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:
It is only juvenile intelligence that analyzes things and arrives at conclusions. If your intelligence is sufficiently evolved and mature, you realize that the more you analyze, the further away you are from any conclusion.
Sadhguru - "Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy”
The past few decades have increasingly highlighted that much of the activity in sensory networks is intrinsically generated, rather than driven by external stimuli. Compare the activity in the visual cortex of an animal in complete darkness with that of an animal looking around, and it’s difficult to tell the two apart. Even in the absence of light, sets of neurons in the cortex begin to fire together, either at the same time or in predictable waves. This correlated firing persists as a so-called metastable state for anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds to a few seconds, and then the firing pattern shifts to another configuration. The metastability, or tendency to hop between transient states, continues after a stimulus is introduced, but some states tend to arise more often for a particular stimulus and are therefore thought of as “coding states.”
It also highlights the need to move away from focusing on single neurons that respond to particular cues, and toward making internal states and dynamics more explicit in our understanding of sensory networks — even for the most basic sensory stimuli. “It’s much easier to say that a neuron increases its firing rate,” said Anan Moran, a neurobiologist at Tel Aviv University in Israel. But to understand how organisms work, “you cannot account only for the stimulus, but also for the internal state,” he added. “And this means that our previous [understanding of] the mechanism used by the brain to achieve perception and action and so on needs to be reevaluated.”
Brains Speed Up Perception by Guessing What’s Next
The last 40 years of research across multiple scientific disciplines has proven, with certainty, that homo economicus does not exist. Outside of economic models, this is simply not how real humans behave. Rather, Homo sapiens have evolved to be other-regarding, reciprocal, heuristic, and intuitive moral creatures. We can be selfish, yes—even cruel. But it is our highly evolved prosocial nature—our innate facility for cooperation, not competition—that has enabled our species to dominate the planet, and to build such an extraordinary—and extraordinarily complex—quality of life. Pro-sociality is our economic super power.
Economists are not wrong when they attribute the material advances of modernity to market capitalism’s genius for self-organizing an increasingly complex and intricate division of knowledge, knowhow, and labor. But it’s important to recognize that the division of labor was not invented in the pin factories of Adam Smith’s eighteenth century Scotland; at some level, it has been a defining feature of all human societies since at least the cognitive revolution. Even our least complex societies, small bands of hunter-gatherers, are characterized by a division of labor—hunting and gathering—if largely along gender lines. The division of labor is a trait that is universal to our prosocial species.
Viewed through this prosocial lens, we can see that the highly specialized division of labor that characterizes our modern economy was not made possible by market capitalism. Rather, market capitalism was made possible by our fundamentally prosocial facility for cooperation, which is all the division of labor really is.
This dispute over behavioral models has profound non-academic consequences. Many economists, while acknowledging its flaws, still defend homo-economicus as a useful fiction—a tool for modeling and understanding the economic world. But it is much more than just an economic model. It is also a story we tell ourselves about ourselves that gives both permission and encouragement to some of the worst excesses of modern capitalism, and of contemporary moral and social life.
How to Destroy Neoliberalism: Kill ‘Homo Economicus’
the culture industries are very much caught up in the search for monopoly rent. It’s interesting that they’re called “industries” these days, which means that there’s a commodification of culture and an attempt to commodify the cultural commons and even commodify history, which is an astonishing process.
Capitalism and the Urban Struggle
This is a very important signal from Kevin Kelly - signalling the need to re-imagine a more appropriate economic, governance, and political framework for understanding the fundamental ‘anti-rival’ nature of information (including data) as a global commons. The need to resit and enclosure movement of knowledge, the Internet and the emerging digital environment.
Data Manifesto
1) Data cannot be owned. By anybody.
2) The natural habitat of data is in the commons. It is born in the commons, and will return to the commons, even if it is granted temporary monopolies. The longer it spends in the commons, the better.
3) Data is a shared resource, that only exists in relationship to its sources and substrates.
4) Any party that touches or generates a bit of data has rights and responsibilities about that data.
5) Rights always have corresponding responsibilities.
6) Control of data is both a right and responsibility that is always shared.
7) Privacy is a misunderstanding that does not apply to data.
8) Data is made more valuable by being connected to other data. Solitary data is worthless.
9) Data is made more valuable by moving. Storage is weak because it halts, “Movage” is better.
10) Both directions of movage are important — where it came from, where it goes.
11) The meta data about where data goes is as important as where it came from.
12) Ensuring bi-directionality, the symmetry of movage, is important to the robustness of the data net.
13) Data can generate infinite derivative data (meta data) but they all follow the same rules.
14) When new data is generated from data (meta data) the rights and responsibilities of the first generation proceed to the second.
15) At the same time, meta data has claims of rights and responsibilities upon the root data.
16) Data can be expensive or free, determined by the market. It has no inherent value.
17) Data is easy to replicate in time (free copies) and difficult to replicate over time (digital decay). The only way to carry data into the future is if it is exercised (moved) by those who care about it.
18) Like all other shared resources, data can suffer from the tragedy of the commons, and this commons must be protected by governments.
19) As the number of entities, including meta data, touching a bit of data expands over time, with claims of rights and responsibilities, some values will dilute and some will amplify.
20) To manage the web of relationships, rights and responsibilities of data will require technological and social tools that don’t exist yet.
This is an interesting 7 min video signal of how an undercurrent of digital activism is working to provide alternatives to for-profit social media,
Distributed social media - Mastodon & Fediverse Explained
Mastodon is a "federated" social network that works like Twitter. It puts the control of data into the user's hands, not in a single corporation.
Mastodon uses ActivityPub to make sure that each Mastodon instance can reach the others.
ActivityPub is also implemented by other applications such as PeerTube and Plume. This is what makes up the *Fediverse*: a collection of social networks that function as a single one.
The future challenges including climate change - requires multi-dimensional innovations and transdisciplinary work. The focus must include technologies, social, governance and economic institutional innovations. This is a long article signalling one such approach.
Fix the broken food system in three steps
Build a global network for mapping, modelling and managing agriculture, biodiversity, trade and nutrition, argue Guido Schmidt-Traub, Michael Obersteiner and Aline Mosnier.
Land use and food production are not meeting people’s needs. Agriculture destroys forests and biodiversity, squanders water and releases one-quarter of global greenhouse-gas emissions. Yet one-third of food is wasted, 800 million people remain undernourished, 2 billion are deficient in micronutrients, and obesity is on the rise. These figures will worsen as the planet warms, soils degrade and the global population grows, urbanizes and consumes more.
Threats to agriculture, climate and health are entwined. Yet policies treat each in isolation and are misaligned. National strategies for mitigating climate change pay scant attention to biodiversity and food security. The European Union’s Common Agricultural Policy includes steps to reduce emissions from livestock and fertilizers, for example, but offers no way of improving diets.
What is needed are strategies for managing land-use and food systems together. These would consider links between agriculture, water, pollution, biodiversity, diets and greenhouse-gas emissions. Each sector and country can tailor solutions. But global coordination, learning and knowledge-sharing will also be necessary to ensure that the net result is sustainable and resilient, and in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Here we describe three steps for developing such integrated approaches.
From the brain that changes itself - to AI generated visuals that could be tailored to develop specific neural capabilities or treat specific neural conditions - this is a signal worth tracking.
Viewing any image triggers some kind of neural activity in a brain. But neuroscientist Kohitij Kar of MIT and colleagues wanted to see whether the AI’s deliberately designed images could induce specific neural responses of the team’s choosing.
An AI used art to control monkeys’ brain cells
Such tailored regulation of neural activity could lead to new types of neuroscience experiments
New artwork created by artificial intelligence does weird things to the primate brain.
When shown to macaques, AI-generated images purposefully caused nerve cells in the monkeys’ brains to fire more than pictures of real-world objects. The AI could also design patterns that activated specific neurons while suppressing others, researchers report in the May 3 Science.
This unprecedented control over neural activity using images may lead to new kinds of neuroscience experiments or treatments for mental disorders. The AI’s ability to play the primate brain like a fiddle also offers insight into how closely AIs can emulate brain function.
The AI responsible for the new mind-bending images is an artificial neural network — a computer model composed of virtual neurons — modeled after the ventral stream. This is a neural pathway in the brain involved in vision (SN Online: 8/12/09). The AI learned to “see” by studying a library of about 1.3 million labeled images. Researchers then instructed the AI to design pictures that would affect specific ventral stream neurons in the brain.
The promise of artificial photosynthesis could provide us ways to capture carbon in addition to other technologies aimed at reducing our production of carbon. A hopeful weak signal ready for trial.
World’s first ‘BioSolar Leaf’ to tackle air pollution in White City
Imperial College London is to collaborate with startup Arborea to develop pioneering ‘BioSolar Leaf’ technology to improve air quality in White City.
The technology, which is the first of its kind in the world, purifies the air through the photosynthesis of microscopic plants, removing greenhouse gases from the environment whilst generating breathable oxygen.
Arborea have developed an innovative cultivation system which facilitates the growth of tiny plant-life - such as microalgae, diatoms and phytoplankton - on large solar panel-like structures. These can then be installed on land, buildings and other developments to improve surrounding air quality.
The team say that Arborea’s cultivation system can remove carbon dioxide and produce breathable oxygen at a rate equivalent to a hundred trees from the surface area of just a single tree.
The system also produces a sustainable source of organic biomass from which Arborea extracts nutritious food additives for plant-based food products.
A signal for contributing to how we meet the challenges of climate change and terra-forming. There’s a 2 min video.
“We now have a case confirmed of what species we can plant and in what conditions,” Irina Fedorenko, co-founder of Biocarbon Engineering, told Fast Company. “We are now ready to scale up our planting and replicate this success.”
These tree-planting drones are firing ‘seed missiles’ into the ground. Less than a year later, they’re already 20 inches tall.
In September 2018, a project in Myanmar used drones to fire “seed missiles” into remote areas of the country where trees were not growing. Less than a year later, thousands of those seed missiles have sprouted into 20-inch mangrove saplings that could literally be a case study in how technology can be used to innovate our way out of the climate change crisis.
According to Fedoranko, just two operators could send out a mini-fleet of seed missile planting drones that could plant 400,000 trees a day -- a number that quite possibly could make massive headway in combating the effects of manmade climate change.
This is a very interesting signal related to new materials for ecological consumption. There’s a 1 min video showing these in action.
Edible water bottles
London-based tech startup Skipping Rocks Lab wants to make packaging disappear. They have created a water bottle you can eat.
Ooho! is a spherical packaging made of seaweed, entirely natural and biodegradable. Inspired by egg yolks, water is trapped inside layers made up of brown algae and calcium chloride and can be drunk when those membranes are punctured. The membranes have been compared to the skin of an apple, as they can then be eaten or thrown away.
The goal is to create a waste-free alternative to plastic bottles and cups with material that cheaper than plastic and can encapsulate any beverage including water, soft drinks, spirits and cosmetics.
When will the internal combustion engine become displaced as the most affordable choice? It seems to be getting closer.
Analysts have for several years been using a sort of shorthand for describing an electric vehicle battery: half the car’s total cost. That figure, and that shorthand, has changed in just a few years. For a midsize U.S. car in 2015, the battery made up more than 57 percent of the total cost. This year, it’s 33 percent. By 2025, the battery will be only 20 percent of total vehicle cost.
Electric Car Price Tag Shrinks Along With Battery Cost
Choosing an electric car over its combustion-engine equivalent will soon be just a matter of taste, not a matter of cost.
Every year, BloombergNEF’s advanced transport team builds a bottom-up analysis of the cost of purchasing an electric vehicle and compares it to the cost of a combustion-engine vehicle of the same size. The crossover point — when electric vehicles become cheaper than their combustion-engine equivalents — will be a crucial moment for the EV market. All things being equal, upfront price parity makes a buyer’s decision to buy an EV a matter of taste, style or preference — but not, for much longer, a matter of cost.
Every year, that crossover point gets closer. In 2017, a BloombergNEF analysis forecast that the crossover point was in 2026, nine years out. In 2018, the crossover point was in 2024 — six years (or, as I described it then, two lease cycles) out.
The crossover point, per the latest analysis, is now 2022 for large vehicles in the European Union. For that, we can thank the incredible shrinking electric vehicle battery, which isn’t so much shrinking in size as it is shrinking — dramatically — in cost.
The hydrogen economy has taken longer than many expected - here’s a good signal of its continued progress - maybe it’s around the corner.
Clean fuel cells could be cheap enough to replace gas engines in vehicles
Advancements in zero-emission fuel cells could make the technology cheap enough to replace traditional gasoline engines in vehicles, according to researchers at the University of Waterloo.
The researchers have developed a new fuel cell that lasts at least 10 times longer than current technology, an improvement that would make them economically practical, if mass-produced, to power vehicles with electricity.
"With our design approach, the cost could be comparable or even cheaper than gasoline engines," said Xianguo Li, director of the Fuel Cell and Green Energy Lab at Waterloo. "The future is very bright. This is clean energy that could boom."
A paper on their work, Enhancing fuel cell durability for fuel cell plug-in hybrid electric vehicles through strategic power management, appears in the journal Applied Energy.
Another signal of several things - a new line of evidence related to climate change as well as how AI and machine learning are providing fundamentally new ways to analyse data for new patterns.
"We are seeing more El Niños forming in the central Pacific Ocean in recent decades, which is unusual across the past 400 years," said lead author Dr. Mandy Freund.
Impossible research produces 400-year El Nino record, revealing startling changes
Australian scientists have developed an innovative method using cores drilled from coral to produce a world first 400-year long seasonal record of El Niño events, a record that many in the field had described as impossible to extract.
The record published today in Nature Geoscience detects different types of El Niño and shows the nature of El Niño events has changed in recent decades.
This understanding of El Niño events is vital because they produce extreme weather across the globe with particularly profound effects on precipitation and temperature extremes in Australia, South East Asia and the Americas.
The 400-year record revealed a clear change in El Niño types, with an increase of Central Pacific El Niño activity in the late 20th Century and suggested future changes to the strength of Eastern Pacific El Niños.
Moving beyond facial recognition AI is progress to whole body recognition and as with all technology this is both exciting and hugely scary.
A multi-scale body-part mask guided attention network for person re-identification
Person re-identification entails the automated identification of the same person in multiple images from different cameras and with different backgrounds, angles or positions. Despite recent advances in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), person re-identification remains a highly challenging task, particularly due to the many variations in a person's pose, as well as other differences associated with lighting, occlusion, misalignment and background clutter.
Researchers at the Suning R&D Center in the U.S. have recently developed a new technique for person re-identification based on a multi-scale body-part mask guided attention network (MMGA). Their paper, pre-published on arXiv, will be presented during the 2019 CVPR Workshop spotlight presentation in June.
"Person re-identification is becoming a more and more important task due to its wide range of potential applications, such as criminal investigation, public security and image retrieval," Honglong Cai, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "However, it remains a challenging task, due to occlusion, misalignment, variation of poses and background clutter. In our recent study, our team tried to develop a method to overcome these challenges."
And if we are worried about ‘deep fakes’ we move from full body recognition to even deeper fakes. Hollywood will be both excited and scared.
Amazing AI Generates Entire Bodies of People Who Don’t Exist
The algorithm whips up photorealistic models and outfits from scratch.
A new deep learning algorithm can generate high-resolution, photorealistic images of people — faces, hair, outfits, and all — from scratch.
The AI-generated models are the most realistic we’ve encountered, and the tech will soon be licensed out to clothing companies and advertising agencies interested in whipping up photogenic models without paying for lights or a catering budget. At the same time, similar algorithms could be misused to undermine public trust in digital media.
Another signal of advancing capacity to access media via multichannels simultaneously. This is worth the view.
Android Q’s Live Caption feature adds real-time subtitles to any audio or video playing on your phone
It even works when using video chat apps
Google waited until I/O 2019 to demonstrate one of the most impressive features of Android Q. It’s called Live Caption, and when enabled, you’ll see any video or audio you play on your phone transcribed in real time — with extremely accurate results. Live Captions are overlaid on top of whatever app you’re using, be it YouTube, Instagram, Pocket Casts, or anything else, and it also supports video chat apps like Skye and Google’s own Duo. It’ll even work with video or audio that you record yourself.
“For 466 million deaf and hard of hearing people around the world, captions are more than a convenience — they make content more accessible. We worked closely with the Deaf community to develop a feature that would improve access to digital media,” Google wrote in a blog post.
There are some who still feel prediction of the future is possible - here’s an interesting signal about the progress in prediction.
Key developments in observation, numerical modeling, and data assimilation have enabled these advances in forecast skill. Improved observations, particularly by satellite remote sensing of the atmosphere and surface, provide valuable global information many times per day. Much faster and more powerful computers, in conjunction with improved understanding of atmospheric physics and dynamics, allow more-accurate numerical prediction models. Finally, improved techniques for putting data and models together have been developed.
Advances in weather prediction
In 1938, an intense hurricane struck the New England coast of the United States without warning, killing more than 600 people. Since then, death tolls have dropped dramatically even though coastal populations have swelled. Many people and organizations contributed to this improvement. But, as the American Meteorological Society celebrates its 100th anniversary, the improvement in forecasting stands out. Modern 72-hour predictions of hurricane tracks are more accurate than 24-hour forecasts were 40 years ago (see the figure), giving sufficient time for evacuations and other preparations that save lives and property. Similar improvements in forecasting tropical cyclone tracks have been achieved by other leading agencies worldwide.
Weather forecasts from leading numerical weather prediction centers such as the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA's) National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) have also been improving rapidly: A modern 5-day forecast is as accurate as a 1-day forecast was in 1980, and useful forecasts now reach 9 to 10 days into the future (1). Predictions have improved for a wide range of hazardous weather conditions, including hurricanes, blizzards, flash floods, hail, and tornadoes, with skill emerging in predictions of seasonal conditions.
Because data are unavoidably spatially incomplete and uncertain, the state of the atmosphere at any time cannot be known exactly, producing forecast uncertainties that grow into the future. This sensitivity to initial conditions can never be overcome completely. But, by running a model over time and continually adjusting it to maintain consistency with incoming data, the resulting physically consistent predictions greatly improve on simpler techniques. Such data assimilation, often done using four-dimensional variational minimization, ensemble Kalman filters, or hybridized techniques, has revolutionized forecasting.
This is an summary of a new book by Stuart Kauffman - a nice complementary piece to the limits of predictability and the development of an understanding of life and evolution that extends beyond a ‘Physics Worldview’ of causality.
The new physics needed to probe the origins of life
Stuart Kauffman’s provocative take on emergence and evolution energizes Sara Imari Walker.
A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life Stuart A. Kauffman Oxford University Press (2019)
Among the great scientific puzzles of our time is how life emerged from inorganic matter. Scientists have probed it since the 1920s, when biochemists Alexsandr Oparin and J. B. S. Haldane (separately) investigated the properties of droplets rich in organic molecules that existed in a ‘prebiotic soup’ on the primitive Earth…
What was missing then, as now, is a concrete theory for the physics of what life is, testable against experiment — which is likely to be more universal than the chemistry of life on Earth. Decades after Oparin and Haldane, Erwin Schrödinger’s 1944 book What Is Life? attempted to lay conceptual foundations for such a theory. Yet, more than 70 years and two generations of physicists later, researchers still ponder whether the answers lie in unknown physics. No one has led the charge on these questions quite like Stuart Kauffman.
His key insight is motivated by what he calls “the nonergodic world” — that of objects more complex than atoms. Most atoms are simple, so all their possible states can exist over a reasonable period of time. Once they start interacting to form molecules, the number of possible states becomes mind-bogglingly massive. Only a tiny number of proteins that are modestly complex — say, 200 amino acids long — have emerged over the entire history of the Universe. Generating all 20200 of the possibilities would take aeons. Given such limitations, how does what does exist ever come into being?
This is where Kauffman expands on his autocatalytic-sets theory, introducing concepts such as closure, in which processes are linked so that each drives the next in a closed cycle. He posits that autocatalysing sets (of RNA, peptides or both) encapsulated in a sphere of lipid molecules could form self-reproducing protocells. And he speculates that these protocells could evolve. Thus, each new biological innovation begets a new functional niche fostering yet more innovation. You cannot predict what will exist, he argues, because the function of everything biology generates will depend on what came before, and what other things exist now, with an ever-expanding set of what is possible next.
Because of this, Kauffman provocatively concludes, there is no mathematical law that could describe the evolving diversity and abundance of life in the biosphere. He writes: “we do not know the relevant variables prior to their emergence in evolution.” At best, he argues, any ‘laws of life’ that do exist will describe statistical distributions of aspects of that evolution. For instance, they might predict the distribution of extinctions. Life’s emergence might rest on the foundations of physics, “but it is not derivable from them”, Kauffman argues.
