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
Contents
Quotes:
Articles:
But while the acknowledgment of the problem of Big Tech is most welcome, I am worried that the diagnosis is wrong.
The problem is that we’re confusing automated persuasion with automated targeting. Laughable lies about Brexit, Mexican rapists, and creeping Sharia law didn’t convince otherwise sensible people that up was down and the sky was green.
Rather, the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros.
Remember that elections are generally knife-edge affairs, even for politicians who’ve held their seats for decades with slim margins: 60% of the vote is an excellent win. Remember, too, that the winner in most races is “none of the above,” with huge numbers of voters sitting out the election. If even a small number of these non-voters can be motivated to show up at the polls, safe seats can be made contestable. In a tight race, having a cheap way to reach all the latent Klansmen in a district and quietly inform them that Donald J. Trump is their man is a game-changer.
This isn’t to say that persuasion is impossible. Automated disinformation campaigns can flood the channel with contradictory, seemingly plausible accounts for the current state of affairs, making it hard for a casual observer to make sense of events. Long-term repetition of a consistent narrative, even a manifestly unhinged one, can create doubt and find adherents – think of climate change denial, or George Soros conspiracies, or the anti-vaccine movement.
These are long, slow processes, though, that make tiny changes in public opinion over the course of years, and they work best when there are other conditions that support them – for example, fascist, xenophobic, and nativist movements that are the handmaidens of austerity and privation. When you don’t have enough for a long time, you’re ripe for messages blaming your neighbors for having deprived you of your fair share.
Facebook isn’t a mind-control ray. It’s a tool for finding people who possess uncommon, hard-to-locate traits, whether that’s “person thinking of buying a new refrigerator,” “person with the same rare disease as you,” or “person who might participate in a genocidal pogrom,” and then pitching them on a nice side-by-side or some tiki torches, while showing them social proof of the desirability of their course of action, in the form of other people (or bots) that are doing the same thing, so they feel like they’re part of a crowd.
... because dossiers on billions of people hold the power to wreak almost unimaginable harm, and yet, each dossier brings in just a few dollars a year. For commercial surveillance to be cost effective, it has to socialize all the risks associated with mass surveillance and privatize all the gains.
Facebook doesn’t have a mind-control problem, it has a corruption problem. Cambridge Analytica didn’t convince decent people to become racists; they convinced racists to become voters.
Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags
Adam Smith’s commanding insight into how markets organise economic resources for the common good rests upon the even distribution of power between market participants. Remove that qualifying condition and the proposition falls. Thus the reality of markets today is that imbalances of power are pervasive and efficiently exploited by the powerful for their own gain.
Building an economic democracy does not imply equality of economic outcomes, however, but it is interdependent with economic security for all. Greater understanding of the lived experience of the most economically marginalised leads to policies that promote a better base of economic security.Equally, when people feel more secure, they have a greater sense of individual agency and flourishing that enables them to confidently engage in civic life. This is why our work on universal basic income is not merely seeking to tackle poverty and inequality; the real prize is empowerment. We need to create a level economic platform on which everyone has the opportunity to build a creative and fulfilling life. As Franklin D Roosevelt put it in his 1944 Economic Bill of Rights, “We have come to a clear realisation of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence.”
Accessible economics
It’s hard to believe that anyone—even Zuckerberg—wants the 1984 version. He didn’t found Facebook to manipulate elections; Jack Dorsey and the other Twitter founders didn’t intend to give Donald Trump a digital bullhorn. And this is what makes Berners-Lee believe that this battle over our digital future can be won. As public outrage grows over the centralization of the Web, and as enlarging numbers of coders join the effort to decentralize it, he has visions of the rest of us rising up and joining him. This spring, he issued a call to arms, of sorts, to the digital public. In an open letter published on his foundation’s Web site, he wrote: “While the problems facing the web are complex and large, I think we should see them as bugs: problems with existing code and software systems that have been created by people—and can be fixed by people.”
TIM BERNERS-LEE CREATOR OF WORLD WIDE WEB HAS REGRETS
we have been engineering our environments to more productively serve human needs for tens of millennia. We cleared forests for grasslands and agriculture. We selected and bred plants and animals that were more nutritious, fertile and abundant. It took six times as much farmland to feed a single person 9,000 years ago, at the dawn of the Neolithic revolution, than it does today, even as almost all of us eat much richer diets. What the palaeoarcheological record strongly suggests is that carrying capacity is not fixed. It is many orders of magnitude greater than it was when we began our journey on this planet.
There is no particular reason to think that we won’t be able to continue to raise carrying capacity further. Nuclear and solar energy are both clearly capable of providing large quantities of energy for large numbers of people without producing much carbon emissions. Modern, intensive agricultural systems are similarly capable of meeting the dietary needs of many more people. A planet with a lot more chickens, corn and nuclear power might not be the idyll that many wish for, but it would clearly be one that would be capable of supporting a lot more people consuming a lot more stuff for a very long time.
The Earth’s carrying capacity for human life is not fixed
Albert Einstein put it in 1926: ‘Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use. It is the theory which decides what can be observed.’
How we interpret the gorilla experiment might be seen as a kind of Rorschach test. How you interpret the finding depends on what you are looking for. On the one hand, the test could indeed be said to prove blindness. But on the other, it shows that humans attend to visual scenes in directed fashion, based on the questions and theories they have in mind (or that they’ve been primed with). How we interpret the experiment is scarcely a trivial matter. The worry is that the growing preoccupation of many behavioural scientists – across psychology, economics and the cognitive sciences – with blindness and bias causes scientists to look for evidence of human blindness and bias. Highlighting bias and blindness is certainly catchy and fun. And the argument that humans are blind to the obvious is admittedly far more memorable than an interpretation that simply says that humans respond to questions. But scientists’ own preoccupation with blindness risks driving the type of experiments scientists construct, and what they then observe, look for, focus on, and say. And looking for validations of blindness and bias, they are sure to find them.
The far more important point is that we also need to recognise and investigate the remarkable human capacities for generating questions and theories that direct our awareness and observations in the first place
The fallacy of obviousness
This is an extremely important signal. In the late 90s David Brin wrote “The Transparent Society” (still the best book on privacy I’ve read) - where he proposes that we either develop into a surveillance society or we choose to enact laws and other protections to ensure our society provides for reciprocal accountability - who better to watch the watchers than the watched?
Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras
In the Chinese city of Zhengzhou, a police officer wearing facial recognition glasses spotted a heroin smuggler at a train station.
In Qingdao, a city famous for its German colonial heritage, cameras powered by artificial intelligence helped the police snatch two dozen criminal suspects in the midst of a big annual beer festival.
In Wuhu, a fugitive murder suspect was identified by a camera as he bought food from a street vendor.
With millions of cameras and billions of lines of code, China is building a high-tech authoritarian future. Beijing is embracing technologies like facial recognition and artificial intelligence to identify and track 1.4 billion people. It wants to assemble a vast and unprecedented national surveillance system, with crucial help from its thriving technology industry.
This is a 22 min read - and offers some very good thinking about the problems of Universal Basic Income in the emerging Digital Environment - a deep question of how we will value our values - well worth the read.
Basic Income, Job Guarantees, and Invisible Labor
This is a very preliminary sort of ramble, because my ideas are still in a pretty early stage, and I’m quite likely to be wrong about several things. But it’s good to explore these ideas publicly, hear feedback, and think more; everything I’ve thought so far has come from some very thoughtful critiques I’ve heard of these ideas, both Leftist and Conservative. (In fact, it’s the intersection of the two critiques that has been most thought-provoking, a sure sign that this is a complicated question!)
Basically, more and more jobs are vanishing, and they aren’t going to come back.
But it’s a weird sort of vanishing. What happened is that our productivity per worker has been skyrocketing since the 50’s. At first, this meant not just more pay per worker, but a drop in prices of goods, so everyone was better off. Until the late 70’s. At that point, we started to hit the point where we had enough production of all sorts of things that we simply needed fewer workers to make all the stuff anyone would want, and that meant that while prices dropped, wages did, too. Some of this briefly got hidden by “offshoring” — it was cheaper to move manufacturing to China, then to Bangladesh, and so on — but those countries are starting to see automation take jobs away, too. The cost of production is dropping to zero.
What’s really stupid about this is that it leads to people starving in the midst of plenty. That’s because we actually use jobs for three different things:
To make things we need;
To allocate resources (via things like wages); and
As sources of individual meaning in our lives.
Google can’t be faulted for not engaging in fearless failures - remember Google Glass? (which actually continues to find a market in manufacturing of complex products such as aircraft). These two initiatives will be worth watching. - These initiatives can complement its ongoing development of self-driving transportation. The 2 min video is worth the Watch
Only people who want to learn as fast as possible are willing to fail this much - eventually you’ll fail to fail :)
“Today, unlike when they started as X projects, Loon and Wing seem a long way from crazy — and thanks to their years of hard work and relentless testing in the real world, they’re now graduating from X to become two new independent businesses within Alphabet: Loon and Wing.”
Leaving Google’s nest: Loon and Wing graduate from Alphabet’s X idea factory
Two of Google’s best-known flights of fancy, Project Loon and Project Wing, are being hatched from their X incubator to become independent businesses under the wing of Alphabet, Google’s holding company.
Loon will work with mobile network operators globally to bring internet access to a market of billions of people currently without high-speed connections.
Meanwhile, Wing is developing a drone delivery system as well as an air traffic management platform to route robotic drones safely through the skies.
This is a good signal for the accelerating emergence of human enhancing prosthetics of all sorts. Not just a form of recovering capability but improving capability.
Exoskeleton that allows humans to work and play for longer
The technology to give people superhuman strength is currently being developed but the ethical questions about whether we should be developing it and in what circumstances it should be used, are only just beginning to be asked.
An exoskeleton, as the name suggests, is an external frame that can be worn to support the body, either to help a person overcome an injury or to enhance their biological capacities. Powered by a system of electric motors, the frame gives limbs extra movement, strength and endurance.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Biomechatronics Lab, researchers are working on exoskeletons that will work in far better harmony with the body.
Using a technique they call neuro-embodied design, Mr Clites's team is finding ways of extending the human nervous system into the synthetic world and vice versa.
At the centre of the laboratory is a treadmill fitted with devices that measure how much force is used when people walk or run. Above it are motion-capture cameras that work out exactly how people move their joints and muscles.
The data helps them design a system to help people run or walk faster or more efficiently.
This is an awesome signal of emerging science based on leaps in our instruments - our technologies - the images alone are worth the view - and provide a glimpse of what’s to come. The 4 min video is astounding.
“This is the miracle of being able to see what we have never been able to see before. It’s simply incredible,” said study co-author Tomas Kirchhausen, HMS professor of cell biology, and the Springer Family Chair of pediatrics and a senior investigator at Boston Children’s Hospital.
“Every time we’ve done an experiment with this microscope, we’ve observed something novel — and generated new ideas and hypotheses to test,” Kirchhausen said. “It can be used to study almost any problem in a biological system or organism I can think of.”
Microscope’s 3-D movies capture unprecedented details
In a new study in the April 20 issue of Science, researchers from Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s (HHMI) Janelia Research Campus, Harvard Medical School, and collaborating institutions report the development of a microscope capable of capturing, in unprecedented detail, 3-D images and videos of cells inside living organisms.
Adapting a technique used by astronomers to study distant stars, the research team, led by Nobel laureate and Janelia group leader Eric Betzig, showcased the new technology by generating a series of stunning movies: cancer cells crawling through blood vessels, spinal nerve cells wiring up into circuits, immune cells cruising through a zebrafish’s inner ear, and much more.
The resolution of the microscope is so powerful it can even capture subcellular details such as the dynamics of miniscule bubbles known as vesicles, which transport molecular cargo through to the cell.
Talking about 3D - this is a strong signal of the future of science research and education and learning. Imagine becoming a blood cell circulating a body. The two very short videos are worth the view.
Discovering new drugs and materials by ‘touching’ molecules in virtual reality
Scientists can now visualize and experiment with structures and dynamics of complex molecular structures (at atomic-level precision), with real-time multi-user collaboration via the cloud
University of Bristol researchers have designed and tested a new virtual reality (VR) cloud-based system intended to allow researchers to reach out and “touch” molecules as they move — folding them, knotting them, plucking them, and changing their shape to test how the molecules interact. Using an HTC Vive virtual-reality device, it could lead to creating new drugs and materials and improving the teaching of chemistry.
More broadly, the goal is to accelerate progress in nanoscale molecular engineering areas that include conformational mapping, drug development, synthetic biology, and catalyst design.
The multi-user system, developed by developed by a team led by University of Bristol chemists and computer scientists, uses an “interactive molecular dynamics virtual reality” (iMD VR) app that allows users to visualize and sample (with atomic-level precision) the structures and dynamics of complex molecular structures “on the fly” and to interact with other users in the same virtual environment.
Because each VR client has access to global position data of all other users, any user can see through his/her headset a co-located visual representation of all other users at the same time. So far, the system has uniquely allowed for simultaneously co-locating six users in the same room within the same simulation.
And 3D is also about a phase transition in how we make things - including living things.
“The cardiac patch that we printed demonstrated two major advancements,” Steven Morris, CEO of Biolife4D, told Digital Trends. “First, it demonstrated Biolife4D’s ability to take a patient’s own blood cells, reprogram them back into stem cells, reprogram them again to make the different type of cells which we need to 3D bioengineer our human heart viable for transplant, and then successfully 3D bioprint with those cells to make living human heart tissue. Second, this is the first time that a cardiac patch was 3D bioprinted that contains multiple cell types of which the human heart is made, and includes preliminary vascularization — all of which are needed to make a functional patch and to keep it alive after the bioprinting process.”
Scientists can 3D print human heart tissue now. The future is here
Long term, the goal of 3D bioprinting is to be able to 3D print fully functioning organs which can be used to replace the failing biological organs of humans in need of a transplant. That may still be years off, but Chicago-based biotech startup Biolife4D this week announced a major new milestone: Its ability to bioprint human cardiac tissue.
The scientific landmark followed shortly after the company opened a new research facility in Houston. It involved the printing of a human cardiac patch, containing multiple cell types which make up the human heart. It could one day be used to help treat patients who have suffered acute heart failure in order to restore lost myocardial contractility, the ability of the heart to generate force for pumping blood around the body.
This is a great signal of the acceleration of new computing paradigms, hardware designed for AI and the very near future phase transition in transportation.
Baidu unveils Kunlun AI chip for edge and cloud computing
Baidu today unveiled a new chip for AI, joining the ranks of Google, Nvidia, Intel, and many other tech companies making processors especially for artificial intelligence.
Kunlun is made to handle AI models for edge computing on devices and in the cloud via datacenters. The Kunlun 818-300 model will be used for training AI, and the 818-100 for inference.
Baidu began working with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chips especially designed for deep learning in 2011, the company said. Kunlun is about 30 times faster than the first FPGA chip from Baidu and is able to achieve 260 tera-operations per second (TOPS) and 512 GB/second memory bandwidth, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat in an email. No date has been set for release of the chip.
Also announced today: Baidu’s Apollo program will help power Apolong self-driving buses.
Apolong was developed with Chinese bus maker King Long and utilizes Baidu’s Apollo autonomous driving platform. The buses for commercial passengers will operate in Chinese cities like Beijing, Shenzhen, Pingtan, and Wuhan and in Tokyo in Japan. Roughly 100 Apolong buses have already been made, and they are scheduled to hit roads in early 2019.
This is not as spectacular as the 3D microscope videos - but this is a must view site and play with the interactive demonstration of the comet’s path through the solar system.
Explosive brightening of approaching green comet – may be plainly visible in August
A comet that could become visible to the naked eye in August has just exploded in brightness. Amateur astronomer Michael Jäger of Austria reports that Comet PANSTARRS (C/2017 S3) brightened 16-fold during the late hours of July 2nd, abruptly increasing in magnitude from +12 to +9.
The comet was discovered on Sept. 23, 2017, by the PanSTARRS telescope on the summit of the Haleakalā volcano in Maui. PanSTARRS’s primary mission is to detect near-Earth asteroids that threaten our planet. In the process,it sweeps up variable stars, supernovas, and comets like this one. With almost a year of data in hand, astronomers have been able to nail down the comet’s orbit. Click on the image to launch an interactive 3D visualization from JPL
This is an interesting experiment - although it sounds like a democratizing model - it remains about ‘private property’ versus a real democratic effort that would build public infrastructure and commons.
Instead of points, Bumped gives equity in the companies you shop at
What does brand loyalty even mean anymore? App downloads, points, stars and other complex reward systems have not just spawned their own media empires trying to decipher them, they have failed at their most basic objective: building a stronger bond between a brand and its consumers.
Bumped wants to reinvent the loyalty space by giving consumers shares of the companies they patronize. Through Bumped’s app, consumers choose their preferred retailer in different categories (think Lowe’s versus The Home Depot in home improvement), and when they spend money at that store using a linked credit card, Bumped will automatically give them ownership in that company.
The startup, which is based in Portland and was founded in March 2017, announced the beta launch of its service today, as well as a $14.1 million Series A led by Dan Ciporin at Canaan Partners, along with existing seed investors Peninsula Ventures, Commerce Ventures and Oregon Venture Fund.
For founder and CEO David Nelsen, the startup doesn’t just make good business sense, it can have a wider social impact of democratizing access to the public equity markets. “A lot of brands need to build an authentic relationship with the customers,” he explained to me. “The brands that have a relationship with consumers, beyond price, are thriving.” With Bumped, Nelsen’s goal is to “align the interests of a shareholder and consumer, and everybody wins.”
This is a strong signal of the phase transition in global energy geopolitics.
One of the World's Biggest Insurers Is Ditching Coal
Earlier this week, one of the biggest re-insurance companies in the world started implementing a policy reflecting the growing risk around new coal projects. Swiss Re announced on Monday it would no longer insure companies that get 30 percent of their revenue or generate 30 percent of their power from coal burned for energy (known in energy parlance as ‘thermal coal’).
It’s yet another sign that economics are turning against coal. The re-insurance giant, which underwrote $35.6 billion in non-life insurance contracts in 2016, is the latest in a string of re-insurers pulling back from one of the dirtiest sources of power generation on the planet. These companies aren’t doing it from the bottom of their hearts, though. This is about cold, hard cash and actuarial tables.
This is a wonderful signal of the combinatory nature of accelerating innovation - the bio-energy paradigm - moving toward domesticating photosynthesis.
Scientists create bacteria-powered solar cells that can work under cloudy skies
Researchers from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada have genetically engineered the microbes to produce a dye that harvests light and converts it into energy.
Initial testing has shown the cells to work “as efficiently in dim light as in bright light”, generating a current “stronger than any previously recorded from such a device”, the team said.
The researchers say their method is cheap and sustainable and the hope is that these “biogenic” cells could in future be used in solar panels in places like British Columbia and parts of northern Europe where overcast skies are common.
This may seem creepy to some - to others it may seem like a signal to domesticating better, more complete and more comprehensive metabolisms.
Scientists Engineer Cleaner Pig Poop
Genetically modified pigs produce fewer dangerous pollutants.
In recent years, however, thanks in part to the ravages of climate change, some researchers who manipulate genes have assumed a new focus: saving the planet. Among other things, they are making grass more palatable for cows and designing climate-friendly cattle that expel less heat-trapping methane. And now they have turned to pigs.
Globally, people consume more pork than any other meat. But there is a big environmental downside to raising pigs. Pigs can’t make three important enzymes they need to digest the nitrogen and phosphorus in their feed. So they poop out most of it, which ends up polluting the air and water. Pig farmers could add these enzymes to pig grain, but that would cost more money, so scientists have come up with another way to fix the problem.
By tweaking the animals’ genes, they’ve made a new generation of transgenic pigs better able to digest these nutrients. They did it by transferring DNA fragments needed to make the required enzymes (β-glucanase, xylanase and phytase) through a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer, a fancy name for cloning. “It’s a mature technology that’s been applied in reproduction of various animals for decades,” said Huaqiang Yang, a scientist at South China Agricultural University, and member of the research team.
“The aim of our study was to enhance the digestion of feed grain in pigs to see if it lowered the release of both phosphorus and nitrogen from their manure,” said Zhenfang Wu, senior author of the scientists’ study, which appears in journal eLife along with a companion article commenting on the research. Once the process was complete, they examined the pig manure and urine, “which was rather unpleasant work,” to measure levels of the nutrients excreted, Yang said.
