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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Quotes:
Articles:
Adam Smith offered advice for how societies should handle the rich: he calls on legislators not to put the interests of wealthy monopolists ahead of the public welfare. Whenever new government legislation is proposed by businessmen, Smith suggests the government should treat the new proposal with “not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention”.
The handouts to the rich that he complains about in Wealth of Nations have never entirely disappeared. Instead, a language of “free trade” has obscured the government’s role in favouring the wealthy. Just look at the past 30 years, a time of ever-growing subsidies to pharmaceutical executives who gouge consumers with unacceptably high drug prices; tax gifts to tech corporations that lobby to erode worker and consumer protections; the ever-replenishing “money-tree” of quantitative easing programmes that rain on the rich while the poor work ever-longer hours.
Smith did talk about the invisible hand. But he also wrote about the “invisible chains” that structure people’s lives. He and his revolutionary friends understood that wealth inequality could become a type of invisible cage. He taught his readers a simple lesson: keep the power of the rich in check.
Capitalism’s Case for Abolishing Billionaires
“Thirty years ago, we used to ask: Can a computer simulate all processes of logic? The answer was yes, but the question was surely wrong. We should have asked: Can logic simulate all sequences of cause and effect? And the answer would have been no.”
What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster and the primrose to the orchid, and all of them to me, and me to you?
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature
‘There are times, … when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’
Impossible choices
There’s a metaphor that’s only been available to us in the past 30 or 40 years, and that’s the desktop interface. Suppose there’s a blue rectangular icon on the lower right corner of your computer’s desktop — does that mean that the file itself is blue and rectangular and lives in the lower right corner of your computer? Of course not. But those are the only things that can be asserted about anything on the desktop — it has color, position and shape. Those are the only categories available to you, and yet none of them are true about the file itself or anything in the computer. They couldn’t possibly be true. That’s an interesting thing. You could not form a true description of the innards of the computer if your entire view of reality was confined to the desktop. And yet the desktop is useful. That blue rectangular icon guides my behavior, and it hides a complex reality that I don’t need to know. That’s the key idea. Evolution has shaped us with perceptions that allow us to survive. They guide adaptive behaviors. But part of that involves hiding from us the stuff we don’t need to know. And that’s pretty much all of reality, whatever reality might be. If you had to spend all that time figuring it out, the tiger would eat you.
The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality
This is a signal whose time is nigh. The evolution of the atomistic, isolated, selfish notion of self toward self and inevitable social and entangled. I encourage everyone to sign on. This is inaugurated by a Canadian Henry Mintzberg.
The Declaration of Our Interdependence For 2020 Vision
For two centuries, the American Declaration of Independence served as the model to grow democracy. Now our world has reached the limits of growth driven by the pursuit of individual rights at the expense of shared responsibilities. Faced with the threats of warming, weapons, waste, and the lopsided distribution of wealth, we must declare our interdependence.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created dependent—on each other, our earth, and its climate—endowed with the inalienable responsibility to maintain justice, liberty, and affiliation for all. Thus our societies must sustain balance across public sector governments that are respected, private sector businesses that are responsible, and plural sector communities that are robust. Some societies retain this balance; others have lost it; many never had it. We propose the following resolutions to guide the rebalancing of society: ….
Here’s another signal of the emerging sense of entanglement.
Unlike the Enlightenment, where progress was analytic and came from taking things apart, progress in the Age of Entanglement is synthetic and comes from putting things together. Instead of classifying organisms, we construct them. Instead of discovering new worlds, we create them.
The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement
We can no longer see ourselves as separate from the natural world or our technology, but as a part of them, integrated, codependent, and entangled.
We humans are changing. We have become so intertwined with what we have created that we are no longer separate from it. We have outgrown the distinction between the natural and the artificial. We are what we make. We are our thoughts, whether they are created by our neurons, by our electronically augmented minds, by our technologically mediated social interactions, or by our machines themselves. We are our bodies, whether they are born in womb or test tube, our genes inherited or designed, organs augmented, repaired, transplanted, or manufactured. Our prosthetic enhancements are as simple as contact lenses and tattoos and as complex as robotic limbs and search engines. They are both functional and aesthetic. We are our perceptions, whether they are through our eyes and ears or our sensory-fused hyper-spectral sensors, processed as much by computers as by our own cortex. We are our institutions, cooperating super-organisms, entangled amalgams of people and machines with super-human intelligence, processing, sensing, deciding, acting. Our home planet is inhabited by both engineered organisms and evolved machines. Our very atmosphere is the emergent creation of forests, farms and factories. Our networks of commerce, power and communications are becoming as richly interconnected as ecologies and nervous systems. Empowered by the tools of the Enlightenment, connected by networked flows of freight and fuel and finance, by information and ideas, we are becoming something new. We are at the dawn of the Age of Entanglement.
This is a great 29 min video summarizing key features of the emerging digital environment and its ecology of platforms. Why we have to accelerate the scaling of learning.
SU Global Summit 2019 | Platforms & Ecosystems | John Hagel
John Hagel, Co-Chairman of Deloitte's Center for the Edge, shows how platform thinking and ecosystem development can lead to better strategy and execution.
This is an excellent 26 min video offering some economic policy considerations based on Modern Monetary Theory - the next emerging economic paradigm for meeting the challenges of climate change, economic inequality and more.
Warren Mosler: What Modern Monetary Theory Tells Us About Economic Policy
This episode features Warren Mosler, president of the financial services firm Valance Company and one of the founders of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), speaking about what MMT tells us about economic policy. He explains not only what policy makers can do but also what they should do in the current economic environment. How can MMT help get the economy back on track? Watch the interview to find out!
This is an important signal - one wonders if it can improve a nation’s sovereignty over the creation of money or constrain it in an artificial scarcity sort of way.
Say Goodbye to Banking as We Know It
China is poised to launch the first national digital currency. There will be no counting the disruption.
So is China readying its own Bitcoin? Banish the thought.
It’s far bigger than that. Yes, just like any other cryptocurrency — or for that matter, cigarettes in prisoners-of-war camps — the upcoming digital yuan will be “tokenized” money. But the similarity ends there. The crypto yuan, which may be on offer as soon as 2020, will be fully backed by the central bank of the world’s second-largest economy, drawing its value from the Chinese state’s ability to impose taxes in perpetuity. Other national authorities are bound to embrace this powerful idea.
Little is known about the digital yuan except that it’s been in the works for five years and Beijing is nearly ready to roll. The consensus is that the token will be a private blockchain, a peer-to-peer network for sharing information and validating transactions, with the People’s Bank of China in control of who gets to participate. To begin with, the currency will be supplied via the banking system and replace some part of physical cash. That won’t be hard, given the ubiquitous presence of Chinese QR code-based digital wallets such as Alipay and WeChat Pay.
This is a signal of changing paradigms around drugs, plant medicines and consciousness development and therapies.
Within 10 years we are likely to have multiple psychedelic-assisted therapies approved in the US, Europe, and in many countries around the world for the treatment of various mental health conditions. As new success stories from treatment with psychedelic therapy continue to emerge, and new scientific evidence continues to be collected from ongoing clinical trials and neuropsychopharmacology research, many more patients will be asking for these treatments. We’ll see multiple forms of treatment centers emerge, including psychiatric hospitals as well as privately owned clinics and independent practitioners. Psychedelic therapy is on track to be the next major breakthrough in mental health care.
The future of psychedelic science: What the next decade holds
The last decade has been inarguably incredible for the field of psychedelic science. The term renaissance is hyperbolically thrown around a lot these days but in this context it is perfectly apt. Moving from the fringes of the research world and shaking off years of baggage from illicit recreational circles, scientists have made startling progress in legitimizing the medical potential of these drugs.
With both MDMA and psilocybin on the precipice of approvals as mainstream medicines, and several leading universities opening dedicated psychedelic research facilities, the story of the last 10 years has been one of profound breakthroughs. So, as we stand on the precipice of a new decade, it's worth pausing for a moment and looking forward to investigate what the 2020s may hold in this rapidly accelerating field.
New Atlas spoke to several leading psychedelic researchers to get their thoughts on three big future-forward questions. Where will psychedelic science be in 2030, what is the biggest hurdle psychedelic researchers will face in the 2020s, and what is the most interesting psychedelic research topic that has yet to be fully explored?
This is a fascinating signal regarding human perception that could contribute to understanding some phenomena such as dosing and other sorts of ‘psychic’ experience.
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, 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 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.
This is still a weak but very important signal of the future of computation and more.
Information teleported between two computer chips for the first time
Scientists at the University of Bristol and the Technical University of Denmark have achieved quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time. The team managed to send information from one chip to another instantly without them being physically or electronically connected, in a feat that opens the door for quantum computers and quantum internet.
This kind of teleportation is made possible by a phenomenon called quantum entanglement, where two particles become so entwined with each other that they can “communicate” over long distances. Changing the properties of one particle will cause the other to instantly change too, no matter how much space separates the two of them. In essence, information is being teleported between them.
Hypothetically, there’s no limit to the distance over which quantum teleportation can operate – and that raises some strange implications that puzzled even Einstein himself. Our current understanding of physics says that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, and yet, with quantum teleportation, information appears to break that speed limit. Einstein dubbed it “spooky action at a distance.”
Harnessing this phenomenon could clearly be beneficial, and the new study helps bring that closer to reality. The team generated pairs of entangled photons on the chips, and then made a quantum measurement of one. This observation changes the state of the photon, and those changes are then instantly applied to the partner photon in the other chip.
Another signal of the transformation of energy geopolitics.
South Australia’s clean-energy shift brings lowest power prices on national grid, audit finds
For first time, state has cheaper wholesale power than rest of country for consecutive months
The shift to more than 50% clean energy in South Australia led to the lowest average wholesale power prices in the national electricity grid over the past two months, an audit has found.
According to the national energy emissions audit published by the Australia Institute, South Australia has had lower monthly wholesale electricity prices than Victoria since January, than New South Wales since August and than Queensland and Tasmania for the past two months.
It is the first time the state has had cheaper wholesale power than all other states for consecutive months. It coincided with the percentage of electricity from wind and solar energy in the state reaching nearly 65% in November.
Another weakish signal but one that may be important in accelerating the transformation of energy geopolitics. It also signals the increasing capabilities of the use of AI in science discovery.
AI enables design of spray-on coating that can generate solar energy
A new system enables optimization of perovskite materials for the production of technology that could make solar energy ubiquitous.
Solar energy is increasingly becoming a source of renewable energy throughout the world. Now researchers have found a way that could make generating energy from the sun even more ubiquitous by creating a spray coating that can be used on bridges, houses, or even skyscrapers so they can be energy self-sufficient.
A team from the University of Central Florida used artificial intelligence (AI), or machine learning, to optimize the materials used to make perovskite solar cells, or PSCs. The organic-inorganic halide perovskites material used in PSC converts photovoltaic power into consumable energy.
Perovskite cells in general have long been viewed as the future of solar cells because the material has key advantages over the silicon used to develop this technology today, including higher efficiency and less cost in cell production.
Another benefit of perovskite solar cells is that they can be produced not just in a solid-state form for typical solar panels, but also in a liquid state, which expands the flexibility of how solar-energy-generation technology can be delivered, researchers said. This could ultimately pave the way for any object or structure to generate its own electricity from the sun, which could revolutionize how people use energy.
[the] team reviewed more than 2,000 peer-reviewed publications about perovskites and collected more than 300 data points that they then transferred into a machine-learning system they created, he said. The system analyzed the information and predicated which recipe for perovskites would optimize the material for solar-energy generation.
The results of the study show that AI can be used to craft perovskite materials for the creation of highly efficient technology to make this type of renewable energy more prevalent, Thomas said. “This can be a guide to design new materials as evidenced by our experimental demonstration,” he said. Researchers published a paper on their work in the journal Advanced Energy Materials.
This is another strong signal of the rise of AI as the next cognitive prosthetic enhancing human capacity.
Google just beat humans at spotting breast cancer — but it won’t replace them
A new study reveals Google AI is often better at detecting breast cancer than actual doctors
Google is developing artificial intelligence to help doctors identify breast cancer, according to a research paper published in Nature today. The model, which scans X-ray images known as mammograms, reduces the number of false negatives by 9.4 percent—a hopeful leap forward for a test that currently misses 20 percent of breast cancers, as reported by The New York Times.
Today, breast cancer is the second leading cause of death in women, beat out only by lung cancer in its deadliness and overall prevalence. Early detection is the best defense most people have in identifying and treating the disease. Yet while mammograms are the most common detection tool, they miss a large number of cases. “Mammograms are very effective but there’s still a significant problem with false negatives and false positives,” Shravya Shetty, a researcher at Google who co-authored the paper, tells The Verge.
In the study, which Google funded, researchers used anonymized mammograms from more than 25,000 women in the UK and 3,000 women in the US. “We tried to follow the same principles radiologists might follow,” Shetty says. According to Google’s blog post, the team first trained AI to scan X-ray images, then looked for signs of breast cancer by identifying changes in the breasts of the 28,000 women. They then checked the computer’s guesses against the women's’ actual medical outcomes.
Ultimately, they were able to reduce false negatives by 9.4 percent and cut down false positives by 5.7 percent for women in the US. In the UK, where two radiologists typically double-check the results, the model cut down false negatives by 2.7 percent and reduced false positives by 1.2 percent. “The model performs better than an individual radiologist in both the UK and the US,”
This is a great signal of the possibilities for the future of food - not just urban and vertical farms - but a new form of commons.
The rise of urban food forests
Cities like Atlanta and Philadelphia are recognizing a park can be more than just a green space when visitors are allowed to pick fruits, vegetables and nuts.
A walk through an Atlanta park will soon include the option of picking berries, plucking apples from trees or gathering herbs from surrounding plants — all for free.
The Food Forest at Browns Mill, which has been years in the making, surged ahead in May when the Atlanta City Council unanimously approved an ordinance to use grant money secured from the U.S. Forest Service to purchase a 7.1-acre plot of land from The Conservation Fund for a food forest.
The land was a working farm for decades but sold for redevelopment in 2006; the development plan was abandoned when the recession hit and the land sat vacant until The Conservation Fund purchased it in 2016.
The park will serve as a community green space complete with trails and a large-scale edible garden. Atlanta's Department of Parks and Recreation will oversee the property while nonprofit Trees Atlanta maintains it. Volunteers already have pitched in for site restoration and construction — including creek and pecan orchard restoration — in addition to planting hundreds of food-bearing trees and plants.
The city conducted extensive community outreach and assessments to identify available land for this project. Some of the suggested properties no longer were suitable for other developments due to issues like drainage, but they could work as a food forest. Targeting these properties carries the ancillary benefit of eliminating blight and improving quality of life for citizens within the neighborhood.
