Thursday, March 28, 2019

Friday Thinking 29 March 2019

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  
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st  Century

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9

Content
Quotes:


Articles:



In another, virtual experiment, we divided 4,000 human subjects into groups of about 20, and assigned each individual “friends” within the group; these friendships formed a social network. The groups were then assigned a task: Each person had to choose one of three colors, but no individual’s color could match that of his or her assigned friends within the social network. Unknown to the subjects, some groups contained a few bots that were programmed to occasionally make mistakes. Humans who were directly connected to these bots grew more flexible, and tended to avoid getting stuck in a solution that might work for a given individual but not for the group as a whole. What’s more, the resulting flexibility spread throughout the network, reaching even people who were not directly connected to the bots. As a consequence, groups with mistake-prone bots consistently outperformed groups containing bots that did not make mistakes. The bots helped the humans to help themselves.


Both of these studies demonstrate that in what I call “hybrid systems”—where people and robots interact socially—the right kind of AI can improve the way humans relate to one another. Other findings reinforce this. For instance, the political scientist Kevin Munger directed specific kinds of bots to intervene after people sent racist invective to other people online. He showed that, under certain circumstances, a bot that simply reminded the perpetrators that their target was a human being, one whose feelings might get hurt, could cause that person’s use of racist speech to decline for more than a month.

How AI Will Rewire Us





But by virtue of its focus on our mental lives, and especially on our subjective experience of the world and ourselves, psychiatry, far more directly than other medical specialties, implicates our conception of who we are and how our lives should be lived. It raises, in short, moral questions. If you convince people that their moods are merely electrochemical noise, you are also telling them what it means to be human, even if you only intend to ease their pain.


In this sense, the attempt to work out the biology of mental illness is different from the attempt to work out the biology of cancer or cardiovascular disease. The fact that the brain is necessary to consciousness, added to the fact that the brain is a chunk of meat bathing in a chemical broth, does not yield the fact that conscious suffering is purely biological, or even that this is the best way to approach mental illness. Those unresolved, and perhaps unanswerable, moral questions loom over the history that Harrington traces here. The path she has chosen may require her to steer clear of such knotty concerns as the relationship of mind to brain or the relationship of political order to mental illness. But her account doesn’t just skirt the polemics she decries. It also overlooks the consequences of psychiatrists’ ignoring those questions, or using scientific rhetoric to conceal them.


At the risk of being polemical, let me suggest that Harrington’s word disingenuous fails to describe the cynicism of Robert Spitzer, the editor of the DSM-3, who acknowledged to me that he was responding to the fact that “psychiatry was regarded as bogus,” and who told me that the book was a success because it “looks very scientific. If you open it up, it looks like they must know something.” Nor does ironic accurately describe the actions of an industry that touts its products’ power to cure biochemical imbalances that it no longer believes are the culprit. Plain bad faith is what’s on display, sometimes of outrageous proportion. And like all bad faith, it serves more than one master: not only the wish to help people, but also the wish to preserve and increase power and profits.

Psychiatry’s Incurable Hubris



There’s an anti-prey-switching analogy! Bluefin tuna is an example I use a lot. Bluefin tuna are in very high demand in the international sushi market, so they get hunted commercially. As they’ve become more rare, they’ve become more valuable.


You get this perverse anti-ecological dynamic. In an ecological system, as something becomes rarer and harder to find, its ecological value goes down. That’s why predators prey switch: They have to expend too many calories to try to get that prey, or it’s too dangerous. But in a luxury market, all of a sudden you get the perverse incentive to hunt more because it’s worth more and more money. A bluefin tuna was just sold recently for more than 3 million dollars, a new record.


It’s bad for the bluefin tuna, right? But that also introduces a bad dynamic into the whole system. It’s destabilizing — not just for bluefin tuna but potentially for the whole food web. The tuna are embedded within a whole network of interactions.


And that’s part of the point of doing food web research, or interaction research. You pull out one node, you pull out one interaction, and it’s not just about those species. It’s about impacts that can potentially ripple throughout the whole system, and often in unexpected ways.

Clues to Future Sustainability in Old Food Webs




Humans are animals, mammals, primates — and something distinct. Over the past 2 million years, our genus, Homo, has undergone significant changes in bodies, behaviour and ecologies, resulting in the development of a human niche characterized by societal complexity.


No other species creates cash economies and political institutions, changes planet-wide ecosystems in a few generations, builds cities and aeroplanes, arrests and deports its members or drives thousands of other species towards extinction. These are the actions not of individuals, but of societies. Now, three books — by biologist E. O. Wilson, entomologist Mark Moffett and sociologist Nicholas Christakis — argue that the key to understanding our distinctiveness lies in how societies evolved. All showcase solid science engagingly; all share blind spots.

Evolving society: why humanity coheres




This is an good signal of the Web turning 30 and some indicators of its future.
“Against the backdrop of news stories about how the Web is misused, it’s understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the Web is really a force for good. But given how much the Web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the Web as we know it can’t be changed for the better in the next 30.”
A lesson that we—researchers, developers, and innovators—can learn from the Web is: Don’t underestimate the potential of your ideas, however humble they may seem. It’s our responsibility to leverage the good while safeguarding against any harmful effects. Let’s join hands and create a better Web—the Web we want.

As the Web Celebrates Its 30th Anniversary, What Should Its Future Be?

Several issues and challenges still need to be addressed
This month marks the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, the most influential technology of our time. Its evolution and impact have been phenomenal, and its growth continues unabated. Within a mere 30 years, the Web has irrevocably revolutionized the world and our lives, ushering in the Information Age. It has become indispensable, and it has impacted almost every aspect of our activities and almost all industries. But no one anticipated it.


The Web has redefined the way we live, communicate, socialize, and transact. It has prompted companies to rethink how they conduct business, interact with customers and suppliers, foster innovation, and collaborate with others. It has changed the face of politics, governance, religion, and spirituality.


Web tools and services enable us to gain and share knowledge and information. And Web-enabled applications continue to transform banking, education, government, health care, and many other sectors.


The Web’s further development is being driven by:
- Advances such as Web 3.0, the Semantic Web, the 3D Web, and the Real-Time Web.
- Open standards, open data, and open-source software.
- The Internet of Things.
- Edge computing.
- Multimodal access and multilingual presentations.
- Internet-enabled consumer electronics.
- Smarter search engines and question-answering systems.
- Integrated, context-aware, collaborative apps.
- The demand for an open, neutral, equal-access Internet.


But the Web has a dark side too. Concerns include privacy violations, security breaches, lack of access, censorship, fake or incorrect news, information overload, online harassment, misuse, and illegal activities.

Welcome to the world of Artificial Agents - the test may be less about if we can know how they understand - than whether decisions are demonstrably better than humans make. An artificial agent can have a clear signal of performance much like athletes today have their resume of stats.
“This mindset, which probably relates to the growing mistrust citizens feel towards governments and politicians, constitutes a significant questioning of the European model of representative democracy, since it challenges the very notion of popular sovereignty,” Diego Rubio, the executive director for IE’s Center for the Governance of Change, said in a statement.

A surprising number of people trust AI to make better policy decisions than politicians

A new survey on Europeans’ attitudes towards technology found that a quarter of people would prefer it if policy decisions were made by artificial intelligence instead of politicians.


The Center for the Governance of Change at Spain’s IE University polled 2,500 adults in the UK, Spain, Germany, France, Ireland, Italy, and the Netherlands in January. The results reflect an intense anxiety about the changes brought about by advances in tech, with more than half of respondents worried that jobs would be replaced by robots, and 70% saying that unchecked technological innovation could do more harm than good to society. Respondents also expressed concerns about the impact of digital relationships replacing human contact as more people spend time online.


Perhaps most interestingly, a quarter of the respondents said they would prefer AI to guide decisions about governance of their country over politicians.

This is an important strong signal yet is imbued with spectres of any day breakthroughs. Perhaps we have to consider the self-driving car as the first breakthrough robot for the common consumer.

Robotic Dreams, Robotic Realities: Why Is It So Hard to Build Profitable Robot Companies?

Roboticists need to discuss openly and honestly not only our successes but also our failures
In mid-November, we received the sad news that Alphabet is closing SCHAFT, a spinoff of the University of Tokyo robotics lab. The decision comes one year after Boston Dynamics was sold to SoftBank, the company that also acquired Aldebaran Robotics (known for the Pepper and Nao robots). During the 2018 IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, we heard that Rethink Robotics, which created the collaborative robot industry and had a large impact on our view of robots in industrial applications, had closed its doors.


Some months before, Jibo and Mayfield Robotics, makers of Kuri, were forced to shut down sales and operations. Jibo was once heralded as “the first social robot for the home” and was named one of Time’s “Best Inventions of 2017.” Other than a few robot vacuum companies (mainly iRobot), no company has developed a successful home robot.


The problem, as Giulio Sandini put it, occurs when one sells (or buys) intentions as results. Overselling is a dangerous strategy that can be counterproductive, even for the whole robotics community. Both companies and researchers publish videos of robots doing tasks, but sometimes they fail to point out the limitations of the technology or that those results were achieved in lab conditions. This makes it much more difficult to explain to non-roboticist industry executives the difference between creating a one-off demo and creating a real product that works reliably.

A counter signal about the emerging of effective remote controlled robots (drones) - including the potential for ‘kill bots’. There is a 1 min video.
A single lionfish per reef reduced young juvenile fish populations by 79 percent in only a five-week period. Many species were affected, including cardinalfish, parrotfish, damselfish, and others. One large lionfish was observed consuming 20 small fish in a 30-minute period.
“There are many methods of crowdsourcing the mission that we are considering. One is an autonomous hunting robot that asks for human confirmation on an image of the target lionfish before a capture is made. This would allow a much larger fleet of autonomous robots to be operated with oversight when it matters most”

Latest Generation of Lionfish-Hunting Robot Can Find and Zap More Fish Than Ever

It's round three of invasive lionfish vs. underwater robots
Lionfish don’t make for very good oceanic neighbors, though, and in places where they’re an invasive species and have few native predators (like most of the Atlantic coast of the United States), they do their best to eat anything that moves while breeding almost continuously.


As horrible as this is, lionfish have the right idea about successfully controlling fish populations—if you want fewer of something, eat it. Lionfish fillets are tasty, and there have been concerted efforts to raise demand for the meat for conservation purposes.


The trouble with this is where many lionfish hang out and breed, which is too deep for most recreational divers. This is where Robots in Service of the Environment (RSE) comes in. Founded by Colin Angle of iRobot, RSE has been developing remote controlled underwater robots that can efficiently hunt, stun, and capture lionfish at depths of 400 feet for up to 60 minutes at a time, and today they’re introducing their third-generation robot.


The RSE Guardian LF1 Mark 3 prototype is a modular unmanned underwater vehicles (UUV) designed specifically for lionfish hunting. Two paddles at the front of the robot can zap any lionfish that swims between them, stunning it instantly. The incapacitated fish is then sucked into the body of the robot, and up to 10 fish can be captured before the robot needs to return to the surface. The battery, sensing, propulsion, and nearly everything else is contained in modules bolted to the chassis of the robot, making repairs and upgrades simple. Control is fully manual at the moment, and dependent on a tether to the surface, although RSE is exploring how assistive autonomy can make piloting easier.

This is a fascinating 29 min video summarizing human similarities and differences with animals. Well worth the view.

Are We Just Another Primate? Robert Sapolsky

In this talk from SAND 2018, Robert Sapolsky considers the unlikely realms where humans are merely on a continuum with other species...until you look closely. With a host of surprising and fascinating examples and illustrations he spells out the case that humans are a type of ape, operating on the same basic types of neurons found throughout the animal kingdom. So is there any behavior that we can say for certain is unique to humans?

This is an amazing and weak signal of new knowledge of evolution arising from our domestication of DNA.

Genetic Struggles Within Cells May Create New Species

Mitonuclear conflict — a struggle between the genes in a cell’s nucleus and those in its mitochondria — might sometimes split species in two.
In the complex cells of humans and other organisms, two different genomes collaborate to sustain life. The larger genome, with DNA encoding thousands of genes, resides in the cell nucleus, while copies of the much smaller one sit in all the energy-producing organelles called mitochondria. Normally, they work in quiet alliance.


Over the past five years, however, scientists have begun focusing on the consequences of mismatches between the two. Emerging evidence shows that this “mitonuclear conflict” can drive a wedge between organisms, possibly turning one species into two. It’s too soon to say how frequently mitonuclear conflict acts as a force in speciation, but researchers agree that better understanding of that tension may help to solve mysteries about what barricade separates some apparently similar populations into distinct species.

This is a weak but very interesting signal - may be related to the influence of music on cognition and perhaps can lead to understanding how sound can be used to enhance wellbeing.
In ways that the researchers still don’t understand, sound-triggered gamma waves seem to kick off other beneficial changes in the brain, too. In the mice, levels of a harmful form of tau in the brain, another protein implicated in Alzheimer’s, dropped, and blood vessels in the brain expanded, perhaps easing the disposal of A-beta. Immune cells called microglia also bulked up and grew more active, attacking A-beta.
When the mice were treated with both flickering lights and clicks, the effect was even stronger, Tsai says. The combined treatment led to fewer A-beta plaques across a big stretch of the brain, including the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, an area important for complex thinking. What’s more, the microglia seemed to swarm into a feeding frenzy. “Microglia pile up on each other, all congregated around the amyloid plaques,”

Flickers and buzzes sweep mouse brains of Alzheimer’s plaques

Memories also improved after a daily dose of fast clicking noises
Fast clicking sounds can boost brainpower in mice with signs of Alzheimer’s disease. Like flickering lights, these external sounds spur a type of brain wave that seemed to sweep disease-related plaques from mice’s brains, researchers report in the March 14 Cell.


It’s too early to say whether the same sorts of flickers and clicks could help people with Alzheimer’s. If so, the treatment would represent a fundamentally new way to target the neurodegenerative disease — with lights and sounds instead of drugs.

This is another interesting signal about the human sensorium. What are the boundaries of human sensation and what possible new senses will we develop? Also how has the spread of the electric environment and related magnetic fields influenced us?
Previous tests of human magnetoreception have yielded inconclusive results. This new evidence “is one step forward for the magnetoreception field and probably a big step for the human magnetic sense,” he says. “I do hope we can see replications and further investigations in the near future.”

People can sense Earth’s magnetic field, brain waves suggest

A new study hints that humans have magnetoreception abilities, similar to some other animals
A new analysis of people’s brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a “sixth sense” for magnetism.


Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it for navigation. Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way.


These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth’s magnetic field — although it’s not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information.


With this first compelling evidence that humans are subconsciously processing magnetic signals, “we can [try to] identify the brain region it originates from and try to identify the nature of the cells” responsible, says Michael Winklhofer, a magnetoreception researcher at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. “This is really the first step.”

Given the increasing legalization of Cannabis - this article signals a potential phase transition in therapeutic approaches and a shift of cultural consciousness. The FDA recently approved Ketamine as a breakthrough drug for treating depression and other mood regulation disorders. New research is being conducted with psilocybin for mood disorders and especially for end-of-life conditions.

Welcome to the trip of your life: the rise of underground LSD guides

Some Americans searching for alternative paths to healing have turned to psychedelics. But how does one forge a career as a guide when the substances are illegal?
Indigenous people are believed to have used plant-based psychedelics for millennia; now, factions of the western medical establishment seem to be catching on. But most psychedelics are still Schedule I controlled substances, in the same category as heroin and cocaine; possession or sale has been punishable by prison sentence since 1971. With rare exceptions, the only way you can legally consume psychedelics in the US is as a participant in one of a few clinical research trials conducted at universities such as New York University and Johns Hopkins.


These studies have yielded astounding results: they suggest that, when administered to carefully screened patients by trained health professionals, psychedelics are safe and potent tools for alleviating PTSD, addictions, cluster headaches, anxiety and depression.


Amid a broken healthcare system and rising rates of opioid addiction and suicide, Americans are searching for alternative paths to healing, which is where underground guides come in. The industry has its share of charlatans, but many guides hold themselves to ethical standards and protocols comparable to those established in clinical settings.

All sorts of AI tools are emerging that will enhance human creative efforts. This is still a weak signal - but one that could be at our fingertips very soon. The 2 min video is a Must See.

Nvidia AI turns sketches into photorealistic landscapes in seconds

at Nvidia GTC 2019, the company unveiled a stunning image creator. Using generative adversarial networks, users of the software are with just a few clicks able to sketch images that are nearly photorealistic. The software will instantly turn a couple of lines into a gorgeous mountaintop sunset. This is MS Paint for the AI age.


Called GauGAN, the software is just a demonstration of what’s possible with Nvidia’s neural network platforms. It’s designed to compile an image how a human would paint, with the goal being to take a sketch and turn it into a photorealistic photo in seconds. In an early demo, it seems to work as advertised.

This is a brilliant signal of mass customizability via 3D printing - although the article (and very short videos) are focused on Ikea furniture - the concept can be applied to any furniture or household.

Ikea’s 3D-printed add-ons make its furniture more accessible for people with disabilities

Ikea furniture is ubiquitous because it’s affordable, but it’s not always accessible to everyone, especially people with disabilities. For example, some wardrobes are handleless, and it can be difficult to turn on a lamp with its tiny switches. To remedy this, Ikea Israel teamed up with nonprofits Milbat and Access Israel to develop ThisAbles, a line of 3D-printed add-ons for Ikea furniture.


There are 13 designs available. They slip over Ikea furniture and accessories to turn a small button into a giant one or to lift a couch a couple of inches from the ground to help make getting up a little easier. Installation methods for all of the 3D modifications are demonstrated on Ikea Israel’s YouTube page, showing how a small tweak can make a huge difference for people with disabilities.

This is a very important weak signal - not only about the domestication of DNA - but its integration into digital technology.

Microsoft just booted up the first “DNA drive” for storing data

Microsoft has helped build the first device that automatically encodes digital information into DNA and back to bits again.
DNA storage: Microsoft has been working toward a photocopier-size device that would replace data centers by storing files, movies, and documents in DNA strands, which can pack in information at mind-boggling density.


According to Microsoft, all the information stored in a warehouse-size data center would fit into a set of Yahztee dice, were it written in DNA.


Demo device: So far, DNA data storage has been carried out by hand in the lab. But now researchers at the University of Washington who are working with the software giant say they created a machine that converts electronic bits to DNA and back without a person involved.


The gadget, made from about $10,000 in parts, uses glass bottles of chemicals to build DNA strands, and a tiny sequencing machine from Oxford Nanopore to read them out again.


Still limited: According to a publication on March 21 in the journal Nature Scientific Reports, the team was able to store and retrieve just a single word—“hello”—or five bytes of data. What’s more, the process took 21 hours, mostly because of the slow chemical reactions involved in writing DNA.
While the team considered that a success for their prototype, a commercially useful DNA storage system would have to store data millions of times faster.

This is a fascinating signal - one sent from very long ago - but may harken a new approach to trigonometry - but maybe to more mathematics
“The huge mystery, until now, was its purpose – why the ancient scribes carried out the complex task of generating and sorting the numbers on the tablet. Our research reveals that Plimpton 322 describes the shapes of right-angle triangles using a novel kind of trigonometry based on ratios, not angles and circles. It is a fascinating mathematical work that demonstrates undoubted genius."


“The tablet not only contains the world’s oldest trigonometric table; it is also the only completely accurate trigonometric table, because of the very different Babylonian approach to arithmetic and geometry. This means it has great relevance for our modern world. Babylonian mathematics may have been out of fashion for more than 3,000 years, but it has possible practical applications in surveying, computer graphics and education. This is a rare example of the ancient world teaching us something new.”

3,700-Year-Old Babylonian Stone Tablet Gets Translated, Changes History

Dr. Daniel Mansfield and his team at the University of New South Wales in Australia have just made an incredible discovery. While studying a 3,700-year-old tablet from the ancient civilization of Babylon, they found evidence that the Babylonians were doing something astounding: trigonometry!


Most historians have credited the Greeks with creating the study of triangles' sides and angles, but this tablet presents indisputable evidence that the Babylonians were using the technique 1,500 years before the Greeks ever were.

A great signal of the emerging phase transition in energy geopolitics.
Georgetown, Texas, with a population of 65,000, is one of the first U.S. cities to be 100 percent powered by renewable energy. The city gets its renewable energy from two wind farms and a solar facility. The plants cover the city’s 170-MW peak power demand, with enough left over to sell to the state electric grid. Georgetown is an example of what the future of energy might look like.

Texas Renewable Energy Policy Sets an Example for the World

China, the EU, and other regions also are decreasing their fossil-fuel dependence
In many areas of the world, renewable energy is now a cheaper source of electricity than fossil fuels. It is possible that renewable energy soon will be the preferred choice all over the world.


Transition to renewables is no longer a question. The potential exists that renewable energy and its storage technologies will be able to generate 100 percent of the world’s energy in less than 30 years. The switch to renewable energy would reduce the cost of electricity to, on average, from US 80 cents to 60 cents per megawatt-hour globally, according to recent research by Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology, in Finland, and the Berlin-based nonprofit Energy Watch Group.


In a study by the International Renewable Energy Agency, the global weighted average levelized cost of electricity of utility-scale solar photovoltaic has fallen 73 percent since 2010, to 10 cents per kWh for projects commissioned in 2017. A report released in January 2018 by Bloomberg New Energy Finance said $333.5 billion was invested globally in clean-energy projects during 2017.

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Friday Thinking 22 March 2019

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  
In the 21st century - the planet is the little school house in the galaxy.
Citizenship is the battlefield of the 21st  Century

“Be careful what you ‘insta-google-tweet-face’”
Woody Harrelson - Triple 9

Content
Quotes:

Articles:



Here are four pressing questions about privacy that Mr. Zuckerberg conspicuously did not address:
Will Facebook stop collecting data about people’s browsing behavior, which it does extensively?
Will it stop purchasing information from data brokers who collect or “scrape” vast amounts of data about billions of people, often including information related to our health and finances?
Will it stop creating “shadow profiles” — collections of data about people who aren’t even on Facebook?
And most important: Will it change its fundamental business model, which is based on charging advertisers to take advantage of this widespread surveillance to “micro-target” consumers?

Until Mr. Zuckerberg gives us satisfying answers to those questions, any effort to make Facebook truly “privacy-focused” is sure to disappoint.

Zuckerberg’s So-Called Shift Toward Privacy




The way we start out thinking about a problem shapes the solutions that we end up with. This is as true in physics as it is in biology and so it is with political challenges like Brexit. There are cognitive and technological limitations on how we are able to think when complexity is high. This has meant that for most of the last 300 years, science has only succeeded in solving problems where complexity can be eliminated either by breaking the problem up into simpler parts, or by averaging the complexity out. We now know that only an infinitesimally small class of problems can be solved in this way and for the rest, when we simplify the complexity, we get it wrong.

Brexit Becomes Simpler if we Embrace Complexity




Manufactured crises are much easier to navigate since they are fundamentally a small thing blown out of proportion through emotional narrative appeals. You just stay close enough to the action to associate yourself with predictable success but not so close that you'll be blamed for unexpected failure. That's how you write yourself into the story as the hero.

A real crisis, on the other hand, is a situation that demands a response, but which existing mature capabilities cannot address with high likelihood of success. The shift in perception is a shift from a sense of helplessness to a sense of "this is something, I could try this."

To genuinely activate and use a new capability for a strategic shift, executives must be faced with even worse consequences of doing nothing. A new capability is typically seriously deployed only in a "it can't possibly make things worse" last-ditch situation.

The disconnect between manufactured and real crises is incidentally the root cause of the "poster child" effect, where a very real emerging capability is deployed in a way that guarantees it will not have an effect.

The executive sponsorship




Every major challenge in the world today is deeply and profoundly cultural — and cultural systems are always complex. They are comprised of many interacting parts with critical interdependencies that are not reducible to usefully meaningful modular parts. There are threshold effects, phase transitions, chaotic attractors, various kinds of self-organization, and all are deeply dynamic and emergent as evolutionary processes at the intersection of culture and the environment.

If we are to have any hope of tackling chronic problems like ecological destruction, political corruption, misinformation campaigns, or ethnic conflicts that escalate to violence, we will need to bridge the foundational knowledge areas of complexity science and the convergent approach to social change known as cultural evolutionary studies together in a coherent framework for research, education, and design practice. One way to do this is to think of Society as a Platform in the same way that software development requires “platform solutions” in its current capacities of sophisticated developments.

Society As Platform — A New Frontier in Complexity Science




This is an important signal of the continuing struggle to determine a proper property rights regime over creative works. Entrenched and powerful incumbents want to keep their power over both creators works and the ability of anyone to combine creations to create anew.
the reality is that Article 13 was always going to be bad for creators. At best, all Article 13 could hope for was to move a few euros from Big Tech's balance-sheet to Big Content's balance-sheet (and that would likely be a temporary situation). Because Article 13 would reduce the options for creators by crushing independent media and tech companies, any windfalls that media companies made would go to their executives and shareholders, not to the artists who would have no alternative but to suck it up and take what they're offered.

Artists Against Article 13: When Big Tech and Big Content Make a Meal of Creators, It Doesn't Matter Who Gets the Bigger Piece

Article 13 is the on-again/off-again controversial proposal to make virtually every online community, service, and platform legally liable for any infringing material posted by their users, even very briefly, even if there was no conceivable way for the online service provider to know that a copyright infringement had taken place.

This will require unimaginable sums of money to even attempt, and the attempt will fail. The outcome of Article 13 will be a radical contraction of alternatives to the U.S. Big Tech platforms and the giant media conglomerates. That means that media companies will be able to pay creators less for their work, because creators will have no alternative to the multinational entertainment giants.

Throwing Creators Under the Bus
The media companies lured creators' groups into supporting Article 13 by arguing that media companies and the creators they distribute have the same interests. But in the endgame of Article 13, the media companies threw their creator colleagues under the bus, calling for the deletion of clauses that protect artists' rights to fair compensation from media companies, prompting entirely justifiable howls of outrage from those betrayed artists' rights groups.


This is a good signal moving beyond the wisdom of crowds and exploring conditions where collaboration enables better forms of collective intelligence.

Harnessing the Power of "Collective Intelligence" to Change Beliefs about Global Warming

New research on collective intelligence demonstrates an innovative approach to combating belief polarization. The core idea of collective intelligence is that collaboration can improve both individual and group performance, depending on characteristics of group members and on conditions that facilitate (or inhibit) the exchange of information. In a recent study, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication set up social networks and found that they could eliminate belief polarization between liberals and conservatives on the issue of climate change. The key to the change was keeping people’s political affiliation hidden, a finding consistent with the idea that collective intelligence is greatest under conditions that promote the free exchange of alternative viewpoints. The study provides a proof-of-concept for how social media can be used constructively to improve people’s understanding of climate change and other urgent issues, while eliminating polarization.

The 2,400 participants were selected for the study based on their political ideology; on a pre-screening questionnaire, half identified as liberal and the other half conservative. Through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, these participants were presented with a NASA graph showing the average amount of monthly Arctic sea ice between 1979 and 2013 and asked to make a forecast for 2025. The graph shows a “saw-tooth” pattern, with ups and downs over short spans. However, the overall trend is downward; therefore, the correct answer is a value lower than the final point on the graph. To be exact, according to NASA, the monthly ice average will be 4 million square kilometers in 2025—a reduction of 43% since 1979. There were three rounds of the task—an initial estimate and two opportunities for revision.

In the control condition, liberals gave more accurate estimates in the first round than did conservatives (74% vs. 61%), and neither group improved much across rounds. By contrast, in the network condition with no political cues, accuracy was higher for liberals than for conservatives in the first round, but both groups improved to greater than 85% by the third round, eliminating the difference between the groups. In the two other network conditions, which included political cues, both groups showed improvement across rounds. However, belief polarization persisted, with liberals outperforming conservatives in all rounds. Taken together, the results indicate that collective intelligence can emerge in bipartisan social networks, especially in the absence of political identifiers.


Here is an interesting signal about the real world and video games - now not all games are so directly related to real world work - but still this is worth consideration as our ability to create better and better modeling of the real world - modeling and video games may merge.
the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding — and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living. For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, “SimCity” was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone's job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go.

From video game to day job: How ‘SimCity’ inspired a generation of city planners

Jason Baker was studying political science at UC Davis when he got his hands on “SimCity.” He took a careful approach to the computer game.
"I was not one of the players who enjoyed Godzilla running through your city and destroying it. I enjoyed making my city run well."

This conscientious approach gave him a boost in a class on local government. Instead of writing a term paper about three different models for how cities can develop, Baker proposed building three scenarios in “SimCity,” then letting the game run on its own and writing about how his virtual cities fared.

He ended up getting an A. Playing “SimCity,” Baker said, "helped remind me of the importance of local government, which is what I ended up doing for a living."

Today, Baker is the vice president of transportation and housing at the nonprofit Silicon Valley Leadership Group. He served as a council member in Campbell, Calif., from 2008 to 2016, a tenure that included two stints as mayor.


This shouldn’t really be news to most scientists - but the world of Big Data is increasing as science explodes with new efforts and focuses. The question becomes what does the scientist do?

How Artificial Intelligence Is Changing Science

The latest AI algorithms are probing the evolution of galaxies, calculating quantum wave functions, discovering new chemical compounds and more. Is there anything that scientists do that can’t be automated?
No human, or team of humans, could possibly keep up with the avalanche of information produced by many of today’s physics and astronomy experiments. Some of them record terabytes of data every day — and the torrent is only increasing. The Square Kilometer Array, a radio telescope slated to switch on in the mid-2020s, will generate about as much data traffic each year as the entire internet.

The deluge has many scientists turning to artificial intelligence for help. With minimal human input, AI systems such as artificial neural networks — computer-simulated networks of neurons that mimic the function of brains — can plow through mountains of data, highlighting anomalies and detecting patterns that humans could never have spotted.

...some scientists are arguing that the latest techniques in machine learning and AI represent a fundamentally new way of doing science. One such approach, known as generative modeling, can help identify the most plausible theory among competing explanations for observational data, based solely on the data, and, importantly, without any preprogrammed knowledge of what physical processes might be at work in the system under study. Proponents of generative modeling see it as novel enough to be considered a potential “third way” of learning about the universe.


This is another strong signal of how AI is changing everything - in this example some chilling evocations should arise when also considering China’s Social Credit and Facebook’s predatory data practices.
“The goal of Patternizr is, of course, to improve public safety,” said Levine, an astrophysicist by academic training. “The more easily that we can identify patterns in those crimes, the more quickly we can identify and apprehend perpetrators.”

Modern policing: Algorithm helps NYPD spot crime patterns

The software, dubbed Patternizr, allows crime analysts stationed in each of the department’s 77 precincts to compare robberies, larcenies and thefts to hundreds of thousands of crimes logged in the NYPD’s database, transforming their hunt for crime patterns with the click of a button.

It’s much faster than the old method, which involved analysts sifting through reports, racking their brains for key details about various crimes and deciding whether they fit into a pattern. It’s more comprehensive, too, with analysts able to spot patterns across the city instead of just in their precinct.

The software also found two other thefts committed with a syringe by the same suspect, who was eventually arrested and pleaded guilty to larceny and assault.


This is a currently strong signal - but government could change that.

Nine companies are steering the future of artificial intelligence

The Big Nine explores the political and economic factors that are shaping the tech world
Whether artificial intelligence is humankind’s best friend or greatest threat has been widely debated. We’ve all heard promises of device-studded smart homes conferring unprecedented convenience, as well as warnings of killer robots. The Big Nine is a different kind of story about the potential risks and rewards of AI.

Rather than questioning the character of thinking machines, futurist Amy Webb turns a critical eye on the humans behind the computers. With AI’s development overwhelmingly driven by nine tech powerhouses, she asks: Is it possible for the technology to serve the best interests of everyone?

Webb shines a spotlight on the Big Nine: Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, IBM and Apple (the “G-MAFIA”) in the United States, and Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (the “BAT”) in China. The G-MAFIA is beholden to capitalist market forces; the BAT serves the will of the Chinese government.

The book highlights warning signs of what happens when we increasingly rely on technology created by corporations that prioritize commercial and political interests over the public. These red flags include mismanagement of users’ personal data in the United States and a state-sanctioned “social credit” system that monitors people’s behavior in China. Webb generally holds the Big Nine accountable but occasionally pivots to defend the companies, which she believes are led by people with good intentions.


This article signals some interesting emerging trajectories of computation - we may be approaching the end of Moore’s Law proper - but that may not signal the end of accelerating computational developments.

3 New Chips to Help Robots Find Their Way Around

Intel and academic groups are designing specialized hardware to speed path planning and other aspects of robot coordination
Robots have a tough job making their way in the world. Life throws up obstacles, and it takes a lot of computing power to avoid them. At the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference last month in San Francisco, engineers presented some ideas for lightening that computational burden. That’s a particularly good thing if you’re a compact robot, with a small battery pack and a big job to do.


Well this is sort of an advancement for mobile technologies.

NatWest trials fingerprint debit cards to remove £30 limit

Contactless card that stores owner’s fingerprint could mean an end to typing in pin
Bank customers will be able to spend more than £30 using contactless cards and could never again have to remember their four-digit pin if a fingerprint technology trial starting in April proves a success.

The pilot project from NatWest, the first of its kind in the UK, will use debit cards that contain an electronic copy of the customer’s fingerprint on one corner. If the customer places their finger on that part of the card while waving it at a retailer’s payment terminal, it will authorise a contactless payment above £30, and the customer will not have to type in their number.

The first phase of the trial will be limited to 200 customers. If it gets the go-ahead, it will be the next step in the contactless spending revolution that has swept Britain since 2013. Last year more than 6bn payments were made using contactless “wave and pay” technology, but the £30 limit is restricting further growth, particularly for people filling up their cars at petrol stations or doing a large weekly supermarket shop.


And a weak signal of how Moore’s Law could continue with new types of approaches to transistors.

How 2D semiconductors could extend Moore’s law

Incredibly thin transistors could deliver even more powerful computers if three research challenges can be solved, argue Ming-Yang Li and colleagues.
The number of components in electronic circuits has doubled every two years since the 1960s — a trend known as Moore’s law. Transistors have shrunk so that ever more can fit on a silicon chip. But now, silicon transistors are reaching their physical limit. Radically different types of materials and devices are needed to realize the potential of the next generation of computers.

The problem is common to all transistors based on bulk (3D) semiconductors, including those made of germanium, indium gallium arsenide and indium phosphide. Electrons find it hard to travel through channels nanometres in thickness. Imperfections in the surfaces of the channels scatter charges, slowing their flow.

But 2D materials could enable transistors to keep shrinking. These are crystalline sheets of atoms, one layer thick. Because they have only a limited ‘vertical’ dimension, and flat surfaces free from defects, electrons are less prone to scattering and charges can flow relatively freely through them. Promising materials include transition-metal dichalcogenides (such as tungsten diselenide and molybdenum disulfide, MoS2).

However, this research is still at an early stage. For these materials to meet industry needs in practical devices, three fundamental research challenges must be resolved.


The ongoing progress toward domesticating DNA has many twists and turns - this is an important signal. There is a 5 min video elaboration.

Corn School: Nitrogen-fixing hybrids 10 years away

Imagine planting corn hybrids that could produce 40 to 80 percent of their nitrogen requirements.
It’s only 10 years away, says University of Wisconsin–Madison researcher Dr. Vania Pankievicz. The breakthrough comes from a Mexican corn variety called Sierra Mixe. At the recent Innovative Farmers Association of Ontario conference in London, Ontario, Pankievicz explained that the 15-foot tall variety, often referred to as giant corn, grows aerial roots that secrete a mucus-like gel that supports bacteria capable of converting atmospheric nitrogen into amonia that can be used by the plant.

On this edition of RealAgriculture Corn School, Pankievicz explains that her team has identified the “nitrogen-fixing” trait and the process of developing commercial hybrids that can bring nitrogen into farmers’ fields is underway. Researchers have successfully seen the trait expressed in Wisconsin trials and are confident they can breed it into hybrids that can be grown across North America.


A signal of the emergence of a whole new domain of ‘high-tech cleansing spas’ - new ways to clean ourselves up?
Nanoparticles are about one three-thousandth the size of red blood cells, yet each tiny particle can carry thousands of drug molecules.
Zhang’s work “opened up the whole field” of membrane-coated nanoparticles, says Omid Farokhzad, a physician-scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston who studies nanoparticles as medicine. Many labs are now “building on the platform that Zhang’s group developed.”

Nanosponges sop up toxins and help repair tissues

Tiny particles coated with cell membranes can do more than deliver drugs
Pulling funds from other projects and from the start-up package he received to set up his lab at the University of California, San Diego, Zhang did the experiments for his breakthrough paper, published in 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He and coworkers created a new class of nanoparticles, made from carbon-containing polymers, that could slip through blood vessels in a mouse without triggering an immune reaction. While immune responses are important for killing disease-causing pathogens, the same reactions are a nuisance when they clear out molecules made to deliver lifesaving drugs.

Then, instead of just viewing their particles as a drug-delivery system, which most other researchers were focused on, Zhang and his team made a surprising pivot. They repurposed the particles to act as “nanosponges” that trap and remove toxins from the blood. In lab experiments, the nanosponges worked against toxins unleashed by E. coli and some of the harder-to-fight bacteria. Nanosponges also slowed harmful inflammation in mice with a form of rheumatoid arthritis and diverted HIV and Zika from the cells those viruses normally infect, the researchers reported last year.

Nanosponges, which have not yet been tested in people, do their under-the-radar cleanup because of an offbeat idea: The synthetic nanoparticles are coated with membranes from living cells, which helps them blend in. And a single nanosponge can root out a slew of mischief-makers without knowing much about them individually. Many toxins that attack red blood cells, for example, will cling instead to nanoparticles coated with bits of those very cells. Zhang’s team at UC San Diego and others have created a growing arsenal of nanosponges cloaked in membranes of red or white blood cells, each of which absorbs its own set of toxins.
Vaccinating mice with red blood cell nanoparticles protected the animals from toxins produced by MRSA and showed potential to protect against toxins from E. coli, poisonous snakes and bees, the UC San Diego team reported in 2013 in Nature Nanotechnology. Zhang, Hu and colleagues have since expanded their collection of nanosponges to include particles covered in membranes from three types of white blood cells — macrophages, neutrophils and T cells.


A good signal of the ongoing emergence of stem cell therapies from progress in domestication of DNA.

Japan poised to allow ‘reprogrammed’ stem-cell therapy for damaged corneas

If approved, the treatment could restore vision.
A Japanese committee has provisionally approved the use of reprogrammed stem cells to treat diseased or damaged corneas. Researchers are now waiting for final approval from the health ministry to test the treatment in people with corneal blindness, which affects millions of people around the world.

The cornea, a transparent layer that covers and protects the eye, contains stem cells that repair it when damaged. But these can be destroyed by disease or by trauma from chemicals or burns, which can result in patients losing their vision. Currently, cornea transplants from donors who have died are used to treat damaged or diseased corneas, but good-quality tissue is scarce.

A team led by ophthalmologist Kohji Nishida at Osaka University plans to treat damaged corneas using sheets of tissue made from induced pluripotent stem cells. These are created by reprogramming cells from a donor into an embryonic-like state that can then transform into other tissue, such as corneal cells. Nishida’s team plans to lay 0.05-millimetre-thick sheets of corneal cells across patients’ eyes. Animal studies have shown that this can save or restore vision.


A good signal of an next stage of wind power.

GE Just Switched On Cypress, Its Experimental Next-Gen Wind Turbine

The prototype Cypress turbine blades come in two pieces and are assembled on site for larger and more durable turbines.
One of the big problems holding back wind energy is that turbine blades must be transported by road, which limits how big they can get.

GE designed a new blade called Cypress that can be moved in two parts, which could lead to bigger and more powerful wind turbines.

Currently, the prototype turbine in the Netherlands generates a modest 5.3 megawatts of electricity. That’s enough to power around 5,000 homes. But in the future, turbines built with Cypress blades could produce substantially more. Perhaps more importantly, Cypress turbines can be built in more remote regions that wouldn’t be practical for conventional turbines. The result here is more turbines if not necessarily larger ones.

According to GE, the first order for a Cypress turbine has already been placed, and the company is expecting more soon.


And a complementary signal

EU Parliament votes for 55% emissions cuts by 2030

Members of the European Parliament voted in favour of increasing the EU’s 2030 emission cuts target to 55% and a net-zero mid-century target on Thursday (14 March), bringing an end to weeks of infighting.
At the monthly plenary session in Strasbourg, EU lawmakers backed a non-binding resolution on the European Commission’s draft climate plan for 2050.
369 MEPs voted in favour, 116 against and 40 abstained.

The main highlights included a call to increase the bloc’s overall emission cuts target for 2030 from the current 40% to a beefed-up 55%. MEPs have gradually come around to an increase to the benchmark since a landmark United Nations report was published last October.


And another.
“All our homes and buildings must be made efficient, affordable and zero-carbon within the next two decades to address the climate crisis. Ending the scandal of poor quality new homes is a no-brainer that’s good for everyone.”

New homes will no longer be heated by gas from 2025, government says

Fossil fuel heating systems banned in bid to tackle emissions
Gas boilers will be banned in new homes from 2025 in a bid to tackle emissions, the government has announced.

Philip Hammond said new standards “mandating the end of fossil fuel heating systems in new homes from 2025 delivering lower carbon, and lower fuel bills too”.

The move was one of a series of environmental measures unveiled by the chancellor in a short Spring Statement as he sought to address one of the major concerns of young people ahead of a second school climate strike later this week.

The Treasury also announced the protection of all the waters around Ascension Island in the Atlantic, where no fishing will be allowed.


This may signal a real breakthrough in 3D printing - a must view 5 min video.

Why This 3D Light Printer Is A HUGE Game Changer

Computed Axial Lithography is the first printer of it's kind. It can shape objects, all-at-once, using specialized synthetic resin and rays of light.
Volumetric additive manufacturing via tomographic reconstruction
"The speed, geometry, and surface quality limitations of additive processes are linked to the reliance on material layering. We demonstrated concurrent printing of all points within a three-dimensional object by illuminating a rotating volume of photosensitive material with a dynamically evolving light pattern. We print features as small as 0.3 mm in engineering acrylate polymers, as well as printing soft structures with exceptionally smooth surfaces into a gelatin methacrylate hydrogel"


This is an amazing signal for human living and working in close proximity - the emergence of the ‘Cone of Silence’? Will it accelerate architectures of the open-office and thin-walled apartments?

Scientists have discovered a shape that blocks all sound–even your co-workers

Offices and tiny apartments could be transformed by the work of Boston University researchers, who recently unveiled an “acoustic metamaterial” that blocks all sound.
A team of Boston University researchers recently stuck a loudspeaker into one end of a PVC pipe. They cranked it up loud. What did they hear? Nothing.

How was this possible? Did they block the other end of the pipe with noise canceling foams or a chunk of concrete? No, nothing of the sort. The pipe was actually left open save for a small, 3D-printed ring placed around the rim. That ring cut 94% of the sound blasting from the speaker, enough to make it inaudible to the human ear.


This is a lovely signal on a few levels - one of them is how a technology inevitable will have affordances that are unpredicted - maybe unpredictable - until the a marriage of the right need and convenience.
“We don’t really pass physical notes anymore,” said Skyler, 15, who, like all the other students in this story, is identified by a pseudonym.

The Hottest Chat App for Teens Is … Google Docs

How a writing tool became the new default way to pass notes in class
When the kids in Skyler’s school want to tell a friend something in class, they don’t scrawl a note down on a tiny piece of paper and toss it across the room. They use Google Docs.

As more and more laptops find their way into middle and high schools, educators are using Google Docs to do collaborative exercises and help students follow along with the lesson plan. The students, however, are using it to organize running conversations behind teachers’ backs.


And another signal to watch from Google. This signals a new big player in the gaming world as well as the shift from owning to access.

Google’s Stadia is a video game-streaming platform that is taking aim at consoles

Is this the death of the traditional console? The new service will let people stream video games that usually have had to be bought as a download or CD.
The details: Google says Stadia will work on any device, be it a TV, laptop, or smartphone. It also promises that games on its platform will be available in resolutions up to 4K and 60 frames per second, with HDR and surround sound. The cloud computing power that Google is promising is more than what’s available to a PS4 and XBox One X combined. The firm also unveiled a Stadia controller including a button that will let users capture game play and share it straight onto YouTube. YouTube gaming content has an audience of more than 200 million people every day.

When can I buy it? Google is yet to say how much Stadia will cost, but it’s promised it’ll launch later this year in the US, Canada, UK, and much of Europe.

A bold move: The idea of a “Netflix for gaming” holds huge promise, and that’s why Sony, Microsoft, and other tech and gaming giants have been working on it for years. However, it’s a lot harder to make it work than you might imagine. Others have tried and failed. For example, cloud gaming service OnLive, which launched in 2003 but closed in 2015, was killed by its frustratingly slow speeds. To try and avoid this, Google says its Stadia controller will connect to its servers directly. If any company can make this work, it might just be Google, thanks to its vast, global network of data centers.

Here is the direct link to Google’s Stadia Page