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 early decades of AI were dominated by the logic-based approach, but in the 1980s researchers demonstrated that neural networks could be trained to recognise patterns and classify images without a manifest algorithm or encoding of features that would explain or justify the decision. This gave rise to the field of machine learning. Improvements to the methods and increased computational power have yielded great success and explosive growth in the past few years. In 2017, a system known as AlphaGo trained itself to play the strategy game Go well enough to sweep the world’s highest-ranked Go player in a three-game match. The approach, known as deep learning, is now all the rage.
Logic has also lost ground in other branches of automated reasoning. Logic-based methods have yet to yield substantial success in automating mathematical practice, whereas statistical methods of drawing conclusions, especially those adapted to the analysis of extremely large data sets, are highly prized in industry and finance. Computational approaches to linguistics once involved mapping out the grammatical structure of language and then designing algorithms to parse down utterances to their logical form. These days, however, language processing is generally a matter of statistical methods and machine learning, which underwrite our daily interactions with Siri and Alexa.
Principia - Is it possible that mathematical method is no longer fundamental to philosophy?
Margulis’s physiological conception of holobionts was revitalised in the late 2000s as part of a new theory: what’s known as the hologenome theory of evolution. Advocates merged both versions of holobiont into something a bit more conceptually loaded. On this view, the ecological notion of holobiont (the host and all its resident microbes) is given additional properties. It’s an entity that’s coherent enough to have its own hologenome, made up of the host genome plus all the microbial genomes. A major implication of this theory is that natural selection doesn’t just act on the genome of individual organisms: it acts on the hologenome of holobionts, which are seen as single units that can evolve at the level of the holobiont.
Today, researchers engage in fierce debate over which forces shape holobionts and host-microbiome systems. They can be roughly split into two factions, the ecological and the evolutionary. On the ecological side, holobionts are seen as complex and dynamic ecosystems, in constant flux shaped by individual interactions from the bottom up. So you are part of a holobiont. But this stands in opposition to the evolutionary account, which casts holobionts as higher-level entities akin to organisms or units of selection, and believes that they are shaped as a whole from the top down. On this view, you are a holobiont.
A dominant view in medicine treats the body as a battleground where any invaders are bad and must be exterminated. But in an ecosystem, there are no bad guys, just species playing different roles. If the ecological account of holobionts is true, a human host is more like a habitat to be managed, with the right balance and competition between different kinds of microbes being an important consideration. What counts as healthy can depend on what kinds of services we want out of our attendant ecosystem.
I, holobiont. Are you and your microbes a community or a single entity?
The computer you’re reading this article on right now runs on a binary — strings of zeros and ones. Without zero, modern electronics wouldn’t exist. Without zero, there’s no calculus, which means no modern engineering or automation. Without zero, much of our modern world literally falls apart.
Humanity’s discovery of zero was “a total game changer ... equivalent to us learning language,” says Andreas Nieder, a cognitive scientist at the University of Tübingenin Germany.
But for the vast majority of our history, humans didn’t understand the number zero. It’s not innate in us. We had to invent it. And we have to keep teaching it to the next generation.
The mind-bendy weirdness of the number zero, explained
There are many ways and contexts in which to interpret what might be called the unexpectedness of our existence, none of which necessarily supports the conclusion of divine planning. Every person exists because a particular egg (1 out of roughly 500 ovulated by the person’s mother in her lifetime) encountered a particular sperm (1 out of roughly 150 million produced by the person’s father in a single ejaculation). According to the perspective and logic of the anthropic principle, every member of the human population of roughly 7.5 billion can therefore insist that his or her existence was foreordained, evidence of a me-thropic principle.
For a wider-ranging example, consider the case of the Chicxulub asteroid, which, 66 million years ago, crashed into what is today Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Eventually, its impact wiped out the dinosaurs, clearing a path for the rise of mammals. Should we see the Chicxulub impact as evidence that our planet’s fine-tuning wasn’t working very well so the Earth needed a collision with a massive and catastrophic asteroid to prepare it for human life? Was the dinosaurs’ destruction collateral damage en route to the ultimate goal of creating Homo sapiens roughly 65 million years later?
What if natural selection occurs at the level of galaxies, and those with a potential for life are more likely to replicate?
Anthropic arrogance
retreating from information flows is just a different way of having your attention hacked by others. This argument is developed starting in point 25 below. If FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, is the basic fear exploited by third parties that want to drown you in information, the basic fear exploited by people telling you to unplug and retreat is FOBO: Fear Of Being Ordinary.
The fact of the matter is that information distribution has become free/cheap, so the firehose is going to have flows at all timescales, time constants, and abstraction levels no matter what designers and advertisers want or don't want. It's the information firehose itself that's creating this environment not evil designers.
This is the heart of FOBO. Fear of Being Ordinary. Fear of being just another entangled particle in the Giant Social Computer in the Cloud (GSCITC). Fear of your ego dissolving into the collective ego. Fear of having "nothing to show" for playing a part, despite it being sustainable.
We are all now part of a powerful global social computer in the cloud that is possibly the only mechanism we have available to tackle the big problems of the world that industrial age mechanisms are failing to cope with. We might as well get good at it. Do your part. Stay as plugged in as you can.
The attention management turnpike
Imagine throwing a baseball and not being able to tell exactly where it’ll go, despite your ability to throw accurately. Say that you are able to predict only that it will end up, with equal probability, in the mitt of one of five catchers. The baseball randomly materialises in one catcher’s mitt, while the others come up empty. And before it’s caught, you cannot talk of the baseball being real – for it has no deterministic trajectory from thrower to catcher. Until it becomes ‘real’, the ball can potentially appear in any one of the five mitts. This might seem bizarre, but the subatomic world studied by quantum physicists behaves in this counterintuitive way.
Through two doors
This is a great signal of the possibilities of smart cities and digital infrastructure that every cities could provide.
Two years after the deployment of prototypical kiosks in Manhattan, Intersection — a part of the aforementioned CityBridge, which with Qualcomm and CIVIQ Smartscapes manages the kiosks — is ready to declare them a success. The roughly 1,600 Links recently hit three milestones: 1 billion sessions, 5 million users, and 500,000 phone calls a month.
LinkNYC’s 5 million users make 500,000 phone calls each month
In 2014, in a bid to replace the more than 11,000 aging payphones scattered across New York City’s pedestrian walkways with more functional fixtures, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a competition — the Reinvent Payphones initiative— calling on private enterprises, residents, and nonprofits to submit designs for replacements.
In the end, LinkNYC — a plan proposed by consortium CityBridge — secured a contract from the city, beating out competing proposals with electricity-generating piezoelectric pressure plates and EV charging stations. The plan was to spend $200 million installing as many as 10,000 kiosks, or Links, that would supply free, encrypted gigabit Wi-Fi to passers-by within 150 feet. They would have buttons that link directly to 911 and New York’s 311 service and free USB charging stations for smartphones, plus wired handsets that would allow free calls to all 50 states and Washington, D.C. And perhaps best of all, they wouldn’t cost the city a dime; advertising would subsidize expansion and ongoing maintenance.
Signaling the same issue.
CITIES ARE TEAMING UP TO OFFER BROADBAND, AND THE FCC IS MAD
THIS IS A story that defies two strongly held beliefs. The first—embraced fervently by today's FCC—is that the private marketplace is delivering world-class internet access infrastructure at low prices to all Americans, particularly in urban areas. The second is that cities are so busy competing that they are incapable of cooperating with one another, particularly when they have little in common save proximity.
These two beliefs aren’t necessarily true. Right now, the 16 very different cities that make up the South Bay region of Southern California have gotten fed up with their internet access situation: They’re paying too much for too little. So they are working together to collectively lower the amounts they pay for city communications by at least a third. It's the first step along a path that, ultimately, will bring far cheaper internet access services to the 1.1 million people who live in the region.
Another signal of the near future roll-out of self-driving transportation. Our cities may also become differently architected in the next few decades.
GM’s Cruise will get $2.75 billion from Honda to build a new self-driving car
Funding secured
Cruise Automation, the self-driving unit of General Motors, is teaming up with Honda, one of the world’s largest automakers, the company announced on Wednesday.
The two auto giants will collaborate on a purpose-built autonomous vehicle that can serve a “wide variety” of use cases and be manufactured at high volumes for global deployment. Honda will devote $2 billion to the effort over 12 years, which, together with a $750 million equity investment in Cruise, brings the total commitment to $2.75 billion.
It’s another enormous win for GM’s Cruise. Just last May, it announced a $2.25 billion investment from the SoftBank Vision Fund, a major venture investment effort that was started by the Japanese tech giant in 2016. Today’s transaction brings Cruise’s post-money valuation to $14.6 billion.
This is a fascinating look at one of the costs of air travel that I certainly didn’t know about and maybe most people don’t.
Why the world’s flight paths are such a mess
If you think flying from A to B is a matter of plotting the most direct path between two places, think again. Security and political issues determine flight paths, and ticket prices far more than considerations about an airline’s carbon footprint
Pilots cannot just fly wherever they want. Apart from technical and practical matters like waypoints and the Earth’s natural jet streams, there are also man-made constraints such as political, legal and financial restrictions on airspace and flight paths.
Many countries use airspace fees as a form of revenue and, sometimes, as a form of leverage during political negotiations. This causes prices and routes to fluctuate, with airlines subject to different policies. Costs are, of course, transferred to travellers, while airspace restrictions can significantly limit the options available to certain destinations.
Another very important signal in the phase transition in energy geopolitics.
One of the world’s biggest power plant developers just gave up on coal
In a statement on its website on Sept. 18, Marubeni affirmed its plan to leave coal behind, but allowed for the possibility of exceptions in the case of some high-efficiency plants: “As a general principle, Marubeni will no longer enter into any new coal-fired power generation business. However, Marubeni might consider pursuing projects that adopt BAT (“Best Available Technology”, which at present is USC: Ultra-supercritical steam generating technology)…” The company’s stock has risen 2.2% since the announcement, its highest price this year.
The Japanese energy conglomerate Marubeni will no longer build coal-fired power plants, and it plans to slash its ownership in coal-fired energy assets in half by 2030, according to the Japanese newspaper Nikkei
Before the decision to divest, Marubeni had continued investments in coal, one of the primary culprits behind global warming, even as it poured billions into renewable energy. The firm owned more than 3.5 gigawatts (GW) of coal power plant capacity in 2017 (about 11% of its total), and had plans to build 13.6 GW more, which would have made it 11th among the top 120 coal power plan developers worldwide, according to the German environmental non-profit Urgewald.
After abandoning further investment in coal, Marubeni will now boost renewables from 10% to 20% of its energy portfolio, and it will reassign employees from its coal business to renewables development. The company is already building a 1.17-gigawatt solar project, one of the world’s largest and cheapest solar developments.
This is another amazing signal pointing to the ongoing progress toward not just restoring human capabilities but ultimately enhancing them.
Prosthetic Skin to Sense Wind, Rain, and Ants
A new tactile sensor could enable people with prostheses to feel subtle touch
Could you perceive the touch of an ant’s antenna on your fingertip? This new tactile sensor can, and its inventors report that it could one day be integrated into prostheses to give wearers a superhuman sense of touch.
The sensor converts pressure from touch to electric signals that, theoretically, could be perceived by the brain. Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Ningbo, Zhenhai, described their invention yesterday in the journal Science Robotics.
There have been a lot of touch sensors described in the literature, but this one’s sensitivity is off the charts. It perceives the most subtle touches, including wind, tiny drops of water, and the actions of an ant. In tests of the device, when the ant wasn’t walking, the tactile sensor even detected the touch of the insect’s antenna.
This is a very interesting signal - the inclusion of traditional sources of knowledge into a global cannon.
Why Chinese medicine is heading for clinics around the world
For the first time, the World Health Organization will recognize traditional medicine in its influential global medical compendium.
next year sees the crowning moment for Choi’s committee, when the WHO’s governing body, the World Health Assembly, adopts the 11th version of the organization’s global compendium — known as the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). For the first time, the ICD will include details about traditional medicines.
The global reach of the reference source is unparalleled. The document categorizes thousands of diseases and diagnoses and sets the medical agenda in more than 100 countries. It influences how physicians make diagnoses, how insurance companies determine coverage, how epidemiologists ground their research and how health officials interpret mortality statistics.
The work of Choi’s committee will be enshrined in Chapter 26, which will feature a classification system on traditional medicine. The impact is likely to be profound. Choi and others expect that the inclusion of TCM will speed up the already accelerating proliferation of the practices and eventually help them to become an integral part of global health care. “It will definitely change medicine around the world,” says Choi, now the board chair of the National Development Institute of Korean Medicine in Gyeongsan.
This is another powerful signal of the tsunami of knowledge emerging with the domestication of DNA - each new development can also be used to review retrospectively a great deal of data which in turn accelerates knowledge generation.
the advance published today will help clarify those areas. The team, led by Thomas Keane, a geneticist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory outside Cambridge, U.K., uncovered substantial diversity in key areas, and identified intriguing genes previously unknown to science.
Unexpected Diversity Found in 16 New Lab Mouse Genomes
The availability of new genomes for 16 diverse strains of laboratory mice will help accelerate research into the genetic underpinnings of human traits and diseases.
No animals have done more to help science unravel the complex genetics of human disease than laboratory mice. Their usefulness as guides may rise further, however, with the announcement today in Nature Genetics that European researchers have completed draft genomic maps for 16 of the most commonly used strains of mouse. It’s a boon to researchers who until now have had to rely on a single reference genome for all mouse strains. The new work has already brought to light hundreds of genetic differences that affect a wide range of health conditions and fundamental processes in mice, and possibly humans as well.
“It’s long overdue,” said Evan Eichler, a professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, who was not involved in the study. “While we’ve known that there is genetic diversity among these strains for a long time, we haven’t had this level of resolution.”
A reference genome is a comprehensive catalog of all the genes of an organism, assembled in the correct order and grouped into chromosomes, forming a sort of map. Equipped with this map, researchers can investigate genetic variation within a population, or identify variants associated with particular traits or diseases.
Another signal about alternatives to antibiotics.
Smuggling a CRISPR gene editor into staph bacteria can kill the pathogen
The technique takes advantage of the way the microbes naturally swap genes to become more harmful
Bits of DNA that make bacteria dangerous can be co-opted to bring the microbes down instead.
Stretches of DNA called pathogenicity islands can jump between bacteria strains, introducing new toxin-producing genes that usually make a strain more harmful. Scientists have now modified pathogenicity islands by replacing the toxin-producing genes with genes that, in mice, disabled or killed Staphylococcus aureus bacteria. If the approach works for humans, it could offer an alternative to traditional antibiotics that could one day be used against deadly drug-resistant Staphylococcus strains, researchers report September 24 in Nature Biotechnology.
This is a signal well worth tracking - the domestication of DNA and the transformation of agriculture.
Replacing fertilizer with plant probiotics could slash greenhouse gases
Pivot Bio just got a $70 million infusion from Bill Gates’s energy fund and other investors to launch its commercial product next year.
The science: The biotechnology company, based in Berkeley, California, is creating probiotics for plants. The firm’s researchers have identified microbes with a dormant ability to produce nitrogen, a crucial nutrient in synthetic fertilizer, and engineered them to reawaken and enhance it. For its initial product, Pivot Bio has created a liquid treatment for corn crops that can be applied when the seeds are planted.
The sell: In early field tests, patches treated with the microbes produce comparable yields to those relying on synthetic fertilizers. Pivot Bio’s pitch to farmers is that the product reduces work and complexity, because a single application takes less time than spraying multiple rounds of fertilizer.
The big picture: The larger concern is that manufacturing synthetic, nitrogen-based fertilizers produces a significant amount of greenhouse gases, contributing to climate change. Excess fertilizer adds to the problem, too, because it decomposes into nitrous oxide, itself a potent greenhouse gas. Fertilizer runoff also pollutes waterways, which in the United States has contributed to massive algae blooms and “dead zones” in the Great Lakes and Gulf of Mexico.
This is a signal worth following - another dimension of the transformation of transportation and energy geopolitics. The images are worth the view.
Singapore’s HES Unveils Plans for Regional Hydrogen-Electric Passenger Aircraft
ELEMENT ONE is a zero-emission, long-range electric aircraft powered by distributed hydrogen-electric propulsion.
After 12 years developing hydrogen propulsion systems for small unmanned aircraft, HES Energy Systems is today unveiling its plans for Element One, the world’s first regional hydrogen-electric passenger aircraft.
Designed as a zero-emissions aircraft, Element One merges HES’ ultra-light hydrogen fuel cell technologies with a distributed electric aircraft propulsion design. With virtually no change to its current drone-scale systems, HES’ distributed system allows for modularity and increased safety through multiple system redundancies.
Element One is designed to fly 4 passengers for 500 km to 5000 km depending on whether hydrogen is stored in gaseous or liquid form. This performance is several orders of magnitude better than any battery-electric aircraft attempt so far, opening new aerial routes between smaller towns and rural areas using an existing and dense network of small-scale airports and aerodromes.
Originally from Singapore, HES has been working with a number of fast-moving start-ups and SMEs in France over the past year and exploring various locations to execute its Element One vision, including Aerospace Valley, the global aviation R&D hub located in Toulouse. Its parent company H3 Dynamics has been a symbol of intensifying technological cooperation between the two countries as part of the 2018 Year of Innovation.
In a time of super-exponential growth of information - creators have more difficulty ensuring rigorous attribution.
Prior Art Archive Aims to Improve the Patent Process
Imagine you have invented a device that could save millions of lives around the world.
Instead of profiting from the invention yourself, you decide to share the design online, to allow others to make their own version at a low cost. But two years later a company applies for a patent on your invention. The application is granted, and the company not only begins profiting from your device, but launches a lawsuit against you, the inventor, for infringing their patent.
This is the danger faced by researchers and developers alike, because the limits of existing content repositories means patent examiners often struggle to find all prior art relating to an application. This means that some patent applications that should be rejected — because they are not new — are being wrongly approved.
Now an open-access archive, developed as a collaboration between the MIT Media Lab, Cisco, and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), is aiming to make prior art much more accessible.
And this is also fascinating - keeping the ephemeral web of links dynamically alive.
More than 9 million broken links on Wikipedia are now rescued
As part of the Internet Archive’s aim to build a better Web, we have been working to make the Web more reliable — and are pleased to announce that 9 million formerly broken links on Wikipedia now work because they go to archived versions in the Wayback Machine.
For more than 5 years, the Internet Archive has been archiving nearly every URL referenced in close to 300 wikipedia sites as soon as those links are added or changed at the rate of about 20 million URLs/week.
And for the past 3 years, we have been running a software robot called IABot on 22 Wikipedia language editions looking for broken links (URLs that return a ‘404’, or ‘Page Not Found’). When broken links are discovered, IABot searches for archives in the Wayback Machine and other web archives to replace them with. Restoring links ensures Wikipedia remains accurate and verifiable and thus meets one of Wikipedia’s three core content policies: ‘Verifiability’.
To date we have successfully used IABot to edit and “fix” the URLs of nearly 6 million external references that would have otherwise returned a 404. In addition, members of the Wikipedia community have fixed more than 3 million links individually. Now more than 9 million URLs, on 22 Wikipedia sites, point to archived resources from the Wayback Machine and other web archive providers.
The future ain’t what it used to be - this is a projection from 1967 - worth the 25 min view. The differences between what it projects and isn’t here yet and what it projects and we’ve already far surpassed is interesting - especially the ‘kitchen with a computer terminal in the kitchen’.
Walter Cronkite - "The 21st Century" March 12, 1967
March 12, 1967 episode of CBS' show "The 21st Century" with legendary newsman Walter Cronkite bringing news of what we'd be doing at home and work in the future.
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