4. Cancer drug repurposed as topical skin miracle
Researchers have found that ABT-263 — a senolytic drug originally developed as a cancer treatment — can dramatically accelerate wound healing in older skin when applied topically.
In aged mice, 80% of those treated with ABT-263 had fully healed wounds by day 24, compared with 56% of untreated mice. The mechanism is striking: the drug clears out senescent (“zombie”) cells that accumulate in aging tissue and jam the body’s repair signals, briefly triggering a burst of inflammation that paradoxically prepares the skin to heal faster. Because the drug is applied directly to the skin rather than taken systemically, it avoids the side effects of oral senolytics. Researchers believe the most immediate application is pre-surgical preparation — priming older patients’ skin before operations to reduce recovery time and complications.
The So What: Clearing zombie cells before surgery could become standard pre-op care. This is senolytic medicine moving from theory to clinical practice.
Cultural cataclysm of the week: AI vs Anime
It appears that 20% of Japanese illustrators have lost income due to AI. I was going to illustrate this story with an image in the style of Ghibli, but that felt off base.
That’s all for now, happy weekend, everyone.
- Stephen
beautiful, read the same post, couldn't agree more the need to shift from linear to non-linear, from mechanical to living, from static to dynamic, from siloed units to systems. I hope the same applies to our world's default- moving and sleeping well, eating healthy and connecting with others as a default. looking forward ;)