Hello all – Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. My purpose is to pick interesting pieces, based on my own curiosity (and the curiosity of the many interesting people I follow), about developments in some key domains (work, organization, social-economy, intelligence, domestication of DNA, energy, etc.) that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity will SKILL the cat.
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning. Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works. Techne = Knowledge-as-Know-How :: Technology = Embodied Know-How
“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9
Content
Quotes:
Articles:
The human protocols of creating value in the post-industrial world
1 informed free choice, rather than compliance, is the basis for decisions
2 active participation, rather than passively accepting instructions, is the basis of growth and development
3 work activities are carried out within a framework of meaningfulness and goals for self-direction, rather than direction from outside
4 activities are carried out in interaction, with the goal of sharing the cognitive load of work, rather than work being based on reductionist principles and social isolation. Work shifts from tasks and roles to relations
5 one is responsible for one’s own actions, rather than seeing someone else, somewhere else, responsible
6 a worker is engaging in complex, responsive, open activities with others, in contrast with engaging in closed repetitions of the same activity. Work is creative interaction between interdependent people
7 the network, rather than traditional organizational units, processes or hierarchies, is the main architecture of work
8 productivity is a result of creative learning and scaling up learning, rather than just creating more output with less input. Increasing the quality and speed of learning matter more than increasing the quantitative output of work
9 knowledge work can be understood as investments of human capital following the same logic we have used to understand financial investments. All workers should share the responsibilities and possible upsides that used to belong only to the investors of financial capital
10 as knowledge work is about interdependent people in interaction, intelligence, competence and learning are not about the attributes and qualities of individuals, but about the attributes and quality of interaction
Esko Kilpi - The ten principles of digital work
The clearest rationale for corporations comes from the Nobel prize winning economist Ronald Coase and his 1937 theory of the firm. Imagine you want to make money by selling widgets. What’s the best strategy: sign up talent individually and on a needs-only basis, or hire staff to do the various jobs in-house? Coase showed that it made more economic sense to incorporate as a company, because it allowed you to minimise three very important costs. The first reduction would come from resourcing: it’s less expensive to find and recruit people with the right skills and knowledge from inside the company than to look for them externally every time you want something done. The second line-item is transacting, or managing processes and resources: it’s less of an administrative burden to have teams in-house than to keep an eye on multiple external contractors. And finally there’s contracting: every time work takes place within a company, the rules and conditions are implied in the employment contract, not negotiated afresh each time. By reducing these three costs, Coase claimed, corporations are the optimal structures for increasing economic activity.
But what if the nature of the economic puzzles that corporations evolved to solve have shifted? Thanks to software, the internet and artificial intelligence, the expenses that Coase identified can now be reduced just as well with tools from outside the company as they can from within it. Finding freelance workers via online marketplaces can be less costly, less risky and quicker than recruiting full-time employees. Collaboration tools are opening up space for manager-free forms of work. And contracting costs are likely to fall markedly thanks to the advent of blockchain protocols – algorithms that replace trusted third parties, and instead automatically verify transactions using a huge digital ledger, spread across multiple computers. As a result of these innovations, a new way of working is emerging: a series of interactions that are open, skills-based and software-optimised. Where once we had the ‘corporation’, instead we are witnessing the ascendancy of the ‘platform’. The question is: should we see this as a promise, or a threat?
Do platforms work?
The virtues that underpin collective intelligence are also rare and difficult, because each one clashes with other basic features of human interaction and other virtues. The autonomy of intelligence challenges the social order (which rests on an agreement not to see certain things while suppressing the views and voices of the powerless). It also runs directly against accountability in many instances (and too much accountability, like no accountability, can make institutions surprisingly stupid).
Balance challenges the status of the groups or professions associated with particular elements of intelligence, such as the guardians of memory. Reflexiveness challenges practicality and the pressure of events — the need to act now. It takes time to think, and time is scarce, so life rewards shortcuts.
Focus fights against curiosity, and it is particularly hard for clever people (and intelligent groups and civilizations have repeatedly been defeated by ones that are less intelligent but more focused on what really matters in a particular situation). Appropriate focus is even harder for machines that, like human brains, struggle to concentrate in a granular way, recognizing the scale of different tasks and contexts.
Finally, integrative thinking fights against our tendency to latch on to one way of thinking (to the person with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail).
Big Mind: How Collective Intelligence Can Change Our World.
By many standard measures, globalization is in retreat. The 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing recession brought an end to three decades of rapid growth in the trade of goods and services. Cross-border financial flows have fallen by two-thirds. In many countries that have traditionally championed globalization, including the United States and the United Kingdom, the political conversation about trade has shifted from a focus on economic benefits to concerns about job loss, dislocation, deindustrialization, and inequality. A once solid consensus that trade is a win-win proposition has given way to zero-sum thinking and calls for higher barriers. Since November 2008, according to the research group Global Trade Alert, the G-20 countries have implemented more than 6,600 protectionist measures.
But that’s only part of the story. Even as its detractors erect new impediments and walk away from free-trade agreements, globalization is in fact continuing its forward march—but along new paths. In its previous incarnation, it was trade-based and Western-led. Today, globalization is being driven by digital technology and is increasingly led by China and other emerging economies. While trade predicated on global supply chains that take advantage of cheap labor is slowing, new digital technologies mean that more actors can participate in cross-border transactions than ever before, from small businesses to multinational corporations. And economic leadership is shifting east and south, as the United States turns inward and the EU and the United Kingdom negotiate a divorce.
In other words, globalization has not given way to deglobalization; it has simply entered a different phase. This new era will bring economic and societal benefits, boosting innovation and productivity, offering people unprecedented (and often free) access to information, and linking consumers and suppliers across the world. But it will also be disruptive. After certain sectors fade away, certain jobs will disappear, and new winners will emerge. The benefits will be tangible and significant, but the challenges will be considerable. Companies and governments must prepare for the coming disruption.
Globalization Is Not in Retreat
The concept of “aging” is not as straightforward as it seems. Obviously, aging has a chronological component, expressed in the straightforward question: “How old are you?” But it can also be viewed in terms that are biological (“You look good for your age”), subjective (“You are as old as you feel”), and sociological (“You shouldn’t be doing that at your age”). Policymakers’ sole focus on chronological age is a 200-year-old artifact from the era when governments first started keeping reliable birth records.
If the various dimensions of aging could be embodied in a single immutable concept, focusing on a benchmark such as chronological age would not be a problem. Yet the biological, subjective, and sociological components of aging are not immutable. On the contrary, their relationships with one another have shifted over time.
…. the average age of the US population has steadily increased since 1950, but the average mortality rate has trended down. In other words, the average US citizen has become chronologically older but biologically younger. She is further along in years from her date of birth, but also further away from her probable expiration date. And the same trends can be found in other advanced economies, including the United Kingdom, Sweden, France, and Germany.
… over the past few decades, this aging effect has been offset by a “longevity effect”. Owing to medical advances and other factors (for example, lower rates of smoking), mortality rates at all ages have fallen. In actuarial terms, this means that people are younger for longer. Whereas the aging effect captures changes in the age distribution, the longevity effect addresses how we are aging. And in a country like the US, where the average age has increased while average mortality rates have fallen, it is clear that the longevity effect has more than offset the aging effect.
In the US, a 75-year-old today has the same mortality rate as a 65-year-old in 1952. Similarly, in Japan, 80 is the “new 65.” As an actuarial matter, then, today’s 75-year-olds are not any older than the 65-year-olds of the 1950s.
This is the myth of the “ageing society”
Google has published its AI principles that will guide the work it undertakes in developing and actualizing AI in the world. This is not a long article and well worth the read.
AI at Google: our principles
At its heart, AI is computer programming that learns and adapts. It can’t solve every problem, but its potential to improve our lives is profound. At Google, we use AI to make products more useful—from email that’s spam-free and easier to compose, to a digital assistant you can speak to naturally, to photos that pop the fun stuff out for you to enjoy.
Beyond our products, we’re using AI to help people tackle urgent problems. A pair of high school students are building AI-powered sensors to predict the risk of wildfires. Farmers are using it to monitor the health of their herds. Doctors are starting to use AI to help diagnose cancer and prevent blindness. These clear benefits are why Google invests heavily in AI research and development, and makes AI technologies widely available to others via our tools and open-source code.
Objectives for AI applications
We will assess AI applications in view of the following objectives. We believe that AI should:
Be socially beneficial.
Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias
Be built and tested for safety
Be accountable to people.
Incorporate privacy design principles
Uphold high standards of scientific excellence
Be made available for uses that accord with these principles
This is a good 5 page downloadable report signaling the future of smart cities and the corresponding informational and digital infrastructure.
“Building these programmable places is not just a matter of putting wires in the walls and electronic boxes in rooms... In the end, buildings will become computer interfaces and computer interfaces will become buildings”
William Mitchell (1996)
The Relevance of Informational Infrastructures in Future Cities
Cities around the world are installing digital architectures of sensors, computational cores and telecommunications in the urban fabric, transforming existing infrastructure systems into multi-functional informational and services platforms in the process. The fast pace of digitization is often hard for cities to fathom, many of which are challenged by a silent privatization of the informational value of public spaces and the under-development of the potential of 21st century digital infrastructures due to a mono functional non-inclusive process of design. This is compounded by the power behind large-scale data ecosystems, which when paired with technologies such as machine learning will have profound impact over our future urban services and lifestyles. Cities need to adapt their design mentality and institutional models, but it is through social participation, and open technology standards that true inclusive synthesis of the future digital systems that enable our interactions with cities and allow for the myriad of new services and experiences can be achieved.
This is a very strong signal of the emerging digital environment and the transformation of currency.
I am convinced that within 10 years we will almost exclusively be paying digitally, both in Sweden and in many parts of the world.
Going Cashless
The governor of the world’s oldest central bank discusses his country’s shift toward digital money
Sweden is rapidly moving away from cash. Demand for cash has dropped by more than 50 percent over the past decade as a growing number of people rely on debit cards or a mobile phone application, Swish, which enables real-time payments between individuals. More than half of all bank branches no longer handle cash. Seven out of ten consumers say they can manage without cash, while half of all merchants expect to stop accepting cash by 2025 (Arvidsson, Hedman, and Segendorf 2018). And cash now accounts for just 13 percent of payments in stores, according to a study of payment habits in Sweden (Riksbank 2018).
Digital solutions for large payments between banks have existed for some time; the novelty is that they have filtered down to individuals making small payments. And my country isn’t alone in this regard. In several Asian and African countries—for example, India, Pakistan, Kenya, and Tanzania—paying by mobile phone instead of cards or cash is commonplace.
The emerging digital infrastructure for the smart city and nation will inevitably have to include a spectrum of distributed ledger technologies.
“Blockchain and related trust enhancing technologies are poised to redefine the automotive industry and how consumers purchase, insure, and use vehicles,”
MOBI believes that an open-source collection of blockchain software tools and standards can create a connected public and private transportation ecosystem that reduces fraud, frictions, and costs.
Automakers Are Collaborating on Blockchain for Vehicles
Several major automakers and technology companies have formed the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI) with the goal of exploring blockchain's applications in transportation.
While blockchain technology continues to search for a home outside of the volatile world of cryptocurrency, major automakers are eying the technology for its potential to make transportation safer, more affordable, and more accessible in the the world of increasingly connected and autonomous cars.
To that end, several major automakers and auto parts manufacturers—including Ford, GM, BMW, and Groupe Renault, along with blockchain technology companies such as IBM, Accenture, and Context Labs—have partnered to join the nonprofit Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI). According to the organization's mission statement, MOBI will be “working with forward thinking companies, governments, and NGOs to make mobility services more efficient, affordable, greener, safer, and less congested by promoting standards and accelerating the adoption of blockchain, distributed ledger, and related technologies.”
Rather than using middleman types of servers and systems like traditional networks, blockchain transfers data across an encrypted ledger that is distributed to all members of a network (a chain). Each member (or block) holds a copy of the ledger. For any transaction to take place, it must be verified across all members of the chain and not just a single system, thus providing added layers of security as well as the ability to securely automate tasks and transactions via what are called smart contracts.
This is an amazing signal of a transformation in therapeutic diagnostic technology.
“This technology has the potential to transform how we screen and monitor children’s development,”
Mobile App For Autism Screening Yields Useful Data
A Duke study of an iPhone app to screen young children for signs of autism has found that the app is easy to use, welcomed by caregivers and good at producing reliable scientific data.
The study, described June 1 in an open access journal npj Digital Medicine, points the way to broader, easier access to screening for autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders.
Autism screening in young children is presently done in clinical settings, rather than the child’s natural environment, and highly trained people are needed to both administer the test and analyze the results. “That’s not scalable,” said New York University’s Helen Egger, M.D., one of the co-leaders of the study.
The app first administers caregiver consent forms and survey questions and then uses the phone’s ‘selfie’ camera to collect videos of young children’s reactions while they watch movies designed to elicit autism risk behaviors, such as patterns of emotion and attention, on the device’s screen.
The videos of the child’s reactions are sent to the study’s servers, where automatic behavioral coding software tracks the movement of video landmarks on the child’s face and quantifies the child’s emotions and attention. For example, in response to a short movie of bubbles floating across the screen, the video coding algorithm looks for movements of the face that would indicate joy.
In one year, there were more than 10,000 downloads of the app, and 1,756 families with children aged one to six years participated in the study. Parents completed 5,618 surveys and uploaded 4,441 videos. Usable data were collected on 88 percent of the uploaded videos, demonstrating for the first time the feasibility of this type of tool for observing and coding behavior in natural environments.
Here’s a signal of the emerging entourage of AI-ssistants that we may be counting on in the near future to shift from information overload toward pattern recognition. I haven’t tried it yet - but I will.
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This is a must see 37 min video by Cesar Hidalgo - for anyone interested in both knowledge management and information utilization (for knowledge flow).
The Laws of Collective Learning
part of the Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium on Modeling and Visualizing Science and Technology held at the Beckman Center in Irvine, CA on December 4-5, 2017
Progress is continues in the search to increase the spectrum of technologies related to antibacterial treatments. While this doesn’t involve natural agents - nano-biobots could truly augment our defences against the bacterial and viral challenges.
The bacteria busters add to the growing list of tiny robots that can deep dive into the human body. Many of these were built with drug delivery in mind, and they move in imaginative ways. There’s the squishy clockwork biobot, the jackhammer, the stomach acid-driven nano rocket, the magnetic field-guided nanoparticles, and even robots propelled by sperm cells from bulls and sea creatures.
Tiny Robots in Disguise Combat Bacteria in the Blood
Miniature robots cloaked in platelets and red blood cells can clear bacterial infections in the blood
Researchers have come up with all sorts of ways to propel tiny robots deep into the human body to perform tasks, such as delivering drugs and taking biopsies. Now, there’s a nanorobot that can clean up infections in blood.
Directed by ultrasound, the tiny robots, made of gold nanowires with a biological coating, dart around blood, attach to bacteria, and neutralize toxins produced by the bacteria. It’s like injecting millions of miniature decoys into blood to distract an infection from attacking the real human cells.
The invention, developed in the labs of Joseph Wang and Liangfang Zhang at the University of California San Diego (UCSD), was described in Science Robotics. The researchers hope the robotic detoxification system could provide an alternative to the multiple, broad-spectrum antibiotics currently used to treat life-threatening infections—one that can work in minutes.
This is a good signal of the potential of domestication of DNA and capacity to adapt for the future - if not flourishing and least surviving.
Coming to a plate near you soon? Rice grown by Chinese scientists using seawater in Dubai’s deserts
Successful harvest of salt-resistant strain raises researchers’ hopes that one day large swathes of the desert could be turned into paddy fields
A team of scientists, led by China’s “father of hybrid rice” Yuan Longping, has already started growing the crop in diluted sea-water at home and is now bringing the technique to the Middle East, where fresh water is too precious to use for growing water-intensive crops.
Last week’s rice harvest, which had been planted in January on the outskirts of the city, far exceeded scientists’ expectations, according to a report by the state news agency Xinhua.
The high yield reported – 7,500kg per hectare compared with the global average of 3,000kg per hectare – has encouraged scientists to expand the project.
They now plan to set up a 100-hectare experimental farm later this year, put it into regular use next year and then start expanding after 2020.
Eventually, the report said, the goal is to cover around 10 per cent of the United Arab Emirates, which has a total area of 83,600 sq km (32,278 sq miles), with paddy fields – although details as to how this will be achieved have yet to be disclosed.
If we can create ways for bio-nanobots to cooperate with our biosystem to protect us - we can also engineer cooperative - mutualisms with our bodies and our microbes.
'Our study shows that protection by gut microbes is a benefit that is strengthened and reciprocated when both microbe and host evolve together. The bacteria evolved to become more protective, and in turn, hosts evolved to allow more E.faecalis colonisation. Evolving to allow protective bacteria to colonise and help could be a common means of defence against infectious diseases.
In itself, hosts and bacteria forming co-dependent relationships is not a new concept. However, our study is the first to develop this relationship from scratch
Could we work together with our bacteria to stop infection?
The benefits of antibiotics to both human and animal health are undisputed. However, as microbes have become increasingly resistant to antimicrobials and other drugs, scientists have become interested in new solutions to the growing superbug crisis, including the use of defensive microbes and faecal transplants. In new research, Oxford University scientists have developed a lab-based approach, creating positive co-dependent relationships between hosts and bacteria, termed 'mutualisms', quickly. These lab-developed bacterial relationships demonstrate how microbes can work with their hosts to prevent infection.
Defensive host-microbe relationships are prevalent in nature across plants and animals, including humans. The mutual benefit comes from the host benefiting from the protection of the bacteria, and the bacteria then benefiting from the host being a healthy living environment—allowing it to accumulate further over time.
In a study published in Evolution Letters, scientists from Oxford's Department of Zoology worked with the University of Bath to test whether these defensive host-microbe 'mutualisms' could evolve from scratch to protect against attack from harmful and infectious parasites.
The speed at which the sciences behind understanding the role of our microbial ecologies to establish and maintain physical and mental wellbeing has been remarkable. In fact - microbial transfusions maybe key to the treatment of a number of ailments.
Do You Have the Right Stuff to Be a Stool Donor?
Altruism, and a little financial incentive, can be motivating factors.
Wanted: fecal matter from healthy adults with a regular constitution and a good heart. Screening is rigorous. Reimbursement is modest but can add up for those willing to make daily donations of waste that would otherwise be flushed away
Fecal transplants are being used increasingly to treat Clostridium difficile, an often intractable and debilitating bacterial infection. The potential for expanding the therapeutic applications of fecal transplants sent Canadian researchers on a quest to pinpoint what precisely motivates stool donors and how they might recruit more volunteers.
For their study, 802 people in the United States, Canada and England completed an online survey that assessed their attitudes about becoming stool donors. Respondents were, not surprisingly, put off by the unpleasantness that would be involved in collecting stool samples. And most said the time commitment that would be required would be a deterrent — most centers require “deposits” at least three times a week.
A very good signal - of the phase transition into a new energy paradigm - things can change slowly until they change fast - The benefits of renewable energy infrastructure include near zero marginal cost energy, and multiple ways to adapt to emergencies and a distributed robust grid.
Proterra Gives Fleet Operators More Reasons To Go Electric With New Line Of Charging Stations
American electric bus manufacturer Proterra introduced its new high-power charging solutions this week at the American Public Transportation Association (APTA). The three new solutions were introduced under Proterra’s Power Control Systems line. They range from 60 kW to 500 kW, opening up new use cases for fleet operators around the world.
A signal related to the emerging change in energy paradigms and geopolitics.
“Microgrid (and solar home system) solutions powered by renewables provide electricity to nearly 90 million people,” says the Microgrid Investment Calculator. “To achieve universal electricity access by 2030, the current pace of expansion will have to double. It is estimated that off-grid solutions will supply 50%-60% of the additional generation needed to achieve universal electricity access by 2030.”
Onsite Power And Microgrids May Be The Key To Global Development
Nearly a quarter of the 1.1 billion without access to reliable electricity are located in India, which is critical to its development and which requires creative solutions. While the growth of centralized power generation and delivery is expanding there, so too is onsite rooftop solar energy with localized microgrids.
India’s government is crafting a plan to build such decentralized power and delivery mechanisms over the next five years — a $2.5 billion effort. While the focus there is on extending access to those rural areas without electricity, it could also be used in its industrial and manufacturing sectors.
India is an example of how microgrid technologies could be applied in the world’s growth regions. To have universal electrification by 2030, microgrid expansion would need to double, notes the Microgrid Investment Accelerator, which was founded by Microsoft and Facebook, along with Allotrope Partners. And that requires reduced barriers to entry to entice risk takers.
Australia may be a shining example of embracing renewable energy.
South Australia rides renewables boom to become electricity exporter
State reverses decades of importing power, while solar continues to grow nationally and emissions fall, audit shows
The politics may not change much, but Australia’s electricity grid is changing before our very eyes – slowly and inevitably becoming more renewable, more decentralised, and challenging the pre-conceptions of many in the industry.
The latest national emissions audit from The Australia Institute, which includes an update on key electricity trends in the national electricity market, notes some interesting developments over the last three months.
- Renewables-rich South Australia became a net electricity exporter for first time;
- 12 new wind and solar farms totalling 1050MW of capacity were added to the grid, including 500MW of large-scale solar, trebling the amount of large-scale solar in the system;
- The continued rapid uptake of rooftop solar by homes and businesses kept a lid on grid demand, even if overall consumption showed a rise, and;
- Electricity generation emissions in the national market fell again, but only slightly.
There are more ways to gain energy within the way we manage energy - this real-time paradigm of AI-enhanced management will likely be applicable to the costless coordination of the emerging logistics Internet. This is a long article - but well worth the read - it goes beyond the simplistic claim.
This technology could fundamentally change our relationship to electricity
An “operating system” for power could double the efficiency of the grid.
How much power is lost on the grid?
The consensus among experts in the field is that most electricity is lost on the two ends, in generation and use, and not that much in between. The Department of Energy estimates that, of 37.7 quads (quadrillion BTUs) of “energy consumed to generate electricity,” 23.24 quads (about 62 percent) is wasted as “conversion losses.” After that, only 0.84 quads (roughly 2.2 percent) is lost or “unaccounted for” in transmission and distribution (T&D).
Now a research and development lab-cum-start-up out of North Carolina’s research triangle has begun commercializing a technology it says can measure and manage electricity with a level of accuracy and precision far beyond any existing technology, using a cutting-edge application of real-time computing.
Human capacity to know, monitor and eventually regulate the environment (digital and otherwise) continues to increase.
Researchers shine a light on more accurate way to estimate climate change
It doesn't matter if it's a forest, a soybean field, or a prairie, all plants take up carbon dioxide during photosynthesis -- the process where they use sunlight to convert water and carbon dioxide into food. During this changeover, the plants emit an energy "glow" that is not visible to the human eye, but can be detected by satellites in space. Now, researchers at the University of New Hampshire have taken that one step further. By using satellite data from different major land-based ecosystems around the globe, they have found that the photosynthesis glow is the same across all vegetation, no matter the location. This first-of-its-kind global analysis could have significance in providing more accurate data for scientists working to model carbon cycle and eventually help better project climate change.
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