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
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Articles:
As he chose his subjects, Blumenberg followed careful selection criteria. The stories had to be short parables, myths, or aphorisms. They had to contain the germ of philosophical argument without quite articulating it, like metaphors with vivid vehicles but ambiguous tenors. Scholars before him would have dismissed these stories as mere illustrations, but Blumenberg claimed that they are pivotal to philosophical thinking. Indeed, they constitute the hinges on which our rational edifices rest. Through the logic of metaphor, such parables buttress otherwise shaky or implausible narratives about the world and one’s own self. They assert ties between different realms of knowledge and experience that otherwise seem threateningly disconnected. Their vividness manages to convince us when rationality fails. Indeed, it might even distract us from the scandal of its failure. When such stories emerge, time and again, across different cultures, they reveal to us some shared features of our humanity.
The religious myth, the aphorism, and the anecdote are not opposed to rationality. Instead, they are some of the means by which abstract thought emerges from immediate experience. Indeed, these forms’ attachment to subjectivity can never be fully transcended.
Transcultural communication reveals the subjectivity of our local thought systems with intensifying clarity. The analogies we use to move between cultures and disciplines, or between artificial intelligence and human consciousness, come to seem ever more far-fetched, like metaphors.
The Myths of Enlightenment
Charles Darwin wrote a less well-known book The Descent of Man after writing the famous On the Origin of Species. In the Descent of Man he made the revolutionary claim that evolution is not only about the survival of the fittest, but also the result of attraction and delight in individual subjective experience. With aesthetic evaluation and choice, a new kind of evolutionary agency emerges, the capacity of individual aesthetically based judgments to drive evolution. Beauty equals fitness.
What if we removed human institutions from the organizing centre of art and aesthetics?
We could do that by adopting a new aesthetic view of life that places the art world in a larger ecological context. We should also learn, or relearn, to look closely at the aesthetic complexity of nature. This could perhaps create an understanding of art as a co-evolutionary process, a dance, or a process of communication, which evolves in the same way in the human arts, and in other species. Many species of birds learn their songs from other members of their own species.
An aesthetic view of life also means elevating beauty to the methodological mainstream, filling some of the blind spots of the present cult of innovation and productivity. It is about seeing the small amongst the big, hearing the quiet in the midst of the loud and appreciating tacit, aesthetic, knowledge in addition to the explicit, rational knowledge that our industrial world is built on.
Our future as a species may, perhaps, be dependent on this.
An aesthetic view of life
ultimately the information war is about territory — just not the geographic kind.
In a warm information war, the human mind is the territory. If you aren’t a combatant, you are the territory. And once a combatant wins over a sufficient number of minds, they have the power to influence culture and society, policy and politics.
Meanwhile, the new digital nation states – the social platforms that act as unregulated, privately-governed public squares for 2 billion citizens — have just begun to acknowledge that all of this is happening, and they’re struggling to find ways to manage it. After a year of Congressional hearings and relentless press exposés detailing everything from election interference to literal genocide, technology companies have begun to internalize that the information world war is very real, is causing real pain to many, and is having profound consequences.
This particular manifestation of ongoing conflict was something the social networks didn’t expect. Cyberwar, most people thought, would be fought over infrastructure — armies of state-sponsored hackers and the occasional international crime syndicate infiltrating networks and exfiltrating secrets, or taking over critical systems. That’s what governments prepared and hired for; it’s what defense and intelligence agencies got good at. It’s what CSOs built their teams to handle.
But as social platforms grew, acquiring standing audiences in the hundreds of millions and developing tools for precision targeting and viral amplification, a variety of malign actors simultaneously realized that there was another way. They could go straight for the people, easily and cheaply. And that’s because influence operations can, and do, impact public opinion. Adversaries can target corporate entities and transform the global power structure by manipulating civilians and exploiting human cognitive vulnerabilities at scale.
why execute a lengthy, costly, complex attack on the power grid when there is relatively no cost, in terms of dollars as well as consequences, to attack a society’s ability to operate with a shared epistemology?
The Digital Maginot Line
More than one might initially think has our image of artificial intelligence been shaped by popular culture. AI in films has been mostly portrayed as somewhat anthropomorphic in nature: talking cars, a robot that wants to become a boy, a replicant that is “more human than human.” For the last couple of decades, popular culture has shaped an image of artificial intelligence as something humanlike: self-contained and autonomous. In reality the opposite is true. AI and human beings are part of an ecology of intelligences. Intelligence is not a binary quality, but more of a spectrum. An ant on its own is rather unintelligent. Yet an army of ants figuring out how to transport leaves in the most efficient manner over a certain distance is what one would call an emerging, collective intelligence. An ecosystem that has been adapting to changes in climate over thousands and thousands of years can be described as some kind of slow intelligence. Intelligence comes in many different forms, scales, and speeds.
Unfortunately we lack adequate ways of accessing and understanding this new form of intelligence, or rather accumulation of different intelligences. Whereas representations of AI in fiction have often failed to represent the character of progress in the field, it is, ironically, another pop culture medium that shows potential for expanding our understanding of it: games. I argue that video games and game engines offer new possibilities as an interface for networked forms of AI.
The modular patchwork intelligence of numerous sub-AIs is manifested in the physical world. Our smartphones alone make up an earth-spanning sensor network collecting data from millions of users, considering that the average smartphone consists of 20 sensors or more. The planetary-scale networks of sensors and computers, harvesting and processing data, are largely unmapped, and it is fair to say that the general public is unaware of its sheer scale. Rather than the McLuhanian way of referring to these objects as extensions of use, a more object-oriented view seems appropriate. The relationship between human beings and machines is not a one-way street: The landscape of networked sensors and computers experience us as one of many stimuli.
“Sensing is not just the process of generating information but also a way of forming experience.” (p.11) Monitoring our sensing planet, then, not only results in rational insights, it enables us to render and experience our world from multiple viewpoints. These renders enable us to see new kinds of patterns by “bring[ing] entities into communication even if not directly connected, an environment influencing genetic adaptation and evolution, and to the contrary, even an environment to which living entities are indifferent.”
gaming could serve as an alternative to voting — could potentially be realized with a plurality of people gaming national and global eventualities. For any given issue, different proposals could be gamed in parallel. As some games collapsed, gamers would be able to join more viable games until the most gameable proposal was played through by all. That game would be a surrogate ballot, the majority position within the game serving as a legislatively or diplomatically binding decision. Provided that citizens consented from the start, it would be fully compatible with democratic principles — and could break the gridlock undermining modern democracies.”
Artists, developers, and designers have started to experiment with games in ways that are agnostic to the concept of winning or losing; playing an infinite game. They take inspiration from the way nature adapts to new conditions and other forms of emerging intelligence. Those experiments embrace the unpredictable and uncontrollable as means of computing new worlds, of opening up other paths.
there is no reason to not apply this object-oriented, infinite game approach to real-world applications. With rapid advancements in game cloud computing technology and an ever growing sensor network, one can imagine interfaces for the general public to explore and relate to emerging, distributed and networked forms of intelligence. Games making use of real-world data in real time can become tools for citizens to take on new and unexpected points of view. They can provide ways to build one’s own worlds, to understand complex systems or counter-intuitive processes, to become emotionally invested in a larger picture going beyond the anthropocentrism Silicon Valley promotes. They could become ways to experiment, to build one’s own sub-AI rag rug. One can imagine thousands of thousands of AI network simulations at different scales, at different speeds, with different aspects, factors, data sets, and degrees of influencing each other. These worlds might indeed change one’s opinions and behaviors in the “real” world. In their goallessness, they would develop more like nature, with no notion of control.
Playing Intelligence
So often we are subjected to analysis and stories blaming technology for our loss of privacy. However, it has less to do with technology than it has to do with the underlying business models and ideologies that use and shape technologies in specific ways. This is an important signal by Tim Wu, of the need to transform our political-economies and social-cultural institution to ensure technologies serve democracy.
How Capitalism Betrayed Privacy
The forces of wealth creation once fostered the right to be left alone. But that has changed.
For much of human history, what we now call “privacy” was better known as being rich. Privacy, like wealth, was something that most people had little or none of. Farmers, slaves and serfs resided in simple dwellings, usually with other people, sometimes even sharing space with animals. They had no expectation that a meaningful part of their lives would be unwatchable or otherwise off limits to others. That would have required homes with private rooms. And only rich people had those.
The spread of mass privacy, surely one of modern civilization’s more impressive achievements, thus depended on another, even more impressive achievement: the creation of a middle class. Only over the past 300 years or so, as increasingly large numbers of people gained the means to control their physical environment through the acquisition of wealth and private property, did privacy norms and eventually privacy rights come into existence. What is a right to privacy without a room of your own?
The historical link between privacy and the forces of wealth creation helps explain why privacy is under siege today. It reminds us, first, that mass privacy is not a basic feature of human existence but a byproduct of a specific economic arrangement — and therefore a contingent and impermanent state of affairs. And it reminds us, second, that in a capitalist country, our baseline of privacy depends on where the money is. And today that has changed.
This is an important signal of ongoing research and work related to distributed ledger technologies.
Over the next four years, we should expect to see many central banks decide whether they will use blockchain and distributed ledger technologies to improve their processes and economic welfare. Given the systemic importance of central bank processes, and the relative immaturity of blockchain technology, the banks must carefully consider all known and unknown risks to implementation.
10 Ways Central Banks Are Researching Blockchain Technology Today
While research and experimentation with blockchain technology across sectors have been underway for the past several years, few organizations have deployed the technology. Although central banks are among the most cautious and prudent institutions in the world, a recent white paper published by the World Economic Forum indicates that these institutions, perhaps surprisingly, are among the first to implement blockchain technology.
Central bank activities with blockchain and distributed ledger technology are not always well known or communicated. As a result, there is much speculation and misunderstanding about objectives and the state of research. Dozens of central banks around the world are actively investigating whether blockchain can help solve long-standing interests such as banking and payments system efficiency, payments security and resilience, as well as financial inclusion.
These organizations, tasked with overseeing a nation’s monetary policy and financial and economic stability, are very cautious to implement any technology or solution that can have adverse consequences. Yet, many central banks are actively researching a variety of use cases to explore the technology’s potential in controlled, secure settings.
This is a good signal of the possibilities of global national efforts to meet the complex challenges of the 21st century.
The Japanese programme has been modelled on other large-scale international projects, such as the European Commission’s upcoming programme Horizon Europe, and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) programme NSF 2026 Idea Machine
Japan prepares ‘moonshot’ project to solve global problems
The ¥100-billion initiative could focus on challenges such as how to reduce carbon emissions and create a plastic-free society.
Japan is launching a moonshot this year, but the target is closer to home. The Japanese government says that it will spend ¥100 billion (US$897 million) on an ambitious research project that seeks to solve some of the country’s biggest challenges. The goals of the project have yet to be decided, but a committee advising the government met for the first time on 29 March in Tokyo.
The project follows the ¥55-billion Impulsing Paradigm Change through Disruptive Technologies Program (ImPACT), which ran for five years and ended last month. ImPACT brought universities and companies together to pursue high-risk, high-impact innovation, but some projects were not ambitious enough, says Yoshiaki Tamura, who helped to manage the initiative for the Bureau of Science, Technology and Innovation in Tokyo. The new project — the Moonshot Research and Development System — is more aspirational, he says.
Tackling rising carbon emissions and creating a plastic-free society were two goals that the advisory committee — comprising scientists, businesspeople and artists — discussed, says Tamura. The government approved the project in February, and has also asked the public for moonshot suggestions, which the government is expected to decide by June, says Akira Tsugita, director of strategic planning and management at the government-run Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) in Tokyo.
This is a great signal in these time where everything seems to be falling apart. An African Trade Union could hasten the spread of renewable energy and reduce poverty and population growth.
This is Africa's ambitious free trade plan, mapped
A united African continent working towards common goals would be a major force on the global economic stage.
To this end, nations in the region have been working towards an ambitious plan to create the world’s largest trade area. The Gambia recently became the latest country to ratify the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), helping the agreement reach critical mass to move forward.
One key to unlocking the region’s economic potential is making it easier for Africa’s 55 countries to trade with one another.
Currently, Africa is a patchwork of regulations and tariffs, and trade between countries has suffered as a result. For example, only 10% of Nigeria’s annual trade activity is with other African countries. This is a surprising given the country’s dominant economic standing and location firmly in the center of the continent.
As a whole, Africa’s intra-continental trade level hovers at just around 20%, while nations in Europe and Asia are at 69% and 59%, respectively. Clearly, there is a lot of room for growth.
Today’s graphic helps put the region – and the status of AfCFTA – into perspective.
Another signal of the emerging arrival of autonomous transportation.
Alphabet’s drone division has launched its first public delivery service
About 100 homes in five suburbs of Canberra, Australia, will be able to order food and medication from local businesses to be delivered by drone.
Approved: Australia’s Civil Aviation Safety Authority granted the project regulatory approval, after an 18-month trial that involved 3,000 deliveries. There are conditions attached: the drones can only fly at certain times, they can’t fly over main roads, and they need to stay at a safe distance from people. The service will gradually expand to further areas once it’s up and running in the initial zones, Alphabet’s drone spinoff Wing said.
How it works: Wing has partnered with 12 local businesses to deliver their products to customers nearby “in minutes.” Initially there had been some complaints from residents over noise levels during the pilot, but Wing has since developed a quieter drone model, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports. It has claimed that the service could be worth $21 million to $29 million to the local economy.
A first? Sadly, probably not, despite claims of Australia’s regulator that it “very likely” is. UPS seems to have got there first in the US. It looks as if the market for drone deliveries is finally starting to get off the ground, with fierce competition between Alphabet, Amazon, and a handful of other players.
Here’s is Alphabet’s own Wing site. Some great images and illustrations of the drone’s design.
Wing is developing a new method of transporting goods that’s faster, cheaper, and more environmentally friendly than what’s possible today on the ground.
Transforming the way goods are transported
Project Wing is an autonomous delivery drone service aiming to increase access to goods, reduce traffic congestion in cities, and help ease the CO2 emissions attributable to the transportation of goods. Wing is also developing an unmanned traffic management platform that will allow unmanned aircraft to navigate around other drones, manned aircraft, and other obstacles like trees, buildings and power lines.
This is a good signal of autonomous robots - for subsurface, surface, land, air and space work. There are several very short video.
NASA Launching Astrobee Robots to Space Station Tomorrow
A pair of autonomous, free-flying robots will be on their way to the ISS
It’s been a little over two years since we were first introduced to Astrobee, an autonomous robotic cube designed to fly around the International Space Station. Tomorrow, a pair of Astrobee robots (named Honey and Bumble) will launch to the ISS aboard a Cygnus cargo flight. There’s already a nice comfy dock waiting for them in the Japanese Experiment Module (JEM), and the plan is to put them to work as soon as possible. After a bit of astronaut-assisted setup, the robots will buzz around autonomously, doing experiments and taking video, even operating without direct human supervision on occasion.
NASA has big plans for these little robots, and before they head off to space, we checked in with folks from the Intelligent Robotics Group at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., to learn about what we have to look forward to.
Astrobee’s components include multiple cameras, a touch screen, laser pointer, and lights. The propulsion system consists of a pair of impellers that pressurize air inside of the robot, which can then be vented through a series of 12 different nozzles spaced around the robot’s body.
It may seem that 3D printing has trailed away as a fad - this project signals it’s continued development and promise.
3-D-printed propeller blade opens the way to eco-friendly shipping
the EU-funded project RAMSSES has taken advantage of new lightweight, high-performance materials to develop the first demonstrator of hollow propeller blades. This innovative outcome was achieved using additive manufacturing (AM) – a process in which 3-D objects are built by adding layer upon layer of material.
The AM process the researchers are using to improve ship propulsion is called wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM). The process works by melting metal wire using an electric arc as the heat source. When melted, the wire is extruded into beads that stick together to create a layer of metal. This is then repeated layer by layer to build a 3-D metal part. WAAM is used to design large components – in this case, propellers of up to 6 m in diameter – which traditional manufacturing technologies are incapable of.
The team's first demonstrator is a one-third–scale hollow blade for a container ship propeller. It was printed in stainless steel in under 100 hours and weighs approximately 300 kg. While 300 kg for just one blade, and a scale model at that, may seem ridiculously heavy to the layman, it may put things in perspective to know that propeller blades can way up to 20 tonnes! When produced at full scale, the team expects that the blade will weigh over 40% less than conventional components.
New manufacturing methods continue to advance.
Being able to weld glass and metals together will be a huge step forward in manufacturing and design flexibility.
Welding breakthrough could transform manufacturing
Scientists from Heriot-Watt University have welded glass and metal together using an ultrafast laser system, in a breakthrough for the manufacturing industry.
Various optical materials such as quartz, borosilicate glass and even sapphire were all successfully welded to metals like aluminium, titanium and stainless steel using the Heriot-Watt laser system, which provides very short, picosecond pulses of infrared light in tracks along the materials to fuse them together.
“At the moment, equipment and products that involve glass and metal are often held together by adhesives, which are messy to apply and parts can gradually creep, or move. Outgassing is also an issue - organic chemicals from the adhesive can be gradually released and can lead to reduced product lifetime.
“The process relies on the incredibly short pulses from the laser. These pulses last only a few picoseconds - a picosecond to a second is like a second compared to 30,000 years.
“The parts to be welded are placed in close contact, and the laser is focused through the optical material to provide a very small and highly intense spot at the interface between the two materials - we achieved megawatt peak power over an area just a few microns across.
Here’s a great signal for energy storage and electric transportation.
Innolith Energy Technology Brings 1000km EV Within Range
New safe battery set to quadruple energy density
Innolith AG, the world leader in rechargeable Inorganic Battery Technology, today announces that it is developing world’s first 1000 Wh/kg rechargeable battery. Under development in the company’s German laboratory, the new Innolith Energy Battery would be capable of powering an Electric Vehicle (EV) for over 1000km on a single charge. The Innolith Energy Battery would also radically reduce costs due to the avoidance of exotic and expensive materials combined with the very high energy density of the system.
In addition to its range and cost advantages, the Innolith Energy Battery will be the first non-flammable lithium-based battery for use in EVs. The Innolith battery uses a non-flammable inorganic electrolyte, unlike conventional EV batteries that use a flammable organic electrolyte. The switch to non-flammable batteries removes the primary cause of battery fires that have beset the manufacturers of EVs.
Innolith will be bringing the Energy Battery to market via an initial pilot production in Germany, followed by licensing partnerships with major battery and automotive companies. Development and commercialisation of the Innolith Energy Battery is anticipated to take between three and five years.
This is an amazing signal of emerging medical technology - that in one form or the other will hasten customized medical treatments.
The Ultimate in Personalized Medicine: Your Body on a Chip
One day your doctor could prescribe drugs based on how a biochip version of you reacts to them
You’ve fallen ill, but neither you nor your doctor know which treatment will work. Which would you rather do—try five different drugs, one at a time, until you find one that treats your illness without serious side effects, or take one drug that’s guaranteed to work? You’d opt for that one drug, of course.
Right now, though, there’s no way to know for certain that a particular medication will work in your particular case. But someday, before you ever take that drug, it could be tested on a version of you small enough to fit in your pocket.
These miniaturized copies of you would be enabled by improvements to technologies that are currently in development in labs around the world. These organ-on-a-chip devices—usually made on substrates of plastic or rubber, not silicon—contain living cells. These cells are organized to form a 3D bit of artificially grown tissue, often called an organoid, that operates like a human organ but on a scale of cubic millimeters. A liver organoid might be functional enough to metabolize the painkiller paracetamol. A lung organoid could simulate breathing.
An organoid on its own is useful, but in your body, no single organ works in isolation. Your organs are in constant communication. Your nervous system sends commands to the rest of the organs to modulate their behaviors; your heart pumps blood to other organs to deliver oxygen and nutrients; the pancreas produces insulin that tells everything else how much glucose to take in. And we can’t know for sure the real therapeutic value of a new drug or its side effects unless we can test it in a system more complex than just one organ. So researchers, including my group at Harvard Medical School and at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston, have been developing chip-based systems with multiple organoids—systems with a miniature heart, a diminutive liver, even a basic brain. Many of these are 3D printed and all are connected by a circulatory system of microfluidic pumps and channels.
This is a wonderful signal of how AI can enable better agricultural products - especially in urban farms.
MIT’s ‘cyber-agriculture’ optimizes basil flavors
The days when you could simply grow a basil plant from a seed by placing it on your windowsill and watering it regularly are gone — there’s no point now that machine learning-optimized hydroponic “cyber-agriculture” has produced a superior plant with more robust flavors. The future of pesto is here.
This research didn’t come out of a desire to improve sauces, however. It’s a study from MIT’s Media Lab and the University of Texas at Austin aimed at understanding how to both improve and automate farming.
In the study, published today in PLOS ONE, the question being asked was whether a growing environment could find and execute a growing strategy that resulted in a given goal — in this case, basil with stronger flavors.
Such a task is one with numerous variables to modify — soil type, plant characteristics, watering frequency and volume, lighting and so on — and a measurable outcome: concentration of flavor-producing molecules. That means it’s a natural fit for a machine learning model, which from that variety of inputs can make a prediction as to which will produce the best output.
This is a very interesting 20 min video that explains the ‘arms race’ nature of the challenge that platforms have in managing fake content. For anyone interested in understanding - in simple terms how algorithms are manipulated. Worth the view j- this is the new form of spam.
Manipulating the YouTube Algorithm - (Part 1/3) Smarter Every Day
first video of a 3 part series on "coordinated inauthentic behavior".
Renée Diresta is a Mozilla Fellow in Media, Misinformation, and Trust, where she researches unintended consequences of algorithms and works towards helping machines make better decisions. Renee also writes about disinformation and the changing face of information war — check out her essay “The Digital Maginot Line”
